Category Archives: Evil

Merry Christmas to you, Jeremy, in jail!: A very PTSD Christmas Eve

24 Saturday Dec 2016

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I love Christmas. I’m a Christmas nut. Perhaps the result of growing up on a Christmas tree farm. I love the music and the movies and the pine cones on the mantle and the gingerbread cookies my four year old insisted using the cowboy hat cookie cutter for. Christmas Eve is a very special day for me. But it’s also one of the 365 days a year I have at least a passing thought about my trauma. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

One of my favorite Christmas movies is “It’s A Wonderful Life” starring Jimmy Stewart (who is from my hometown, by the way. I used to volunteer at the world famous Jimmy Stewart museum) as George Bailey. There’s a scene in the movie where greedy villain Potter gleefully shouts “Merry Christmas to you, in jail!” at George. (I’m not going into the context here but I’d encourage you to watch it if you’re curious)

So, I have a Christmas Eve tradition that those of you who haven’t known trauma might find a little… odd. Creepy maybe. Depressing perhaps. I like to shout,

Merry Christmas to you, Jeremy, in jail!

Jeremy’s the one who did trauma to me(read about it here if you like). I’m an anomaly in that my rapist actually went to prison. Not many do. It’s a merrier Christmas this year and the next 40 of them for the little girls he was planning to traumatize. So, I don’t see this tradition as odd or creepy or depressing at all.

Christmas is a season of hope. What was the birth of Jesus if not the creation of a whole new hope for us all? Hope that there is something more than this fallen world. And hope, I’ve learned through my PTSD, is the stuff of life. Without it, we’re not dead, but not really alive either (read about it here if you like). My hope was resored when I recovered from PTSD. I like to think sharing my recovery on here could give other survivors in the purgatory of PTSD have some hope too.

I’m a big believer in speaking your truth, in the toxicity of silence. The time I spent singing/screaming in a riot grrl band were some of my most empowered. Maybe it’s the autism in me, but screaming is liberating for me. When the problems of life seem unsolvable, I scream and it helps. For so many years I was told be quiet about what Jeremy did to me. I was told it would ruin my career. I was told it was my fault, that I was a slut and I mustn’t advertise this. I have seen the damage this did to me and so, I don’t just speak my truth in this season of hope. I scream it.

Joy to the world, you fucker.  Joy to you, little girls. There is hope.

I have slept in the bed with evil

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

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I am wearing all black today. I am in mourning. I am not going to make a joke about my goth days in high school. I am not going to compare the title of this post to that awful made-for-TV movie from the nineties starring Tori Spelling, “Mother May I Sleep with Danger.” This is no joke. This is not a nightmare we will wake up from tomorrow, a bipolar fugue we will not remember when it ends and we find ourselves far from home. It may be the 1930s.

I do not use the word evil lightly. A lot of people have referred to Hillary Clinton as evil in this election cycle. I am as big a critic of Bill Clinton’s policy and Hillary’s record on free trade, her foreign policy, and her “super predator” comments as anyone. But she’s hardly evil.

For four months, I slept in the bed of a man who can rightly be called evil. A man who loved raping and torturing little girls above all else, who admired Hitler, who raped me again and again and again and threatened to kill my children. A man who disturbed even the seasoned federal judge and the FBI agent who were involved in his case. He was a medical student on his way to becoming a doctor. Nobody suspected. None of us even knew such evil existed as it all came out, certainly not that our fellow medical student possessed the evil.

Trauma changes you. It changes your relationship with yourself, with your family and friends, with God, with the world itself and every person you encounter day by day. They say the fundamental experience of trauma is the feeling you have been abandoned. By the people you love, by the ones who were supposed to protect you, and by God himself.

My Ordeal changed me in so many ways but one of the worst was the knowledge of just what evil exists in our world. Evil I did not know existed. And I had not lived a sheltered life to that point. I was not naïve. And yet I was. My fear now is that we as a country are being naïve. Despite our very violent history.

We cannot underestimate the possibilities of this new world. We cannot afford to be naïve. I do not know what will happen but I know it could be very, very bad.

A few years ago we were at a festival at a place called City Island in Harrisburg. Our three sons went off on their own while my husband and Princess (still a baby) and I stayed and chatted with some friends. Eventually two of our sons came back, but not the third. Our legally blind, autistic son was not with them. They told us they’d had some kind of fight with him and decided to leave him. They were too young to know not to do this. Too naive.

My husband and I split up to cover the island looking for him. And as I looked in booths and the dense woods that framed the island, pushing Princess in the stroller, terror went through my body. My mind went to Jeremy. To the people he talked to on the internet who also loved raping and torturing children. Who sent him images of their horrific acts, recorded in stills and movies. The ones presented at trial that took any remaining innocence from anyone in that courtroom. I cried as I looked. I pictured what might happen to him. Things that are worse and more common than we allow ourselves to believe. I didn’t want to scare Princess, but I could not hold back the tears. My husband found him and I ran up to him, shaking and crying and finding it hard to bring the oxygen into my lungs.

I do not know how so many people at Penn State stood by while little boys were raped and did little or nothing. I will never comprehend that. The coaches, the janitor, Mike McQuery whatever the hell he was. I could have been killed. My children could have been killed. I laid down my body. I laid down my mind. I lost seven years of my life to PTSD. So did my children and husband, lost seven years of me being truly present in our lives. I have no regrets and never have. Not for a second. But I know the men of Penn State are much more common than people like me. And this election confirms it.

Evil can flourish, slowly, insidiously. I see friends who loved Bernie so much now so glad they voted Trump. I can see the mainstream Republicans now falling in line or being eliminated (we’re assured by Trump’s people the are making “a list” of “his enemies”). I can see the inevitable persecution of journalists and violent crackdown on peaceful protests. Hate crimes and sexual assault rates rising (if you don’t believe me, look at what happened in the aftermath of Brexit). Muslims forced to wear badges identifying them (yes, Trump said this).

You think I exaggerate. You think this couldn’t be the 1930s. And I hope you’re right. But I know in my bones you probably aren’t.

God bless and protect the Union.

 

Thank you for contacting the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section. This message acknowledges the receipt of your email

21 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by in Evil, outrage, PTSD, Rape, Uncategorized

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97b4387e5e4c8cb774f98aee73ea273d

Eight years ago, in the hot sticky month of June, I called the FBI field office in Pittsburgh to turn in a fellow medical student for trafficking a child. A three year old little girl, specifically. They never returned my call. So, I sat and typed it all out and emailed it to them on their website. I didn’t think I’d ever hear from them. So, I copy and pasted it onto an anonymous blog I was keeping at the time. I didn’t think he’d ever go to prison. And I thought he would probably kill me as he’d promised to do if ever I turned him in. No one in my life knew what had been going on for months. My ordeal. So I pasted it to my anonymous blog. Because you need to speak, no matter what. Because I needed to believe somewhere someone would read it and know my truth. And maybe if I died, the truth at least had a chance of coming out.

He went to prison. He’s in prison for 45 years now. In Arizona. I track him online on this federal prisons website where you can look up any prisoner by name (who knew such a thing existed? Funny how life goes). My victim advocate from the FBI, Bridget, has long since released me from her care, although I wasn’t clear on what she did anyway. When the judge sentenced him, sentenced Jeremy, Jeremy Noyes, he said Jeremy was one of the worst sadistic criminals he’d ever seen. You should be grateful, dear reader, you weren’t at his trial when they showed the images he had on his computer. You would never be the same again. You cannot imagine the evil men are capable of. Men that are medical students, future doctors. I was there. I was there in that beautiful courthouse with its arches and mezzanine (or was it a balcony? It was beautiful either way) when my rapist called me to the stand to question me (did I mention he fired his lawyer and represented himself? That I got the unique experience of being cross examined by my rapist?). There I sat in federal court in Erie, Pennsylvania. Just me and my rapist. And 12 jurors. And the press. And several lawyers. And all the people who just came to watch.

My school was not kind to me for turning this man in. And so, after all these years, I have finally found the courage and the energy to once again email the federal government. I’m once again afraid nothing will happen, so here I am on a blog. Once again. But this time it is not anonymous. I am not ashamed anymore. I am proud. I am a goddamned hero.

That choice is gone (or, This is hell. get walking)

06 Thursday Oct 2016

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Mental illness kills.

It kills with heroin overdoses and self-inflicted gunshot wounds and anorexia induced cardiomyopathy and obesity induced sleep apnea and girls who take risks they shouldn’t with dangerous boys.

And when it does, there are usually kids left behind. And that is the worst tragedy.

When I was a resident, we would admit patients overnight who had failed at killing themselves with drugs. We needed to make sure they were medically stable before being sent to inpatient psych. The ER  had saved them but we were the ones to run fluids and monitor them and fill out the paperwork once the psychiatric hospital was ready for them.

It was the job of the residents to go see these patients at two in the morning and complete an H&P, a history and physical exam. We would ask the questions we asked all patients: chief complaint, onset, duration, intensity, chronology, exacerbating and remitting factors, associated symptoms. In this case, the chief complaint was not shortness of breath or fever. In this case, the chief complaint was, I wanted to die. So I tried.

Sometimes onset was a long time ago, often it was right beforehand. Intensity was of course always a ten. Sometimes they told you their story freely. Sometimes only the bare minimum. (we would write “history limited by non-cooperative historian)

I remember one patient in particular. She was a mom. She had three kids around the same ages as my three kids at the time.  She told her story of how her boyfriend had hurt her. Hurt her so badly she decided to die. I asked where her kids were when she took the pills. They were home with her. Maybe they’re the ones who found her and called 911. Maybe it was the worst night of their lives after many other bad nights. She didn’t know whether they’d found her or not. She didn’t care. She never asked us where her children were now. Just went on about the boyfriend and how he’d hurt her and how hurt she was. And I tried very hard to have compassion for my patient, but all I could think of was her kids. Of how badly a successful suicide by their mother would have wounded them.

I have never been the type to lack compassion for those so hurt inside they feel killing themselves is the best solution. I have heard good Christians say they will go to hell. I have heard people call them selfish for hurting their families and thought, do you have no grasp of how much pain they must be in?

But by this time, at the age of 34, I’d lived a bit more of life and had a more nuanced view, you could say. I still think its’s awful to say they’d go to hell. But I do not think, when children are involved, we can simply say they were ill, they were in pain, and so it was.

When I was 28, I had a boyfriend too, just like my patient. He broke my heart too, just like my patient. And I decided to die too, just like my patient. I planned out which pills I would take and when. I’d just had pharmacology before Christmas break had begun and knew which ones would be most effective. It was Christmas. The tree was up. I hadn’t given my kids their presents yet. We were alone in Erie for break. I decided I would drop them off with their dad. He would take them to his parents house for several days for New Years as he did each year. No one was expecting to hear from me. It was time to die.

I was in a depression as deep as any I’d been in many times before. But this time was different. I was 28. I’d been battling depression since I was ten. I always held out hope I would get better one day. Life held so much possibility. But at 28, I thought, here I am again. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t. I sat on my floor crying as my three year old and two year old asked what was wrong and brought me Children’s Tylenol to try to make me better. I hate that I did that to them. I am sorry that I did that to them.

I kept pulling presents from the basement and giving them to them one by one to keep them occupied. I fed them leftovers from the Christmas eve party at my family’s house I’d brought back. I suppose I changed their diapers. I don’t remember.

I planned out how to die and thought, they will go live with my parents and be so much better off without a worthless mother like me. But then it happened.

I entered into rational thought long enough to realize they wouldn’t go live with my parents if I died. They would go live with their dad. And their dad, luckily, was a tremendous asshole at that time. And I thought, I’m really worthless, but he’s even worse. Thank you God he was such an asshole. I couldn’t do that to them.

I remembered when my oldest son Soldier Boy was a baby and I didn’t know if he would live because of a genetic disorder they thought he might have. I remembered sitting in the glider in the nursery wailing a gutteral wail from as deep down as a person can, begging God not to take my baby. Put me through the pains of childbirth for all eternity, I said (I’d just finished a 32 hour natural birth so that’s no small statement). Put me through hell, I said. Just save my beautiful baby.

And he did.

And I thought to myself, I am in so much pain. It hurts so much to live. I am in hell. But now it seems I must do what I told God I would. I must walk through hell for my babies. And so I did. One step at a time.

When you are that depressed, finding the will and the energy just to get out of bed in the morning is excruciating and exhausting. But I did. I got out of bed and I took care of my babies. I went to class and studied. I called a psychiatrist’s office and was told they don’t take Medicaid. That about did me in. But I made myself call another. And I got a psychiatrist appointment for a month from then and a therapy appointment in a few weeks.

I kept breathing. I kept living. Every breath hurt. My heart ached. My muscles ached. My soul was not in my eyes if you bothered to look. Luckily no one looked.

I wanted to check myself into inpatient psych but I knew if I did it could ruin my career and I could get my kids taken from me. I was right. I’m glad I didn’t. But it hurt. It hurt so damn much.

It was in this time, this darkness, this exile, waiting to see a psychiatrist that I entered into the relationship with the man who was my trauma, who was my Ordeal. I was in hell, so I laid with a demon. I suppose.

There in the midst of my Ordeal, I made my way through hell. I chose to live each and every day in every decision I made. When I did not feel like getting out of bed,  I would say to myself, you either live or die. If you stay in bed, you are choosing to die. When I didn’t want to go for a walk to get exercise and fresh air, I would say to myself, you have two choices, life or death. If you do not go on this walk, you are choosing to die. And that is not an option. Your babies need you to live. This is hell. Get walking.

I do not know how it is that a part of me found wellness inside the trauma, the Ordeal. Sometimes I think it’s that a part of me, a version of me, broke off and endured the trauma while the rest of me went on with life as usual. Sometimes I think it was the adrenaline. Sometimes I think it was God. Maybe a little of each.

I know that with my therapist and my psychiatrist I got to a point where I could do a load of laundry without exhausting myself. Where I could study and enjoy neuroanatomy and feel proud of myself for rocking the exam. Where I could play with my kids.

Then came PTSD, but that’s another story for another time.

And so this is what flashed through my mind and heart when I stood there collecting this patient’s onset and chronology. For her chief complaint of choosing to die. This is why I could not lend her more compassion.

When we choose to have children, certain choices go away. Dying is one of them. Even when living is hell.

And to not die is not enough. We must choose to live every day in every choice we make. We must fight for our children. Even when we can’t bring ourselves to fight for us.

They are innocent. We are not. The body is weak, but the will is strong. Must be. For them. This body, this mind, this pain, is not endless. It will all fall away. Ending it a little sooner is not worth the price of their innocence.

It is not a choice. That choice is gone.

 

 

 

 

 

Go For It

15 Monday Feb 2016

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I stepped out into the cold January air, the first real 5 degree-wind blowing-makes your face hurt winter day of the year. It was Martin Luther king day. The kids were off school and we’d gone to visit my parents for the day. I took Soldier Boy, The Ax, Princess and Our New Baby. Poobah and Tree stayed behind to work on the house. It was a nice day, admiring the newly remodeled kitchen my mother finally had after dreaming of it for forty years and getting to meet my sister’s new boyfriend, the chef. I caught them up on all the goings on at our house and my mother shared the latest from the various relatives. We talked politics a bit (Go Bernie! was the consensus). My mom offered me a nice crockpot too big for her empty nest and a Keurig the wrong color for her new kitchen, both of which I excitedly accepted. She told me to go through the old board games because they were throwing out whatever I didn’t want. I scored some Gumby Colorforms (remember those?), VCR Clue II, and Go For It, my favorite 1980s board game centered on accumulating red convertibles, hot tubs, and ski chalets: the good life, eighties style.

Our afternoon was wrapping up. The kids were getting cranky and it was time for us to go. So I gathered up an armful of the dusty board games and headed out to my car. And as I stepped out of my parents newly remade kitchen onto the familiar patio, the bitter cold air hit my face and suddenly I was in Erie.

Erie. January 2008. Class just let out and we’re walking to his apartment through the snow. The crunchy kind with a thin layer of ice on top that your foot catches on for a moment before sinking in. They say the Inuits have a hundred different words for snow, don’t they? (I don’t know if it’s true but it’s what they say anyway) I could not normally tell you much about what kind of snow there was on any particular day of my life years ago. I am not an Inuit of old, surviving in the Arctic north. Snow is not something of great importance to me. But those days, those memories, are not normal memories. They are not stored in the circuitry of my brain as normal memories are. And I am not now remembering that day. I am reliving it. I am there.

We are walking to his apartment to study and eat lunch. And maybe when we’re done he’ll rape me too. My stomach is in a knot. My chest is aching. My limbs are heavy and slightly numb. Not from the cold but from The Ordeal. My head is there but not there. How do you force yourself to walk to a violent sadist’s apartment? You will it. It is survival, moral spiritual survival. Protecting the young. You must. And so you do. Your will tells your legs to move and they do. They feel heavy and numb like they don’t belong to you but rather someone else. Because they must. For surely you would never go with this man so seemingly cooperative. Surely this isn’t happening. But it is.

I am afraid of what he will do when we get there. I am more afraid of the plans he has for his other victims, that I won’t find a way to stop him. He makes my whole being nauseous. Not just my stomach but my muscles and my head and my skin. My myocytes and epithelial cells. My heart and my spirit. Helpless. I am helpless with him. If I cannot stop what he has planned then I’m hopeless too. Powerless. Utterly alone in the universe. That is how it is in his apartment. Just me and him. Only one soul in the room. Mine. And he is trying to take it from me. His apartment has become the whole universe. At once a vast expanse and a vacuum. Just me and him. Nothing else, no one else.

I make him lunch and he talks about nutrition and he talks his madness all over me, coating me in its sticky thick tack. Cortisol is coursing through me. My pulse is quick. I am hypervigilent. I must be able to detect any changes to his mood so I can prepare for what’s next. The worst thing is to be caught off guard. Defenseless. I must cut the apples just so, but I must pay attention to the nuance of his speech: the tone of his voice, the rate, the cadence, the choice of words. His body language too. The way he carries himself, the tone of his muscles, the subtle change of expression on his face. He is a sociopath so he rarely shows anger. It is not so simple as that.

The irony of this is that he has brainwashed me into believing he can read me so easily, that he is always watching me and can tell when I’m lying and what I’m really thinking. He tells me he has researched it all thoroughly, how to tell if someone is lying. The direction their eyes move when answering questions, the rate their heart beats, the tone of their muscles. (But he really was terrible at it. I fooled him. He went down. He lost his life as he knew it. Why? Because he wasn’t hypervigilent. Why? Because he wasn’t afraid. He was arrogant. My fear saved me really. And allowed me to stop him. It saved my life and my soul.)

It pressed this moment into my memory too. This moment I am reliving now eight years later. In an instant. Yes all of this comes and passes in just a few seconds. And then just as suddenly I am back in 2016 packing up my car, hurrying to get back to Our New Baby before he starts fussing in his car seat.

I’m free of my prison. I have been PTSD free for a year now. I have my moments. I have my hours. But I am no longer trapped inside. I am free and I can now appreciate the fear for what it did for me then. It saved my soul. It stopped a sadist. And now I am free to live the good life, 2016 style.

Of Angels and Devils

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From January 2015:

Dr. Steven Gelfand died on January 18th after a brief battle with cancer. He was 66 years old. He was also amazing.

I’m going to tell you about him. And just from reading about it, you’ll be better off for having known what little I can tell you here.

I met Dr. Gelfand July of 2009. He was the attending of my very first clinical rotation as a medical student. The first two years of med school are spent in the classroom and the last two years are spent on rotation. You get to leave the classroom and spend time actually doing medicine.

I’d had PTSD for about a year at this point. My perpetrator, a fellow medical student, had been arrested in August 2008. My trauma officially ended with his arrest I suppose, and then came the PTSD.

After he was arrested, my medical school became upset with me. You see, the FBI released my name (even though they didn’t need to) and implied a lot of things about my personal life, sex life, and mental health in the affidavit they used to arrest the sociopathic child molestor I’d turned in. Some of what they wrote about me was accurate and some of it wasn’t. Two things made very clear by this affidavit were:
1. He was a dangerous sadistic pedophile
2. I had risked my life and the lives of my children to turn him in.

I’d like to think a medical school, an institution charged with shaping the physicians we place our trust in and rely on for our lives and health, would be appreciative of a future doctor risking her life and the lives of her children to stop a fellow future doctor who is a sadistic pedophile from hurting any more women or children. But that’s not how it went.

Quite the opposite.

My school chose to punish me instead. They placed me on probation for having morals below the standards of the community (in reference to the affidavit’s inference that I had engaged in consensual, kinky sex with the perpetrator before The Ordeal began). More than this, they waged psychological warfare on me. They brought in a speaker from the state board of medicine (and an alum of the school) who spoke in front of the entire student body about me, saying I really should leave med school now because I wasn’t fit to be a doctor. Warning them not to be like me. A sexually immoral person. The head of my school told me I would never be a doctor. She said no doctor would take someone like me on for clinical rotations and that even if I somehow managed to become a doctor, I would never have patients because I was so disgusting, they wouldn’t want me touching them.

Such cruel words coming from the head of your medical school, coming to you in an acute post-traumatic state, has such an impact. I didn’t even realize at the time how much I believed her.

I was able to get a lawyer and, after a legal battle, get her off my back (but not before suffering the utter humiliation of being forced to apologize for my behavior to the faculty of my school.) But she had gotten inside of my post-traumatic soul and planted herself there.

Fast forward a year to my first day of clinical rotations. The day she said would never come.

The PTSD had obliterated my self-confidence. Deep inside I was afraid she was right, that I wasn’t going to make it and I should have cut my losses when I had the chance.

I know there is a God because it cannot be chance that I wound up on Dr. Gelfand’s doorstep. By the end of my first day with him he’d shared with me that he had no respect for the head of my school. In fact, he told me, he’d once told her to go f*** herself. He was a Jewish, cursing, bold as all hell, certified angel.

He told me she had once punished a medical student he had rotating with him after he gave the student time off to spend with her mother who was dying of cancer. He responded by sharing his feelings as above.

I ended up telling him what had happened to me. The brave deed I’d done and the evil she’d paid me with. He told me I’d done a courageous thing, the right thing. And he told me not to tell any other doctors like I’d just told him. It could ruin my medical career.

Over the next two years, he became my two special needs sons’ neuropsychiatrist. He was, by far, the best doctor they’ve ever had. He became a mentor for me too. He told me I was going to be a great doctor. And part of me actually believed him somehow.

He was a tough attending. He let you know every single detail you got wrong. But he also let you know when you got something right. And when he did, it really meant something.

He went into medicine for the right reason. He cared about his patients and worked for and advocated for them fiercely. He was good and he knew it, and he earned it.

Dr. Gelfand was right that I shouldn’t tell the other doctors I would be rotating with what she’d done to me. It wasn’t the time for it. She still had the power to end my career. I wasn’t emotionally ready to speak publicly about it yet either.

But I have been healed of my PTSD after seven long years. I am getting ready to graduate from a wonderful, supportive residency. And I’ve never been one to keep quiet.

It was Martin Luther King day on Monday so we talked to our kids about the civil rights movement. We talked about the turning points like Rosa Parks and how those were just moments that sparked off a movement that ha been building for a long time. My son asked me why those particular events set things in motion and I told him no one could say for sure.

The passing of this amazing man has changed things for me. Something has been brewing within me that would inevitably, eventually come out. I didn’t know when.

The silence ends now.

Jeremy Noyes raped me, tortured me, threatened to kill me and my babies. My medical school punished me for risking all of that to do what is right as a physician and as a person. He is now serving 45 years in federal prison. What my school did was wrong and dangerous. They sent a clear message to that school full of future doctors that turning in a child predator could cost you your career. It was unethical, immoral, and unacceptable.

Your seven years is up, LECOM. Let’s talk.

You’re Not a Good Little Girl, You’re a Warrior

28 Friday Nov 2014

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I watched the first two episodes of a British show recently called “The Bletchley Circle”. It’s about four women who were code breakers for British intelligence during world war two who have now blended into civilian life seven years later. One is a stay-at-home mom, another a housewife, another a waitress, the last a librarian. They reunite when they realize they can stop a serial killer with their code breaking skills. They realize, too, that a piece of them has been suffocating all those years. Their minds, their hearts, their spirits, trapped in an ordinary life they weren’t meant for.

They pursue the killer. When the police aren’t very helpful, they take it upon themselves to go undercover. They visit the gruesome crime scenes before calling the police with the location of the body. They set a trap with one of their own as the bait. In the end, they get their man in a dramatic scene where he gets blown away by one of the ladies as he’s about to kill another one.

So, I like it a lot right up until the last ten seconds. I mean, what’s not to like: feisty, intelligent women banding together and protecting their sisters in a man’s world. Well written scenes subtly addressing the alienation of women in modern society and the problem that has no name. Recognition of how common rape and domestic violence are. Entertaining yet socially relevant. I could relate to them too. They knew trauma. They knew aloneness. They had seen the evil of the world, survived it. It made me feel a little less alone. More optimistic maybe. But then came the ending.

The main character is walking home after nearly being killed by a serial killer who rapes his victims after they’re dead. She went willingly to his house because he said if she didn’t, he would kill her children. If she came, he said, he would spare them. She did what we do for our children. She walked into trauma to save them from the evil. And after she nearly died and was saved and the police came in and she processed it all as well as she could with her three friends who’d gone through it with her, who’d saved her, she went home to her husband and kids. She opens the gate of the little picket fence that surorunds her house. She looks in the window at her husband playing with her kids. She’s going to tell him what happened. She’s going to tell him all of it. He doesn’t even know she was a code breaker during the war. He thinks she was a clerical worker. She’s going to tell him now. About the war, about what she and her friends have really been doing when he thinks they’re off gossiping, about the evil she’s seen and known. More than that, she’s going to tell him about the rush of it all. About how powerful she is. She’s stopped a killer. She’s saved countless women. She’s saved her children. She helped defeat the Nazis.

But then she pauses. She looks at them playing happily, blissfully ignorant of it all. She remembers what one of the other women told her. She can’t tell him, she said. She looks at them and she changes her mind. She does what good little trauma survivors do. She swallows it down and hides it away. It’s not enough to have saved so many lives, she must protect them from the knowledge of evil too. To keep them safe in body and mind and spirit.

That’s when they lost me. That’s when my heart sunk and I felt cheated. And I felt pissed.

I wrote in an earlier entry about sin eaters. About swallowing the evil down and keeping it away from the rest of the world. About how I didn’t want to tell anyone about the evil I’ve known because they couldn’t possibly understand. I wanted to be a good little trauma surivor and hold it inside but I can’t. I wanted to be like those war veterans who refuse to tell their families what happened, who maybe don’t even tell them they fought in the war at all. To be like the woman in London who pretened to be a clerical worker turned stay-at-home mom instead of telling her husband who she really was, a warrior. The pain of trauma, the thrill of saving lives.

I haven’t protected my husband from the evil. I have told him all of it in detail. He came to the perpetrator’s trial and saw the graphic pictures of the brutality and perversion. I have told him what he did and how it felt and how it has haunted me. I have been honest about my existential crisis that has started in recent weeks, seven years after the events that changed my life. That changed his. He didn’t even know me then. He was finding Jesus and doing missionary work and writing scripts and raising his beautiful son. It may be harder for him to hear the unholy thoughts I have had lately than the details of the violation.

But I have been brutally honest about those doubts and thoughts and feelings, about the rage I feel for God right now. About my daydreams of violent revenge on my perpetrator which have resurfaced. About how exhausted I am to be seven years out and feeling like I’m back where I started. This is PTSD, I tell him. Why can’t you just get over it, he asks. Why can’t it be over? This is PTSD, I tell him. It will get better, but it will keep coming back. I could go twenty years and be pretty good and then it could come back all over again. And living with that knowdlege in and of itself is cruel enough. We are married for life and so the PTSD is a life sentence for him too.

It is not right to want to violent revenge, he tells me. God calls us to forgive, he reminds me. I said I’d forgiven the perpetrator. I had prayed for him. I had seen him as a poor banished child of Eve. Like a good girl. But I am not a good girl now because I have come to realize I spent all these years being a good girl because I thought maybe if I was good enough, bad things wouldn’t happen to me. I’ve blamed myself all these years because it gave me a sense of control. I realized, really realized, a few weeks ago that it wasn’t my fault. He alone chose to do the things he did. I had no choice. I could not have been so good he wouldn’t have done what he did. I cannot be so good I am safe. And so, I am not going to concentrate my being into being good. I am going to feel the anger I need to feel, I am going to doubt the goodness and power of God as is inevitable with trauma, I am not going to hide from the reality we live in a patriarchy maintained through brutality of body, mind, spirit.

I bring this to him because he’s my husband. I bring it to him first. But I’m not planning to stop there. This is a series of events set in motion in that cold February of 2008. Set in motion by him. I used to think I had such a choice in how I responded to what he did. I used to think I chose to go back to his apartment over and over again because I had made the choice to save my children and to save that little girl. The only choice I had was my body and mind versus my soul. Something would be lost. There was no good choice. I have no good choice now either. Keep it all inside and go on living the nice external life we’ve built up for ourselves or speak the truth and risk losing that external life. Body or soul. Ignore my fellow survivors, the little girls suffering out there, move on and tell myself finding health and happiness is the best revenge. Or be honest.

He’s my husband and my fate is his. His is mine. And God with us. The three of us. And so the three of us have PTSD. The three of us had the good choices taken from us seven years ago on that cold winter day in that motel room in Appalachia.

I will tell my children what happened one day when they are older. It happened to them too. A piece of their mother stolen never to return. A warrior born. I will tell them of the evil in the world and of the not good choices it leaves us. I will tell them I chose my soul over my body and mind. I will tell them he took something from them too. I will tell them the no good choice between body and mind and your soul is at the very core of this fallen world. Because I cannot protect them from the truth of this world but only do my best to prepare them for it. You see, what those good little trauma survivors in the movies don’t know is that you cannot be a good enough girl to keep bad things from happening.

Stop being good and be the warrior you are.

Of Santa Claus and Mama Lions

28 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in empathy, Evil, kids, love, outrage, parenting, Rape, Sin

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My husband recently informed me my nine year old son no longer believes in Santa. My ten year old with autism still believes. He told me he wants an English policeman costume for Christmas. When I told him that might hard for me to find, he said, don’t worry because Santa can make anything. He said Santa would make it because he doesn’t really believe in elves anymore. I said, so just Santa? He said, well Mrs. Clause too. Obviously. It would be lonely at that cold North Pole without someone to come home to.

My husband and my ex-husband as well don’t really agree with the Santa thing. You shouldn’t lie to your kids, they say. How could they ever trust you once they find out the truth. You lied, you lied! All those years, all those lies! I’ve gotta admit, when they say that my first thought is just, WTF? Are you serious? Then I calm down and formulate a more helpful defense. It’s a little moment of magic we give them for a few years. It’s what childhood is supposed to be. They have the rest of their lives to come to terms with reality. Give them a little piece of magic before the, lets be honest, rather brutal process of growing up begins. They will come across so many lies in their lives told for unkind ends. If we can tell a few to make the brief flash of true childhood a little more magical, I say, do it. I say, it’s not fair for us to impose the world as we see it on them.

There is a truth to Santa. He may not be a man, but he’s the personification of all we feel and hope for them. He is what childhood is. And I hope that’s what we want for them.

I’ve come to realize that protecting childhood is more important to me than almost anything in this world. I don’t mean spoiling kids, I don’t mean coddling them. I mean keeping them safe, giving them room to be themselves, fostering their confidence. When they are young, giving them a time of sweet oblivion from the way of the world. As they get older, leading them into the world as gently and meaningfully as we can. Cradling the fragility of what is true about that childhood innocence intact into the fallen world so they can thrive despite it all and hopefully do some good along the way.

As important as all of this is to me, there is an accompanying … frustration. Yes, we’ll say frustration. We’ll be diplomatic. A frustration with adults who derail this in the less obvious ways. Obviously, there are those who deny kids safety, whether it be sexual, physical, emotional, spiritual. There are those who are not strong enough to let them be themselves. Those who allow their own wounds to keep them from letting them know how wonderfully made they truly are. And frustration is not the word I use for these adults. They are what’s wrong with this world. They are original sin.

The ones I am frustrated with are not the wounded, the evil, the weak. They’re the ones who never really became adults themselves. The ones who do not know the evil this world holds, the suffering, the injustice, the unfairness. Does that sound mean? Bitter? Pessimistic? If so, you may be one of these adults yourself. Before you get all defensive, let’s look at the facts:

1 in 4 girls will be sexually molested in some way
1 in 3 women will be sexually victimized in some way in her life
1 in 4 women will be raped in her lifetime (rape being specifically vaginal or anal penetration)
1 in 6 boys will be sexually molested in some way
That’s in the U.S.

22,000 children die from poverty a day worldwide
28% of children in developing countries are underweight or growth stunted

So, yes, the obliviously priveleged adults of this world frustrate me. They’re safe and warm in their cocoons and the children of the world are outside left on their own. They ignore the safety so many children are denied. They cannot prepare any of the children to make that transition from the innocence of early childhood to the world of trouble and sin we live in. They need to get their asses out here and get to work.

There is a lot of work to do.

I am, above all, a mama lion. For my children and for all the others. Children need milk and play, to learn to fend. They also need a mama willing to rip out the intestines of those who threaten.

Man up, people. Be the mamas they need.

You will sleep soundly because we don’t

15 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by in doctors, Evil, Rape, Sin

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“Professor Evans of the Presbyterian College, Carmarthen, actually saw a sin-eater about the year 1825, who was then living near Llanwenog, Cardiganshire. Abhorred by the superstitious villagers as a thing unclean, the sin-eater cut himself off from all social intercourse with his fellow creatures by reason of the life he had chosen; he lived as a rule in a remote place by himself, and those who chanced to meet him avoided him as they would a leper. This unfortunate was held to be the associate of evil spirits, and given to witchcraft, incantations and unholy practices; only when a death took place did they seek him out, and when his purpose was accomplished they burned the wooden bowl and platter from which he had eaten the food handed across, or placed on the corpse for his consumption.”

I gave a talk on PTSD in women to a room full of doctors today. I talked about incest and oral rape to a room full of doctors today. I started off my talk by telling them the next 45 minutes were going to be unpleasant and uncomfortable because discussing trauma, thinking about trauma, is an innately unpleasant, uncomfortable thing. And for the first five minutes or so they did look uncomfortable. Which made sense. And then they didn’t. They stopped looking uncomfortable and began to look the way they always do during a lecture. Some of them listened attentively and made eye contact. Some of them dozed off.

It went pretty much as lectures do. There were questions and comments afterward. About screening and medication and epidemiology.

I told them something else before the lecture started too. I told them I have PTSD and that I was talking to them about PTSD that day (not hypertension or diabetes or depression or all the hundred other diseases it would have been so easy to talk about) because I wanted to help all the survivors I’ve met along the way.

I have not told many doctors over the years that I have PTSD because the admission of the disease, quite unlike other diseases, is a confession of having lived something. In this case, something horrible and terrifying and evil. I’m not supposed to tell them what happened to me in medical school. Everyone who knows tells me so. We are a society that blames the victim and the medical world is no different. But these people who tell me this, these well meaning people who want to protect me, they don’t know how awful a thing it is to not tell.

What good is it to gain the whole world for the price of your soul? And a medical career, after all, is hardly the whole world.

The thing that keeps me from telling them what happened to me is not fear. I left fear behind the day I turned him in knowing he very well might kill my children, knowing very well bad men like him rarely go to jail for very long. The reason I don’t tell them is that they wouldn’t care, not enough anyway. They do not know evil as those of us who’ve lived it do. They do not have the darkness in them. When evil surfaces, we listen for a moment and tell her we feel so bad for her and tell her she’s so brave. And then we forget. Because anyone who can, will. And the reason we can is because of the sin eaters.

We swallow down the darkness for the rest of the world. It sits in us, contained in us, and you are safe.

It will never change. It is not patriarchy or capitalism or imperialism. It is evil, it is fallen Man.

I stood up there and I taught those doctors about the three stages of recovery from PTSD. I made them feel so good about the whole thing. These women will always have this chronic disease, they’ll never get justice for what happened to them, but they’ll be okay because they’ll break their silence and push through their fear and integrate the trauma experience into the story of their lives. They’ll be redeemed by learning acceptance. Not resignation, acceptance. Cue the music, fade out as the heroine smiles through her tears and heads out to conquer the world with her loving supportive man at her side.

I swallowed down the darkness for them. And there it sits.

I write this now not for those of you who will read this who do not know the darkness. You will never change. You can’t. You will forget this in a few minutes or a day. I write this for the sin eaters. So I might feel a little less alone for a moment before I head back to work, to the land of the those we protect who will never really know.