Category Archives: marriage

Lassoing the Beast

24 Friday Apr 2020

Posted by in christianity, empathy, Evil, kids, love, marriage, medicine, my awesome husband, narcissism, PTSD, Rape, Sin, Uncategorized

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I do not think that I have ever seen a case where the sentencing goal of protection of the public figured more predominantly. Anyone who sat through this trial would realize that this defendant is the worst nightmare of every child’s parent. The entirely credible and overwhelming evidence demonstrated that the defendant is a dangerous predatory sadist…
Hon Sean McLaughlin, sentencing of Jeremy Noyes

golden lasso

A package arrived today. A hoody. Oh, how I love a good hoody. Is there anything better? Cozy and comfy and flattering on people of all shapes and sizes. Maybe it’s because I grew up crushing on boys with long hair in hoodies and Vans, but hoodies hold a special place in my heart. Back to present day: the hoody that arrived was blazoned with Beast on the Bay. Because I have decided to run the Beast on the Bay again this year.

Regular readers may recall that in 2018, I ran the Beast as part of my ten year anniversary of my trauma. It inspired me to get into shape and do something that felt impossible. It also happened to be in Erie, where my trauma occurred and is sponsored by my old med school, who made the trauma significantly worse. I was not able to run the race in 2019 because the previous summer, in the best shape of my life, I had suddenly developed a mysterious autoimmune neurologic disorder a week before I was to run a different obstacle course race, the Spartan. Now, within this surreal time of quarantine, I’ve decided to do it again this September (if it’s not cancelled).

I had come to some new revelations on Easter Sunday. Not regarding God or Armageddon or resurrection. Regarding my immune system.

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In order for me to explain, let’s rewind to June 2019.

I’d been in training for 14 months and was in peak form. My body fat percentage was its lowest ever. I could run a 9 minute mile. I was pumping out burpees like a champ. I felt amazing. On Sunday, my husband I went to a local Crossfit gym to do a class and practice rope climbing. I’d never climbed a rope in my life. I never even tried in gym class as a kid because I was convinced I couldn’t do it and would just embarrass myself. I knew I needed to climb one for the race coming up the following Saturday so we went and the owners gave me some tips and I did it! I was so damn proud of myself.

The next morning I woke up and felt sick: I was exhausted, my muscles ached and felt weak. It wasn’t the way I felt after a really brutal workout. It was the way I felt when I had the flu. I decided I better give into it and rest as much as possible but I’d been planning on working out leading up until a couple days before the race. I needed to get better quick, though , so I cancelled the workouts. By the time Friday came, I was still exhausted and I knew I needed to cancel the race. I was heartbroken. I’d worked so hard and it meant a lot to me. It was odd I was still feeling just as bad six days in, so on Saturday instead of going to the race, I went to Quest to get some bloodwork drawn.

Over the next few months I saw neurologists and rheumatologists. I had bloodwork, MRIs, EMGs, and EEGs. I began to piece together symptoms I’d been having in the months leading up to my exhaustion. Blistering on my lips I’d assumed were cold sores (they weren’t). Neuropathy in my arms and legs after showering. A tightening of my rib muscles during a run. At one point, my calves swelled and hardened during a run, forcing me to stop. My fine motor skills were off and I was having more of the involuntary muscle movements I’d gotten for years. I was losing my balance more often too.

pemphigus

None of the doctors ever arrived at a diagnosis and I was told to deal with it and be grateful it wasn’t something bad. I wasn’t. How could we know if it would get really bad or not if we didn’t know what it was? I had plenty of patients in the same boat. Vague autoimmune symptoms and slightly off labs but no clear clinical picture of a known disorder. They often found their way to my doorstep looking for help from medical marijuana (Which is smart because it helps both the symptoms and has immune modulating effect which can help longterm outcomes). I was now one of them.

I tried changing to a plant based ketogenic diet but it only seemed to make it worse (and was unpleasant as hell to eat). I tried forcing myself to exercise but it made it worse too. I would have a few days where I felt pretty good, but the symptoms always returned. That is, until November.

In late November, my husband moved out. Our marriage ended. And so did my symptoms. I hadn’t been expecting such a dramatic reaction on the part of my body, but there it was. Fatigue, pain, weakness, skin blistering, muscle jerking, neuropathy. Gone. My toxic marriage had been killing me. My body was sending me one last desperate message before it gave up the fight. And it worked.

What can make you more grateful for the movement of your body than losing it?

There has been a lot going on in my life since then. Divorce, buying a new house and moving in less than two weeks before Christmas, and the in and out of court of a high conflict divorce and custody battle. Finally as February came to a close I felt like things had settled down and I was ready to start working out again and go on a diet to shed the weight I’d gained since June. It went well for a couple weeks and then buh buh buh, quarantine! And it all went to pot. Like it did for all of you.

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No more daycare. No more school. Time to homeschool 3 kids and take care of a preschooler. And now you have to take your medical practice and completely restructure it because you can’t do office visits anymore. And no one can help you because it’s a freaking quarantine. And did I mention the high conflict divorce I’m in? Yeah, those don’t improve with quarantine either.

And then we got sick. March 22nd, my four year old and I woke up with a fever, sore throat and cough. Exhausted, body aches, chills, no appetite. Then the other three kids got it. We didn’t qualify for COVID testing so I put us into complete isolation (actually considerably worse than regular quarantine life, believe it or not) and waited for it to pass. But it didn’t. The fever would sometimes for 24 or even 72 hours, but it always came back. We’re now on Day 33. I eventually coerced an urgent care into giving me a test despite not meeting criteria on Day 24 when our fevers went up higher than ever. The test came back negative but they told me false negatives were common and I should consider getting tested again. I consulted with my mentor, the best doctor I know. He said he thought it was COVID and a false negative. I agreed.

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If you consider the other things in the differential diagnosis (cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, Epstein Barr virus, CMV, Lyme disease), none of them made as much sense as COVID.

And so, here we sit in isolation. Now, back to the Beast. I was in a lull of symptoms two weeks ago on Easter Sunday. I was sitting watching a local church service on my big screen TV while my kids ate their candy and watched their iPads, and a verse struck me.

A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.

And I realized my husband had ruined my relationship with God. Because that’s what abusive people do. They isolate you. From friends and family and, sometimes, if they’re really good at it, God. I realized how far from God I’d gotten, and how I couldn’t separate God from my husband and the harm he does. And I realized it was now time to stop. And I said hello to God again.

I realized something else that night as I stayed up late journaling about all my newfound epiphanies. I was ready to get in shape and lose weight again. But I needed something to focus on, a race. I thought of the Beast. But when I thought of it, my stomach dropped. I realized the thought of running it alone, without my husband, scared me. That I felt like his ghost would be haunting me the entire time. And most things that scare you, are the things most worth doing. And then it occurred to me. The timing of the onset of my autoimmune issues. I’ve always noted the cruel irony of it beginning right as I was to run an obstacle course race even harder than the Beast, that I’d trained for for so long. Right at my physical peak. My husband was going to run the Spartan with me just like he’d run the Beast with me. He jumped on the Beast wagontrain late in the game. He said he didn’t think I’d actually train and go through with it so he waited. Like it was such a big freaking honor to have him run it. He took something that was mine and made it his. He was jealous. And he was going to take the Spartan from me too. He had spent years complaining I was fat and had a flat butt but when I got in shape, he was so damn jealous, he did everything he could to undermine me. And he couldn’t let me have the Beast, my moment. I didn’t finish high in the Beast, mind you. I couldn’t do about a third of the obstacles. But I finished. And I was so damn proud. He acted proud too: proud of us, proud of his wife, of himself. His wife, not me. His possession that reflects on him. That was what he showed the world. A few weeks after we finished it, I put a “I Beat the Beast” bumper sticker on my car and he looked at it and said “You didn’t beat the beast. You didn’t finish all the obstacles.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what he shows his family. For out the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. I stood up to him and told him I had finished and tried all the obstacles and that was a big accomplishment for me. He gave me a shitty look and walked off.

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He took the Beast from me and my body wasn’t going to let him take the Spartan. Maybe that’s why it shut down. Maybe my heart called up my immune system and said, if he does it to her one more time I’m going to break. And my immune system said, ok, time for the Hail Mary. We will throw the switch and shut the whole plant down and give her some time to sit and think. And if she won’t walk away, we’ll leave her there sitting. And if she does, she’ll run it for her. And my heart blew my immune system a kiss and my immune system blushed. Maybe. Maybe it was a gift from my body.

So, I signed up for the Beast. And ordered a hoody. And the next day fruits and vegetable and water became a thing again at our house. Planning and cooking dinners because a nightly thing. And working out resumed for me and my kids too. Life was good. I was triumphant!

But then life happened. Our fever has taken up residence and work and homeschooling are getting harder instead of easier. Yada yada yada. I’m back down for the count. But I’m not cancelling the Beast. I am running it, come hell or high water or fever or economic collapse. Even if it takes me ten hours, I’m running it.

I cried a good bit during the Beast the last time I ran it. Cried for what Jeremy did to me, for what my school did to me, for what their mom having PTSD took from my kids, for all the other survivors I know who will never see justice like I did. I imagine I will cry this time too, for a whole other set of reasons.

My high conflict divorce has been nastier than ever this past week. We may soon go before the judge via teleconference (ya know, quarantine) and I am scared my husband will convince the judge he’s the guy out there bragging about his wife running the Beast, instead of who he really is, the guy denigrating his wife when she dared to be proud of herself. But this is not my first rodeo, dear reader. I have sat in court with a man who accused me of lies before and I have spoken the truth and justice prevailed. I will lasso the Beast again this time. And I will put on my hoody and take a run and thank my heart for being so damn good to me.

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June 19, 2008 (or, Tequila!)

19 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by in kids, love, marriage, medicine, my awesome husband, PTSD, Rape, Uncategorized

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It was raining this morning as I headed out for my run. Ten years ago on this day, though, it was hot and sunny. I know this because I can remember the beads of sweat rolling down the back of my legs as I sat in my green minivan in that long, heavy, black Land’s End skirt I’d bought on clearance a few weeks before. My air conditioner was broken and the van churned out warm air as I sat staring down at my phone.

I’d programmed the phone number for the Pittsburgh field office of the FBI into it a couple months before under the name “Hope.” It was finally time to call. I knew he might kill me. Knew he might kill my two boys. Mies had just turned 4. Max was 2 1/2. I asked God to please protect them but told Him if something happened to them, I knew it just was what it had to be. I had to turn him in. I could never face my babies again if I didn’t. I didn’t want them to live in that kind of world. Abraham, I am feeling you, brother.

I operated purely through adrenaline at that time. Until he was arrested in August. And released on bail to a local podiatrist. And jailed again since he, ya know, had threatened to kill me and my kids and all. And then as I fought to stay in school as my med school slut shamed me and tried to get rid of me. Once the adrenaline stopped flowing continuously later that Fall, the real hell began. PTSD.

I wanted to give up but I somehow got to a place where I told myself, this isn’t it. Someday things will get better. You will watch your babies grow up. You will become a doctor and take care of your patients. You might even get married and have more babies. Maybe a daughter. Maybe. I fought off the hopelessness. I convinced myself there was possibility.

Here I am ten years later. With five beautiful kids (including a sassy-sweet daughter). With a handsome, devoted husband. With a practice of my own, complete with amazing patients I care about more than I knew I could. Healed of my PTSD. Having forgiven Jeremy and even Sylvia, the head of my med school, and all those professors who betrayed me. Training for a semi-impossible obstacle course race with my husband and a trainer, for goodness sake. A trainer. More than I dreamed possible.

I am so grateful to God my babies are alive. That I am alive. That I am a doctor. That I have the husband and kids I do.

I skipped work today and drove through the country to Deer Lakes park to go running. The rain and grey gave way to fluffy white clouds and sunshine in a beautiful blue sky. I held my hand out the sunroof as I drove. I felt the sweat run down my legs from my run as I drove.I sang along to Tequila! like a fool. I’m sure I looked and sounded ridiculous.

I pray the little girls he hurt find the peace I have. I pray he does too.

I am so grateful for today. I am alive, I am free. Thank you God.

Tequila!

the smell of collard greens and sickness: 38 today

24 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by in kids, marriage, my awesome husband, parenting, PTSD, Sin, Uncategorized

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Today was the kind of day you question this whole having-5-kids thing. It’s my birthday and I’ve spent it tending 3 sick kids and taking another one to the psychiatrist. We’re talking wall to wall puke and diarrhea. Kids whining and crying. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. And always, always, the cry from all directions: Mom!

That said, 38 is a good birthday. The sun is shining. My husband surprised me with some beautiful flowers (even more a surprise because I ran into him at the store as he was buying them-he thought it ruined the whole thing but I found it more of a unique thrill). Granted, the 16 month old knocked the flowers and the 2 quarts of water they were in on the floor, but still. Clean up efforts of the spill were difficult secondary to every single rag in the house being in the wash, dirty or currently used as a puke reservoir. But still.

I spent my 28th birthday in the midst of my five month long trauma. So, Hell. I spent my 28th birthday in Hell. The great thing about trauma is that it makes puke and diarrhea look pretty damn good.

I took my sick babies for a walk in the double stroller today around our neighborhood on the river. I ate Thai food and vegan cheese cake with a very nice raspberry sauce, made by my hubs. I drank some wine and even convinced my teetolaller hubs to join me. My kids all made me cards (ten minutes before the party once forced to by the hubs) that were very sweet. My hubs spent the day, when not reducing raspberry sauce or walking our daughter to the dollar store for more pink balloons, working on the medical practice we are opening. The best present ever.

And  I got one other very important gift: time to write this.  Luxury living at its finest. I do not know how I could have made it to 38 without writing. It was my escape as an outcast Aspergery tween, was my voice against oppression in high school and beyond, won me scholarships and fellowships that made me feel like maybe I really did belong in academia, inspired lyrics that gave me the drive and the confidence to sing in a punk band in front of hundreds of people despite being completely terrified, got me published in a legit medical journal at a time when I struggled with feeling like I was a *real* doctor. Most importantly, writing got me through the weeks and months directly after Jeremy was arrested. Through the second trauma of my medical school shaming me and trying to ruin my career. And it preserved my memories. A true privilege few trauma survivors have.

This blog helped me recover from my PTSD. It helps me still. The core of PTSD is shame. The only way to battle shame is to speak your truth. More specifically, to have someone hear your truth. And not walk away. It is a small little blog with a small group of followers, and I am grateful for each and every one of you. You are a precious gift to me on this my 38th birthday.

It surprises me how I begin to write these entries with a problem and think to myself “Why are you dwelling on this problem with no solution? Cut the pity party.” And I start to write and by the time I am done, I have found an unexpected solution or a new way of looking at it, or have found a path to accepting it as it is. It makes me wonder if anyone can recover from PTSD without creating something. Trauma is the opposite of creation. It is destruction. It is the Fall in the Garden, the closing of the gate. What is it that Eve suffered for the Fall? Pain in childbirth. Pain in creation. But she did not lose the ability to create new life.

There is a certain pain to my writing now that wasn’t there when I was younger. Before my trauma. Before I had my first little boy and was told he was sick at 6 days old (and on the 7th day God rested. I cried the deepest cry I ever have while God rested. He and I are still hashing that one out). Before. But there is still this gift of the ability to create, as God does. And there is a healing in it. And a connection. Maybe not to God so much, but to other people, other survivors–not just of trauma, but all the sad things we live– to time, tradition, cyclical history. And a connection of ideas, of the points of my life, of the people who’ve passed in and out of it. Maybe, just maybe, if I keep writing, it will all make sense. The connections will be drawn, the pattern will show itself. There will be an answer.

I made a big batch of smoky vegan collard greens today for lunch. I made a lovely kale strawberry smoothie for breakfast. I took my medication. I exercised. The day was still utter chaos. I was still pretty damn grumpy for most of it. But I still ate my greens. I did not resolve my ongoing spiritual struggle over the nature of God (he can’t be all loving and  all powerful, so he mustn’t be all powerful so… where the hell does that leave us?)  But I still ate my greens. I was a highly imperfect mother and wife. But I still ate my greens. I was lonely for a lot of reasons. But I still ate my greens.

And so, the house came to smell of sickness and collard greens on this my 38th birthday. But it was 74 and breezy and so we opened the windows and doors and aired the place out. Took the baby out in the yard barefoot. Walked down to the public dock and watched the water. Hung pink streamers and balloons and had a little party. Watched a cheezy terrorist movie starring Morgan Freeman with my husband with the volume down and made up our own dialogue (lip reading did reveal Mr. Freeman called one of the characters “son” as I predicted he would). Spilled some wine on the couch and laughed about it.

We aired the place out because, as I realized shortly before my 29th birthday, I am not in prison. I am alive and I am free. This is not a cell without windows. The sun is not kept from us. And I am not alone. I am eating my greens and cleaning up the messes as they come. The stuff of life. 38 years alive. Booyah.

The World is Coming to an End

27 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by in kids, love, marriage, my awesome husband, parenting

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My husband is a filmmaker and he made our wedding video. I am blessed like that. He edited it, picked out the music and even hired an animator to make an animated version of the highlights of our relationship. Impressively, he did this while broke and during a really painful separation I had instigated. #MaritalSaint.

We watch it from time to time and we had been meaning to sit and watch it again for the past few months now. Our daughter Lena loves weddings and kept asking when we would watch it. We finally carved out some time to watch it last week. As Lena sat oohing and ahhing over my pretty dress and the “beauuuutyful flowas,” I found myself crying. Which was odd. You see, I am not a crier. I mainly cry when

  1. flooded with pregnancy hormones
  2. when extremely exhausted or
  3. when extremely depressed and heading into a panic attack. When it feels I am falling into the blackness and my world is coming to an end.

I cried several times during the video despite not wanting to do so in front of my sweet, very empathetic Lena. Unlike my boys, she notices any time I am sad or angry. Sometimes she notices before I do. #HighFunctioningAutism. And unlike the boys, I can never lie my way out of it.

I cried as we watched my father give me away and when my nieces walked down the aisle as little flower girls. My wedding was really the last time I saw my sisters and my nieces. I have since then physically seen them a few times, but it was a hollow, awkward exercise. It only served to remind me of what I’d lost.

I watched my two nieces in their pretty little dresses walking down the aisle. The older one was 6 1/2 and the younger one 4 1/2. Smiling and sweet. At the reception the younger one danced with abandon and ran around, often times chased by her father trying to get her to do something. She was quick and evaded capture often. As I watched them, I realized they will forever be caught in this age in my mind. They will never age. Forever sweet, spunky little girls.

I saw them for the first time since the wedding (the first time in 5 years, in 60 months, in 1,825 days) this past summer. 11 1/2 and 9 1/2. They were hard to recognize. They looked so much like their mother now. They looked so grown up. They did not talk to me or my boys.

My boys, especially the Axe, had been asking to see them for five years. He never gave up. He couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed. I didn’t understand either and couldn’t figure out how to explain it. I told him, my sister is mad at me and doesn’t want to see us. He asked why she was mad and I said, I don’t know. Because I don’t.

Now, they were strangers.

My sister gave her older daughter my name as her middle name. Because I had helped her through her very long, very difficult, downright heroic labor. It meant a lot to me. An overwhelming lot. I wonder now what she tells her when she asks where her name came from, as I often asked my mother when I was a little girl.

I cried because I will always miss them. Because they will forever be little girls in my mind even as they grow. And that is a very sad thing, to never grow up.

I cried too to see my parents. My father giving me away.

“Who gives this woman to be married?”

” I do.”

But they didn’t really give me away. They couldn’t bring themselves to let me go. They couldn’t stand the thought of letting me grow up. I was forever a little girl to them. *Their* little girl. They could let no one take me away. It did not occur to them I was choosing to go away, that no one was taking me. In their mind, I was theirs and now he was taking me to be his. After all, a little girl is not able to make such decisions.

If they’d let me go, I would have. I really did want to marry my husband and have a home of my own. Every time I’d left my home as an adult I always came back. I went away to college but then transferred to the local school and lived with them. Then I met my first husband and moved away with him and got married. But then I divorced him and again lived with them for four years during medical school. Then I met my forever husband and moved away again. If they’d let me go, I would have stayed with him. But they couldn’t and I didn’t. I left him twice. I left him in a sudden, jarring, couldn’t see it coming way. Twice. And each time returned to them. The first time I physically moved back in with them. The second time, only emotionally so.

And a man shall leave his parents and cleave to his wife. No mention of the wife in that one.

My husband would say to me I was too attached to my family and our marriage wasn’t going to work until I grew up and left the nest and learned to put my kids and marriage first. I kept insisting I had and offered up various bits of evidence to support the patently untrue assertion. He was never convinced.

They had made clear while we were dating they didn’t like him. My sisters broke off with me after the wedding. My parents remained and put up a show of liking him. When I left the first time, it was at my family’s urging and we sat discussing their true feelings about him. When he and I attempted to reconcile shortly after the separation I kept it a secret as I knew they’d be upset. I was right. When they found out from reading text messages on my phone, my mother kicked me out. Me and my three kids. Me with nowhere to go. I remember calling my oldest sister crying uncontrollably, panicking, terrified. Terrified because I had nowhere to go but mostly because when this side of my mother came out, I felt that black hole feeling. That I was being sucked into the abyss. The world was ending.

Our mothers are the source of life. They are supposed to be the safe womb we can always return to in times of distress. Mine was not. It was in times of distress she was most likely to turn from a seemingly sweet cookie baking, nurturing mom to an ugliness words cannot describe. A cold hate would flow from her and destroy me. My world spinning around me, closing in on me, suffocating me into non-existence.  I would go from being a sacrificial devoted mother in her eyes to a crazy, unfit mother who put men before her children. She would threaten to give my ex-husband money to get a lawyer and take my kids away. Crazy. Unfit mother. Woman who puts men before her children. These were the things I feared most. These were the demons that haunted me. Was she right? Is that who I truly was? That doubt, that possibility, was an endless source of shame deep within me.

You never really knew when she would turn. I grew up in a minefield. Trying so hard not to set her off. And always failing.

I remember going back to my bedroom, the room I had slept in all my life, that I had returned to once again, and calling my husband. Speaking in hushed tones and sobs about my mother kicking me out. He couldn’t understand what I was saying. I was terrified for my mother to hear me so I spoke quietly and ended the call quickly. He had no idea what had happened.

My mother soon summoned me to the living room with an offer. She would not kick me and my babies out on condition that:

  1. I send my two boys to live with their father as she did not have the energy for them. My daughter could remain and she would watch her while I completed residency and
  2. I was to cut off contact with my husband. Any time we met for visitation with our daughter, I was to be chaperoned by my father. They didn’t want my manipulative evil husband sucking me back in. After all, I was just a little girl and easily tricked.

I agreed, so scared. I cut off all contact with my husband without even explaining why. They soon rescinded the demand I send my boys to live with their father, but not the second. We met for visitation with my father awkwardly standing with us. My husband brought me gifts, sweet gifts. A CD he’d made me. Sweet, thoughtful gifts and cards. My family rolled their eyes and laughed. How could he think gifts would make up for what a horrible person he was?

In time, I began communicating with my husband again and we decided again to reconcile. This time, I knew I couldn’t let them find out as we prepared, finding a house to live in and meeting as often as we could (he was living 3 1/2 hours away). My parents rarely left the house, but in August there was a family reunion they would be at for a few hours. In those few short hours we packed up my belongings, disassembled my boy’s bunkbeds and moved all of it out to the new house, an hour away, where I was completing residency. I left them a note saying goodbye.

Their little girl had once again been stolen.

In time, I unpacked the dysfunction of my family in therapy. I began slowly to set boundaries and view my family and my childhood for what it was. I realized there was no emotional intimacy. I realized I had been raised to trust no one but the family. I realized how afraid I had been all these years of my mother disowning me, as she had other people in her life. I realized my mother and I were enmeshed and yet not close at all. Not in the ways that matter.

I left my husband again this past summer just as suddenly, just as secretly, just as heartbreakingly. We reconciled again. And my parents said they were fine with it, but began to punish me in subtle unspoken ways. But still I kept them in my life.

The breaking point came a few months later with the dog incident I have explained in previous posts. I found after I broke with them, my marriage was suddenly so much better. My opinion of my husband so much better, my love for him unconditional. I was not expecting this. I came to see all the subtle ways they had undermined our marriage while, on the surface, appearing to be supporting it. How incredibly cruel. To me and to my kids. Crazy. An unfit mother. Projection.

I no longer have my family in my life and so I cried as I watched my father giving me away in my pretty white dress. They say in Catholicism that we are not waiting for the world to end when Christ comes. The world ends many times in our lives. When we get divorced, get a bad diagnosis, lose a loved on. It ended for me when I found out my son was sick at 6 days old, when a guy I’d been in love with broke my heart, when my medical school tried to ruin my career for turning in a child molester. The world ends but a new one begins. It prepares us for death, they say. For it is in dying that we are born again.

My world has come to an end once again as it has before. But this time I can see clearly the new world that has been created in its place. My children growing up healthier and happier than I, my marriage finally solid, my body and mind stronger than they’ve ever been, my connection to God growing.

They couldn’t give me away and so now I have left of my own will. I am not a little girl. I have grown up.

Lemons and sugar in the snow

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in marriage, movies, my awesome husband, PTSD, Rape

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My husband and I are trying to get out and meet new people, to try to make some friends. “We’re putting ourselves out there,” I said to him as we discussed it the other night, “so to speak. It’s kind of like dating. We’re trying to find another couple to be besties with so we have to be more social and put some feelers out.” He looked a little annoyed, or maybe mildly disgusted. Sort of like the face you make when your stomach is slightly off and you’re trying to figure out if it’s going to pass or if it’s the beginning of a full on GI issue.

I took the first step for us (just as I did back when we first met) and found a get together for us with other 30-something couples with kids at a nearby pub. It’s other Catholic couples so I figured I could pique my hubs’ interest with it and I was right (this is, in fact, even more complicated than dating as it turns out. It’s like I’m a matchmaker *and* I’m dating. This analogy is getting a little cumbersome). I checked with our babysitter and she was free the night of the cas’ soiree so I entered it onto our family scheduling app and we were all set (It wasn’t actually that simple because nothing in our chaotic life is that simple, but we’ll leave it at that).

A few days later, we were driving home from our Saturday evening marital therapy appointment where we’d spent an hour making a family genogram (don’t ask), and my mind began to wander as my hubs drove the minivan down 376 as Soldier Boy made explosion noises behind me and the Baby tried to decide if he was going to cry or fall asleep. I started thinking about what I would wear when we went out to the pub in a couple weeks. I’ve been losing weight lately and I thought of the clothes I haven’t worn in a while that will now fit. I mentally assembled an outfit from med school and paired it with a pair of boots I recently bought. I pictured my hubs and I alone in my car (not the damn minivan, thank you very much) heading out and what nice compliment he might pay me. And then I thought of what I might say to him.

“Do you remember this outfit? Remember the last time I wore it?”

The answer is not our honeymoon or our first date or anything other such romantic thing. The answer is actually that I bought this outfit at the Millcreek Mall in February of 2011 while we were in Erie for the trial of Jeremy Noyes. The man who put me through my Ordeal.

I did not think of this moment, of telling him this, with sadness or anger. I actually thought of it with a slight small on my face.

Jeremy’s trial started on February 14th. It was my hubs Eric and my first Valentine’s Day as a couple. We spent the week up in cold snowy Erie. Jeremy had fired his attorney and chosen to represent himself. He subpoenaed me to testify. I’m not sure which is worse: having to be questioned by your rapist in federal court, or all the time before it that you spend imagining what it will be like. We spent the whole week in Erie, waiting for it to be my turn to testify. Eric was allowed to sit in on the trial but I was not since it could affect my testimony when I was called to the stand later on.

I only packed one suit but I thought I might need a second if my testimony took more than one day. So, as Eric sat taking in images and words at that trial no person would ever want to, evil hard to imagine, I went to the mall. I bought more than I needed, more than I should have. I bought a really, really pretty top. A flowy translucent top with corals and browns and turquoisie blues in a muted floral design like the impressionists, Manet and Monet and all that. It was so pretty. The trial was so ugly. So I bought it even though I was broke. I’m not sorry I did.

We stayed at a nice hotel that the government said they would reimburse us for. We went down to the nice restaurant in the nice hotel one night. I don’t remember which night. The night before I testified? The night after? The night in between? (I was right, it was two days of testimony so I really *did* need that second suit. Not everything else, but, the suit yes)

I don’t remember which night it was but I remember getting ready to go downstairs and making him laugh. I remember sitting there in that nice restaurant in that nice hotel in that pretty flowy top eating a lovely meal with my lovely fiancé. I remember he ordered us dessert and we shared it with two forks and it tasted better than I thought food could. I remember laughing. I remember his eyes. His mouth when the corners turned up. We were still there. In Erie. At a horrible stomach turning trial of a sociopath child predator. We were still there, but for a night, it was a little less. A little less there. There, but better.

And so, almost six years later, when I sat in the mocha colored minivan, a wedding and two kids and a hell of a lot else later, I thought of wearing that top again with the corners of my mouth turned up. It didn’t make me think of my trauma or sitting in that courtroom as Jeremy said the worst things imaginable to me. It made me think of that night. Of that respite, of the soft lighting and the attentive waiter and the clean linen table cloth on the little round table we sat at together. It made me think of all the years and all the hell he’s stood by me through. Of this most unusual life we’ve had together. Of the sweetness that comes with the bitters.

We had watched a documentary about a Holocaust survivor the night before. Made by a man Eric had made films with in another life. And the survivor in the movie told a story of starvation, of being moved from camp to camp. And on one train ride they all looked so malnourished these village women threw food onto the train, whatever they had with them from the market. And so, they had things like flour and sugar and lemons. And at one stop, a man got snow off the ground and brought it on and they made lemon ice with the lemons and sugar. The survivor in the movie said how much he loved lemon ice for the rest of his life. How could that be, I’d asked my husband. Eric had made a lot of films with survivors and he said, yes, he’d heard that many times before. He said, the lemon ice was the first thing he’d eaten after starving for so long, why wouldn’t he love it now? I said, “I guess if I was more like him I could take fish oil capsules.” But I can’t.

Jeremy made me take fish oil capsules. I can’t take them now. I can’t even take vitamins. The body remembers. The esophagus remembers. Remembers the other things he forced down my throat, remembers not breathing, not knowing if he would ever let me breathe again. Eric says I should try to overcome my aversion to fish oil and I say, No. I have overcome a fuck of a lot in the past eight years. I’m just gonna take fish oil as a loss. I’m gonna pass on conquering that one.

But sitting in that mocha minivan, I see the fish oil capsules are not my lemon ice. The flowy top is my lemon ice. I see now how he could love lemon ice. The joy and the beauty and the bodily memory of quite a different kind.

Life is not simple. Is not, yes or no. Good or evil. Would that Eric and I hadn’t spent our first Valentine’s Day together in gray snowy Erie at the trial of a madman. But there was beauty there too. There were lemons and sugar in that snow too. There too.

What Love Really Means

14 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by in love, marriage, my awesome husband, PTSD, Rape, romance

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trenchfoot

This week is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, El Hajj Malik El Shabbaz. I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X when I was 21 and it changed my life. Changed it enough that I named my second born after him. Malcolm X was Godly and brilliant and brave. But the thing I’ve always been most inspired by in him was how much he changed and grew in his life. Why am I writing about this on Valentine’s Day? Because I wanted to write a Valentine for my husband.

He was born in the summer of ’69, a couple weeks after man walked on the moon and a couple weeks before Woodstock. He made his first film at age ten. He was an entrepeneur from the start doing everything from delivering papers, mowing lawns, to selling Grit magazine. He grew up and went away to a small town three hours away in Western Pennsylvania for college. My hometown. I was in elementary school then (I was born in 1979, the year of the collapse of the industrial economy in America. Not quite as cool). He went into computers and had a good job but he left behind the security of it to go to film school, to pursue his calling. He came home and made two independent films and got married and had a son. He found God and set about following Him. When God called him to open a cafe, he did. Crazy as people told him it was. And then he got this email from this girl who’d seen his picture on the interwebs and he decided to write her back. It turned out she’d been raped by a madman in med school and she had two kids who were dealing with mental health challenges of their own. On the day they got married she was $400,000 in debt and had failed to match into a residency and might never be able to make a decent living. He married her anyway. He’s not afraid to take risks. He follows God into the fray.

In the years since then, he has found himself facing the sacrifices of residency and the hell of PTSD. He has driven roughly 35,000 miles going back and forth between residency and our son back home. He has devoted himself to our hooligans. He has been a major factor in the amazing transformation of our son Malcolm. He has washed and scrubbed and shoveled and fixed and cooked and shopped and juiced. Wiped butts and cleaned up vomit and blood. Endured temper tantrums, meltdowns, wiped tears, kissed boo boos. He has listened to my frustrations and guarded the bedroom door from invading children when I needed to sleep.

More than that, he has gotten down in the mud, crawled on his belly, down in the trenches. He has done the real work of marriage, the emotional work. He has faced down his demons and mine. And that is the bravest, hardest, most loving thing there is. He has come with me as I travelled into the heart of my PTSD and faced my spiritual crisis. Been there through the anger and the bitterness and neediness and depression and the one-step-forward-two-steps-back-is-this-ever-going-to-end. He has come to be as outraged as I am about rape. Sometimes I think he’s moreso. When the petition we signed to stop the Bill Cosby performance at Heinz Hall worked, he was more excited than I was.

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, said, “I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.” You can keep your long stemmed roses and diamonds. I have real love.

I love you, Poobah. I’m so proud to be your best friend. Forever.

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

28 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in christianity, Evil, kids, love, marriage, PTSD, Rape

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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.

Remembrance

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in love, marriage, movies, romance

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I watched a movie tonight called Remembrance about a woman who was in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II and was saved by a man whom she loved. The movie takes place 30 years later. She’s living in New York City, married with a daughter. She had thought he had died but then she goes to the dry cleaner to pick up linens for a dinner party and hears his voice on a television being interviewed about the camps.

She goes home and is trying to make phone calls to try to find him all throughout this dinner party. Her husband wants to know what’s wrong and she says she won’t say and he says, it’s not just your problem, it’s ours. No, she says, this time it is just mine.

She eventually tracks him down and goes to see him in Poland with her husband’s blessing. The movie ends with her getting off the bus in his hometown in Poland and his gaze and hers meeting.

I have become so… disappointed with most romantic movies they make because I think they really do us all a disservice when it comes to living out marriage. They fill our heads with a lot of awful ideas. They tend to end right as the relationship is starting. The whole focus is on finding THE ONE. If you’d just find THE ONE, you’d live your happily ever after. Big romantic gestures and winning the person over and finally raealizing why you always wind up with the wrong person and now you’ve learned and found THE ONE.

Remembrance is based on a true story (read about it here) that doesn’t have a very happy ever after to it. There’s a big romantic gesture at the start but then some really bad timiing and a disappointing ending. But ya know what? I kinda like that about it.

As I was watching the movie, I found myself really relating to the main character and her current husband and how this was affecting their marriage. I felt for the guy. How do you compete with a guy who saved your wife from the Nazis?? He saved her and disappeared and they never had to deal with bills and kids and whose fault it was that the minivan’s inspection was overdue and you got a ticket and…. How can you compete with that? In a romantic sense, you can’t. It’s like expecting a mother of three whose been to hell and back and eaten her way through it to compete with a man’s idealized vision of what she ought to look like. It’s a shallow, immature vision of love.

Love is a feeling, yes, but while it may first come into being by virtue of romantic notions, it certainly is not sustained that way and it certainly does not grow that way. Real love comes when we let go of what we thought it would look like. Maybe you wanted a girl with a small waist and a big booty and demure manner but instead you find yourself with an apple who curses like a sailor sometimes. Maybe you wanted a guy who’d be so emotionally intelligent he’d put Jesus himself to shame and would always say the right thing but instead you’re lying in bed at night next to a well intentioned guy who requires an awful lot of psychoeducation and tends to speak before he thinks.

Grand romantic gestures and charm and poetry and perfect beautiful bodies are nice and all, but it’s the sprinkles of this life not the ice cream. It’s not even the fudge or the whipped cream. Don’t get me wrong, I love sprinkles, but who wants to eat a bowl full of sprinkles? Love is mostly vanilla ice cream with the occasional sprinkle on top. The sprinkles are a wonderful treat, but it’s the ice cream that fills your belly.

I had a really really rough week recently that involved a really really awful 36 hour long day. I came home at the end of it and my husband surprised me with flowers and a card. He’d gotten three of our kids to sign it (including Princess) and the older two had written in things like “thank you for working hard for us.” I appreciated the flowers, I did, but it was the card that got me.

Our culture markets these ideals to us, these expectations. Of what our soul mate will look like, and act like, and do, and say. It’s only when we let go of these caricatures that we truly find love. And finding it is only the beginning.