The lifelong scar
“Why won’t you fight?!!!!!”
He leaned his face right into mine, and I could feel the heat of his breath. His eyes were molten blue-green fury, and I struggled to swallow as his fist, shoved up in my throat, twisted the neck of my shirt tighter. It was that years-long familiar choking move that I was never sure he was totally in control of. Through gritted teeth, he kept goading me to react, taunting me because I wouldn’t fight him.
But I had already assessed that flushed face and those hateful eyes, and knew that the stupidest thing I could do was shove him or hit back. I was scared and angry, but no idiot. While I hated the sense of being at his mercy, of feeling like I was a coward, I knew the only REAL way to fight him was to choose NOT to react. That absolutely enraged him.
Finally, disgusted, he shoved me back and stormed out of my room.
Since that day, I have ALWAYS hated being in situations where I couldn’t fight back and had to refrain from engaging in “battle.” I have NEVER again wanted to feel helpless like that.
But the truth was, I hadn’t been helpless. I had actually made my own choice — to respond from my heart, NOT REACT from rage. I was still that kid on the playground who didn’t want to hit the bully. So I made my choice, and I had exercised tremendous strength and courage to execute it…to defy him in the best way I could.
The other thing that I wonder about now is who that rage was really directed at. My feeling is that his rage was self-directed. All the years he was abused by his mother, he must have felt impotent to defy her. And perhaps hated himself for it. Seeing my lack of willingness to scream back at him maybe triggered a weakness he felt long ago? I can’t be sure of any of this. I can only speak to a gut sense that very little of that rage was about my behavior in that moment.
Whatever was operating, he did leave me with a scar that I still struggle with. He handed me his wound, and I’ve had to wrestle with it my whole life. I will speak of that more later on.
God or suicide?
As to the rest of life, the overall trend for me that year ranged from seeking to do God’s will to help others or build a new writing career path, to overdoing the drinking at parties or driving too fast, hoping I’d plow into a tree or off the road and end it all.
For a lot of good reasons, I was depressed. And it didn’t help that, through those years, I was attending more and more weddings of friends and relatives and watching them all start a life I had no hope for. The pain only intensified as now they were all getting pregnant.
Consumed with despair, I questioned the meaning of life, in general, and my own in particular. Suicide began to seem reasonable, which scared me into considering visiting a psychiatrist. But in my family, that was seen as being only for those people who were too weak to bull through whatever. If you had to “see a therapist,” you were a failure. Surely I could pull it together and get on with things, right? Our house was not always happy, but it wasn’t THAT bad, right?
But my depression was so bad that at one point, even my father consoled me. He told me how much joy I gave to him and my mother and that my life had worth. But I found that to be little comfort given how he was treating my mother. If I ever got married, and that was starting to look less likely, no man would ever treat me like that. I was damned if I was going to be my mother.
Those Saturday fights
As to their interactions, the general level of physical violence in our house seemed to be increasing. Those weekend fights between my parents, which had been going on since my childhood, were getting worse. Instead of one violent round in the morning followed by Dad’s contrite behavior the rest of the day, there were now multiple rounds of violent arguments that lasted all day, and no apologies.
So at that moment, life was like trying to paddle upstream in the face of raging rapids — yet again, seemingly hopeless.
God speaks
But then, I came across this book: Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning.
Thank God.
In the first half of the book, Frankl wrote of his experiences surviving in the concentration camps of World War II. The second half was about the particular approach to psychology he developed to heal people, influenced by those experiences. I hungrily read and absorbed every word, and most especially, two lines on page 104 of that book:
“Man CAN preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
The way forward?
Here was the piece of wisdom from the Universe that I needed at that very moment — that every last possession and piece of dignity can be taken away, but you can still choose to keep one last part of yourself safe, locked away deep within — your own thoughts and responses.
In that moment, I felt my world shift. Here was the affirmation that I WASN’T weak or a victim. Just because I didn’t hit him or fight back didn’t make me a failure. I was actually demonstrating total strength in recognizing that fighting in that moment would only escalate the violence, and it was not the time or the place. I wasn’t sure yet what would be the right way or time. But I knew that MY POWER was in maintaining me, holding onto my private thoughts, and choosing what to do and when. And that even if all other choices were taken from me, I still had the choice to withhold the most important and last part of me from him — who I was at my core. If I could keep that, I still had a chance…and worth.
Seeking the wisdom within
After that, I began to read voraciously. Philosophy. Biographies. I read about Robert F. Kennedy’s search for meaning in the Greek tragedies after his brother’s assassination and before his own.
I had also been reading the scary doomsday books about stock market crashes, nuclear holocaust, and global extinctions:
8/9/80
“I’ve always wanted to be already dead when the end of the world came….to live out my life completely and then die quietly and face a solitary judgment rather than some horrendous universal calamity and chaos with bombs, volcanoes, earthquakes, storms, and lightening, climaxed by the Lord riding in on thunderous majesty with legions of angels blowing trumpets heralding His arrival and in general lending to the overall hysteria….”
Yes, that part was a bit dramatic, but given the nuclear fears of the time, the house I lived in, and my own anxiety, I guess it was my own version of The Book of Revelations.
Anyway, given all that, it’s no wonder that when there was pressure at work to go back for a graduate degree in microbiology and move up in my career, I was not interested. While I had considered going back for a Master’s in Business Administration, and was even accepted into a program, deep inside my gut screamed, “WRONG!” So I backed out.
Instead, I focused on what possible ways I could forge my own path forward. I got into a lot of books about survivalist thinking. More than ever, I wanted to just find a job that let me live a quiet existence somewhere where I could focus on simple, sustainable, peaceful living.
The hermit
I dug out my own small-scale garden and learned how to do intensive food growing in small spaces. I bought a food dryer to preserve what I grew, as well as stores of freeze-dried food supplies, a grain mill, and books about surviving any kind of disaster. And I started looking at buying property in New Hampshire or Vermont.
One of the things I liked about New Hampshire was that the land then was still fairly cheap, even as some of it wasn’t that far from the Boston area of Massachusetts. I might have wanted to live like a hermit on a mountain in New Hampshire. But now and then, I still wanted to be able to visit fine restaurants and civilization in the big city…if it hadn’t been blown up by then.
The retreat
As to dating, friends would match me up with, “Here, let me introduce you to my mom’s friend’s brother’s son’s nephew who’s still living at home with his mom.” My experience was that most of the time, there was a reason he was still home with Mom, and she could keep him. There were always bars in town, but that was often men with a white ring of skin where their removed wedding bands usually sat.
Vacations were limited this year, aside from a couple of ski trips and short things with my parents. But then I had a chance to visit a local retreat center and do a silent retreat.
A silent retreat intrigued me. For that matter, any kind of retreat did. It was something that had been percolating in the back of my mind for some time. A weekend away. A weekend to just stop, be still, and see if God spoke.
10/17/80
“I am afraid to say yes – afraid to let go and let God take over. I want His help – but I fight Him at every turn.”
In that respect, God wasn’t faring any better than any of the men I dated. I didn’t want to yield any of myself to anyone else’s power. It was too scary.
“I keep having panicky thoughts, like ‘Why am I here?’ Shouldn’t I be home watching Love Boat on TV or something?”
While I was expecting this retreat to involve a lot of reading, heavy discussions with my spiritual director aimed at identifying my problems and reaching solutions, instead, I was to be silent, reflect, and not read any of the books I’d brought along with me. Instead, Sister gave me three things to focus my thoughts on:
- What does God want from me, NOT vice versa?
- What had my relationship with God been?
- What is His relationship with me?
While I was supposed to think about these, I was mostly supposed to just LISTEN.
The terror of being alone with God
My room was separate from other groups that were there that weekend for their retreats, and I found it a bit unnerving to be so alone with God. I actually felt “cloistered” in my wing of the building, cut off from everyone else. It took a lot of my willpower not to just pack up, get in my car, and leave.
“It’s lonely…it’s scary, just me and God….I’m afraid of what He wants…of what He’ll ask of me…of what I might have to give up to do His will…I’m afraid of signing an ‘unread contract’ with Him.”
The idea of “surrendering” to some unknown spiritual power…especially one depicted as “male,” as “Father,” totally set me off.
“Why should I be afraid? He loves me…I think. God is a good Father and wouldn’t ask of me something that is wrong. And I’m the one who sought this out because I needed to find out once and for all WHAT is it He’s been trying to tell me. WHAT? I’ve been climbing the walls — agitated, angry, hostile, looking for fights. Even when Sister brought me up to this room and told me how we’re handling this weekend, I felt resentment at being told what to do. There it was, my first reaction – rebellion. Why?”
The one relief that helped was that apparently they did have some of the other women at the other end of the hall, so I wasn’t totally alone. The first thing that came to me, following the relief of hearing other voices, even as I was to keep to myself, was:
“I feel better about one thing…there are people in this wing with me. I am NOT alone. That has already taught me one thing about me…While I like time to be off with my thoughts, I don’t like to be alone, separated from others for any length of time. As much as I talk about running off and being a hermit, could I really live without other people? {Maybe that New Hampshire mountain top might not be my answer?} Well, maybe I could be a nun ….join a cloistered order? Like the Abbey of Regina Laudis?”
Don’t MAKE me do anything!
But there was still the terror that God was going to make me do something I didn’t want to do:
“I guess I am afraid God will make me move somewhere far away, be a nun, give up any chance for a husband, children, a home close to my family, and those are all things that are so important to me…but when I’m home I feel I should be far away, experiencing new things, doing something for mankind. But when I am far away, I’m not happy. I want to be back with family and familiar surroundings.”
The amount of back-and-forth really strikes me now. After hearing my therapist’s explanation of my being an adult, with a core child piece that needed healing, I see it in the above. I wanted an adult life, independence, but I was afraid of leaving my family. And there was no recognition of how abusive that family situation was. But still, the very fact that I showed up for the retreat willing to leave me open to an answer from God, even one I did not feel prepared for, showed a tremendous amount of courage on my part, and willingness to seek answers.
More entries from that weekend reflect both my fears, again, of God asking me to do something I didn’t want to, and my sense of rebellion against that. I felt like a victim fighting back against a captor. In fact, by the end of the weekend, my notes were written in SCREAMING CAPITALS WITH EXCLAMATION POINTS ACROSS THE PAGE!!!!!
The victim and the captor
A victim against a captor. I realize now that if that didn’t sum up where I was in life, nothing did. And maybe the term “projection” applies here? Maybe I was projecting my father onto God, as well as my sense of helplessness and being forced to do things I hated?
Maybe the most interesting thing of all is that after that screaming entry from 10/19/80, I didn’t write another word in my journal until July of 1982…
Soul Mosaic 
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