It was a relaxing time on the cruise…at least until our return. Ed switched jobs not long after our return in the hopes that the stress level would drop. But given his career as a computer systems administrator, all you could say was that the job stress “changed.” It didn’t drop.
And three months into our marriage, it would really ramp up.
OMG!
I hadn’t been feeling quite right after a one-day surgery, and my period was delayed. Not unusual, given that my cycles were always a mess. But since I was working that weekend, I ran a pregnancy test. Before the allotted test time was even up, there it was: a very clear and bright “plus” sign.
I remember thinking, “What have we done?!” But then calmed down and invited Ed to have lunch. Given that we NEVER had lunch together when I worked weekends because the schedule was usually too busy, he guessed immediately why I wanted him to come over. As he told it later, all the way over to the hospital, he just kept repeating, “Oh my God!”
We weren’t averse to having kids, which, at least for me, was a major change. Up until my relationship with Ed, I never intended to get married or have kids. I didn’t want to end up like my mother. WITH Ed, I had slowly grown to want to have children with him. We just hadn’t quite planned on it so soon.
I imagine any parent, even one who planned the pregnancy, has moments of “*Am I really ready for this?”* And for sure, we both felt that. But aside from a normal level of that sense of impending responsibility, we were doing okay.
Life seems great
In fact, physically and emotionally, aside from some early nausea, I felt great. It was the best I’d ever felt in my life. I think whatever mix of pregnancy hormones flooding my body at that point was overcoming the hormone deficiencies my body had been living with for all those years of trauma.
I ate well, found books on how to have a healthy pregnancy, and even at six months, I was moving furniture around as I got the nursery ready. I continued working full-time on evening shifts and would continue to do that almost up to my due date.
And of course, there was that whole “nesting” instinct. Aside from gathering supplies, I was making food to stock in the freezer. This even included the 15 or 20 apple and blueberry pies I made and froze, including making the crusts from scratch – something I never did before, or since. Pregnancy hormones are a strange, powerful cocktail of chemicals for sure!
That summer, we did a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, a place Ed and I both loved to visit. One afternoon there, as we strolled the streets, we watched as a family tried to manage their son who was screaming, “I hate dumb ol’ history!!!!” We looked at each other in horror. We both loved history and historical sites. What if our child ended up hating it?! Side note – he loves the place too!
Then there were the cravings I was experiencing – baked stuffed lobster. Neither of us was sure that we could fit that into our budget, and we hoped it wouldn’t come up often. But boy, when it did, there was no denying it!
There was the excitement of friends and family, and especially my early therapist, who had helped me through those rough first months. I hadn’t seen him in a while as I’d been doing well. But when we crossed paths one day at the hospital, and he saw I was pregnant, he was so ecstatic. He just burst out with, “You know, when you first started therapy, I didn’t think there was any hope for a recovery, between all the abuse and the strict religious rules. But this is WONDERFUL!” I understood that ordinarily, he’d probably never have said that, but it indicated just how bad things were when I first started therapy.
So all in all, for those first several months, I felt like life had really landed in a good place. For the first time in my life, things seemed “normal.”
The screaming message
But then, an “instinct” started sounding alarms within me. It was a very deep and primal one, a fire that roared quickly and was unrelenting. And its message was VERY clear:
YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT DAD.
Call it maternal protective instinct or whatever, because this was way beyond the normal level of self-protection I’d been using to deal with Dad. It was 5 years from leaving my parents’ home until this moment. Those years were full of destabilizing realizations, suicidal struggles, and a messy journey into full adulthood. I’d finally started to land on even ground. I figured I could keep Dad in line for my own safety. But now, carrying a new life within me, a VULNERABLE life that I would be responsible for, the message screamed within me:
DAD WASN’T SAFE.
There were a couple of small children in the family. And I was about to have one. He had refused to see a therapist when I tried to get him to do that early in my own work. If he had never gotten help, why would I think he had changed?
About this time, Ed and I were working with a new therapist in West Hartford. Part of it was about continuing my own healing and learning tools for living an effective life as a wife, working professional, and now, a mother. And another part of it was the realization that Ed’s job was still a problem, and we weren’t sure what to do.
But NOW we had a third, even bigger issue:
We HAD to confront Dad, in front of the whole family, so everyone knew what he had done to me…so our kids would be safe…so we could demand that he get therapy.
That secret I’d held all those years…it had to be ripped open if our kids were to be safe. It was time to “reveal” and demand…
Soul Mosaic 
Leave a comment