The “Teshuvah trip”
I didn’t even know what I should be looking for or what to expect on this trip. It’s like going into a grocery store, uncertain of what you need or what you may find. So you just start looking around and flinging everything into the cart that you guess “might” be useful.
Then, when you get home, you find you have bags and bags FULL of things. So many things that you have to spend a fair bit of time just unpacking it all, then sorting it, before you can even consider “Is any of this useful…and…how?”
This post is the “unpacking.” I collected so many bits in the journal I kept on the trip. I’ll let those entries do most of the talking in this post. I’ll “sort and prioritize it all” in the next one.
“Landing…back in time
Looking out the window, it struck me that Connecticut always looks the same when we return: Thick bank of clouds below…as we descended, so much so that the plane got very dark inside…It was the familiar gray, bleak outside, the usual “Connecticut gray” overcast….”
As soon as I stepped from the plane into the building, “it was like stepping right back into ‘then’ as if it was all still waiting there….Like a radio that had been turned off, but as soon as I walked in there, the radio came on and resumed from where it left off.”
Walking through the terminal, I felt like I had stepped into a time warp. I was in the present, but at the same time, I definitely was NOT.
“It was sudden, intense “heaviness; pain; my throat had a fullness…like I was being choked. It was like I had never left – it was just all here waiting for me to return and just pick up where I’d left off….suspended animation…or like when you come out of anesthesia – one moment you are totally out of it, then suddenly it’s like someone turned the lights back on and all the sights, sounds, and smells come roaring back into your consciousness.”
“Are you okay?” Ed was staring at me intently.
I tried to swallow the choking feeling and just nodded. Frankly, I was totally unprepared by how INTENSELY HEAVY and oppressive everything felt. WHY?
Living in North Carolina, it’s far enough away to hold all of this at arm’s length, detached. Thinking of it in little doses, it lulls you into a place of ‘It wasn’t so bad… I am all better. I can handle home again…’ Then you get here, and you find it all around you as far as the eye can see. Like an ocean you are submerged in, being flooded over, and no island to climb up onto or oases to offer respite. You’re here…you’re in it up to your eyeballs.”
I was silent, feeling like a huge weight was pushing me against the floor. More memories flashed back in no particular order, of all the many times I was in this building:
- Ed leaving for a business trip while I watched, holding our infant son, and crying because I was terrified something would happen to him on the trip.
- Years before – waiting for a Navy boyfriend to come home on leave.
- Ed and I returning from our honeymoon trip
- Years of picking my missionary uncle up from here when he’d come home for summer vacation.
- The return from a trip to visit a family member in Michigan and facing a return to “him” and that house
- That last plane trip with a toddler son, moving to North Carolina
The
We rented a car and drove to the hotel. Taking in the view of the area, I felt “decay.” A thriving manufacturing area in the 60s, but now so much of it all closed up.
“Even the trees are older…beat-up structures. The boarded-up Colt factory building….Everything very blue-collar…weary industrial. Dying. Now, instead of a thriving company, an Off-Track Betting facility. Is that progress?”
Across from our hotel, I saw the mall that had been such a light, fun place when I lived here all those years ago. It was a Saturday night reprieve from home.
“I never realized how heavy and old the massive concrete of the buildings made it look.”
We had planned that if I wanted to visit a friend, Ed could walk across the street from the hotel to the mall and get something to eat. “Not a chance. I DON’T WANT ED WALKING THERE…IT’S UNSAFE, SCARY.”
As to the area around our hotel, it was “a nice hotel. But there were men hanging around outside, and the parking lot, which was around the side, felt …oogey, vulnerable. Everyone outside had a ‘rough look.’”
We walked into the hotel:
The lobby was dimly lit. A bride sat slumped off to the side, bullshitting loudly with her friends. Odd energy. Where was the groom? The reception guests?
Needing some things for our stay, we headed to the nearby big-box department store. Its interior matched the outside – “equally dark and claustrophobic. Poor selection. We just gave up on what we needed. It was a relief to get to the hotel room and lock us into our ‘nest.’ I wondered if we couldn’t just stay locked in the room for the week?”
And Ed, again, “Are you okay?”
The next day, we drove to West Hartford for our “celebratory” dinner at a high-end seafood restaurant. As I drove, Ed said to me, “It was stupid of me to think you wouldn’t need me on this trip. I can see now that you do, very much.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I could barely respond because I was sunk deep in a swamp of emotions that matched the landscape, the weather, and the nature of the towns we drove through: old, gray, run-down.
Even when we got to the fancy restaurant…in the middle of the upscale, “elite” area… yet I noted that everything “feels old, even amidst pockets of new and upscale. Underneath it all, it is still decay. Everything and everyone seems to move in slow motion.”
Lipstick on a pig?
Walking into the restaurant, it was “dark, old wood floors and panelling. A heavy feeling. Fishy ammonia smell hit my nostrils. There was an old mural on the walls that reminded me of the one in Torrington’s old post office building – John Brown and his followers driving oxen teams westward.”
The staff was slow in greeting us. Seemingly ambivalent as to whether we stayed or left. As we were led to a table, my concerned husband asked, “Are you okay?”
It was the mantra of the trip so far, but understandable. I was enveloped in a cloud of depression that crushed against me like an anvil. Was “home” truly this depressing and decayed…or was it me? I felt like I was trapped in a reality where everything was colored gray and coated in darkness. I couldn’t break out of it. What did everyone else see?
I sat at the table waiting for our food and looked out on the window onto the raw, gray West Hartford street, hoping to pull out from the cloud of bleak enveloping me.
“West Hartford is supposed to be ‘the place’ upscale. The fancy street shops attest to that. But… it just seems like ‘lipstick on a pig.’...a skin-thin veneer on ugly, aging, cramped, inescapable…
“Was it always like this when I lived here, and I just didn’t see it then?”
I thought back to the early days of being with Ed when he lived here, and I would visit. It seemed good. Fun then. At least compared to living at home.
Yet….I picked up on so much pain underneath….I hadn’t done much emotion work yet compared to now. I remembered those days like it was yesterday. It h-u-r-r-t. OPPRESSIVE. When we drove by his old apartment complex on the way to this restaurant, I remembered that it was a good time then, but now, more like ghosts.
My thoughts were jolted to the present, and a question flashed across my brain:
“IF MY PRESENT SELF WENT BACK AND MET ME FROM THEN, WHAT WOULD I LOOK LIKE?”
The Me, of THEN
This was a trip to find out what I needed to learn. My gut had demanded it. But WHY? Was all of this trip going to be just an unending panorama of bleakness? Then an insight popped in.
“I think that what I am feeling here – this is THE ME OF WHO WAS HERE WAY BACK THEN. All the unresolved pain. And my current sadness was me looking at that person…knowing what was coming for her, so much struggle that she was still unaware of. Knowing all the pain she was still in, EVEN AS SHE DIDN’T KNOW IT. Now, I knew what was still locked away in her, yet to be dealt with. Suddenly I felt so much pain — I hurt NOW, for her THEN. I FEEL HER FROM THEN, AND ALL THAT SHE WAS CARRYING.”
This is the first trip up here that I have felt ME, THEN, so STRONGLY.”
And Ed, again, “Are you okay?”
Touring
A lot of the trip was driving through places from my past. Avon. Farmington. Litchfield. The hospital I used to work at. The garden center, Ed and I liked to wander in. And, the old cider mill. There were drives down to the shore. Restaurants. Observations of what “used to be there,” and what was there now.
And there were drives by the house I grew up in. Places in town where Dad molested me.
Whatever happened to Debbie?
And then….a visit to an old family friend I’d grown up around, and who had been friends with my parents. She had always asked her kids the question: “Whatever happened to Debbie?”
I so loved seeing her. I always loved her. Her house and playing with her kids, those were times of refuge and respite. And I smiled at her use of my childhood nickname. Today, I would tell her what had happened “to Debbie.”
Her first words when we arrived were, “God, you look like your mother.”
My thought was “That’s good because when I look in the mirror, I see HIM.”
There were the usual pleasantries, and then…I just spoke the words – Dad had been sexually abusing me my entire childhood and into adulthood, until I got out of that house.
I told her how I had finally confronted him and my family when I was eight months pregnant with our son. And how Mom said she never knew.
Immediately, without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “Yes, she did. You can’t have it go on that long and not know. I always knew that you kids and your Mom were terrified of him. I saw the fear on your Mom’s face. When you all came to visit and use our pool, there would be that time in the afternoon when your Mom would jump up and say you had to leave to get supper ready. And the fear in all of you….I knew something was wrong…but, what could you do?”
She said she never knew about the sexual abuse. I answered her question that no, I hadn’t told anyone. And she asked, “Why didn’t you say anything?”
How can you ever get someone who didn’t live it to understand that? But I tried.
I explained about Mom cornering me in my room, and I so wanted to tell her, but I knew it was hopeless. The words died in my throat. And even now, how I tried to write to Mom, but she wouldn’t answer. And I described reaching out in the confessional to priests, only to get blamed.
Her sorrow was total and visible. “Was it hard to come back here?”
“Yes, to see home. But to see you? No. Your house was the safe place. And I wanted you to know why I disappeared all these years.”
I am deeply grateful for that visit. I will treasure it until I die. It was good I went then, because she died the next year. I am still heartbroken and miss her deeply. She appears in my dreams often.
Extended family and that precious, precious teacher
In terms of speaking my truth, OUT LOUD, to people who knew me THEN, I wasn’t done.
While I had long ago shared my story with that precious high school teacher whose caring and role-modeling saved me, I had the chance to visit with her at length. She tried to downplay her influence. She “knew I was in pain, hurting, but had no idea it was so bad, and never would have guessed.”
When I reminded her of how much her very presence and caring as a teacher mattered, she noted that it is “scary to realize the power you have to affect someone…how much they notice and remember about you.”
I can appreciate that. It must feel frightening to realize how the things you do have so much power to save or harm, especially when you don’t realize what that child is feeling.
All I know is that I will be grateful to her for the rest of my life. She gave me the idea and example that it was possible to grow to become a strong, sharp woman. I shudder to think what might have happened to me had I never met her. It was no coincidence.
I told her that “your touching words may have also given others hope, value, and a reason for existence, even if you didn’t know it.”
We shared a wonderful conversation about all kinds of things. More peer-to-peer and heartfelt sharing. Though in my mind, I will always hold her, not as a peer, but an honored mentor. Always.
And then there was a stop to visit a couple of relatives. Again. childhood buddies. I could barely get the words out…Ed finally said to me, “Stop dancing around it and just say it.”
I had no idea what they would think of me, but I was totally unprepared for the outpouring of grief, love, tears, and support. I never expected such …unconditional acceptance, and true sorrow.
I kept replaying people’s reactions….and total caring, over and over in my head. Like holding some precious gem you keep turning in your hand, just amazed to have been given it. And in awe of all its beauty and many facets that you’d never experienced before.
It was a shock to see the pain people felt for me. These were people who knew me THEN, when I’d had to keep it secret. And they felt such sorrow for me, for that. They even cried.
For me, after a lifetime of having to either be silent or have my reality minimized by that family system, I could barely process their sorrow and compassion:
“I don’t cry easily. I find it amazing that people so easily felt pain or cried for me…I think I will need to spend time trying to FEEL — connect to feeling deeply like that — and take in the caring of others….”
I think it spoke volumes that I could not feel my own pain or cry for me. Yet others so easily could…
The summary:
The end of the trip notes contained some observations, even as I knew I was going to have to come home and really reflect on things.
“This trip is emotional, exhausting, anxious, unpredictable. It requires courage. Depth. I feel the pain and am not running. And I am speaking my truth…out loud. OUT LOUD! Using my voice for the first time in this. WHAT A HUGE huge change….”
Those notes offered the first clues of why my gut dragged me to Connecticut:
“I miss some of these people…their love and acceptance overwhelmed me. All went well, even as I was very nervous. And I even miss Narragansett Bay…and tide pools. The rocky coastlines and the smell of the ocean.”
“For now, though I am exhausted, but satisfied. And I have some questions:
- Now…what do I do with my story?
- What do I feel NOW about Connecticut…and returning?
- Maybe I can come back and have it be easier next time?
- Can it be less intense, sad, apprehensive?“
And, the last page summed up what I needed to decide…
The time for choice:
If I am standing on the precipice of a new phase, wavering…I can turn around and walk away.
But…how will I feel? To walk up to the line and shrink back?
To come this far and not cross over seems like such a waste.
.…AND, I will not live forever.
There is this moment, the request from the Universe, the opportunity, and my choice:
What will it be?
Courage or cowardice?
There is also “Kavannah” to consider- the spirit of how to do this…and why
But first:
If you do not speak, you remain in exile….
And it ended with a “to-do” list for my return….
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and return home for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Soul Mosaic 
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