So. In the months since being suicidal, I had managed to allow my friend to be a close emotional support. Something I never had before. And with her and her husband, I’d gotten beyond a major hurdle. But…what did that all mean? And did I even have the presence of mind then to begin to question things?
My friend observed where I was currently at: “You can’t keep getting sex from my husband and emotions from me. You need to unite the two in one person.”
As soon as she said that, I remember thinking, “Duh! How could I have been so stupid and so blind?”
We all, no doubt, have moments we are not proud of. Whether the transgressions were big or small, if they were in a book, they would be the chapters “never read aloud.”
But as many memoir writers have noted, to shy away from telling the truth is to defeat the purpose of writing. How do you learn? And if I am writing to heal and to share my story with readers, then I must be honest. How can I connect with anyone if I pretend to be above it all? If I were reading that kind of story, I’d spot it in a second and toss it in the trash.
A therapist, listening to my story a few years ago, said, “Did you expect to be perfect?”
Her frank calling out of my silliness in denying human frailties made me laugh and see how the only person I’d been fooling was myself. Of course, I had WANTED to be perfect…I had DEMANDED that from me. But then that had been demanded OF me my whole life. The truth was, I was just like everyone else — simply a human being. And…there is nothing wrong with being a human being. It just took me a lifetime to learn that.
After the chaos of the winter months of 1984, I’d like to say things quieted down, and I could then just proceed in therapy to full healing and live happily ever after. For sure, at the time I thought it worked that way — if I worked REALLY hard, fast, and fiercely, I could get over all of this quickly and be “normal” and healed. That statement alone indicates just how far from understanding myself and the situation, I really was.
Yes, I had stabilized and was no longer suicidal. And that was no small achievement. But it just meant I had finally landed at the bottom of that abyss, the crash hadn’t killed me, and I was now standing upright on two legs facing a mountain whose top was obscured by a heavy bank of clouds. I had no idea then just how high that mountain was or that I would still be climbing it today.
There’s an old saying about not watching the sausage being made because it is such a messy process. Best to just enjoy the result.
We had a similar rule in our house for when our young son washed the kitchen floor. He absolutely loved to do it. He’d play his music, sing, dance, and splash water everywhere. Yet at the end, it would all come out beautifully.
The trick was not to watch it happen. Just set him up with the mop and water, arrange all so no harm could come to him, and then go upstairs until he was done. At that point, we could both be happy and celebrate, because I’d have a clean floor, and he would feel great about his success. We both understood that there was a “messy middle part” that was best not to watch.
I feel the same about the journey of coming back from that despair and rebuilding my life. It was a long, weary, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, trudging time. And it would get messy, something I would feel ashamed of for a long time. Something I would judge me harshly for, and refuse to look back at for decades.
I felt horrible. Whatever virus I’d picked up had spiraled into one hell of a sinus infection, and finally, my doctor called in a prescription for antibiotics.
Speeding down the road, I slid through the stop sign at the end of the street and turned, minus any blinker. And then, the blue lights filled my rear-view mirror.
I was hanging on just one day to the next. Change. Questions. Despair. Capitulation. Then try again.
A friend saw my struggle. She was compassionate. Very caring. We had given each other support. She was struggling in her marriage and had her own issues in life. I was struggling to stay alive, and life was my issue.
But I am eternally grateful for her endless support at that time. She fed me. Checked on me. Included me in her activities. Didn’t judge me, even the night I drank a bottle and a half of wine as I mourned the mess I’d been left to fix, then had a huge hangover the next day. In the midst of a spinning vortex, and no solid ground under me, she was a lifeline.
It was as if I had a kind of “family” connection again. “Family” had been the whole focus of my life and self-worth up until that point, and I was desperate. Lonely. Afraid. Mine had “lysed.” In biology, cell lysis is the death of a cell. It blows open, spews its guts everywhere, and there is nothing left. With my whole family world blown apart, I was reeling, and so I grabbed on to her support for dear life.
But sometimes even ugly things can save you…sometimes, even a “dead river “ can keep you hanging onto life.
Every day I’d go to work, come home, and then walk with the dog. Miles. Miles and miles of walking. I felt like as long as I was outside walking, out there in the land of the living, wandering past homes and people working in yards and garages, I was still in the land of the living. I might still make it.
I pondered suicide…every minute of every day. Why should I stay alive? Who would ever love me? How could I ever tell anyone what had been done to me and expect them to understand? I could see no future, no use for me. No hope.
But in those moments, I kept remembering those car rides home from Bridgeport when I was a kid. How, in spite of what a polluted river the Naugatuck was during the day, it was so beautiful at night as we drove by it on our way home. I remembered thinking I didn’t want to fall asleep because I might miss something to see. The lights sparkling on the surface of the water. The houses along the river. People moving beyond window frames. It was all so interesting to me, and I DIDN’T WANT TO MISS ANYTHING. So I would fight to stay awake and keep watching…to not miss anything.
It was the Naugatuck River and those memories that kept me alive in those moments. For almost six months, I was suicidal. For almost six months, I walked and walked, and listened to the words in my head as I remembered those drives home:
Don’t do it today…you can always kill yourself tomorrow.
You might miss something. You can always kill yourself tomorrow.
My bedroom was on the third level of my condo. But I couldn’t go near it. Nights were terrifying. You never feel an illness, your problems, or your despair more intensely than in the middle of the dark nights. I couldn’t take being upstairs. Alone. Surrounded by the din of silence.
I was already so alone in my life. The days I could crawl through. I would get up. Dress. Thank God I wore uniforms to the lab, so I didn’t have to figure out what to wear. Then I’d go to work. And even as I didn’t want to talk to anyone, at least there was the busyness of work, people, and routines to keep me going.
But the nights….oh…the nights
For months, I slept on the flower-patterned sofa in my living room, my dog stretched out on the floor next to me. Thank God for the dog.
The room didn’t have a lot of furniture, but it had enough to feel like a secure cocoon. The sofas. A microwave and table set. The clock. And the TV cabinet.
The TV. I would leave the TV on all night. Unlike when I grew up, and TV stations went off at midnight, now, with cable, there was always something to watch. It’s not that I even wanted to watch anything in particular. I just needed the sounds of human voices. The sense that I wasn’t as alone at that moment as I truly felt in my life.
I would put on HBO so that no matter how many times during the night I woke up, there was the comfort of hearing a human voice. I will admit there were some really strange things on at 3:00 in the morning, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about content. It was just to have “someone” in that room with the dog and me.
It was just so I might make it through another night.
People talk about their world turned upside down, or the ground disappearing beneath their feet. But how to describe what that actually feels like? I tried to express it through my writing and painting.
Initially, there was the relief and almost joy at having a therapist who was so supportive. His clarity during those early sessions, that my father had terribly violated me and I had every right to break things off, anchored me and gave me strength. After all, if my doctor, a man, said it was so, then it must be. It all seemed so clear and straightforward during the sessions.
But outside of them, I was still alone, defying the full power of that system’s rules, guilt, and manipulation. It is one thing to have someone tell you that you have worth and deserve to stand up for yourself. It is a whole other thing to actually internalize that and …believe it….and…do it. Twenty-eight years of programming that said I was hurting my father, that I had no right to do that, that it was family first, my needs second, all of that was almost too much to fight on my own.
And worse, I was still reeling from the shock of learning that everything I believed about my father, about my life, was totally wrong. You don’t just get over that. You don’t just “delete” the file in your brain that says “Family Systems 1.0” and replace it with a new file, “Family Systems 2.0,” and go on as if nothing happened. The reality of what my life truly had been, I was still trying to wrap my head around. And it started with the searing pain of having my heart torn open with the realization of how badly I’d been used, abused, and lied to.
“Catastrophe” – painting by author
The truth is, if everything you believed in your whole life turns out to be a lie, then what DO you believe in? What can you trust? Can you even trust yourself anymore if you got it so badly wrong all those years?
It was dark when I got to my parents’ house. I was scared but determined. The therapist and I agreed that this had to be done, and I saw no point in delaying the inevitable. But for safety, I had told a friend exactly where I was going to be so that if she didn’t hear from me in a couple of hours, she would know something had happened.
I don’t remember any of the preliminaries, and I don’t remember leaving. But I do remember sitting at that table and, for the first time in my life, drawing a firm line in the sand:
“I’m in therapy.”
My father sighed. My mother said nothing.
“I came here to tell you that you won’t ever lay a finger on me again.”
His eyes widened. A look of surprise on his face.
“I want you to know that from now on, if you ever touch me again, I will call the police and charge you with assault.”
Soul Mosaic 