Soul Mosaic

The words from then, and now:

For this entry, I will let the words of my journal from that time and observations from now tell the story.

September 5, 1995

We had been seeing a counselor for some time….my husband and I were locked into a struggle we didn’t understand. We sensed there was something going on underneath the obvious issues, but it was elusive and hard to see…

In looking back, the biggest place of conflict usually came up around sex. I wanted it, he didn’t. Which isn’t totally true. I suspect that in most couples, there is no doubt one who is more interested than the other, and they work it out.

But at that point, I just couldn’t understand that. Men were always supposed to want it. After all, looking back, my father was always after me. Here we were, husband and wife, in a healthy place for sex, and yet my husband WASN’T pursuing me. What was wrong? If he didn’t, then that meant he didn’t love me. And by extension, I was no good. So I tried more creative approaches, more focus on methods…everything, and all it did was polarize us more.

What I can understand now is that sex wasn’t the problem. It was the symptom of something else driving it all, and actually driving us apart.

Having been abused all those years, the one message that I had internalized without realizing it was that the most important measure of “love” was sex. And so, by extension, the most important thing in a relationship had to be sex. So I pursued it, reveled in the fact I finally had a “normal,” marital relationship, and I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to always make sure that was paramount in our attention.

To him, it felt obsessive. Where he saw a myriad of ways to be connected emotionally, I was just focused on one. In fact, he complained one time that trying to connect gently and offer a “mothering” love to me was like trying to “mother a porcupine.”

I couldn’t understand. I was offering total sensuality. He wanted that “feminine,” emotional connection. To me, raised to disparage the feminine and honor only the “masculine,” I interpreted his reactions as disinterest and thus, a rejection of me. All I wanted was to finally revel in a regular, appropriate sexual connection. And he wanted…emotion?

This is not to say that all of the problem was on my side. And he will admit that it wasn’t. In any seemingly intractable problem, both bring something to the equation. But it was a knot that just kept binding tighter and tighter. Both of us were hurting, frantic, angry, and clueless as to how to fix things:

The fight was the build-up of several weeks of tensions…we knew we had issues, we were “working” on them, and at some magic time in the future, all would be well, though the “how” it would get well was some mystery shrouded in fog…We just assumed that one morning, it would “happen.”

Instead, one supper time, we nearly parted ways for good. He questioned if we could get through this, and maybe it would be better if he just left. He was angry, frightened, and agonized.

Terror shot through me when I heard him question if we shouldn’t just give it up. It seemed to me we were so close, and if he would just hang in there and chip away at his issues, we would finally get past this…

But right now I was scared to death. The idea of having him actually leave and not come back made my stomach knot, and I was almost nauseated. My insides were literally shaking – I couldn’t conceive of life without him. I knew this was wrong. He was my soulmate.

As an aside, I will note two things before continuing. First, the fact that I considered this all HIS issues demonstrates my own lack of awareness of what MY issues were bringing to this problem. And second, despite that, I *was* deeply committed to making this work. I BELIEVED in us and that we were supposed to be together, even as I had no idea how to fix things. It may have taken me a long time when we first got together to let him in behind my walls. Once I did, once I committed to him, it was for good, and I didn’t want to give up.

To continue with that night:

He was angry at me, angry at himself, ready to give up. He had his men’s therapy group to attend, but as he was leaving, he seemed beaten, ready to quit. At that moment, our son started in on him for something, and that was the last straw. Ed raged out to the car. I followed:

“Are you coming home?”

“I don’t know anymore. I’m not sure.”

With that, he left for his meeting.

Back inside, our son was glued to his TV show. I was crumbling rapidly into a million pieces. I felt terrified, empty, angry, sure it was over, and was consumed by a tremendous wall of dark emotions. I wanted to call someone, but there was no one. Who could help? Not my family. Not any friends. I NEEDED a mom who could hold me, guide me, love me, help me feel safe, and instruct me as to how to proceed. But I had no one. Instead, my insides roiled, terror mounted, and I couldn’t think…it was like mental tetany – so many thoughts going so fast, everything seized up and froze.

I went to my room where I could pound on the bed, and wail, and my son couldn’t hear. As I pounded on the bed, crying, I demanded that the Universe tell me why this was happening. I didn’t want to lose the best friend I had in life, and the best thing that ever happened to me. Our marriage was meant to be, of that I was certain. Yet it was going down the tubes, and I felt helpless to stop it.

I pounded out every last drop of fear and rage until nothing was left but a feeling…a tremendous, empty giant hole in my soul, a horrendous, huge sense of “alone” and sadness, and I started to sob. Wrenching sobs that came from deep within my gut, and just kept pouring out.

Finally, it quieted. I went over to my dresser, where I kept this picture of “God” that I always found gentle and comforting. Don’t ask me why I had it. I was so angry at God. How do you relate to a deity you begged to save you from the abuse, and got no answer? I hadn’t gone to church in a long time. And I rarely ever even spoke to God anymore. Yet I still hung on to this picture. The only one I’d ever seen of God looking caring and soft.

I went over to the picture and just started yelling at God.

“What do I do now, God?! And don’t give me some subtle signal!!! I want a g-ddamn BURNING BUSH!!!!

As a side note, a friend, when I shared my outburst, looked horrified and said “You talked to God like that?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, I answered, “I think that the God of the Universe is strong enough to hear one tiny human yelling at Him.” And I let it all out that day.

I yelled to God about how much I hated Him. And why hadn’t He ever answered my prayers through all those long, lonely, awful years of abuse and humiliation? Why did He let my spirit get killed? And now, when I finally had a good man, and a chance for happiness, WHY WAS HE NOT HELPING?!

That’s when Mary stepped in.

In my sorrow, it finally came clear that all those years, I’d had no mom. I still didn’t. And what I craved more than anything at that very moment was a mom who could hold me in her arms, love me fully, unconditionally, and with strength that would keep me safe. Yes…FEMININE strength, not Dad’s kind, that would make me whole and reassure me that to be soft, vulnerable, feminine, wasn’t weak or stupid, but took guts and strength. ANYONE can be macho. Few have enough guts to feel their feelings and risk being soft.

I sobbed and finally begged Mary to be my mom. To please come hold me, make me safe, like I’d never been safe or loved in my life.

“Please teach me how to change, help me, and love me, and help me save my marriage. I don’t want to lose my husband or our marriage. They are the biggest gifts of my life….PLEASE….”

And she came.

Quietly, softly, probably as she’d always wanted to do, but couldn’t until I asked….she needed to be allowed close. I closed my eyes and saw myself being comforted in her arms, being reassured I was good, I was worth being mothered and cared for. I was filled with a sense of safety and peace. She whispered it would be alright, then told me to get on the phone and call my husband at the men’s group.

I wasn’t sure what to say, but she gave me the words when he came on the line:

“I love you. You are the best thing that ever happened to me. I want to make this work. Please, PLEASE come home.”

I told him how much I’d felt the lack of any female contact or help in my life, but I would join a women’s group, or whatever it took. Bonding weekend, whatever.

It didn’t turn around right away. We had an even worse time the next week when things erupted again, and this time he stormed out of the house, into the car, and peeled out of the yard. This time, I didn’t call his group because this time I knew it was his battle to work out, and he had to make the choice to stay, himself. I couldn’t beg.

But I went back to Mary for help, to hold me, and help me say the right things. I told her I wanted her son’s help, but couldn’t go to Him. God, being male (my view at the time), was just too much for me to approach Him. No more male. So I asked her to help me, and poured out my angers, fears, and terrors to her. She listened, didn’t say much. But I felt her presence and help.

When Ed returned later, he was a transformed man. He had embraced a power within him. He told me he was doing his work at his own pace and wouldn’t tolerate any pressure from me. If I didn’t like that, it was too bad.

He seemed surprised when I congratulated him for standing up for what he wanted. I told him I supported him. We were able to talk things out. That night was finally a turning point.

After that, I joined a women’s therapy group, and… I kept talking to Mary. I even started saying a rosary now and then. It had been years. And where it was always done as an obligation in church or school, now, it was almost a “meditation.” I had a mother again. It was a way to talk to her.

Again, a side note. While I am no longer Catholic, I will note that many spiritual paths have a form of “Mother or Compassion goddess.” For Catholics, that is Mary. And she was the anchoring figure for me, those early years when I would go to Saturday confessions. So it made sense for me to reach out to her in my adult despair. Though I didn’t know it at the time, that image of a compassionate mother would revisit me in a new way, very soon.

For now, we had work to do to bring this crisis back from the edge, and a pivotal way presented itself about this same time.

Flying on the “mio”

“He looks like he’s reading!”

It was a comment from the lady sitting next to my son and me on the plane. She was not pleased to be seated next to an 18-month-old.

I wanted to say, “Oh, but he can!” But no, my son didn’t read yet. But at least he was sitting quietly with the in-flight magazine, intently studying the pictures and slowly turning each page as if he were reading every word.

And to my delight (not to mention that of the lady by the window), he was actually a joy on the flight. Maybe it was the excitement of spending the last week with me in a local motel while our condo got painted. Or the busy airport we walked through. This whole past week had been a whirlwind of change. And today, best of all, he was so pleased to be flying in one of his treasured “mios” – his word for airplanes.

The most impatient he got was toward the end of the flight when he kept asking, “I get down now?” But even then, he was really placid with everything.

Ed, by contrast, had driven a box truck with some of our belongings down to NC, along with our dog. He had to meet the large moving truck that day, then pick us up at the airport.

Cue the eerie music…

When we decided to roll the dice and accept the job in North Carolina, things moved quickly. I had set up an itinerary for him to travel there and arrange what was needed — an apartment, job paperwork, and all the myriad of details for our move.

It was almost eerie to see just how quickly and easily EVERYTHING came together. From me setting up his hotel, rental car, and flights, to obtaining the very apartment we wanted, to renting a box truck for him to drive down.

It was almost scary how well it all went. The process of moving, usually horrible, was one of the smoothest I could have asked for. The moving company’s packers and people loading the truck were great to work with. At least at the Connecticut end. Ed had a different experience in North Carolina, but still, the driver in charge of it all made everything work well enough.

Probably the biggest issue we had at our end was me when I was ready to slit open the waterbed mattress because it wouldn’t drain. My engineer-minded husband took over on that one, which probably saved us from a flood in the condo.

In any event, between movers, the box truck, and a ride on the “mio” we made it to North Carolina.

Our “base camp”

For that first year, we lived in a small apartment near RTP. It was a joy for my husband because, for the first time in three years, he didn’t have an hour or two commute each way. Call it TEN MINUTES!

Within a year, we moved to a house we built in a nearby town. The schools were supposedly good. Parks. Lots of shopping and a small community environment.

Again, it seemed like a higher force at work. It was a town we shouldn’t have been able to afford, yet we found a home in the more rural northern end of town that was perfect and even overlooked a pond.

It was another one of those gambles because we “just” qualified for the mortgage and sale price. In fact, the day we signed the papers and placed a deposit, we learned that the price was going up 20% the next month, which would have priced us out.

And later on, we found out that the day after we signed, one of the neighbors in that cul-de-sac went to buy our lot to give him more room. He missed out by a day. Or rather, we literally locked in that place with only 24 hours to spare.

Whatever forces were at work, this house would be our “base camp” for the next 23 years. Cue the eerie music?

Now, the REAL work starts

It’s not that we suddenly had everything peaceful and easy. I think that with the pressure of the job and commute lowered, and a stable set of circumstances, the dust could finally settle enough to see exactly where the real issues were. It was now time for our REAL work to begin…

I call this next set of pieces “The Warrior Years.” It was the main part of adulthood and child-rearing, the years when so many things were operating at once.

It was a complicated, stressful set of years: A time I felt vulnerable, uncertain, emotionally scared, and scarred. Yet I was also physically and ethically strong and determined to break the patterns and cycles of my father’s “Family System Rules.”

I wanted our son to be free of that past and its influences to give him a better, healthier life. While it wasn’t always done smoothly, it was always done with great care and love.

To write these well, I need to reflect on the main themes of this period. These will be the pieces for this phase, defining the challenges, the efforts, and the insights:

• Marriage – We were soulmates, but how do we stay married when neither of us has the tools?
• My therapy – Continue to learn the life lessons I missed, and identify and heal the pain from the past, all while managing current life responsibilities.
• Parenthood – Breaking cycles for our son’s sake, and meeting his challenges
• Jobs – The dance of job demands, bills, and change
• Friendship – Do I even dare trust?
• God – So, where do we go from here?
• And…My Parents – Confusing messages and keeping him in line while giving our son “some” extended family.

Stay tuned…

The crucible of transformation

With the arrival of my son, a whole new phase of my life was ushered in – The Warrior Years. I will talk about those in upcoming pieces. But first, there was the “minor thing” of giving birth, and “finding my footing” as a new mother.

However easy the pregnancy was, that next year or two was the “Baptism of Fire,” the crucible that would initiate me into motherhood. It would transform me from a young woman managing my own life, needs, and work to heal, to the nurturer and guardian of a whole other life. And even as I would need to keep working on myself, my son and his care would, rightly so, take precedence over my needs for a good many years.

Birth

The birth was difficult – I had to be induced. Hours and hours of transition-level labor. The biggest concern came late in the process, when the baby seemed to be trying to exit out of my hip and was starting to show drops in oxygen levels. The doctor decided we’d give it one last try, and if it didn’t work, then it was a C-section.

My son’s foot was stuck up in my stomach, so while the doctor literally grabbed my abdomen and turned the baby’s direction from the hip, I grabbed the foot and pushed mightily. Finally, he headed on out! We joke to this day about trusting our son’s sense of direction. Anyway, given his stressful journey, they put him right on oxygen, which seemed to help after a few minutes.

The time in the hospital was equally turbulent, especially the first couple of days. Between the exhausting delivery and a snoring roommate, I got no sleep that first night. The next day, I started feeling terrible – shivering, pain, hot then cold, which turned out to be my milk coming in. I had no idea that would happen, or that it was going to mean aching breasts, constant leaking, and the utter sense that my body was not my own. No one explained any of that to me, so it added to the stress and my sense of feeling inept.

Since our son needed to stay an extra day or two for his bloodwork, I was relieved to have some time to try to rest. Frankly, I was glad to have the nurses’ help in his care and was actually afraid to go home. I felt so unprepared. This is one of the places where a lack of mothering really shows up. And for part of that time, I was alone. Ed took a day to rest after the whole delivery. He had been a tremendous birth coach, but I think he was a bit shell-shocked, too. And he had no “paternity leave.” For that matter, he had no time off at all. So we were both struggling to adapt to having a baby to care for.

One of the nurses that I knew from working with her came by and was very kind and calming. She talked about her difficulties at first as a new mom and reassured me that she was sure I would get the hang of things. I will be forever grateful to her.

I did manage to calm down after some rest. And the visits with the baby helped me feel like maybe I could do this after all. While I was in the hospital, my mother came to visit. She did not bring Dad. I had made it clear I didn’t want to see him.

That was a mixed emotional moment for me. I was feeling tired and vulnerable. And so, no matter how old you are, when you feel vulnerable, you want “Mommy” there to help. Even as I knew that was not going to be the case for me.

I did appreciate that she came by, especially since the last time I saw her was that night in the therapist’s office. But at the same time, it was bittersweet. There was no way I was going to have her, and especially not Dad, be around my newborn. She had not been there for me all those years through childhood. What could she give me now? I both needed and wanted her help — what new mother doesn’t? But at the same time, I didn’t want her there.

And it was awkward. I had blown open her shell of denial, made it starkly clear what her husband was. If she lived in silent denial all her life, there was no denying it now. Which left her in the spot of having to choose: Stay with a husband like that or leave, given what he was?

Of course, no matter how upset she was, she would never leave him. He was her security. And on some level, I knew that. She stayed with him all those years, through his abuse of her. Through all the blatant signs that he was abusing me. It pained me to see her be that “stuck.” So yes, it was an awkward, painful, bittersweet visit, filled with longing and need, but resignation that the past would continue unchanged. Unless, of course, he actually got help?

What does the book say???!!!

Going home with a new baby was both an exciting and a terribly scary time. With the birth stuff over with, I was finally looking forward to getting home. But I remember that when we arrived with our “sound-asleep progeny,” and placed him carefully in the downstairs cradle, we stepped back, looked at each other, and said, “Now what do we do?” And we meant it. But if there was any uncertainty of what new life with an infant would require, we were going to find out very soon.

One unsettling thing was introducing the dogs to our new addition. While Jess, the younger female poodle, was more “bouncy curiosity” as she sniffed at the cradle, Charlie, the territorial and jealousy-prone male, seemed unhappy. Yet another harbinger of things to come. I shrugged it off as his hip giving him trouble. And it was. But I never felt he would have adjusted to the baby, no matter what.

But the afternoon went quietly, as did the evening. I began to feel like this would be okay. Until about 11:00 p.m. That’s when he started wailing with a pitch that rattled our spinal cords. This went on for several hours. We tried everything. Rocked him. Fed him. Changed him. Sang to him. Rocked him again. All to no avail.

The nurses at the hospital had told me that he had been calm and slept well for them, so I called them, worried maybe something was wrong. They just laughed and said he probably slept well for them because he was tired from the birth, and now he was starting to be himself. So there was no help there.

Ed and I were not used to being around babies. And I hadn’t done much babysitting either. We knew books. So that was my next resort – Dr. Spock. Literally. As I rapidly paged through it, Ed rocked our son and frantically asked me, “What does the book say??!!”

That was our introduction to life with a colicky baby who resisted any kind of schedule for sleeping and eating, and who screamed constantly.

Certainly, a situation can feed on itself. And no doubt, as the screaming infant made us scared, inept, and frantic, he too must have felt our fear and screamed more.

Somewhere around 3 or 4 in the morning that first night, I think he stopped screaming for a couple of hours, at which point Ed and I grabbed some nervous sleep.

Always running

After that, it was more of the same. Not only did our son have no particular schedule, neither did I. I could barely find time to go to the bathroom, much less take a shower. The baby slept fitfully, then would wake up screaming. And I would drop everything and run to comfort him.

Meanwhile, Jess, our younger female poodle, dug herself behind the backboard of our bed, where she would remain in hiding off and on for the next few months. And as to Charlie, the older, more jealous male? In fact, he would not be with us much longer. Just about the same time I was trying to bond with a newborn, his leg became a real problem. It started separating from the hip joint, requiring me to drop everything to reinsert it. So when I wasn’t running for the baby, I was running for the dog. It was hell.

Add to these problems the fact that any attempts at nursing were a disaster. He wouldn’t nurse well. So he would cry. I couldn’t relax. My breasts ached. Leaked. I tried going to a nursing support group, but let’s just say when I saw one woman’s 4-year-old son walk up to her while she was talking, lift her shirt, take a tug, then walk away, I was like, “Nope! This isn’t for me.”

I finally said to my husband that I just wanted my body back. I was leaking, aching, still bleeding from the delivery, and my nipples were chewed up. I had had enough. So the pediatrician we had chosen told me to start our son on formula and told me what kind to get. But within a few days, our son was refusing to take the bottle, was spitting up formula, and was having diarrhea.

And an aside here – two things. First, to people who tell new mothers to sleep when the baby sleeps, I have a suggestion for what you can do with that advice. Our son barely slept longer than thirty minutes at a time. Then screamed. About the time I finished cleaning and prepping bottles and lay down on the couch, he was awake again. And second, thank GOD someone finally made baby swings battery-operated or electric. They were hand-crank ones when my son was a baby. About the time he just started to fall asleep, the crank cycle would run out. So I’d have to crank it again, he would wake up, and start screaming. Who EVER seriously thought a hand-crank was a good idea???

The dog

Meanwhile, Charlie’s leg was absolutely not staying in the hip joint at all. So I had to send him for surgery. The vet told me that I would need to be nursing him around the clock, which meant that I had to pick him up, carry him everywhere…and keep putting his leg back into the hip joint if it came out.

The surgery recovery went badly right from the start. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get him comfortable, and his leg separated from the joint more and more. I called the vet and said I needed to have the dog cared for at the vet’s office because I had a newborn who wasn’t eating, we weren’t sleeping, and I couldn’t give the dog the care he needed. The vet grudgingly agreed to take him back, but he was not happy.

Within a few days, things went from bad to worse…at which point, we finally had to put the dog down. I feel sorrow and guilt to this day. But I had nothing left to give. I was stressed out, not sleeping, and frantic about my son’s refusal to eat. And, I still feel that Charlie might not have been safe around the baby. So perhaps fate stepped in there.

The nervous mother

This is what having little to no support system is like. And why I think there should be insurance provisions for doulas. Someone to help a new mother adjust, rest, and get up to speed would have been a blessing. I had no support, and one friend who, on the couple of occasions she babysat so Ed and I could get out, let me know that SHE had no problem with him, the implication being, it was my fault and ineptness.

It didn’t help that the pediatrician was no help with our son’s feeding problems. He just laughed and said I was a nervous mother. After several rounds of this, I made my husband take the day off from work to come with me to the next doctor’s appointment. I told my husband that if the doctor called me a nervous mother one more time, Ed would have to come bail me out from jail because I would deck the doctor. Ed was stressed as his job was terrible, and he was nervous about taking the time off, but he came with me. Frankly, by the time we walked out of the office, Ed was ready to deck the doctor.

A friend’s mother suggested the baby’s upset might be gas, and to boil onions and give him the liquid. Another person told me about a bottle of baby simethicone drops. I did both, even though the 0.5 ml bottle of drops cost $21. I would have paid anything for relief. Neither worked.

I quit

In the middle of all of these weeks of chaos, I was starting to get depressed and have anxiety attacks. So I tried to set up a home daycare situation for a day or two a week to give me a break. I tried out a woman who had been recommended to me.

She quit at the end of the first day. She said to me, “I can’t do this! He’s too much work. I don’t know how you do it…you must be exhausted.”

I just started crying when I got home and told my husband what she said. And even when I tried a few other daycares, no one would take him because he wasn’t “on a schedule.”

Meanwhile, the baby wasn’t eating well. And still screaming a lot. The female dog was living behind the bed’s backboard. I wasn’t sleeping. And my husband was trying to keep up with a job that demanded he be on call 24/7 and didn’t care about his family’s needs.

I dreaded when the phone rang at 5 p.m. because it meant the computer systems he was in charge of had a problem, and he would be late leaving. And even when he did leave, his commute would take an hour because of how far away we lived from his job.

One day, he got home, and I was upstairs bathing our son, who was screaming as usual. I was sort of getting used to it. Ed said he opened the basement door and heard the cries, and for a moment, thought about quietly backing out and going for a ride for a few minutes. We both laughed, and I told him that I knew the sound of his car engine coming down the road. So I knew when he was home. If he had done that, I would have known and hunted him down.

Moments of sanity

I will be eternally grateful to Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Cher, Olympia Dukakis, and Dean Martin for saving my sanity during these days. They provided me with the tools to keep going in the form of three movies that I watched again and again and again and again: Diane Keaton in “Baby Boom,” Goldie Hawn in “Overboard,” and Cher and Olympia Dukakis in “Moonstruck.” To this day, I can recite most of the dialogue from Moonstruck. Ed would come in from work and note that one of the three was playing on the VCR that day, but never complained.

Dean Martin sang the theme song for Moonstruck — “That’s Amore.” And when he would sing, I would pick up my son, sing along, and we would swing around the room and dance. However grumpy my son was, he would always laugh when we did that. So we did that A LOT! We now joke that if our son gets married, the mother-son dance has to be “That’s Amore” by Dean Martin. That is the only TRUE version for both of us!

And over time, I even found comfort in Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, though Barney was a stretch. Also, Ed and I would have an occasional night out when a friend babysat our son. While we were totally unaware of anything in life at that point regarding culture, music, or the latest fads, we saw the movie “Naked Gun” in the theater and laughed our hearts out. We so needed that. Silly movie, yes. But just what we needed.

Ed and I did manage to get away for an overnight on our anniversary weekend. Forget mad passion. We had a nice meal at the restaurant where we were married. Then we sat by the indoor pool at the hotel, shell-shocked, and counting down the minutes of quiet time before we had to go back. We were just doing the best we could to hang on.

We need to live somewhere else

Aside from anxiety, post-partum depression that I didn’t know about yet, stress, no sleep, and struggles to feed my son, it was February. That meant snow, sub-zero temperatures, and constantly dark skies.

One particular day, Ed came home from work to find I had the sliding glass doors open to the outside air, even though it was -10 degrees F. out there. When he asked why, I said, “Because I need to hear people!”

Then I looked at him and said, “We need to move. We need to live somewhere else.”

My husband looked surprised but thought this was a good idea. “We can move closer to my job.”

Well, no, we couldn’t because we couldn’t afford a house on the southern coast of Connecticut. But also, I said, “No. We need to move somewhere else entirely. Someplace warmer and sunnier!”

I had lived in Torrington my whole life, and until that moment, I had not intended to move anywhere else. But in that moment, I was done living in Torrington. Or the Northeast. That was the beginning of our efforts to get Ed a new job and to move to a warmer and sunnier place. But more on that later.

“Pick a nipple”

About this time, I was at my wits’ end. This situation was not working right, and it was up to me to fix it somehow. So I did the only thing I could think of — go back to what I knew best – science.

If I were going to help my son, I needed to figure out why he wouldn’t eat. The doctor was useless. But I was a scientist. I knew that to find answers to problems, you try things, make observations, analyze what you find, then try something else until you get a solution.

So I did the “great-bottle-and-nipple experiments.” I got a small notebook, and as I started testing out different things, I would record the results. Then, after a few days, I would look to see if anything changed for the better. If not, I would try the next thing.

The first thing I tested was the baby bottles I was using. I tried different kinds, glass, plastic, regular ones, and ones with liners. The bottles didn’t seem to make a difference.

So then I tried changing the nipples. I tried regular latex ones with one hole, two holes, and three holes. Cross-cuts. I tried orthodontically shaped ones, silicone ones. I would record the nipple used, how much he ate, what his stools were like, everything I could notice.

But the nipples made no difference. One morning, with our son screaming, I stood “frozen” before the counter full of nipples that I’d already tried. None of them worked. My husband, in his infinite wisdom, came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders, and said, “Dear, you’ve got $40 worth of nipples on the counter. Our son is screaming and needs to eat. Pick one, and use it.”

To this day, whenever any of us is overwhelmed by choices and isn’t sure what to do next, we go back to the family maxim: Pick a nipple.

The lab manual and help from the experts

While the nipple and bottle tests failed, the information in my “lab manual” saved us. In looking over my notes, I began to see a pattern of diarrhea related to his eating schedule. From my lab background, which included doing stool analyses, I knew something was wrong in his gut. If something was wrong in his gut, he would be unhappy, cry, and not eat.

I needed help. But the pediatrician was useless. Also, my anxiety and depression were not getting better, and now even if our son slept at night, I couldn’t relax enough to sleep. My regular doctor, a father of three himself, spotted what was going on and prescribed just a muscle relaxer for me. Just enough to relax me to fall asleep, but nothing strong or addictive. He explained about post-partum hormonal changes and that my husband needed to start switching off nights with me, even if we were both exhausted.

At the same time, Ed’s job was just hell for him. Finally, one morning, I said to him, We need help. I need help. We need to go back to the therapist.” His silence for a moment may have just been exhaustion or uncertainty. He was equally fried.

But noting his hesitancy, I just put it all on the line. I told him that whatever he chose, I was going. Because I needed support and help to find answers. And he could come or not. In fact, I remember telling him that if he couldn’t cope with this, he was free to leave. I was no rock around his neck and would raise our son myself if he couldn’t stay.

It sounds terribly harsh now. But I also know now that it was my defense mechanism against rejection. As I said it, I was praying to God that he wouldn’t leave. But I also recall feeling that I wanted someone who wanted to be there with me. If he didn’t want to be there, I couldn’t put up with that.

To his credit, of course, he wanted to stay. He was just equally wiped out. He joined me in therapy even as he had to drive halfway across Connecticut from his job on the coast to West Hartford, where the doctor was. But it was the best thing we ever did.

Finally, some answers

For one, the therapist listened to Ed about the job issues. He suggested that we look at this place — North Carolina – Research Triangle Park — as a possible good new location. RTP was an area with a large technology presence, which meant lots of computer jobs. The therapist had gone to school there and thought the pace of life and climate would help us. Though it would take another year, that advice would eventually land us in that very area. And I think in the long run, that saved all of us.

The other thing the therapist did was arrange for us to meet with his wife, also a doctor, who specialized in CHILD DEVELOPMENT. She examined our son, tested him, and told us that, while he was a difficult baby, he was healthy and doing just fine. She assured us that we weren’t doing anything wrong, but that we needed a better pediatrician. She referred us to a doctor who, while not in Torrington, was a godsend. He looked at my feeding notes and immediately said that the formula was wrong and causing intestinal distress — something I’d been trying to tell the other pediatrician, who was ignoring me. He also assured me that yes, our son was not an easy baby, but he was healthy, it was just his temperament, and we were doing fine.

He even told me that when the baby was crying, after I did everything to give him care — change him, feed him, rock him — to put him in his crib and shut off the monitor for just ten minutes. That would be ten minutes for me to calm myself, and for that ten minutes, the baby would be fine.

It made all the difference in the world. And with the change of formula, our son suddenly settled down, started eating well, and crying less. The dog came out from behind the bed. And I started learning to trust my own gut as a mother. My confidence started to grow. And I even managed to fit in showers on a regular basis.

Last, I had originally planned on being a stay-at-home mother. But that wasn’t working. I needed adult company and support. Lacking it anywhere else in my life, I decided that if I could go back to work even a day or two a week, that would give me adult company and my son, the company of children. That might be good for both of us.

My old boss at the lab was indeed needing people to fill in for people out sick. She was happy to have me back a couple of days a week, and being a new mother herself, she understood the need for adult company. Also, since my son was settling in more, perhaps I could find a daycare that would take him. My boss told me that the hospital had just set up a connection with one, so I went to see the woman.

Again, drawing from my newfound confidence, I met with the woman, and the first thing I said to her was, “*My son is not on a set schedule. He’s had a lot of upset, and so I feed him as he needs it. If that is a problem, this conversation is over, and I am leaving.”*

She laughed and immediately put me at ease when she told me how her son had been the same way. She ran her daycare like it was someone’s home, and they would give him whatever schedule he needed.

Becoming “Mom”

That became the beginning of finding my way into motherhood. It didn’t change everything overnight, and some things never.

Our son was still a difficult baby at times, I mean, he actually cried when I fed him applesauce! Who hates baby applesauce?! Another time, when I worked on a Sunday, I came home to find my son was hoarse from yelling, my husband was wearing ear protectors as he rocked him, and the dog was throwing up in the kitchen. Never a dull moment!

But overall, those moments were diminishing, and I was also growing to understand him and what he needed. He was very sensitive to change, and things being “too” anything – loud, quiet, hot, cold, different. That was just who he was, and I was learning how to deal with it.

For example, we both started sleeping better when I discovered that wave machines were a gift. His machine was set to constant white noise, and he started sleeping regularly. Mine was set to waves, so I could hear if he was crying, in between the waves. And we adapted to the fact that the only time our son truly napped was if he was getting sick. So forget trying for naps.

The point is, I was finally developing the bond with my son that I’d wanted, and to find joy in him, even as I still feared being inadequate at times. But it was a start, and a good one. And no matter the challenges of parenthood, our son has been a total joy for over 30 years now, and worth every bit of the early struggle. And my husband jokes that being a parent helped in his role at work later as a supervisor. Managing people can sometimes be no different than colicky babies!

And all of that progress was just in time…because, as usual, just as things settled now, new big changes were coming. As were battles that would need to be fought.

A “rules” reminder

Just a reminder. As I noted at the beginning of this memoir series, I will not speak about my siblings. Only my parents, myself, and Ed.

The drumming of the minutes

The doctor was late for the appointment. Our meeting was being held after regular hours, so the office was locked. We stood crowded into a side waiting room, Ed and I at one end, my family across from us.

My father stood silent and clutching his bible. Ed remembers that Dad’s hands were shaking. I don’t. I was eight months pregnant and in full “battle mode,” totally focused on what I was about to do. There was no turning back now. Lives beyond my own depended on this.

Why my father actually came to this appointment, I am not sure. He had to know what I was about to do. But maybe it was still a control thing. Even if his secret was about to be ripped open, maybe he figured he could control the fallout? I don’t know. And, I don’t care.

The second hand on the wall clock was as loud as a drum, and the minutes ticked by like hours. But finally, a car raced into the parking lot. The doctor burst through the back door, offering rushed greetings and apologies for being late.

The reveal

The doctor had already arranged chairs in a side area of his office. We sat in a circle, with the doctor just slightly behind Ed and me. From there, the doctor could observe and manage the conversation if needed.

I don’t remember my exact words, only that I got right to the point, “This is about incest. About Dad sexually abusing me all through my life.”

The admission that shocked me

The only reaction was from my mother. And Ed. His was exasperation at the lack of outrage. Or of anything useful from my father. My mother was busy denying knowing anything about it as she whipped her head from me to my father. Then she started crying.

I was emphatic that he had to be held accountable. That our kids were at risk. Since he’d never done any therapy, he was not safe, and that was not acceptable.

My father, weirdly, was very calm. He almost seemed “relieved,” and he didn’t deny anything. Just kept gripping his bible, which was strategically placed right over his groin.

He even actually admitted to getting great “joy” from giving me a bath as a infant. The doctor pressed him to define “joy,” by which he really meant, “getting turned on.”

That admission he offered freely. We had not even been talking about baths when he came out with that. And for a moment or two, it actually shocked me into silence. Even I wasn’t expecting that. My earliest memory of abuse was when I was with him in the car as a three-year-old. So in that moment, I just sat there and tried to take in that he had ALWAYS sexually abused me. Right from the beginning. So I was in shock. In fact, it has taken me years to fully absorb that one.

But as an aside, every therapist I’ve worked with over the years has affirmed the reality that I was NEVER SAFE. And my trauma specialist now has pointed to some of my trauma responses as being body memories of things done “very, very early in life,” during a preverbal time period…i.e., infancy.

In any event, as to the rest of our discussion that night, it wasn’t a long meeting. My mother cried through the rest of it. I demanded, for the second time in 4 years, that Dad get help. The doctor agreed and provided some resources to my father. He agreed to do this.

The warrior

Totally drained, Ed and I left.

I wasn’t sure what would happen next…except for two things: Delivering my child, and…being a warrior for our kids for however long I would need to be. This was no longer just about me.

P.S.

I need to note a few things here. When I look back at all of this, the question comes up — shouldn’t there have been some kind of followup? Legal actions?

I can only assume a few things. First, for the things done to me, I believe the statute of limitations had long since run out. Why there is even a statute of limitations to press charges in situations of child abuse, I don’t know. That is ridiculous. The perpetrator gets to be free after a certain period of time. The victim deals with the wreckage for life. It is just wrong. But that is how it was.

And that is the second thing. In 1988, things were very different. Laws, followup, whose responsibility things were…any of that was much different than how it would be now. Even my own awareness of what needed to happen was very limited. I was still dealing with the effects of my own trauma. So I was doing the best I could

And lastly, I expect, since there was no new crime, there was no legal recourse that could happen…

But it all seems so “flat” a response for almost three decades of abuse to me.

So…the battle would continue…

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…

Since my parents’ return from Texas to Connecticut, I had slowly tried to work out a way to maintain boundaries, but still have some kind of connection with them. There was always a careful dance between us, but we were trying to see if there was, to use the Buddhist term, a “Middle” path.

While I did all the work to set up the wedding by myself, my father gave me the same amount of money to use toward our wedding expenses that he had used for each of my siblings’ weddings. And my mother did throw me a bridal shower.

A day of joy

In spite of that, our wedding day was filled with moments of pure bliss and celebration. Photos with Ed, my father-in-law, and my grandmother all reflect the pure joy.

Yet the undercurrents of my family system were also there.

I never noticed it in earlier years, but to look back at the photos now is to understand how much more a photo captures than just what was posed.

About that “walk down the aisle”

We kept it traditional, and he walked me down the aisle. But he had his mask on. And I had my guard up. At least it was a very short aisle…

And the photo with the parents. Mom and I were at odds more often than not. Including during that time period. But she knew how to smile like everything was fine. And Dad…was Dad.

In case one would think it was just one photo that didn’t do him justice:

The smile never quite reaches the eyes

To me, there is no warmth. Just eyes always scanning, assessing. When out with others, his facade was always in place, but I knew who he was behind closed doors. And always, no matter where he was, the expressions were always the same.

In looking at my father-in-law versus my father, side-by-side, they were two totally different men. My father-in-law was not a perfect man, but he was truly happy that day.

If ever a photo could predict the future….

If I were to choose the images from that day that would predict where our future would take us, it would be these. Because our battles were only just beginning.