by Band Back Together | Nov 29, 2010 | Abuse, Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse, Sadness, Stress, Trauma |
10 years ago today…He is 10 today.
10 years ago today– body and mind split completely open. Each minute brought more pain. Each moment split my mind further away from my body.
Despair it wouldn’t happen
relief it was happening
despair it wouldn’t end
relief it was ending,
despair it was over.
Despair it was just beginning…and down I went.
I remember the feel of my grandfather’s dresser under my hands as I felt the beginning. Black cardigan sweater. Blue shirt, elastic waist black Kmart pants. Two days later they would be bagged up and handed to me much like forensic evidence of what had gone down. What had been killed. Blood soaked underwear, puke-stained shirt. How did I ever get them off of me? Who took them off? How did anyone keep track of them? Why do I want them back? How am I going to ever get them clean?
My water broke. I was still good…still in love with my husband, still believing I was going to be okay. The last image of my marriage as I had known it was my dear one walking me across the street to the hospital emergency room. It was a normal birth. I was a healthy woman. I had a healthy baby. I loved my husband, I loved my baby.
Everything was going great. I was okay. I was birthing the son I loved more than anything I had known. The son who had come to me months earlier as I walked around a lake and said “I am ready, Mama.” First time we tried, he came to me. My dear Zig. My dear one. We tried, he and I. We tried to follow the rules, follow the body, follow the doctors. I followed with some idealistic faith in store-bought images of motherhood not meaning the end of me. But I forgot something on my birth plan.
I forgot to remember to not forget she wasn’t there. My mother, any mother, was not there. No mother to see me through it, to protect me. I forgot to watch my back. So I missed it altogether. Idiot. I should have KNOWN. I wasn’t looking, too distracted by pain, and the slipping away of parts of my mind. I wasn’t aware when the dark figure of the lifelong fear of my father took its place in my birth room.
The dark cloud. Standing behind the door, behind me – lurking. I never had a chance. My bad.
by Band Back Together | Nov 23, 2010 | Abuse, Coping With Domestic Abuse, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, How To Help With Low Self-Esteem, Infidelity, Loneliness, Psychological Manipulation, Self Loathing, Self-Esteem, Shame, Sociopathy, Stress, Trauma |
I’m planning on leaving my husband.
I’m running away.
Last night, after an especially bad fight, I was talking to one of my best friends. I told him what the fight was about (husband got upset at me because I was on my phone while he was asleep) and I told him that it’s my fault, because I’m such a bad wife.
My friend got mad at me. I mean, really angry, and I couldn’t understand why. He told me to search the term BWS. He said that he thinks that I have battered woman syndrome. But you see, it’s rare that my husband actually hits me. Generally he just throws verbal punches.
Since the day we met, something about this man has made me bend over backwards for him. I let go of long time friends (because he didn’t like them), I turned my back on family (because he said that he was my family now), I missed my little brother’s funeral (he thought it would be a bad idea for me to go back home by myself and wouldn’t take me).
He screamed at me and told me I was worthless, and I cried and begged him to give me another chance, because I CAN BE BETTER.
Let me give you some background information on me. Up until I met my husband my friends called me CK, or Cowboy Killer. I had a bad reputation for taking a man and turning him inside out.
Not because I was mean, because I wouldn’t be. But because they all usually told me they loved me within a week or two and then I’d have to let them go. CK rule # 1 is don’t get attached to me. Rule # 2 is I don’t take shit so back the eff off. So when my friends saw the little things that he started off doing to me, they were baffled.
To say the least, I’ve let this man run my life. Deep down there is a little voice in my cold empty heart that says that he is wrong and bad.
But everything else inside of me screams that this is my fault. After he hits me, he says things like “I didn’t hit you that hard, you must bruise easily” or “I didn’t push you that hard, you threw yourself” or “Baby I’m sorry, but you just shouldn’t push me like that”.
A few months ago he put me in the hospital because I said “I hate you” after I found out that he was cheating on me, again.
But the making up… I live for the making up. He is so sweet, and he tells me that I’m beautiful and he loves me and that he’ll change. He asks me to just stick it out, because he knows that he can be better. But a week later it’s back and worse than ever.
When he broke my nose last month another good friend offered to pay for me and my children to move back up north (my homeland) and live with him. He offered me a job in his company and a safe place for my kids and I to live, complete with 2 puppies and a fenced in back yard. I told him at the time that I would think about it.
Last night I did a lot of thinking. And a lot of web searching. Did you know that my husband matches almost every single sign of being a sociopath?
Manipulation? Check. This is the same man that says I force him to treat me this way because of the things I do, like buy myself a coffee with my money.
Lack of remorse? Yeah, we already went over that one.
Poor behavioral controls resulting in acts of rage? Mmhmm.
Promiscuity? LOLZ. This is the same man who has NO IDEA how many women he’s slept with. Since we started dating I know of at least 8.
Parasitic lifestyle? If you’ve read any of my other entries here on BB2G you would know that for the last two years I’ve supported him financially.
Apparently the sociopath’s main goal in life is to create a willing victim. That’s been me for two years. And I think I’m done. I sent an email to my friend, asking if I could still come up. I won’t tell my husband.
But I’m scared. I’m scared of taking my kids up to PA and worrying about whether I can support them. I’m scared that I won’t be strong enough to say no when my husband begs me to come home. I’m scared that all of this is in my head, and maybe I am the crazy one. I’m scared that he’ll find us.
But it’s what I have to do, right?
Because I can’t continue to live this way, right?
*On a side note, thank you all, for being the people that you are. Sometimes I just read over the comments that you leave and I cry and wish that I had people like you actually in my life. Thank you for trying to help me see the bright side, and for telling me that it will get better. A million times over, thank you…
Prankster, there’s no such thing as “abuse light” or “a little abuse.” Your husband is abusive. That’s not a question. The question is, “do you want to take it?”
You know that the answer is no. You don’t deserve it. Nobody deserves to be treated like that. Nobody.
You are loved. We will be here for you no matter what.
Whatever you do, please be safe. PLEASE.
by Band Back Together | Nov 15, 2010 | Anger, Depression, Guilt, Jealousy, Poverty, Economic Struggles and Hardship, Stress |
My friends would say that I have a great sense of humor, and I like to think that I do. I’m one of those “ease the tension with a funny line” kind of people. But lately I’m just so jealous and angry and ugly inside – I feel like even my blood and organs have rotted to black.
I am deeply blessed to have a wonderful husband and healthy child. After long bouts of unemployment, my husband and I both have jobs. That should be all I ever want. But dammit if life isn’t harder than I can take sometimes! We have piles of debt, and I hold my breath and pray when I check our bank account balance online. Last week, we were $500 in the hole until payday on Friday. We are under-employed and under-paid, and every purchase, even necessities, requires deliberation.
Yet we’re surrounded by friends who can afford things like vacations, Christmas gifts, babysitters and second children – all things we would love to have, but we can’t. Our friends have successful careers and gym memberships and freaking disposable income – things that we thought we would have too, being smart, college-educated, hard working people.
So I’m jealous. Deep, ugly-cry, Wicked Witch of the West jealous. I find out about one person’s TV appearance or another’s forthcoming baby, and my first reaction is to wince and roll my eyes. I hate myself so much for that. Nobody wants to be around that person, not even me.
I hate that when I count my blessings, I feel like I got shafted. I think I’m pissing off God, setting myself up for something awful to happen because I’m ungrateful, even though logically I know better. I’m just so tired of economic struggles. People say that money doesn’t solve all your problems, but it damn sure solves the problem of not having any f-ing money!
I feel hopeless and furious and also guilty as hell. It’s an awful cycle that I can’t figure out how to end. Is praying for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow worse than any other idea?
by Band Back Together | Nov 13, 2010 | Encephalocele, Fear, Neural Tube Defects, Stress, Trauma |
Hear my prayer, hear my prayer, hear my prayer, please God, hear my prayer.
I instinctively checked the monitors as I approached my daughter who was sprawled out, getting a sunbath underneath the warmer. Her stats were picture perfect, I noticed, breathing a little more easily, and I made my way slowly to her bedside where she was sleeping peacefully.
I slogged my soggy bottom from the wheelchair onto the rocker that had been shoved into her tiny NICU room; barely even a room, more like a broom closet. She was sandwiched in between two misbehaving (“misbehaving” means that their alarms were constantly blaring) babies who I could hear misbehaving.
Most of the NICU, I noted as I was wheeled past, was full of Feeders and Growers. That’s NICU slang for babies that were, for whatever reason, finishing their gestation outside of the womb. It”s always evoked a pleasant picture of a garden of freshly hatched babies. A Baby Garden.
Of the other babies that I could see cooking away merrily in their incubators, Amelia was the biggest, fattest, and likely the only full- term baby there.
According to her room placement, though, she was the most ill.
Hear my prayer, hear my prayer, hear my prayer, please God, hear my prayer.
My ass firmly planted now onto the chair (I’d had a traumatic vaginal birth mere hours before), I held Amelia’s lone sock as a talisman, hoping it would ward off the Bad News. I was preparing to nurse my daughter again, just waiting for our nurse to come and help me sort through the tangle of wires my daughter was attached to.
It was hard to believe only thirty or so minutes had passed since we’d heard “there’s something sinister on your daughter’s CT scan.”
Our–Amelia’s–nurse walked in and introduced herself to The Daver and I. I was openly weeping, holding onto Mimi’s sock and my iPhone – where the Pranksters live!- as a life preserver. The Daver was pale(r) and stalwart.
I handed off the box of kleenex that had been pressed onto my lap as we left Mother/Baby and my daughter was brought back to me, hooked up to so many wires that she looked like an electrical outlet. The nurse stood there, kindly talking to us, but not revealing anything.
We still had no idea what was wrong with our daughter. A diagnosis would take weeks. Her life, as far as we knew, hung in the balance.
I begged the nurse to have the house neonatologist visit my daughter as the pediatric neurosurgeon was busily operating on someone’s head somewhere other than the NICU. It’s probably good I didn’t know where he was or I’d have stalked him down and dragged him to my daughter for a diagnosis.
The neonatologist – the one I’d met a lifetime ago in the delivery room, the guy who was always drinking a bottle of something – he came over to Amelia’s “room” and he told us that there was a “bright spot” on Amelia’s CT Scan. He didn’t mean diamonds.
I had no fucking clue what that meant and he didn’t follow it up with much, although I did see his lips move, I couldn’t understand his words.
Guess that’s panic for you.
After the doctor left, the nurse came back in to ask if we’d wanted to see the chaplain; rather to have Amelia meet the chaplain. A thousand times yes.
She was amazing. Just. Incredible. For the next year, it was her words, her warmth and compassion that I kept coming back to. She blessed my daughter. My daughter was blessed.
And she is so, so blessed.
We sat there in the NICU; just the three of us. I couldn’t tell you how long we just sat. Time in the ICU is timeless. 4 AM and 4PM are the same.
Soon enough, I had to go upstairs to change my undergarments and ready myself to see my boys. My sister-in-law was bringing my sons to visit, and I had to put on my Poker Face. Given the raw, chapped and bleeding state of my cheeks, was going to be damn near impossible.
Back in my room, I saw that I’d gotten some flowers and a basket from two of my Pranksters and it made me cry. Then again, I think the package of Saltines that had been ruthlessly thrown on the floor the night before might have made me cry. I wasn’t in a Good Place.
Alex and Ben came in a bit after I’d gotten cleaned up. I held Alex very, very close as Ben showed me some pictures he’d colored of Amelia. Ben knew his sister was sick but Alex (only 22 months old) had no idea what a “sister” was, let alone what being “sick” meant. I held them and faked normal until I got the call from the NICU. Time to nurse the baby.
Talk about being torn.
I cried as I said goodbye to my youngest son–my eldest just wanted to get home and I couldn’t find fault with that–and he cried and yowled “Mooommmmyyy” as he was led away to the elevators that would dump him back into the outside world.
By myself for the first time, I tearfully found my way back to the Secret Place, The Land of Tears. Never have I felt so sick to my stomach in my life. People stared sympathetically as I wept in the elevator, leaning against the walls for support.
I begged God to let her live, even if she was retarded and her IQ was 43 and had to live at home for the rest of her life, just please let my baby girl live. I didn’t care what was wrong with her so long as she made it out alive. I begged God to take me instead. I’d had 28 wonderful years on the planet already, and she was less than 24 hours old. Certainly, I’d give my life to save her in a moment.
Hear my prayer, hear my prayer, hear my prayer. Please God, hear my prayer.
After scrubbing the top 50 layers of skin from my arm and signing a reasonable facsimile of my name, I wobbled to her bedside. There she was, my girl. Perfect stats, thrashing about her isolette, pissed as hell and looking for something to eat.
In the brief time I’d been gone we’d gotten a new nurse.
When she came in to assess my daughter and saw me crying as I nursed my girl, for the first time in a day, someone asked me what was wrong. I explained that I didn’t know if my daughter would live or die. I told her that no one had told us what could be wrong with her, what that bump COULD be, why she was in the NICU, nothing.
She looked pretty aghast that we’d been told nothing, and for the first time, someone tried to reassure us. I remember leaving the NICU several hours later slightly less burdened.
That night, we ordered a pizza and tried to relax in my somber room. We tried to let go of some of The Fear. I didn’t feel much like celebrating anything, so no balloons, no stuffed animals, no signs that I had just given birth decorated my room. I could have been on any floor, in any room in the hospital.
The nurse brought me my Ambien and the NICU called to tell me that they would bring my daughter up to nurse every 2 hours (the NICU runs like clockwork. It’s no wonder that new parents struggle to care for their NICU graduate when they get home). I turned on the sound machine to blast white noise over The Daver’s snores, and waited, trying to fall asleep.
Unsurprisingly to no one, I couldn’t get anywhere close to sleep that night. This made the tally of nights without sleep 3.
I was about to lose it.
Somewhere around 4 AM, after someone had barged into my room to empty the wastebasket, waking me from the lightest of light sleep, I panicked. I’d sent Dave down to the NICU to sit with our daughter in the vain hope that having him at her side would set my mind free.
I was alone. The panic that had been a constant dull buzzing had morphed into something much more sinister and I knew what was about to happen.
Frantically, I paged the nurses station because I knew I needed help. I explained as carefully as I could that I was about to have a panic attack and that I needed my nurse NOW. My nurse came in, I don’t remember what she did, but she didn’t want to call my doctors because they would be rounding in a couple of hours and I could ask for something for my anxiety then.
Fucking bitch.
She told me to “relax” and then left.
I tried to “relax” which was as useful as punching myself in the face with a hammer. It didn’t work. I put a call back into the nurses station, begging; pleading with them to call my doctor. I begged for help.
My last rational thought was to quickly inventory anything in the room with any sort of calming properties. The best I could come up with was a bottle of Scope.
I didn’t end up drinking it, but I did call the NICU and beg Dave to come back up. A nurse passing by my room took pity on me and called my doctor, who prescribed me an Ativan. A swarm of people all happened to come into my room at the same time: a partner in my OB practice who looked terrified by me but discharged me anyway, a nurse with that beautiful pill, a tech to get my vitals, and my husband.
It sounds, in retelling this, that they were all there to help, but it wasn’t really like that. Dave and the nurse were trying to calm me down, but the tech, the doctor and whomever was washing the floor were doing their jobs. With spectacularly bad timing.
Ativan on board now, I was trying to gulp some calming breaths and stave off the panic. They’d turned off the lights, and covered my still-swollen body with fresh sheets, cleaned off the bedside table and turned on the white noise machine.
Finally, I began to relax and beat the panic away, if only slightly. Dave held my hand and told me over and over and over again that my daughter was just fine, she was perfect, she was wonderful, she’d done great overnight, she was beautiful, she was going to be just fine. It was soothing to hear, but what would have been MORE soothing? Having her bassinet next to my bed where it belonged instead of three floors below.
Then (dun, dun, DUN), the absolute worst person to show up did.
Lactation services.
Lactation Services showed up, because they say they’ll come by every day you’re in the hospital with a new baby, and they do. It’s awesome for people who need help because breastfeeding is nowhere NEAR as easy as it looks on those weird Lamaze videos.
(also: why are people in the Lamaze videos always naked?)
But I didn’t need help. And when she showed up and saw me shaking in bed, being held by my husband while the nurse clucked around me like a mother hen, lights off, white noise blaring, she should have excused herself. This is not a debate about breast and bottle feeding, this is about decency. But no, she didn’t get the hint.
No.
She introduced herself perkily and asked me how breastfeeding was going, and through clenched teeth, I answered that it was fine. Kinder than the situation warranted.
I expected this to be enough for her, but no, she followed that up with, “Do you have any concerns about breastfeeding?” Wrong question, dipshit. Time, place, all that.
“You know what?” I snarled, “I’m MUCH MORE concerned that my baby is going to die than if I have proper latch, okay?”
Again, she could have gracefully bid be farewell. But no. She kept on keeping on.
“Well, what about your concerns with BREASTFEEDING?” She asked, just not getting it.
I responded with, “Look, if she’s dead, I’m not going to give a FUCK about colostrum, okay? Please!”
I began to sob heavily again. It was the very real truth that my daughter could die. We all knew it. Nursing her wasn’t going to help an encephalocele.
Dave told her to get the fuck out of our room.
Finally, with a DO NOT DISTURB sign on my door, I slept for a few hours.
I awoke when The Daver bounded in and announced, “the neurosurgeon ordered an MRI! And he’s really nice! And not concerned! He thinks it’s an encephalocele! It’s a piece of brain or something that’s herniated out! We can go home after the MRI! And follow up with the results next week! Oh, I wish you’d met him. He was so, so nice.”
And just like that, we went from critical to discharged in less than 36 hours.
by Band Back Together | Nov 10, 2010 | Shame, Stress, Stutter, Tourette Syndrome |
To speak. To form sounds, syllables, words, that when combined, convey a specific meaning to the listener.
A lot of people I’ve met take this ability for granted. They don’t contemplate their ability to articulate a certain sound in the brief moments before they are expected to respond or answer the question looming in the room. Others appreciate the hard work and seemingly miraculous events that occur to allow them to talk.
I’ve never known such bliss. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a stutter. It is what my childhood neurologist referred to as a “hesitation stutter” in that I have difficulty moving past initial sounds.
Throw in a few ever-changing involuntary muscular tics, and you have a diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome, which is a genetic condition consisting of both verbal and motor tics. I rarely admit this as the root cause of my stutter because of the next question I inevitably get – “so why don’t you swear all the time, then?”
Well, I do, but it is completely intentional and not related to the 10% of Tourette’s patients who have coprolalia (involuntary swearing or inappropriate comments and usually how the media portrays Tourette’s).
It feels like a giant lump in my throat, paralyzing my vocal cords and restricting sounds from emerging. Stress makes it worse, as does lack of sleep, or too much sleep, or sometimes just the changing of the winds.
I have struggled with the mundane aspects of life, the things my husband does without a second thought. For me, they require meditation and at least 10 minutes to psych myself up.
Calling to schedule an appointment? Awkward. Answering the phone with the professionally appropriate, dictated script? Impossible. Going through a drive through window? Painful for all involved. Successfully navigating a phone interview? Screw it.
I’ve tried being honest and upfront with employers and customers (I have a very public-facing job. In this recession, I took what I could find. Call me a masochist), and sometimes it helps.
The sympathetic ones understand that my stutter does not define me, nor does it indicate a lack of intelligence. I can’t say that has been the universal reaction from everyone.
The ones who laugh and mock are the most painful. I’ve learned to have a thick skin, at least outwardly. I’ve learned their insults and degrading comments are indicative of their shortcomings, not mine. I thought it would get better once I was out of high school and into the professional environment, where “adults” would know better.
10 years later, I’ve found that’s true about half of the time.
I’m 28 years old, but I still long for just one day where I can say what is on my mind without struggling to get the words out. It sounds so stupid when I put it on paper, and it almost seems ridiculous in comparison to other people’s issues.
In the last 6 months or so, it has gotten worse, likely because of the stress of my current job. I’ve tried medications, but the zombie effect is counterproductive to successful employment, and my doctors took me off all of them two and a half years ago at the start of our child bearing efforts.
I’ve tried alternative therapies, yoga, acupuncture, long hot baths. Nothing helps for long.
I’ve learned to fight past it. Keep doing the things I want to do, and screw anyone else who doesn’t understand. I don’t normally talk about it except when absolutely necessary because I don’t want to be the whiny chick who feels sorry for herself. I keep my head down and go through life as best as I can in that moment.
I’ve noticed a common theme on this site – a lot of the posters say they don’t like to complain or talk about the issue in their post, myself included. I am so grateful for this forum and the creators for providing a safe, open environment for all of us to gather and support each other.
Sometimes we need encouragement, a listening ear, thoughtful words, or a place to vent without judgment.
Sometimes we just need to know we’re not alone
by Band Back Together | Nov 1, 2010 | Anxiety, Cirrhosis, Hepatitis, Liver Disease, Stress, Trauma |
The day I got the phone call, I felt the wholeness of my little world, my security, bodily health, relationship, and peace of mind break apart, red hot, and scatter in every direction around me. That phone call was an atom bomb. My life blew to pieces and then rained down all about me. Everything burned.
Three words changed my life: “you tested positive.”
The blood ran from my face into my feet as I hung up the phone. Although my eyes were open, in a spell of synesthesia, I saw nothing but the sound of the blood beating at my temples. I was delivered my test results in a department store, without my shoes on, and in jeans that weren’t even my own. My skin grew cold and foreign.
I don’t remember peeling the denim from my legs, pulling my coat around my body, or stumbling into the November air of the parking lot. Minutes tick by and I have no recollection of their existence. In the following weeks, I find that whole chucks of my life go missing. I am thankful for those disappeared hours… the sound of my own keening and wailing, all animal, would have later haunted my dreams.
I sat in the car as the sobs ripped through me and left no part of my body untouched. They pulsed through my fingertips, clung to my ribs, drew my thighs toward my chest. They puffed into little clouds of steam in the cold, dispersed, and were replaced by more tiny clouds. I cried all the way home, bent double, called my lover, begged forgiveness. He talked me down. Said I had nothing to be sorry for. He went on with life as usual and by doing so, pulled me through all of my darkest days.
I owe him everything.
You would think that I’d have more to say about the details of this day, but it’s grown flat. I remember the back drop of grey clouds and little else.
I wavered between periods of eerie silence that sounded almost like peace and inconsolable mourning. One moment I was calm, while in the next I swore I could feel the tiny, organic machines sliding through my blood, dismembering my liver. During those first weeks, I read all I could about viruses in fascinated horror. In this, I found a strange comfort.
I lived through the nightmare of half a dozen doctors visits, a battery of tests, and waiting for more phone calls that once hung up leave me sobbing into my shaking hands. My bilirubin was so high, I was only a hairsbreadth away from jaundice, a second antibody test came back positive.
My heart pounded as I read domestic magazines in waiting rooms. The insides of my elbows turned the color of plums with bruises that bloom in the wake of one blood draw after another. I dropped ten pounds in a few weeks. The nurses looked at me with chiding eyes and said, “you really need to eat, you know. You can’t lose any more weight.”
But food turned to sand in my mouth. I had been hollowed out and couldn’t seem to fill myself again.
During all this, my one respite was sleep… plagued night after night by nightmares all my life, the dreams I had at that point were more beautiful than any I had ever assumed possible. My sleeping mind drew images in the dark that blotted out my suffering: my beloved dead showed up, smiling; an evening was lit up bright as day with my mind’s fireworks; a door set into the floorboards swung open to blue sky.
My dreams provided me with a much needed unremembereing. Waking up was the hard part; the sweet flesh of night gave way to the hard light of morning. Really, the relearning of your life as you wake up is the hardest part of this disease, next to liver failure.
This is not to say that there is no hope.
Treatment is long and brutal, similar in its side effects to chemo, but at a success rate of 50%, worth the hair loss, headaches, nausea, anemia, and sleeplessness for the chance to have my health back and a glass of chilled white zinfandel. I did my research and found I was ready to wander 48 weeks in that desert of treatment at the chance of being delivered from my suffering.
It was then I decided that I wasn’t going to mourn any more, I was only going to fight.
