But I don’t know for how long. I peed on a stick in the office. The nurse and doctor watched the line appear…and then disappear. My doctor said he had never seen anything like that happen. He looked at the nurse and then at me and then at the test. He was shocked.
So he said “You’re definitely pregnant right now…but I don’t know for how long.”
I am on partial bed-rest which means that I am to do no heavy lifting. I’m on Zofran for nausea. He will test my HCG hormone levels in a few days and see if it is higher. If it is lower, he will give me a prescription for pain pills and we will wait for my body to miscarry.
I am literally sitting here, willing my baby to stay inside me. Telling it to hang on long enough to get a good grip. Hang in there little guy, just hang on. I am bleeding and cramping but I have been told that is because up until two days ago I was on birth control pills.
So I’ll sit here on my couch and try to grow a baby. I will try to keep my child alive. And I will hope and pray that when they call tomorrow, my numbers will go up.
The bleeding will stop.
The cramping will stop.
I will have three people there to meet my husband when he comes home from his deployment.
We will be a family of three. We will be.
********************
When I wrote this, I was pregnant. Two days later, I was not. I saw the ultrasound, it was there! And now it is not. I still have a baby bump…and nothing inside. My heart is broken, my body is broken, and my husband is 6,700 miles away. The logical side of me says to that we should wait to have a baby. We should wait until he can be here to hold my hair back when I am sick, when he can rub my back and feet and feel our child moving inside me. But the other side…the other side says GET PREGNANT AS SOON AS HE GETS BACK!! Twelve month deployment be damned!
I am so torn. And heartbroken. And yet VERY strong. I have to be strong for my little boy. He needs his mother.
(I know faith is a personal issue. This post is about the effect abuse had on my faith journey. I am not trying to convert or offend anyone, only to tell another part of my journey.)
As a young child who suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of my step-father I was looking for a way out.
By the time I was 8 or 9 years old, I began walking to a little country church about 3/4 a mile from our home. I began, in all honesty, out of curiosity and as a way to be out of my house. In church I found a Father who didn’t abuse me. I found a Father who loved me. I found a Father who saw each tear I cried, without being the one who caused them.
My relationship with God became a life-line, a source of hope where there had seemed to be very little reason to hope. I knew that even though I was weak and small, God was big and mighty. After I had been going for a month or so, my little sister wanted to come along. My mind smiles at the memory of those walks. My sister and I, hand in hand, walking to church in our “best dress” and “fancy shoes”. (In reality, our clothes and shoes weren’t fancy at all, but they were to us).
My relationship with God saw me through that awful childhood and continued into my adulthood. When I was an adult I went to counseling to deal with the pain and shame of my past. During the beginning stages of therapy, I remember telling my therapist that it felt like there was a tornado in my head. So many thoughts, feelings, and issues to discuss and I had no idea which to deal with first. I chose one issue at a time and began working our way through them. Somewhere in the midst of dealing with all of these issues I began thinking “Where was God? How could a loving God allow these terrible things to happen to a child? Why didn’t He stop him? Why didn’t He protect me?”
It was a very painful time. Now, on top of everything else I had to work through, I was angry at God. I told my therapist that I was angry at God and that I didn’t know how to work through that. We talked a lot about it. One day she asked me if I had told God how I felt. I said no. How could I tell God I was angry? Me, a mere human telling God I was angry at Him? She said “He is a big God. He can take it. Tell Him how you feel.”
Simple words – big effect.
I did tell God how I felt. I yelled. I screamed. I asked Him “How could you?” I told Him every angry, rotten thought I had about His role in my childhood.
It took some time. God and I had that conversation more than once, many times. Eventually, I got all the anger out of my heart and mind and in it’s place was truth.
The truth is – I would have never made it through my childhood without God. He certainly did save me. Many, many times. Looking back at the drunken rages when my step-father would be swinging a gun around. The drunken high-speed car rides with him. The many beatings where so many things could have happened to turn a severe beating into a death.
It took quite a while for me to work through this and come to my own understanding of why awful things happened even though I have a loving God. My step-father had free will. We all do. He could choose to do evil and he did. But for God to stop him, He would have had to take away my step-father’s free will and MAKE him do what God wanted him to do. God will not take away our free will. If He did, we would all be robots doing exactly what God wants us to do. God does not want robots. He wants us to love Him and do what is right because we choose to love Him. Could God force us to love Him? If God took away free will and “made” all of us love Him and make the choices He would like us to make, that isn’t us loving Him. It is doing what we are told to do because we have no choice. God wants us to CHOOSE to love Him, or it isn’t really love. It’s obedience.
So, where do I believe God was when awful things were happening to me? I believe He saw it all. I believe He wept, just as we weep when our children suffer. Then He helped me find a way to Him through our little country church. He helped me to feel His love and comfort and gave me the courage and strength that got me through that horrible nightmare.
Thank you God, for being “a big enough God to take it” when I raged at you.
Thank you for helping me find a path to You when I was a scared little girl.
Thank you for protecting my mind and heart enough that I knew abuse is horrific and didn’t repeat the cycle with my own kids.
Thank you for leading me to a wonderful husband who stuck with me through some very difficult times and showed me human men are capable of loving without hurting.
Thank you for leading me to a counselor who “clicked” with me and became a guide through the misery.
And, thank you for helping me become the woman I am today.
The first time I saw a brain, a real brain, suspended in some greenish liquid at the front of my gross anatomy lab, I stood there, staring at it for a good long while. I was long past being disgusted by the organs of the human body, and seeing the folds of the creamy white tissue struck me only with a sense of wonder. This was it, right there: all that you were, all that you thought, all that made you you was right there in that innocuous looking organ.
Really, it could have been a football for as glamorous as it looked.
But to know how it worked, studying the nuances of neurology, that is poetry. All of the mysteries that we still do not know about how the synapses fire to make one person want to maim and dismember and one person want to paint the Sistine Chapel, that is beauty. The smooth folds folding seamlessly into each other made up separate and distinct parts of the brain and instinctively I rattled them off in my head as I examined the brain in the jar: the cerebral cortex, responsible for how we are feeling, our emotions. Those that make someone laugh or weep, smile or scream, right there.
The parietal lobe, which is how we use all of our senses at once to make decisions, the back of the head responsible for sight, the very sense I was using to examine the brain I was so enthralled by. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to drive a car, see the deep brown of my son’s eyes, the bright red of the fall leaves outside of the classroom. One by one, I observed all of these structures on that brain, carefully preserved in formalin in a jar labeled ABBY NORMAL.
How could something that looked like a Nerf ball be so mystifying and so shockingly resplendent in it’s simplicity at the same time? Something that made each of us who we are should have looked unique, special, like a jewel and somehow, the more brains I saw, the more I realized that they all looked pretty much the same.
Maybe it’s what we do with those hunks of white matter that contains the beauty, because with the exception of the cerebellum (which is surprisingly beautiful), it’s a highly understated organ, especially when compared to something flashy like the kidneys.
When my daughter was born with part of her brain hanging jauntily out of the back of her head, the doctors pretty much shrugged their shoulders when we asked what that meant about her future. While she showed no signs of neurological damage, she could be profoundly normal or profoundly retarded, it simply wasn’t something that could be determined by a blood test or an MRI.
Up until she was a year old, Amelia was followed by Early Intervention, who came every couple of months, tested her, declared her normal and left. When she turned a year, I figured it was probably time to let them close the case on her for now and promise to make a call back if something changed. I know the drill with special needs kids well enough, and her medical diagnosis is an immediate qualifier for assistance.
It’s taken me until now to realize that there is actually something wrong with her beautiful brain.
Amelia has no words.
She has no words.
No glorious words, the very thing that I make my (pathetic) living from, she has none. I’ve always derived so much happiness in putting together combination of words to titillate, horrify, or move people, and she has not one word.
She’s had words before, they’ve slipped out of her mouth for a couple of days until it appears that she forgets them and goes back to shrieking and grunting to get her point across. In many ways, this terrifies me more than seeing my mute autistic son did, because it seems as though she has words, then loses them again.
It’s time to call the specialists back in and help my daughter find her words.
For good, this time.
I have a lot of delicious combinations to teach her.
She left him this morning while he was at church. My brother drove five hours to come and take her to stay with his family. After seven years, she finally got up the courage and bailed. I have never been more proud of her than I am in this moment.
She left the abuse, the control, the hate, the mind games. She left the drugs, the crime, the lies and the stealing. She left him for going through her things and screaming at her every day. She left him for punching her in her sleep when she snored. She left him for telling her when she could or couldn’t eat or leave the house or come visit me and her granddaughter. She just… left.
She left.
History has a way of repeating itself, especially when it comes to relationships. And her history has been on repeat since 1970. Every man she has ever been with has treated her like the scum of the earth: my dad, her boyfriend of 10 years (after divorcing my dad), and now him. I would be lying if I said I thought none of this was her fault because she chose this. She has continually chosen this, but that doesn’t mean she deserves it. Nobody deserves this.
Her bouts with mental illness have plagued her for most of her adult life. It’s like the men she chooses know that she is weak. They prey upon those who seem to “need some help.”
My mother has been homeless on the streets, homeless in shelters, fed by soup kitchens, and by the kindness of strangers. She’s been in and out of mental hospitals and failed relationships more times than I can remember. She has been raped, assaulted, kidnapped and abandoned on the side of the road in her underwear in a blizzard. And through all of that, she lived. She lived through it.
But today? She finally ended it on her own. She didn’t wait to be kicked out or told that he was done with her. She didn’t wait to end up in a hospital or shelter or on the side of the road… or worse. She left on her own, by her own free will. She didn’t wait until she was no longer strong enough to go.
I always used to tell her the analogy of the frog in the pot: If you throw a frog into pot of boiling water, he will instinctively know that the water is too hot and leap out. But if you put a frog in a pot of cool water, and gradually increase the temperature, he won’t notice that things aren’t right, and will let you boil him alive and kill him. She was that frog. The one who started out in a relationship being wined and dined and showered with gifts. But soon those things started to go away, and slowly the little jabs at her self-esteem became major blows, both mentally and physically. She didn’t notice… or maybe she did but soon nothing became shocking; nothing “burned” her.
I asked her this morning what finally made her snap. She said she heard them talking outside her door when they thought she was asleep plotting how they would “off her.” Whether it’s the illness talking, or the truth, I will never know. And it does not matter.
I carry too much pain. The person who birthed me didn’t want me and told me I was worthless, from a young age, as early as I can remember. There are not words enough to describe the amount of negativity that was heaped on me for so many years. And there is no way to describe how deeply embedded in my psyche is the pain. Without even getting into the physical abuse, I’m already too full of pain to comprehend it.
When I first started having panic attacks, first experienced that all-consuming terror, I wondered why it was all so damned familiar. I couldn’t comprehend why I felt like I knew this, recognised it… WHY? And then I realized that I had felt like this before; for all the years that I was abused I felt this constant terror, in a muted sense. It got to the point where I was utterly used to it, similar to how you become habituated to the whirring of the fan or the sound of the rain. It was there, but I didn’t really notice, almost took it for granted. It’s been there ever since, and last night it all blew up in my face. Again. Suddenly I was four years old again, and totally immobilized by abject terror. I took my Ativan, but it didn’t seem to be working. It was still there, spreading slowly through my mind, causing me to shake with such force that my muscles were aching with the strain of it.
Then I remembered the words, the only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain, so I dug my fingernails deep into my skin. I hoped that I could focus on the pain, that I could somehow start to breathe again, that I would survive. And I can’t help but think that it’s not fair… I shouldn’t have to live like this. Ambushed by fear I can’t see or name. The kind of thing that creeps in at 4 am when sleep would be such sweet relief, but closing my eyes just isn’t an option.
This is the aftermath of child abuse that nobody can truly understand unless they have been there themselves. How can you pick up the pieces of an ordinary life you never really knew? How do you move on? It’s been so many years. I wish I could say, “I am OK,” but I can’t. It is a long, difficult road to being OK.
I hate being this person. I hate living on this roller coaster, with no warning when the track is going to plunge into darkness. I hate not being able to breathe, not being able to see clearly, not being able to believe that things will ever get better. I hate that I sound like this. I hate that I am ashamed to write these words. I hate that I’m afraid someone will find out.
