Pain...

Pain, pain, please go away and don't come back another day.  

I seriously desire for the knife in my back to go away.  And yet, I wonder at times if that pain in my back is the real reason that he finally left me.  And yet I know that the pain and brokenness that I suffer is not the reason that he finally left.  In the end it was my unwillingness to compromise my sexuality within my relationship with God.  Now for those of you who don't do well with fifty dollar words, I objected to bringing another person into our relationship.  In this world of friends with benefits... my desire to only be with my husband in our bedroom must seem like a blast from the past.

You see...  I view marriage as a sacred bond between partners.  And while I have made my share of mistakes, I eventually reached a point in my life and marriage where the pushing for more was something that I just couldn't give into.  As I sit here in physical pain...  I am recalling the emotional pain that I have survived within my marriage.

To give you a brief idea...  I have no idea what sex really is.  I do know what it is like to spend hours focusing on my husbands needs.  I know what it is like to have reached a point where the physical pain in your jaw makes you want to cry, but you have yet to fulfill your husbands needs.  I know what it is like to listen to your husband spew the equivalent of acid in order to help himself fulfill his needs.  I could go into graphic details, but we all are flooded with way too much details in our day to day life.  And honestly the details are not important. 

It began with a single step out of my comfort zone.  Then another, and another.  Each time I let him convince me that the connection between us needed this next step.  And without any boundaries and limits that were talked about, it slowly became anything he wanted to do... I did.  I will admit that the advice my own mother gave me the night before my wedding...  only helped to set the stage for his desires.  Yet, as I desired to please him more and more...  I lost my voice.  

And with my silence...  I became sick.  In no way am I saying that their is a correlation between the two.  Yet, my silence had me living in pain and more pain until I reached a point that I couldn't walk... and while I have been rebuilt, sometimes the pain overtakes me and I can't sleep...

All I desire is sleep...  To be able to close my eyes and lay down...  For the pain to go away...

Tick Tock...

A year ago we were facing homelessness...  I didn't have a clue where we would live.  My husband had filed for divorce.  I couldn't bear to live in the home we had purchased together, let alone afford to live in it.  And to add the icing to the challenge, my mother had died and I we could no longer continue to live with her in her house.  

I was numb.  I knew that we needed to find a place to live, and yet couldn't begin to start the process to even begin to find a place to live.  And at the same time I was facing the fact that my divorce process had just started moving forward.

Somehow, I began to find the ability to find a place to live.  And then attempt to move out of my mother's house, trying to sort thru what we needed verses what we just had to let go.  In that process we had to let a lot of things go.  We had already let go of the house.  I signed it over to my husband in order to be able to have a place for us to live.  And in that process... oh so much was left behind.

And yet, that is not the reason of this post.  This post is about the beginning to move forward.  I have reached a point where in just over a month I will be divorced.  And we have come a long way from facing homelessness to actually looking for a house.  

All my life I have wanted a place to call home.  Now, years after praying to God to give me a home... that possibility is within my grasp.  I am in shock!

For once in my life I am beginning to feel that out of the ashes, God just might give me something that I have desired for so long...  a place to call home forever!

Fear...

Fear can take over my life rather quickly.  And this past week it has.  You see, I met with my pastor and we talked.  Now to most people that would be a good thing.  To me it is a double edged sword.  One that I needed, but was not ready to face.  Hence the fear.

You see, I understand love when it comes to me loving others.  But to hear the words God loves, well that is enough to send me packing and looking for where I can run away to.  I can handle love, when I am helping others.  I can handle love when I am on my knees.  Hell, I can even handle love when my own life is in danger.  But in all of these cases I am loving someone else.  

I loved my mother, but struggle to even understand why at the very end of her life she told me that she loved me.  I can remember the fear that I had for so much of my life trying to make up for a mistake that I am not sure even now how I could fix.  How do you fix the fact that your own mother regretted that you were born?  I did my best to be the perfect daughter for her.  And yet I always lived in fear that what I did was never going to be enough.  I couldn't maintain a household the way she wanted.  I couldn't clean or do any of my jobs to the level that she desired.  I never could be smart enough or have good enough grades.  And at one point I can remember that she had me tested in school to join a fast track.  So, I took the test to quantify my intelligence.  As my luck would have it when the results came back I had scored one point below the score required to move into the gifted classes.  Yet, the score showed that I was extremely intelligent.  Here I had tested at the level of a genius, and yet was stupid and a failure all because of one point.  Down the road I would take the test again in high school, but I never heard what those results were.  I just was not what my mother had wanted.  

In school, I struggled through.  I only was able to maintain a B average.  And at times I was taking classes below my own level.  Math was like a foreign language to me.  And while I could trudge through it, I never found it to be easy.  I dabbled in languages trying Spanish, French, German, and even Latin.  And in English, I avoided a great deal of the books that we were required to read.  And yet I was always reading.  But then who really wanted to read Lord of the Flies?  My brain could absorb random facts, but even in History and Science the simple memorizing of facts left me feeling pulled under.  The funny was that in 10th grade biology I did a report on mitochondrial DNA, which my own teacher said did not exist.  And reading Shakespeare was easier than understanding Moby Dick.  All this time in my life...  I feared that I wasn't doing enough.  I couldn't keep my room perfect.  I couldn't be first at all that I did.  And I barely had any friends.  And the friends I had were just the kind that a mother wouldn't want.  They introduced me to smoking, and some eventually to drinking.  I feared getting caught, but the calm that smoking gave me was worth the fear.  

I moved on with my fears in life to add not having picked the correct major in college...  not having good enough grades...  not working enough hours to help support my family...  The list that I feel is branded into my very skin grew longer and longer.  Each day adding more and more failures, which in our world were sins.  And the daily repentance that I needed to do before God became a weight that I still feel is dragging me under.

Yet, within all of those fears... one fear existed that dwarfed the rest.  The fear of secrets being revealed.  You see, we didn't talk about things unless they were being used to help someone else.  So, when my mother learned what had happened to me as a child... we could talk about it, if we were going to press charges to help my aunt and cousins out.  The minute that I said no...  we never spoke of that past again.  Though we often spoke of my burden to save my cousins from their own choices as they grew up.  I was required to reach out and help them... to save them.  And that added to another of my failures. 

But the fear of the darkness escaping and secrets being known...  that is enough to still want to send me packing and find a place on this earth where I can hide even from God.  Yet, God never leaves us or forsakes us.  So, where can I hide?  And where was He in all that darkness?  I wish I had answers for those questions... but I don't right now.  What I do know is that in talking to my pastor the darkness escapes.  With that the emotions come... and the fear inside of me grows.  Those nights when I prayed to God to disappear and still was found on the bed are shared with this human being.  And I am breaking the biggest rule in our family...  Nothing is spoken of outside of the family.  But then nothing is spoken of within the family.  These have been moments of darkness that I have been carrying by myself for years.  I learned how to package them neatly in nice little boxes with all the feelings and memories... and built inside of me a vault to hold all of these boxes.  

In these past few years... those boxes have been shaken up inside the vault.  And the darkness began to find a way to reveal itself.  My desire for death became visible.  And the panic that I live with began to show itself even in church.  And in my fear of death, I began to talk.  And that would be why I met with my pastor this past week.  And while I could tell you all the details which would take a whole additional post...  I will leave you with this.  He and I talked until we reached a point where He said that God always provides a way to escape the action.  And that has brought me a new level of fear.  If I could have escaped, what did I do wrong that I didn't.  What moment did I miss that would have allowed me to escape the darkness?  This has been added to my already ongoing conversation inside of me of what did I do to deserve the punishment that I was given.  And when the two conversations are going full force...  I find that fear is my constant companion.  It is not something that I want.  And maybe in the near future I will be able to let fear leave my side.  But for right now... fear is on the double edged sword that I face in talking to my pastor.  The good of talking is that for a short period of time my mind is quiet... but the bad is fear.

Till Death Do Us Part... NOT!!!

I can remember the magic of my wedding.  I can remember the fact that we took vows, till death do us part.  And when I walked out the door of the church into the rain storm that had come, thinking of the blessing that God was giving to our union, I would have never thought that death might be possible before old age.

You see, I took the vows before God very seriously.  I had my priorities in order.  We were married, we would own a house, and then we would have children.  Yet, despite all of my order in my life, I found that things were not in order.  

Within weeks of our wedding, my husband began to have panic attacks.  These panic attacks drove us into a level of isolation.  And yet, I was the perfect wife...  I never once complained.  I took over all the things we use to do together.  It was me working, and then heading to the store to shop for groceries.  In time the isolation grew and I found that our friends were only occasionally calling and I couldn't remember the last time I saw them.  

We made the choice after some time to live with my parents.  My father was sick, and my mother needed the help with him.  While we had moved much closer to our friends, we still rarely saw them.  And with the demands of my mother, I found that I lost even more friends.  I am still not quite sure how, but in a short period of time I had no friends of my own...  every friend that was left was my husband's.  

We did start looking for our house and property with my parents.  The plan and order was that we would live in the house on the property and they would live with us until they built a house of their own.  In keeping with the plan, we found the house and property, but we signed the deed just shy of two months after my father died.  And my mother didn't want to follow with us.  So, we now owned the house and found a greater level of isolation.  We didn't know a soul where we had moved.

In this new level of isolation, I began to be challenged as a wife.  

First it was the fact that he desired his friend to come live with us.  So, in my desire to please my husband I gave in despite the complaints from my own mother and brother.  Then it was the fact that I became sick and spent three months in the hospital.  While I was in the hospital, my husband stayed in a hotel.  And spent more time away from me than with me.  And yet, in the end we both came home.

Once we came home things began to change.  I found that his needs began to change.  He desired to bring others into our marriage.  And to me the four walls of the room we called home were something that I considered holy.  A space that was just for the two of us and God.  And yet, here I was as a wife trying to fathom bringing another soul into our bedroom.  Still every night that I gave into his needs, I listened to him dream about who we might bring thru that door into the space God had created for us.

Years went by with my living with his dreams.  And each time I found it harder and harder to focus on his needs.  This continued until one evening when I refused to meet his needs.  While my reasons for refusing are not a topic for this post... it did create an argument.  And that evening I was left black and blue, but I also had to face down my husband with a gun in his hand.  While he loaded it and chambered a bullet, I was looking down the barrel.  He meant to kill me.  I am still not sure why, but at the last minute the bullet did not pass thru my head.  Instead it went thru the wall of our bedroom.  This was followed by listening to my husband say that he should just kill me, followed by his desire to kill himself.

In the next few hours, I entered into a night mare of police, attorneys, and working to get my husband the help that he needed.  My husband was committed to a psychiatric hospital for five days.  When I finally went to visit him to discuss his return to our home, I was meet by him pounding his cane on the table.  Demanding of me to go to the court and make the charges he was facing go away.  If it had not been for a suggestion of the staff, he would have come home then.  So, I then entered a new arena of court in getting an order of protection that made my husband homeless so that he could get the help that he needed.  

Because of my faith, I worked with my husband to lessen the demands of the charges.  Community service, counseling, marital counseling, and the other demands of being on probation.  In time I started to see the man I married again.  And just as we were starting marital counseling, the push on his part to move home began.  And by Thanksgiving I had given in, but in the next few weeks his moving in for good began to sit with me wrong.  Lots of things were said that could probably become their own blog posts... but I spent the time we were together and when he had needs... running to the bathroom after trying my best not to vomit.  I wish that I could say that I was pregnant, but I wasn't.  I was so disgusted with the words that had come into my mind.

Christmas came and went... and then he once again threatened to take my life again...  Finally two days before the new year I walked out the door.  And then began to rustle with the fact that I would not be married until my natural death...  An idea that became a fact on Valentine's Day when I was sued for divorce.  Which began my new struggle with what divorce meant for me and my faith.  Divorce was a word that we were never to use...  and yet here I was staring at the paperwork.

That day was just over three years ago...  In that time I have learned that my husband abandoned and broke the covenant that we had we with God long before that day when I was served with papers to end our marriage.  I struggle with what life is going to look like as the reality of the divorce becoming final is fast approaching.  I never expected to face life as a single mother.  In the midst of all this change I am learning more about my faith than I thought I could learn.  I am beginning to understand God's love, even if I can't understand what love is right now.  I am finding that abuse is a reason to be allowed out of the covenant.  I just am not sure how to tell you all what I am learning... but maybe that will come in time...

The one thing that I can tell you is that I am alive... and I am not living with my husband.  He is currently sitting in jail for the harm that he brought to my life.  And that despite all this and my commitment to him till death...  I do NOT have to stay married until he takes my life from me...  That is a choice that only my God can make.

Worth?

What are we worth?  And what does worth even mean?  I am struggling with this all inside of my mind... so what do I do... Look up the definition of worth...

The quality that renders something desirable, useful, or valuable (From the thefreedictionary.com)

So what is the quality that renders me desirable?  

This has been an ongoing question in my mind lately.  And honestly my answer is the only thing that renders me desirable is my faith.  Without my faith, I am not sure of what I would be.  I can see so much wrong that I have been a part of in my life...  I am constantly reminded of each and every one of these choices that created pain in my life.  And many times, I have had no say in those choices.  Most people think that it is a person who chooses to bring harm and sin into their life, and yet in so many places and instances it is an outside force that bring them harm...

In my life that first harm came to me in the dark of night...  Asleep in my bed, awoken by someone who should have cherished me as a child, made the choice to teach me about a world of adults.  It was at the age of 5, when I thought that I could do anything that I learned harm.  Like so many others... I thought it made me special... chosen.  Not that I could understand that what was happening was wrong.  To me, those  moments on fleeting nights I believed gave me worth.  They made me feel like a princess, and yet I was not allowed to share what exactly gave me my worth.  Though that idea began to crumble when I was a freshman in high school...  That was when I learned that I was not alone in being special.  And yet many years later, I faced the fact that it is believed that I only got what I was asking for.  Yet, how did I ask for this introduction at the age of 5?

When I found out that I wasn't alone in being chosen to be added to a marriage... I lost my sense of worth.  And yet I knew that I was suppose to protect myself for marriage...  but I had already been married... and discarded.  What worth would I have to anyone in the future?  

As of late... many years later... facing a failing marriage again... these questions are being raised.  And yet, I can begin to understand that at age 5 I didn't make a choice for harm.  That choice was made by others around me.  And yet I prayed to God to make me invisible...  to keep me safe from that harm.  And each time, though I felt special, I also felt dirty and used.  

I may not have explained my worth to you as of yet...  but I hope I have given you an example of something that no one could ask for as a child...

One year...

A year ago at this point in time, I was facing the loss of one of the most important people in my life.  

My own mother...

And to most of us that would create a feeling of sadness and loss.  

Yet, her loss in my life also created for me a new sense of freedom.

Honestly to this day I love my mother.  I have striven to always honor and obey her.  Sadly my failures in being human and prone to making mistakes did not always create the best relationship with my own mother.  She was the type of person who liked everything in a very neat orderly manner...  and in my world it was just a little too neat and orderly.  I could never understand how moving the garbage can a millimeter was such a matter of life and death.  Yet, in my mother's world it was just that.  And since it was such a big deal to her, it also became a big deal in my life of mistakes that I was lectured about... punished over... and eventually started to just understand that I would never be perfect enough to be the daughter that my mother needed, and at times I would wonder if she was even happy with the very fact that I was born.

This desire to be perfect for my mother was not an idea that came to my mind in an instant, but one that would be created over years.  And it is only now that I have come to understand that it was not just an issue of how my mother communicated to me, but also an issue of how I understood what she was trying to communicate.  I spent years lost in trying to understand how to prove to my mother that I really loved her...

It was only in the last few years before I lost my mother that I began to understand that she had spent so many years trying to communicate to me that she did love me...  I just didn't hear the message.  All I ever seemed to hear was how much I fell short of the mark that I thought was set for me.... Perfection!  

In the days right before my mother died...  she said three little words that I still hear in my mind.  Years I longed to hear these words...  To know that I was the daughter that she wanted...  To know that I had shown her that I loved her...  And in the end... her last words to me meant more to me than all the fighting and miscommunication over the years...

Her last words to me were...  I love you!  

And right now... though I struggle with her loss.  I struggle with the changes of being an orphan...  at least I know that somewhere deep inside of my mother...  

She loved me despite my lack of understanding and perfection.  And maybe for now that is enough!

Storms...

I have spent a great deal of time as of late reading about leaving...  And the one thing I wish I could leave behind is the storms of emotions.  And yet, how do you leave behind something that has become such a part of your life.  If I hadn't spent so much of my life learning how to function with simply figuring out how to bury the emotions... leaving them might be easy.

Here is a simple case in my life of not dealing...  About a month ago, I wound up in the hospital.  And while to most people going to the hospital might be a simple act of having a spouse watch the children... in my life it is not that easy.  And I honestly wish that I could say that I wound up in the hospital just because I had an infection.  That wasn't the case.  

I wound up in the hospital because of the new medication the doctor tried wasn't covered by the insurance.  And in my attempts to deal with this... I went off of the medication.  Well, without the medication the hold I have on living life just began to slip away.  And in, what I can only call a God moment, I wound up in the driveway of my pastor and melted down.  Did I meltdown because I lacked faith... No.  But I did meltdown.

Thankfully in my life my pastor is one of the few people I completely trust.  And he understood what was happening to me, when I couldn't even open my mouth and talk to him.  When I lacked the words, he was granted the wisdom to know what needed to be done.  Which of course included needing to find someone to take care of my daughter... while I went to the hospital.

Once I was in the hospital... and the choice was made to keep me.  I began to be able to talk.  It is not easy to know that you are going to be sent to a locked ward, with the understanding that nothing is there that you can harm yourself with.  That once again the mental struggles that you face have demanded that you be in a space where you have the simple choice of life or death removed from your control.  And yet, once that choice is removed... it makes it easier to start to talk and figure out what to do next.

In my case that was simply to be put on a new medication.  One that the hospital fought to get covered by my insurance.  And my church helped me cover the cost for the week that it took to get it covered.  And yet that new medication has brought me to a new awakening.  It was like I was sleeping for so many years...  And it brought me a time of encouragement from the staff at the hospital.  In the past I would have given into the insane need to cut and attempt to stop the pain in my life in so many ways... this time...  I melted down and was able to get help before I walked too far along the path into the need to cut.

Well... Here is the reason for all this history.  The day I got out of the hospital I was given a lecture by a friend.  This friend meant well, but didn't use the best words for how I look at the world.  And that day... I just bite my tongue and didn't say a word to anyone...

Fast forward to this past week... And all the thing that my friend said turned into another meltdown.  The storm of emotions that I refused to face that day when she spoke... came flooding back to me like a class 5 tornado.  And in my attempt to deal with them... I left the trail of destruction like the tornado inside of me. Her disappointment in me and her insistence that our pastor was too nice to say things... now had me convinced that he believed that I was an unfit mother.  To add to the destruction, it also included his wife and the fact that they were telling people things about me behind my back.  And that list could go on, but I think you get the point.  

So, the fall out of this tornado should have been in my mind being thrown out of church... never allowed to talk to my pastor again... and a whole list of other punishments that my mind was quickly coming up with.  And when I found silence... That list grew.  And the tornado inside of me grew.  

Once I finally had allowed the tornado of emotions inside of me to do the destruction and they had begun to calm down...  A simple phone call from my pastor showed me that I needed to seek the truth... And the truth was that if he was thinking anything like I thought he was... He would have talked to me.  And the other lesson that I learned was to explain when asked that the emotions from a month ago had caught up to me.  And while to the rest of the world it was far from urgent... to me it was the most urgent thing in my world.

But as far as leaving behind the storms of emotions... I don't think that is possible.  I am beginning to understand that despite the cost to me currently that I need to walk thru these emotions...  I need to face them and feel them.  And at the same time I need to practice how to simply be in the presence of God.  To know that in time I will be able to sit in front of a candle and simply focus on God... knowing that the emotions exist, but that I can be calm and present with God.  A simple idea, but a challenge that I have to keep sitting down and working towards.  Because after so many years of living life numb... I can feel.  And if the price of feeling and being able to focus on God at some point is walking thru these storms...  The sign me up!  Anything has got to be better than hating myself and loving God... and always wanting to love others better than I love myself.