Well, dear readers, I must confess, despite the company of Jenkins the sewing machine, I am just not doing well.
I should be. It's been sunny for four days now, sunny and warm and the grass is showing through, everything smells damp, earthy and when I take the dogs out in the morning, I can hear the liquid, trilling notes of hidden birds.
Keith is settling into his new job and has about finished with being "the new guy" and is enjoying the responsibilities of his position. He recently sat on a mock promotion board.
"I failed every one of 'em," he confessed to me, yesterday. "Do you think that's bad?"
"No," I said stoutly, actually having no idea but backing up my husband anyway.
"I knew more than that as a Private! It's basic Army stuff; they should know it."
I am making the bed, taking long walks, keeping up with the housework, making dinner schedules and shopping lists and bonding with Jenkins.
But I am not getting better. I feel worn down, hollowed out. I feel rusty on the inside. I hated to admit it, but there comes a time when pretense is impossible. Something has overwhelmed my internal system and must be processed through.
At first I thought it must be a new memory of abuse, pushing its fetid way through the layers of my defenses, unsettling everything in its path and needing to be shed. But I don't think so. It could be, I live always with the possibility of that happening.
But I don't think so. I think my failure to get pregnant right away is bring up stuff, so much stuff that I'm clogged.
Should I publicly process through this on my blog? I will, at least in part. But I must warn you, gentle readers all, that this will not be pretty and not well written and possibly not even interesting.
And as I know must of my readers are friends and family, I want to assure you now that I am fine. I have been through worse in the course of trauma therapy. I'm incredibly strong, capable, insightful and resourceful.
Firstly, there is the line of thinking that God is punishing me for my earlier sins. I have been a bad girl, headstrong, disobedient and willful. I have gone my own way and now He is withholding children. He is holding them out at arm's length, tantalizing; the one thing that I cannot say, "Screw you" and take anyway. I can't control getting pregnant. I am being humbled.
But this predisposes the character of God being vengeful, remembering sins and waiting in the wings to punish when the time is ripe for punishment. I did grow up with this God, the God of indelible memory.
This is not the God I have learned to know, however. The God that followed me down every single path, every single emotional meat grinder that I threw myself into, is of an entirely different make up. He is tenacious as well, infinitely creative and His mercies are new every morning, no matter how grimy the night. There are no dead ends with Him, nothing can thwart the creative power of His redemption.
No, if there is punishment being dealt out, it is most certainly of self origin. Yes, that settles down nicely unto the inner bull's eye. I am lacerating myself. No doubt I believe I should be punished.
I believe I will fail. I believe I will be a failure as a mother. I'm too selfish as a mother, I'm too immature, self absorbed, shattered on the inside, I don't have enough self control, I'm not warm enough, connected enough. I'll be distant, I'll be angry, I'll be absent.
God knows this; He knows it and is withholding a child for the child's own safety. I don't deserve to have a child, I'll never grow up, people like me don't ever become whole again, we can't keep children safe. Because what if what happened to me happens to my own child?
And the shame that rises up from this internal dialogue is so thick that I can't see through it and that is what is driving me underwater. I was hoping, unconsciously, that if I got pregnant quickly I could push off this internal crisis until later, or avoid it entirely. And that would have been impossible; I would simply have been miserable pregnant, inside and out and everything would have been worse.
It's time's like these when I hate, with a great and tearing rage, what happened to me. I wish to shred everything- my mother, my father, my church, my entire family, the whole system that failed, that let me fall down into the filth, the hadalpelagec zone of hell, the very bottom of human experience where the darkness is complete and the pressure crushes all the life out, where the dead things fall and make a silt so deep things disappear into it. (Who's been watching shows on the Science channel about the ocean? Me.)
Why can't I be perfect, whole? Blithely going through my life with solid foundation, surrounded and upheld by all kinds of internal and external supports, things I would take for granted because I couldn't imagine a life without them.
Instead of this twisted fear and shame, I'd be happy! Glowingly pregnant! A whole circle of chirping friends to give me a pink and blue baby shower with chocolate poopy diapers and crepe paper. I would be blissfully unaware of the depths, the horror and also the strength, the desecration and the profoundly good.
I would never need to know how strong I could be. I would never need to know how to consciously choose life over crippling bitterness. There would be no shards inside, razor sharp pieces of memory left behind to trouble each phase of life. To resist, constantly, the choice to live a life of the victim, caught in self pity like a fly in honey, static and stuffed with a heavy, cloying sorrow.
Well, here's the thing; life is a battle, whether we live it out or not. And who cares about how other people get to live their life, I have mine. And I get to choose to live it with honor, I get to choose the bright and shining steel strength. I can choose, looking down into the abyss, to stare fascinated down into it or to look up and acknowledge the sky. It's that simple.
And right now, I am having a great deal of trouble thinking about not being able to get pregnant. This is how I face motherhood, this is what comes up for me. It doesn't make me a weak person, it doesn't make me some strange, twisted version of a woman. It's the off shoot of a crime that raped me of my own integrity. I can choose to live it out, and perpetuate that crime long after it was committed, or I can face it, acknowledge it, and choose something else.
I hate that I have to do it all over again, I hate that it's infecting this part of my life, my own self perceptions about being a mother. But it is, of course it is, how could it not? And having faced it will in the end, I have faith, make me a better mother, more prepared for the chaos of that transition, the emotional chaos that comes up for every mother.
But I'm going to have to tell myself this over and over again for a while.
