December 26th, 2010

Some Christmas images from the Indiana household:

Keith, who really, really enjoys gingerbread.

And is very helpful putting up lights.

Us, at his Mom's house on Christmas eve.

Keith holding our newest niece. Doesn't he look so natural like that?



I, on the other hand, look like I'm going to sneeze. But I loved holding her. She fell asleep and lay like that for an hour or so. Every once in a while she would wake up and give me a milky, toothless smile. Three more months, and we can start the adoption process for one of our own.

In the morning, we woke up to a white blanket of snow and blueberry pancakes. We took the girls out to the deserted dog park and let them frolic in the snow. Then we made what is beginning to be our tradition: the homemade Christmas day pizza with pepperoni and pineapple. It was a very good day.

Hope everyone had a Christmas full of peace and joy.

December 17th

I want to write more about therapy, now that I've gotten so bold and detailed in my blogging about it.

It struck me recently that repressing memories is an incredible act of faith in oneself. What I did as a child was to say, "I literally do not know how to think about this. If I did, it would destroy me. But I know one day I'll be strong enough to sort this through, so I'm tucking it away until that day."

I can't go back and save myself from the abuse, but I truly can go back and save myself from my wrong thinking about it. It is a concrete act of grace. It is claiming some power for myself over the abuse. In doing so, I validate my own faith in myself. I am as strong, resourceful and clear thinking as I desperately needed myself to be.

I think there are some things we do, that no one else sees, that have the power to shake the very gates of hell. Those choices confound and terrify the dark, because they can't understand it. They can't understand grace, or meekness, or redemption. When they come in contact with this, it reminds then that they are on the losing side of reality, that they are only temporary and will shortly be undone.

It doesn't have to be done with thundering or huge internal wrestling, or shouting. It can be a silent thing, as simple as accepting grace for oneself, and then the shackles just slip off as if they never were at all.

I keep thinking of the greatest act of this kind, the one that made all the others possible.

"Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His stripes we are healed."
"He was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He opened not his mouth; like a lamb led to slaughter, and like a sheep that is before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth."
-Isaiah 53:4,5 and 7

Yet in that silence, He saved the whole human race. In laying down His life, He claimed power over death and degradation and shame.

O Holy Night!
The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour's birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining.
Till He appeared and the Soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees!

Written December 9th & 16th

-I wrote this the day after therapy last week and worked on it a couple times that week, but wasn't able to finish it until now. Forewarned is forearmed; this is not a Christmasy post.-

I have been crying on and off for the last twenty four hours, since my last therapy session. It was a rough one.

It has recently surprised me to realize that I have not actually grieved for the little girl that I was. It must have felt too overwhelming. The work of putting oneself back together again after the kind of abuse I suffered is a very long work, with many stages. I have finally reached this one.

My therapist had me do dominate hand writing. She had me write with my "wise self" in the right hand and then allow the inner voice of my child self to write with the left hand. I had to do it this way because I couldn't connect with my inner child any other way. It was too frightening, I didn't want to see what she had seen or know what she had had to know.

After I wrote with my right hand that it was all over now, that it was finished and I would never have to suffer that again, I switched the pencil to my left hand. Immediately I was sobbing, like a switch had been thrown. I was sobbing so hard I could barely write. I felt this great cry come up from inside me, this great grief and horror and fear and bewilderment.

In my shaky left hand I scratched out the words "I don't feel safe." Seeing those words in hand writing so like my childish handwriting, the same as those scrawled in a moldy "Precious Memories" diary, nearly overcame me. I felt so much grief for the little girl I had been. She didn't deserve what happened to her. She got caught up in a vile force beyond her power to escape.

I didn't know how to comfort myself. I can't go back in time and save myself, an innocent, voiceless hostage to fate. I can't make it so it didn't happen. I watched the new version of "The Secret Garden" last night and in it, Sarah Crew dreams that she is a very little girl, lost in the garden. She starts to cry, but nobody comes for her. She is alone in the choking weeds.

But it was no dream for me.

Also, I have this growing realization of some thought patterns originating from the abuse. My therapist mentioned that little children tend to believe it was their own fault that these things happen to them. I looked at her in horror, but it didn't connect with me emotionally. I've had these walls up internally, maybe part of the structure that allowed me to repress the memories.

But over the past few days, the emotion is seeping through. I know that as a child I did believe it was my fault. Not only that, but if only I changed something about myself, if only I was a better little girl, a good girl, a very quiet girl, if I dressed a different way, acted a different way, it wouldn't happen to me any more.

Doesn't that just break your heart? Here I am, just little girl, ravaged, and I felt guilty, like people were going to blame me. I carried not just the burden of the abuse, but the burden of guilt for it. That is horrific. That is unthinkable. It makes me so angry.

And just the realization that it happened to me over and over again. How does a person survive that? How does the same little girl survive, year after year, time after time? It's unthinkable.

December 16th

I dug out my old stuffed unicorn from the storage box in the cellar, and I won't lie, I walked around the house with it for a little while in my arms. It was so comforting. And by the way, I am not crazy. What I was doing is a very well respected and common therapy tool.

In fact, I brought my stuffed animal with me to therapy this week (yesterday) and my therapist was delighted to see her.

"Oh, you found a way to nurture your inner child," she cried, clapping her hands together.

I had, and I had found other ways as well. I found it helped a lot to remind myself that my great uncle had died. He was dead. This is very comforting because the part of me that still thinks like a wounded little girl believed him to be an unstoppable force. If he's dead, then there's really no question about whether or not the abuse might happen again; it really won't. Because he died.

Also, I've been telling myself over and over again that the abuse was not personal. It had nothing to do with me, my personality, my looks or my behavior. Instead, I now describe my abuser as a shark, with a pea sized brain, constantly on the move and eating anything it comes in the way of, trash, inner tubes, fish, people. It doesn't care what it eats, because all it has is appetite and forward movement. I just had the terrible fate of landing in his life path.

This is important because my abuser was seductive and made it appear to be about me. The lies he used were that he loved me, I was a special person to him, etc. But in fact he was heartless, primordial. He was like was one of those fish that live deep down in the dark of the ocean, where humans could not survive, shadowed in the black, but with a little dangling lure of false light above his massive jaw.

Innocent fish will be drawn to the light and then be snapped up, disappear in a cloud of debris. The innocent fish cannot help but be drawn to the false light, they can't tell the difference. Just like little children are drawn by promises of false love or attention. They can't tell the difference. Little children are incredibly vulnerable by nature. They can't process complex issues. They have very poor discrimination. They can't help it, it's the way are made.

Over this past week I remembered many things. I remembered what it felt like to be abused, I remembered it vividly. My mind was literally divided. I felt numb. I was blanking out, actively blanking out what was he was doing while focusing completely on what he was saying and there was no option available but to endure. As an adult, I have the options fight, flight or endure. As a child, the first two options were non existent. I had one option available.

Remembering this really helped me understand the horror and the helplessness I felt as a child. Also during the week I had flashbacks of other abuse. These weren't crystal clear. In fact, I will probably never know exactly what happened to me, when it happened, or how old I was when it happened. I'll never have a time line. This bothers me, though my therapist tells me this is common and will not prevent me from healing.

Instead, frequently I feel again what it felt like to be violated. It's like phantom pain after a leg's been amputated. You know the leg is not there, but you still feel the pain. It's very disturbing. I would rather see than feel. It's like this quote from "The Sexual Healing Journey"-

"Your body may feel like a battleground over which you fight ghosts who have great power, reclaiming territory which is your birthright." -Miriam Smolover, therapist

Each time I would feel these things, I would tell myself, "I am so sorry that happened. That was terribly wrong, but it wasn't your fault and it's finished now. At some point that stopped. I don't know how, because I don't remember, but clearly it did because I'm here, right here in my real life and I'm safe now."

Thankfully, those sensations are fading away now. I'll never have to feel that again. The abuser died, his body rots away. I get to go on living, free of him.

December 6th

As I write, big pieces of fluffy snow are whirling past the window. It's been snowing on and off all this past weekend, on Saturday morning I pulled back the curtains to reveal the first snowy landscape of the year.

I was immediately inspired to lug up the boxes marked "Christmas" from the basement and to bake like there was no tomorrow. I had the added incentive of knowing Keith's brother would be spending the night, so there would be an extra mouth to feed.

The white Christmas tree went up in its spot, the fall wreath was exchanged for the Christmas one, dirty sheets got thrown into the washer and then Keith's brother arrived. The boys decided they wanted to go out for a cheeseburger and a pitcher of beer so I happy waved them off.

Ah, the pleasure of having the house to myself. I put on Accuradio's Religious Christmas Classics and turned on the oven. It was an absolutely delicious afternoon. I started with kaiser rolls and while that dough was rising on the warm oven top, I started in on a new cookie recipe, Amish ginger cookies.

These cookies are now in my top three cookies of all time category. These might even be the pen ultimate cookie. They are rich with butter, glisten with granulated sugar, dense, moist and warm with spice. The recipe calls for a stick and a half of butter, a quarter cup of molasses, and a teaspoon each of ground clove, ginger and cinnamon. The smell as they baked was heavenly.

I under baked the first batch, since I do tend to err on the side of the underdone cookie. But the next batch, when allowed an extra minute or two, got all deliciously cracked on top, looking "rustic" -a word one hears a lot on the Food channel.

After I attended to my mise en place (a French phrase that loosely translated means "clean up your cooking crap already") I then moved on to chocolate chip banana muffins. Only these aren't muffins. That name is just a disguise to hide the fact that they're as decadent as a chocolate cake.

It calls for a cup of melted butter, cooled. I have made this recipe several times already, but had never completely melted the butter, just softened it. This time, however, I tried it. The difference in the texture of the cake was amazing. It was almost as soft as Angel food cake. The butter and sugar in the recipe cause the top of the muffins to caramelize the most beautiful, blushing gold and the chunks of chocolate throughout set off the delicate banana flavor.

By this time, the kaiser rolls were ready to be punched down, a most satisfying step in the baking process. One actually punches the dough and poof! All air gushes out and the dough immediately deflates to half its size.

After being punched down, the dough got divided into eight pieces, rolled into balls and placed on greased baking sheets to rise again. After half an hour, I brushed them with an egg white wash and put them in a four hundred degree oven.

By now, the kitchen smelled like a bakery shop at four in the morning, as trays of crusty bread are slid out on wide, wooden paddles and flaky confectioneries are arranged behind the glass display. Also, as I baked, I could hear the strains of "Oh come, oh come Emanuel," as well as The Elizabethan Singers singing "The First Noel" and Bing Crosby crooning, "Silent Night."

It was a really marvelous afternoon and more then once I felt my heart well up with some emotion I couldn't identify. It was some potent mixture of both grief and joy. The grief welled up especially when the songs talked of little children or the little child in the manager. I wasn't sure, was I grieving for the children I haven't had, the hurts I lived through as a small child, or for the innocent baby Jesus, born for sacrifice to the human race.

Then, just as I was on the verge of weeping, on would come a beautiful jazzy, flamenco version of "Silent Night" played on a classical guitar and I would be dancing around the warm kitchen in my bare feet, eating another ginger cookie.

Actually, after I ate five ginger cookies and a kaiser roll for dinner last night, I realized for the sake of my jeans, I really had to get them out of the house. I sent Keith to work this morning with two bulging plastic baggies of them to be given away.

Wow. The snow is really coming down now. Maybe I'll put sturdy boots on and take the girls out into the white.

December 3rd

December. I love the idea of December, but generally the reality is something different. This weekend my mother in law is coming down. We will decorate the house for Christmas and make cookies, I'm thinking I want to try those little white round cookies that melt in the mouth. I'm looking forward to seeing the glint and glitter of white Christmas lights against the dark.

My brother in law is also coming down to spend the guy time with Keith, drink a few beers, play some gruesome online video games, that sort of thing.

It was my birthday a few days ago. When I came down at seven thirty, I saw a dozen pink roses on the table and a card. My husband managed to keep the flowers a secret all the night before and in the morning when he woke me up with thirty three kisses. He was immensely proud of himself for being able to keep the secret, since usually he just can't bear to keep it in.

That night he drove us all the way down into Louisville, in five o'clock traffic, in the rain, to a restaurant that does excellent salmon and that does not have beer on tap. A friend had recommended the Bonefish Grill when Keith had been asking around. It was delicious. I had the salmon with lemon butter sauce-rich, rich, rich.

Keith ordered the steak and was surprised that it was so small; never mind that it was filet Mignon. He drenched it in A1 sauce and downed it with Bud Light. I love that man.

My therapy is going well. My therapist is an older woman with a great deal of experience and quiet competence. She has already given me some insights into myself that allowed me to continue some healing that had been held up for years. But it seems like no sooner do I achieve some measure of peace than another thing comes up, something that had been waiting for it's turn to be resolved.

I begin to wonder how much damage is rattling around in me. It's discouraging. No wonder some people don't even start therapy. I was terrified to, I was afraid it would ruin my life. It didn't, it made my life more worth living, but it certainly does drag on so.

I delight my therapist though. Yesterday she could not restrain herself from exclaiming that she loved working with me, because I listen to what she says, take it in and than actually do it. I am not like a Woody Allen character, sitting there, droning on, unfocused, miserable.

This next thing that is coming up in therapy; it won't be easy to work on. It's too close to the initial trauma and I don't like going back there. I'm always afraid of triggering new memories or even having to re experience the ones I've already seen. Maybe this will be the last of the very intense stuff. Maybe after I've resolved this I won't have anything more inside of myself to be afraid of.