September 26th

Hello, blogosphere. Or I should say, hello family members. I can't identify you by your last name, but you know who you are! :)

We are back from vacation. Here are some interesting things I learned on vacation.

Number One: My family's philosophy of life can be summed up in one word: "Adapt." Keith's personal philosophy, on the other hand, can be summed up in "Conquer."

Adapt and conquer do not mix. More than that, it is nearly impossible for the conqueror to notice the strengths of adaptation; such as warmth, creativity, spontaneity, flexibility, hospitality, casualness, calm, improvisation, philosophical curiosity, etc. People who conquer life, such as my husband, are driven, masterful, bossy, clear, black and white, demanding, reliable, trustworthy and effective.

I spent most of the vacation time being acutely aware, for the first time in my life, of my conflicting roles of wife and daughter. Frequently I had to give up my daughter role so I could uphold my wife role. And once I came out swinging in my long held role of Big Sister. All this was no one's fault, just to be clear. It's just a part of growing up, a part of life.

Also, it was made abundantly clear that I cannot control the way my husband forms relationships within my family.

You might think that goes without saying, but really, all along I was assuming that my husband could not only read my mind, but had in some way absorbed every bit of my own, personal family history and would then base his actions on that knowledge.

Heh. I know it sounds crazy when I write it out like that, but don't we all hold on to some down right crazy notions when we really examine them? I certainly do.

Anyway, it turns out that Keith is his own man, a blank slate and a free moving agent who crashed and collided and connected in various and unpredictable ways, with my family members. Who knew?

In the midst of all this glorious, interpersonal chaos, there was a lot of good food. I put on even more weight. I hugged my mom as often as I wanted, which was often. I had loud, interesting, fast moving conversations with my father in the car on the way into Boston, where we saw a bicyclist casually pedalling through four lanes of on coming traffic.

Boston fed my soul. I love Boston. I love the north east. It was such a relief to be there. I would see a place, or a style or the light and I would know, in that moment, where a piece of myself came from, a part of myself brilliantly explained.

In the elevator at the Taft hospital we were already all squashed together with various people who also had parked on the very top level of the parking garage, out under the grey, soft sky. The elevator opened on the next floor to reveal an Asian woman with bags who hesitated but a moment and then, to our collective, north eastern horror, jumped into the tiny, mostly imaginary space left.

On the next floor it opened again, to reveal a thin Asian man, who regarded our predicament impersonally, and then hopped in. We were now like sardines. Our intimacy was immediate and unwanted.

"My god in heaven," snapped a woman in a heavy Boston accent, squashed in the back. "This is unbelievable. Who can stand this? Why did you get in the elevatah?"

Finally, we reached out floor and the Asians got out with us.

"That woman was rude," I remarked cheerfully.

"I know!" exclaimed the woman, putting her bags down. "I thought she was going to throw me out of the elevator."

"She should see the trains in Japan," I remarked, when the Asian man, who was walking with us, turned suddenly, his face lighting up.

"I am from Japan!" he exclaimed, managing not to point his finger at his nose and hitting the collar bone region instead.

"I thought so," I said. "when I saw you slip inside there."

"That is normal in Japan," he said, eager to explain to someone, anyone.

The rest of Boston was just as much fun. It rained, we had coffee and bagels off a small public square in the shadows of towering office buildings, somewhere in the Financial district. We walked to the harbor and stared into the menacing, opaque waters of the Atlantic, lapping at the stones and pilings. We had a beer and "Big Dig Fries" at an Irish pub, where Keith was aghast at the prices and asked for a Bud Light somewhat defensively.

Dad pointed out all the places where he had installed something, which is everywhere. In fact, if all the buildings where my dad had installed a window treatment were lit up, the whole city could be seen from the moon. We passed by the Wang theater, where I have seen "The Nut Cracker" and "Dracula."

We passed by the Boston Commons, where we stopped to look at the prices and pictures of featured properties pasted in the windows of realtor offices. There was one pent house listed at eight million dollars. But I only wanted the one and a half million water front loft, very modest, just one bedroom. Nothing too pretentious.

Anyway, now we are back in Kentucky. How blissful the calm and serenity of our home! Nothing makes one appreciate one's own life like a prolonged break from it. It is fall and even if, during the day, it reaches the mid nineties, in the mornings the air is cool and crisp. I almost need a fleece.

Ah, the fleeces of New England! How ubiquitous they are, how varied. And the L.L. Bean wind jackets and rubber mocs. In the mid west, the woman dye their hair blond and even when it isn't done, it looks done. In the north east, it's dyed blacker and the women wear flannel. Maybe that's just New Hampshire.

I want a house with a mud room, a sunny mudroom with a stiff, bristly mat at the door where people kick off their boots and a large bench with cubbies underneath and the children's name listed there. Inside is full of mismatched, wool mittens and rainbow hats with tassels. The room is paved with flag stones and off of it is the laundry with a large, farm house sink and a bathroom and long, narrow windows that look out over the wide yard to the wooded hills beyond, which are just then turning color.

I don't want to be blogging for hours, so I must try to stay on point.

Anyway, lastly, I am doing better. I am still angry and I swear a lot, but not out loud, because I think even I would find that tiresome after a while.

I realized something important recently, which is that we never fully figure anything out. Life isn't like a series of mountains we climb and then plant our flag on, victoriously.

It's more like being in a boat in a high sea, the mountain we thought we conquered is really just a wave and even now it's sinking back into the ocean and another one is coming up. It's not that fighting or learning or growing is pointless, it's just that it's never ending.

Thinking like this helps me be more merciful to myself when I realize I haven't learned something as well as I thought I had, like patience or compassion. I guess it's the general direction that we're sailing toward that matters. And that fact that we keep on keeping on.

September 13th

I'm on the road, somewhere close to Albany.

"We go through three difference states with no tolls; then we hit New York and hit three tolls in less than an hour," my brother commented dryly.

Ah, the East Coast.

At a gas station, we let the dogs out for some water and a potty break.

"That's right," I said, to passing cars, "we're from Kentucky, and we have dogs in our Chevy diesel."

I have discovered my inner bitchiness. It's been long missing and I'm still kind of adjusting to it. Sometimes I go to pray, to "assume the position," as it were, because I'm realizing that standardized form has no true meaning- but anyway, I go to my rote prayer form and then remember-"You! I'm not talking to you!"

My anger has more meaning and reality than the prayer, which is just like a routine whine. I knew it was pretty empty for years, but after years of having the proper religious form drilled into my head, I just couldn't quite let it go.

There's a valid part of me that is simply living in bitterness and anger. I'm letting that part of me be. If God's going to judge me for my anger, than He is a monster and I'm going to hell anyway. I might as well have the integrity to go down without false humility.

But I don't think that He does judge me for it. I think He prefers it over the rote prayer, because it's alive and true. Not that all I've ever done is just assume the prayer position, that was long a rag. I'm just more vocal and unafraid in my anger and demands of God. I want Him to answer me.

Here's the funny thing, if I don't conceive and end up adopting, I know without a shadow of a doubt that I will thank God with every piece of me for not letting me have biological children, because I wouldn't be able to imagine it any other way at that point. I wouldn't be able to imagine, not having the children I was given.

And yet this doesn't lessen my anger at the course of my life. I refuse to judge myself for that either. I can be pissed about life sucking. That is perfectly ok. I can be illogical if I want to.

Other than all this, life has been pretty good. I'm enjoying life. I'm enjoying being angry. It was the internal conflict, the judgement that I was putting on myself that was the main source of misery.

Having my brother here has been great. We have eaten well, very well. One night Tim made a rub from some baby back ribs, slow roasted them and then finished them on the grill with BBQ sauce. We also had the best chicken fajitas ever. Ever. And apple crumble, sausage and biscuits for breakfast, all kinds of stuff.

I also discovered that I rock at Guitar Hero. I totally schooled some of Keith's guys who came over for some Corn Hole and stayed for poker. It was pretty satisfying. They were holding up imaginary lighters as I finished up "Hotel California."

"Who are you?" asked my husband in amazement. "I'm Keith. Welcome to the Man Room."

September 8th

I had a break through yesterday, thanks to my blogging about it so openly. So I'm going to continue doing so. Before I do, I want to say just a few things.

Firstly, to those of you out there who may be feeling like you wish you knew what to say to me but don't and might be feeling guilty about reading in silence- I know exactly how you feel and I am releasing you from your guilt. Be free of that. You are fine just reading along.

Secondly, to those who do know what to say and wish to say it, thank you so much for your courage and sympathy. However, because I don't want to risk the possibility to having to process the wrong feedback on top of what I'm already having to process, I won't be checking my e-mail inbox or even facebook until I feel ready to, which could take weeks. So please don't worry if you don't hear back from me, your words are just waiting for the right time to be heard.

To those of you still in the church I grew up in, you are my dear friends and I want you to know that I don't think anything less of you because you are lead to worship and follow after God in that church. We all have our path. I also don't think that my experience of the church is in anyway the definitive experience, in fact even I received many good things from the church as well as the hurtful things. In fact, for as long as I've been blogging I have been deliberately holding back from blogging about the church for fear of alienating or offending my readers who still attend it. I'm giving myself the freedom to express what I need to now.

Lastly, those of you that are happy and fulfilled and have good things in your life, like children or pregnancies, please don't not in the slightest even feel tempted to feel guilty for being happy and for sharing that happiness.


After I blogged, I realized that whenever I thought of the future and having children, I was assuming that the sexual abuse was, by then, in some way, negated, finished. Like by the time I reached that point in my life the abuse would be all over by then, in some far distant path.

But now I'm realizing that there is no past so distant and no stretch of time so wide as to free me from the abuse. That abuse is always going to be the terms and conditions of every single experience I live through.

Like those car commercials where you see the giant writing which accompanies the shouting:

"SEVENTY PERCENT OFF!!!!!! ZERO DOWN!!!!!!"

And then a whole screen full of tiny writing goes scrolling quickly by which undermines everything.

I can, and will, continue to not define my life by the abuse. But initially, everything is. I'm always going to have to move away from the original, abusive definition of myself until the day I die.

So, in a way this is good because I don't have to feel like a failure for having to wrestle with it again and again and again. It's because the messages from the abuse as written right into my DNA, as it were. I'm always going to be thrown back to it.

In another way, it's sickening and makes me feel furiously angry that my abuser should have so much power over the rest of my future. It makes me want to cut his balls off with garden sheers and stuff them in his mouth. But he's dead, so that's not really an option.

That's why I'm so depressed when thinking about the future. Or partly why. There's no real escape from this. I guess I assumed that there would be. I must have been operating on the assumption that at one point in my life I would be completely free and now, I have to give that up, because it's not true. It's not real.

That's what's contributing to my idea that the future might hold nothing but further, pointless suffering. Pointless, I guess, because it's never really done with. I just have to reprocess it in a new way, in a new context. Which, I have to be honest, undermines my vision of God's redemption. It must mean that there is no true redemption possible in this life. It must be waiting in the next one.

That's it. I have no further insight into that aspect of my life right now. I just have to go on living in the uncomfortable, depressing question until I get more of the answer.

However, I did think of something else yesterday. I was thinking about the generations of my family that were caught up in sexual abuse, like a family curse. Three generations, at least, on my mother's side, two on my fathers.

My maternal grandparents had very little help or resource in their life, so could not truly help or protect their children. Consequently, my mother had little resource in her own life. In fact, her memories of abuse were repressed until she was forty years old, which was mostly too late to protect the next generation.

However, because she had the incredible courage and fortitude to pursue healing for over a decade, she blazed a path ahead that I was able to follow, in my late twenties. Because of her courage, I didn't have to wait until I was forty to begin to heal and I had a partner and support in the healing process.

So you can see that with each generation, the abuse has less and less hold. And, let's say I don't get pregnant and Keith and I pursue the fost/adopt route. It's almost a given that without a permanent home, those children would experience abuse. So by snatching them out, by God marking them as my own children, I would be literally stopping abuse from ever happening at all.

So, if that is true, then in three generations we would go from complete silence and suffering under the abuse to completely negating it. I would be reversing their fate before the terrible things even had a chance to happen. Which would be something profound, I think.

But I don't put too much weight in this, because if I do, I may set myself up for feeling guilty for having a biological child, which would be ridiculous. A person could get tied up in knots thinking through all the options, and I steadfastly refuse as much as possible. At the right time, the right children will be given into my care, whether through conception or adoption.

I don't know how much more I'll be blogging for the next two weeks, not that I've been prolific lately, of course. Today I'm going to pick up my brother Tim at the airport. I would be totally stoked about this if I wasn't so nervous about the drive to the airport. But I'll be fine. And then, after about a week, we'll all be driving up to New Hampshire together. I plan to deeply enjoy every minute, if it's at all a choice.

September 7th

No wonder I don't blog anymore, just trying to get on line was excruciating. I can't imagine the kind of dedication that made my previous blogging possible.

So on Friday I took the pregnancy test and stared at it with my blurry, way too early morning gaze and it was negative. I stood staring at it for a long time. Then I went back to bed for a few hours and then tried another one and that was negative and then that night I got my period. It was like hearing that someone was dying in the morning and then watching them die in the evening. Only this someone was not ever real.

I have this growing, deepening anger at God. I've been angry at Him before, but because I've always needed Him in my life, I moved as quickly as possible through the anger and then just let it be. Somethings you just never know the why of.

But there's no moving quickly through this anger. It's deep rooted. It's like the straw that broke the camel's back. I do not live my life thinking, "what if." I don't. Because it's pointless. So, I haven't allowed myself to waste much time thinking, what if I hadn't been sexually abused by my great uncle, my special friend, the church elder, a man who carved a pentagram into the skin of his grandson's forehead, and raped and sodomized his daughter, his sons, his grandchildren, his nieces, his nephews, local girls, the friends of his children and me every time he saw me, from before I knew how to speak until I was in grade school? Would it have been awesome if that wasn't true of me, if that didn't make up my experience?

Or here's another one, wouldn't it be great if my parents also hadn't of been sexually abused when they were children and therefore were emotionally available to me as a child? Then I would have been raised feeling loved and cherished instead of ignored and a burden.

Or, here's another one, wouldn't it have been great if I had been raised in a church where people had bake sales and tent evangelical meetings in July and they taught grace and truth and good fellowship, instead of being raised in a church begun by a mad man who felt he was the reincarnated spirit of John the Baptist sent to preach the imminent second coming of Christ and to begin a prophetic church based on Principles in the midst of the evil and fiery Last Days. Not to mention the fact that his successor sexually abused dozens of girls who attended Bible School and the other sexual abuses that grew up and in and around the cracks of this church like a cancer and that caught up at least two generations of my family.

But all that is true. You would think, after all that, all that shit that I didn't ask for, that doesn't happen to most people, that makes me weird and broken and strange, you would think that maybe now, God would be like, "Hey, I'll cut her a break."

Especially because after I caught myself, as a young adult, doing stupid things because of this past, I made the tough decision to face up to the damage and found the courage to remake my life, to choose hope and joy and forgiveness over bitterness and anger.

I think God is up there, just amused by me, He's like, "Hey, hey come look, look at this girl over here. I knock her down again and again and again, and she just gets right back up again. It's great. Watch. Even if I destroy her dreams of motherhood, which I happen to know will bring up intense feelings of worthlessness and shame from her past along with the grief, even then, she's get back up."

For the first time in my life, I realize that life may be nothing more than an unending series of suffering. I feel like, no matter how hard I try, God can always mess it up for me. He's never going to stop screwing around with my life. I'm that clay pot that was made just to be broken and nothing will ever go right in my life.

I don't completely believe this, not yet. But I'm seriously considering it. It's right there. It's a real possibility and it makes nothing worthwhile. This creates a much deeper crisis, a crisis of faith or of the whole nexus of my life. I could take the suffering, if I could believe that there was a point to it, that it would be redeemed and would go toward an even better future.

But take that belief away, and what do I build the rest of my life on? I don't know how I'm going to resolve this, I'm just living in the question and trying not to judge myself for what I feel, even if what I'm feeling is very dark.

I always do come through in the end. I just have to have faith that if I let myself sink in and feel what I need to feel, that I will then start to heal at the right time.

If God is in the process of completely undoing me, then there's no point in resisting it or being ashamed of the fact that I'm falling apart. In fact, resisting falling apart, judging myself for falling apart and trying to hold onto to stupid platitudes, like, "count your blessings," and "keep your chin up" only prolongs the agony.

Maybe I'll come out of this with some incredible deep wisdom, some unearthly serenity. But that doesn't just come easily, you have to go through the fire for that stuff. I used to be all about that, all about the deep parts of life. Now I would just settle for normalcy. But that's clearly never, ever going to be an accurate descriptor of my life.

We aren't going to try the clomid this month. The day after I got my period, I woke and felt clear headed for the first time in a long, long time. It was a cold, clear morning, there were red leaves outside my open kitchen window and I could hear the crows calling. We had French toast and fried eggs, we curled up on the couch and watched some Travel Channel.

I just couldn't stomach going through the whole thing again, dumping all that hormone into my system and getting lost in those murky emotional swamps for weeks on end. If it were up to me, I'd stop all the infertility treatments. I'm just waiting for our move to Georgia and it doesn't seem to far away now.

Provided God is not a monster, I should be able to have a family then. I dream about it a lot lately. I heard Michael Buble's song, "Haven't Met You Yet," and it summed up so well how I feel that I think I might paste it into my children's baby books.

I'm not surprised, not everything lasts
I've broken my heart so many times, I stopped keeping track
Talk myself in, I talk myself out
I get all worked up, then I let myself down

I tried so very hard not to lose it
I came up with a million excuses
I thought, I thought of every possibility

And I know someday that it'll all turn out
You'll make me work, so we can work to work it out
And I promise you, kid, that I give so much more than I get
I just haven't met you yet

I might have to wait, I'll never give up
I guess it's half timing, and the other half's luck
Wherever you are, whenever it's right
You'll come out of nowhere and into my life

And I know that we can be so amazing
And, baby, your love is gonna change me
And now I can see every possibility

And somehow I know that it'll all turn out
You'll make me work, so we can work to work it out
And I promise you, kid, I give so much more than I get
I just haven't met you yet

September 1st

I've been purely miserable. And because I'm ashamed at the depth of my misery and haven't wanted to even think about it, I haven't wanted to blog about it either. At first it was really, really bad because I wasn't even sure why I was so miserable, so I was faced with a triple layer of awfulness; the original misery, the misery over wondering what the hell was wrong with me and the misery of judging myself for the misery in the first place.

So I've been pretty abject.

Did I do anything wonderfully stupendous about the misery? No. I went and bought a video game and literally played it every spare minute of every day so that I could avoid thinking or even being in my own skin.

For two weeks that's all I've done. That's quite astounding when one thinks about that. Well, I did cook and clean, but only what I had to do. I've gotten on line once before and that was a few days ago and I pretty much forced myself to do so.

Now I'm feeling a little better, but only because I have achieved, at last, some clarity about the suffering. The clarity tells me, by the way, that this is only going to get worse. I thought that taking clomid would feel like taking control of the situation, but what it really did was drive home to me that the most vital part of my inherent identity, that of a woman, does not function. Therefore I feel worthless, secondary and sometimes even cursed, though this is coming from some atavistic part of me that is still connecting fertility and God's blessing and all those ancient beliefs.

So there's that. Then there's the incredible, crushing suspense of wondering if the treatment even worked. I can't describe it. It's like being twenty leagues under the sea. It makes me want to crawl out of my skin. It's getting down to the wire and the thought of looking at the test makes me want to throw up.

So there's that. Then there's the deeper and deeper realization of how badly I want to mother. Furthermore, how much I've already mothered. In fact, looking back now, all my relationships with men had at their core some maternal instinct. Hell, I've even related to my father maternally. I have cared for disabled children, infants, Korean children and the elderly. I am the elder sister of three brothers, I was baby sitting at eleven. I am a natural born care taker. If I am not taking care of someone then I don't feel as if I'm putting in my contribution to the human race.

So, combine that with the fact that I am thirty fricken' three years old, married to the right man and stalled. Stalled because my body won't function at it's most basic level. It won't procreate.

But wait, I might be pregnant! Surely that means something.

I'll tell you what that means, that means jack shit. I've thought I might be pregnant for twelve months counting, some of those months very strongly. And every. single. time. I was wrong. I can't even think about what if this time I am. I'm hedging against the greater pain to come.

And oh, it will come. That's the other stone, cold fact I'm facing down. Unless I do get pregnant, nothing gets easier. If this month fails, next month is worse, and the month after that. Three months later and we're looking at artificial insemination. That's me, lying with my feet in stirrups while Keith's sperm is injected into me via catheter. How about the humiliation and failure I'll feel then, huh? Won't that be a fricken' party.

Wow, that's such a bad attitude, says...maybe Irving.

The worst part is that I agree, it is a god awful attitude. That's what I mean when I say I've been miserable about the extent of my misery. What can't I look on the bright side? Why can't I count my blessings? Why can't I just look to the distant future and know that I will have children at the end of the road?

'Cause the road is so god forsaken awful, that's why. And I never guessed at the pain walking down it. I should have had an idea, but I kept putting it off, so I wasn't prepared. And I was stupidly naive. I thought I could go through this and have it not be what my father would call "an identity conversation," another words, not have it impact how I define myself.

Ha, bloody ha.

So either I'm whining on in my blog in gruesome, depressing detail, or I'm sedating myself with electronics. I wish I could end on some kind of uplifting note, but I don't have one myself, so I have nothing to share. I asked God to make sure the suffering made me a better person in the end, and I'm sure that will happen, but I'm no where near the end. Unless I am pregnant.