Twitching

For the first time in my life, earlier this morning, my collarbone (clavicle if you're feeling medically fancy) hurt.  I'd taken Gareth to daycare early and so was running without pushing him in his stroller.  As I passed the 2 mile mark, I had to stop and breath through pain that suddenly radiated out of my collarbone.  The interwebs tell me the most likely culprit for my mystery pain is that I was tensing my shoulders too tightly as I ran and that I needed to loosen up as I ran.  

Imagine that - I'm tense.

That tenseness manifested in other ways this weekend.  I took G to see Cliff on Saturday, and during the visit the muscle under my right eyebrow started to twitch.  And kept twitching until this morning.  Again, I surfed into the deep darkness of google and discovered that I needed potassium, or sleep, or a lack of stress in my life.  

Imagine that - I'm stressed.

I've learned to pay attention to my body and what it is telling me.   Scripture tells me that my "self" is not just my spirit or my soul or my body, but that I am all things at once.  My soul is never separated from my body and my body is never to be escaped because I am all of them together, a blending of aethyr and earth that cannot be compartmentalized.  So when my eyebrow starts twitching and my collarbone radiates hurt and I can't shake a cold, I know to look deeper and see what the root is of all the distress.

It didn't occur to me till I was almost finished with my run what today was.  Two years ago today, I sat with my sister on the couch of my house in Waco and waited to hear the judgment of Cliff's jury.  Two years ago today, my life burst apart at the seams when I read a well-meaning text message from a concerned friend that only said "I'm so so sorry Elizabeth."  I wasn't in the courtroom to hear the verdict, but those words told me all I needed to know.  Guilty.  Guilty.  Guilty.  Guilty.  Guilty.  Guilty.  All charges.

Imagine that - the latent pain of this day wends its way even into my cellular structure.

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I'm not really sad today.  Choosing to pursue divorce has helped me to let go of the more stinging aspects of grief.  But whether or not I'm married to Cliff, I'll always be connected to him through our son.  So I will never stop having to negotiate prison visits and legal repercussions, custody concerns, financial arrangements, etc.  And I do it alone, still.  I'm a metaphysical weightlifter in this regard, bracing myself under the burdens of life after "all the evil", so its no wonder that I develop twitches and tense muscles.

This last Sunday, the lectionary gospel reading was a dark one - Jesus' apocalyptic predictions in the book of Luke.  Wars and rumors of wars, persecution, moons like blood, suffering and the like.  It's pretty depressing stuff, except the last verse in the pericope.  "By holding fast," Jesus says, "you will gain your lives."  Indeed.

Jesus knew that life was filled with unfairness, with unearned punishments, with unlikely tragedies, with unforgiving judgments.  Jesus knew that and was always honest with his disciples about the trials that every life intersects.  And he told them to hold fast - not that they would escape the pain, not that they would escape the loss of the days ahead.  He told them to hold fast.  To belligerently choose existence and tomorrows and dawn and new experienes and life even as the world crumbled and roiled around them.

Unknowingly, that has been my theme during these passing years, the one repeating refrain, the goal in all the turmoil of my life - Hold fast.  And I am grateful for the words of Christ that remind me WHY I'm holding on in the first place: because I gain my life this way.  It may be a life where I occasionally twitch under stress.  It may be a life where I have to focus on letting go of the tenseness that I carry in my shoulders.  It may be a life where colds linger and where I still have the occasional late-night cry.  It may be a life of gray Novembers.  But I gain my life by facing the moons of blood and devastating spiritual earthquakes and holding fast.  

The days pass my friends, quickly and haltingly.  The days pass, and some memories fade while others remain burned forever into the film of your mind.  The days pass, but we can hold fast.  The days pass, and there is life to be gained.

December is almost here.  

Praise be to God! 

Crying at Camp

This weekend I took four of the teenagers from my church to a middle school retreat. The retreat itself was good - they learned something, they made new friends and I had the opportunity to hang out with some of my fellow youth ministers. All in all, it should have been a weekend without much emotional turmoil.

Except, of course, All the Evil has a way of intruding into every last aspect of my life. STILL.

Three years ago, when I was 8 months pregnant with Gareth and waddling awkwardly around Chi Rho midwinter with my kiddos, Cliff was carrying on the affair that would shatter our lives. I haven't been back to this particular retreat since, and that is partially because I didn't want to deal with the inevitable triggers that I would encounter.

But my girls wanted to go and I needed to be there with them and I hoped that somehow, someway, I could keep it all together despite the looming anniversary. I managed to keep my demons at bay till right before dinner time on Saturday night, when they reached down deep into my chest and clenched tightly around my heart. I scurried away from the crowds, and after dodging some of the other counselors, I sat down on the cold hard ground and cried.

I haven't cried that long or that hard in months, but the juxtaposition of time, place and memory overcame the steep mental boundaries I had put around my grief. It was too much - once I had been there knowing nothing and now I was there knowing EVERYTHING. I almost hated the old me for her ignorant bliss, but mostly I cried for both of us: tears for what she was about to undergo and tears for myself and the violently upended life I was living in the midst of. The retreat center was unchanged, but I was so different. It was an affront, that placid calm could exist in tandem with the maelstrom of alteration that I was and continue to be.

Confession: I'm a bad cryer. My grief, even 15mn past the last tears, is palpably read on my face. I blotch red and the skin around my eyes puff up and the whites of my eyes become bloodshot and even my voice becomes swollen with spent misery. But I couldn't avoid all human company, and I needed to eat, so I tried to mitigate the physical evidence of my emotional collapse. It wasn't very effective, but I greatly appreciated the privacy that my fellow counselors provided to me by feigning ignorance.

Eventually I wrestled my pain back into its dark inner cave and I was able to carry on as before, to play the part of the FUN AND SILLY YOUTH MINISTER who writes on t-shirts with markers and dances without care to "Don't Stop Believing." Today has been better, less fraught with memories soaked in horror. But I am home now and pondering how to keep the introspective moments of solitude from becoming slippery slopes that lead only to mental movies that replay terrible scenes of betrayal.

Pray with me today? Pray that I can live through this anniversary and find strength - not brittleness - on the other side.

The Day Of

November 17th-18th of 2011 were the worst days of my life.  When Cliff was convicted on all charges, I went to bed furious and sick at what I thought was a miscarriage of justice.  The next day I discovered my emotional turmoil had been ill-informed - my husband confessed in front of our friends, our family, the jury, the lawyers, judge and news reporters that he had had a sexual relationship with a 16 year old while I was 8 months pregnant. My mother broke the news to me over the phone and I remember the feeling of the earth dropping out from underneath me and the sensation that all sound around me had ceased.  Not only had I been betrayed, but I didn't even have the privilege of being told about the betrayal first.  The local newspaper knew before I did.

The psychic wreckage was unfathomable.  Not only was I dealing with the aftermath of infidelity, but I also had to come to terms with a broken family, single-motherhood, endangered job prospects and possible financial ruin. And the fact that anybody with an internet connection could know my deepest pain and private family tragedy and have an opinion about it.  I've been seeing a therapist since October of 2010 and her help has been critical to my continued mental, spiritual and physical health.  No one comes "standard" with the skills to cope with the level of devastation that I and my family underwent in November of 2011, and her counsel has helped me to navigate the apocalyptic-ruined landscape of what my life became last year.  And this doesn't even factor in my father's cancer diagnosis only one week after Cliff's conviction.

The last year has been one sharp moment after another - Thanksgiving, my Birthday, Christmas, New Years, Cliff's Birthday, Valentine's Day, Gareth's Birthday, Mother's Day, our Wedding Anniversary, Father's Day, Fourth of July, Halloween - my progress through life resembling step after step after step through sharp glass.   Every memory was a booby-trap; Every family gathering was a reminder of pain; Every visit to Cliff's prison a jarring journey.  So you can imagine that I approached this last week and this Thanksgiving holiday with a certain amount of trepidation.  I was afraid that I was about to become Alice and fall down the rabbit hole into a land not-so-wonderful.  There be dragons here.

Except...

Except there wasn't any hole to fall into.  I had a couple of fleeting moments when I shed tears (leaving Target and watching several episodes of Deep Space Nine), but mostly this terrible anniversary has lacked any power to bring me low.  My counselor says that it is a sign that I am experiencing healing, that time has leached the poison of these days, that I am progressing normally through the process of grief.  And I think that my decision to have an "Early Thanksgiving" with my family helped to strip the heaviness from this week.  But my lack of debilitating remembering has been confusing for me, and mostly what I have been feeling during these days shadowed by dark memories is guilt.

Guilt that I am not wracked with bitter tears.
Guilt that I am not expansively angry at my unasked for fate.
Guilt that I have not desire to gaze out windows with melancholy brokenness, sighs spilling forth.
Guilt that I seemed to have healed (at least, in part) from what I thought was a mortal wound.

Is this guilt normal?  It wraps around me, but I try to shake it off because I do not wish to return to those wretched first days when I stood stunned in my own emotional holocaust.  I have no desire to cry so much that I leach my body of salt.  I do not wish to experience the disassociative state which I lived in for so many months, months during which I could not accept that this TRULY WAS my life.  I was blessed by the outpouring of love, gifts, money, cards, help, company, but I never EVER again want to suffer so deeply that my whole support system has to turn it's gaze inward to care solely for me.  I want NONE of that.  But I still feel guilt clinging hard onto my back and whispering into my ear "No tears? What's wrong with you?"

Facebook has been overtaken by a daily naming of "thanksgiving" by many of my friends, family, church members, etc.  And I thought about joining in and decided against it in fear of becoming banal or trite about the good things in my life.  And also, because the things I am thankful for are a bit...sharp.

I am thankful that I don't cry much anymore.
I am thankful that my son seems to be no worse for being raised by a single mom.
I am thankful that some days I am not overcome with anger or regret.
I am thankful that I have survived and that I am only plagued by nagging guilt instead of breathless grief.
I am thankful that my days ahead are now familiar territory, days of loneliness that I know the shape of.
I am thankful that my memories no longer hold me hostage.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Repeat

I've started reading apocalyptic fiction again.  The Twelve was recently released (and purchased for my Kindle) and at the local "Friends of the Library Sale" I picked up a copy of Guillermo Del Toro's vampire book The Strain.  I haven't read books in this literary vein since last November, right after All the Evil.  My immersion into this genre last year was a symptom of my grief: I needed to read books where everyone else's lives were tragically destroyed so that I didn't feel isolated in my trauma.  Slowly I made my way out of these worlds and into less fragmented ones - for a while this summer I was voraciously reading several series that focused on strong women coping with unfair/ridiculous life circumstances.  It was a sign of my healing psyche, as I was self-identifying with these plucky women and also desperately wishing that I would somehow attain magical powers.  (To be fair: I wouldn't have caught the deeper implications of my reading choices unless my therapist had helped me to see it.  She's been invaluable to me for the last two years.)

But I've fallen down the rabbit hole back into these ruined worlds with their desolate landscapes and it only seems appropriate for the time of year.  November 14th of 2011 is when Cliff's trial started, November 17th is when he was convicted and November 18th was when he was sentenced to 90 years in prison.  I haven't been swamped with sadness like I thought I would be; I haven't been despondent at night like I expected to feel.  Mostly, I am feeling detached, like an outside observer watching the recordings of another person's life.  I suspect this detachment is something my brain has done to protect me, but I'm aware of it now because the detachment isn't complete: the vampire books are the sign of a "leak" in my psychic seals.

So I've started "repeating" myself and time is about to start throwing more repetitions at me.  I'm reading apocalyptic books again.  Cliff won't be participating in the holidays with me - again.  I'm in charge of my own birthday - again.  And though I expect these days to have pain in them, they will be the dull pain of repeated blows, of aches brought on by cold weather and heavy rains.  I'm mostly done with the surprising pains of time after a tragedy and I am glad for that.  I expect now that grief will be more like a cold wind than a sharp knife.  Less 3D Imax screens and more old VHS or fragile photographs taken long ago.

If you're the praying kind, throw some prayers my way as well as to Cliff and to all of our families.  I know that I'm not the only one walking into this week and the days ahead with ghosts of tragedy past perched upon my shoulders.  We're about to start walking familiar roads, repeating steps we took not so long ago.

3 Years Ago

Today Cliff and I have been married for three years.  In those three years we've:
- both graduated from Seminary
- had 8 jobs between us
- bought a house
- bought two cars (and sold three cars)
- had two cats (Ghost & Tully) and one dog (Rika)
- been in a car accident
- been in the hospital twice (once for Cliff and once for Gareth)
- been to Jamaica and New York City
- had a beautiful baby boy

I look forward to all the new adventures that we'll encounter in the future.  Happy Anniversary love!

Hey World

It's been awhile, yes?

Well...here are some updates (and pictures!) for those who are actually interested.
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After Cliff and I went to New York, we got out 1 year old wedding cake from his granddad's freezer and had a bite.

Here I am about to cut the cake.
Here's the cake about to be cut.
Poor cake. It's a little...deflated.
Here I go!
Look! Chocolate!
Look! Cliff has a huge mouth! ::laugh::

June was fun. Hot. And then July came, and with it, our niece Aubrey's first birthday. She got many many gifts.

One of which was a pink horse! That had to be assembled...

So Cliff assembled it!
Later, Aubrey and Cliff discussed the finer points of activity tables

She wooed her newly acquired giraffe
And got some books. Good for you kid.

The DAY we got back from Aubrey's birthday party, this is what I saw:

I know. Terrible. I freaked out hard core, made Cliff come home to take me and Ghost to the emergency vet (did i mention that it was Saturday? And that my vet's office was closed? And I was also pretty sick from having done 4th&5th grade church camp the week before?)

Here's Ghost in his new cat carrier at the Emergency Vet's office.
Here are the 3 week old kittens that the receptionist/nurse/vet-lady was trying to nurse. Cliff immediately said "NO! YOU CANNOT HAVE ANOTHER CAT!"
Admit it. They are ADORABLE.

So that was June and July. The next post is about August/September and the Tale of the Terrible Flooring Project. Stay Tuned.