The Center

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Lisette d. Johnson

There is a certain way the light is changed from summer. Lower. The sky is clear and blue and crisp. The air cooler, absent humidity, the nights chilly. All the windows and doors are open. The tape begins.

As I dress for church I feel it start, but I push the feeling back down. I get into the car, I drive, feeling it come up my spine. I arrive at church and settle into the worship ritual I know so well. My mind wanders to thinking of a walk after church, which day – today or that day – I am uncertain, and there it is again in my head pounding to get out. The harder I fight it the more unbearable the sensation. My heart begins to race to match the pounding. My mind recognizes I have been here before. Triggered by the light and the weather, and the sameness of the sequence of the day, the sameness of this ritual; I cannot escape it and finally give in and let it play. It envelops me and takes me away from the peaceful state I manage to find myself in more and more these days and takes me back.

By the end of the service I am so unnerved I can barely function but I make myself engage as I go to the parish hall for coffee. That day is relived over and over again. Eating the food. The people. The conversations. My minds races backwards to the haziness of being in the ER, in and out of consciousness, doctors questioning have I eaten, what, how long ago; as they prepared me for emergency surgery and I know I have eaten but don’t know what or when or even what time it is or where I am or why I am here. The ER scene chatters in my head like it is now, and I can’t focus on my conversation with church members as they fade to the background. I become overwhelmed and have to leave the parish hall.

I know I cannot go home, that I must change the sequence to stop this. Even so, visiting a friend our light conversation belies my heart beating to a rhythm of the anxiety the spectacular fall-like weather has created and in it this reliving. I am far more quiet than usual. Respite my friend provides is temporary and I stare at the sky, am lost in it, transported to that day, over and over and over in my mind.

Later in a torrent of emotion, a cataclysmic meltdown of nuclear proportions, my son’s pain comes bursting forth, falling out over both of us as we struggle to keep from being buried. I silently admonish myself for not heeding my friend’s warning to watch him closely and be mindful of his emotional needs while addressing his sister’s. He is in the height of hormones, the insecurity of adolescence, amidst unspeakable loss, finding his way without the benefit of a male anchor, a role model, a good cop when I must be the bad cop. He is a boy maturing in a female household where his mother is no longer enough, a household without a father. I observe perhaps to a boy a father of any sort is better than no father at all.

His sister watches and seems afraid of his anger, his screaming, and finally his crying. She leaves us, silently exiting, slipping away invisibly as she learned over the years of living in abuse. My son and I remain trying to find a neutral place.

It is creeping in towards all of us, gathering force like a storm, the inescapable day when everything changed in an instant. It is unstoppable and failure to acknowledge it does not relieve its existence. Somewhere deep, on an unconscious level, the weather changes alert us…remember what happened.

I must be strong, rock solid, steady for them as my private world teeters back and forth. One day I feel like I’m making great strides, another I am unable to accomplish any but basic tasks of daily living. This is our life. This is what intimate violence has left us. The shooting has become the center. Everything before that day moved inward towards it, everything now moves out from it, but the center still remains.

That I could wave a magic wand so no other child, no other person, no other family has to wade through this; that I could change the world. Oh, if only I could. I would start by saying hear my story so it does not become yours.

“Our ongoing survival requires relentless attention.” Laurence Gonzales, Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience

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The Only Rule of Survival

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Lisette d. Johnson

It is a more difficult day today. I find myself in a crazy mind game contemplating different rules of survival, trying to come up with a rule book to stay accountable to myself. Certainly one must survive if deemed a survivor. The other rules flit around and don’t settle in as they are all contingent on that one specific edict.

With a few blessed weeks of respite between, the dreams still come and with them a lingering shadow over the next day. Most times it bleeds into the days that immediately follow. In last night’s dream I awake to find him at the side of my bed, pistol pressed to my temple. The household and I awaken to my screaming. I wonder how unsettling it must be for the children to hear me, and imagine how scary it might be to get up and investigate. My son comments how difficult it is to go back to sleep. Given I am their protector if I am compromised, how could they possibly feel safe? If it lingers with me, does it linger with them as well? How do they process my trauma?

My daughter is finally beginning to process her own trauma, and I suspect an initial anger has yielded to denial. It has been revealed that she continues to weigh her options as to whether to continue with this life or end it, on a daily basis. My daughter who I love beyond words, this absolutely beautiful, artistic, funny, friendly, smart individual I am privileged to know and raise still experiences an inner turmoil that leads her to the conclusion that opting out might feel better. On some level, I understand.

As I look around her room I see she had added tons of pictures of her and her father in various stages of her childhood. I am both relieved that she can embrace their relationship, and saddened at the incongruity of those images with the imprint of the last minutes, and for me, the images left by my nightmares. Even with all of my life experience the images are irreconcilable. Is it any wonder she has now assumed a position of denial that he drank, was abusive, and the violence of his last act and death? She refuses any correlation of our life before and her pervasive state of discontentment.

Looking at the images, I am again thrown into the mixing bowl of how the man in these pictures could have done this to us. Tempted once again to take responsibility for something that was not, is not, mine. He did do this.

She will have to get there herself. I can’t make her, coax her, cajole, coach her. It is her journey as much as I want to lead the way she has to walk it. My son, too, is also now beginning to walk his own. I can only love them, provide what support and resources I can, watch and wait. When I am most tempted to jump in and ‘do’ something, I am aware I need to step back and give them the space to work through it in their own way, praying they follow the rule.

As for me, I am learning to stop fighting and yield to the process; let my life flow naturally around this obstacle, accept it will continue to exist, and appreciate the futility of using precious energy in resistance. It has become apparent to me after such tragedies we must practice joy, practice happiness, until it becomes a reflex rather than an awkward adaptation; retraining our minds to embrace the obscure and miniscule things which represent them until they blend together seamlessly. Joy and happiness or sorrow and discontentment, either are habits we form and fit to us once we decide what we shall be.

So strength may also be found in apparent weakness Tao

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Wonder Woman

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Lisette d. Johnson

 That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger….

There are a lot of assumptions about abuse. Many revolve around what ‘type’ of women are victims of abuse. Few public examples show dynamic, successful, career women and entrepreneurs who were duped by charasmatic, socially engaged middle to upper class abusers. We see the show “Cops”, posters portraying women with hollowed black eyes and bruised bodies, and mental images of lower income households cycling through generations of abuse. Certainly each and every one of those images are valid.  So, however, is the image of a home where what happens behind closed doors can’t be heard simply because the houses are so far apart in upper income neighborhoods. Smart abusers who know how to protect their reputations and public personas by abusing under the radar; emotionally, financially, and physically to unseen areas of the body. There is a huge social stigma going public when married to a physician, or CEO, or business owner who abuses invisibly. 

Successful speaker, radio host and author Mary Foley shares her story of rising up the corporate career ladder while in an abusive marriage. Now she is coming out of the closet with her story to help women see that anything is possible. Every one of us has a dynamic woman waiting to emerge from the ashes of abuse. Thank you Mary for encouraging us to find that woman!

http://www.maryfoley.com/sanity-for-your-life/374-the-shocking-reason-i-became-the-wonder-woman-of-my-life

 

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The Between

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Lisette d. Johnson

I have developed an emotional attachment to a very old borrowed desk. I attempt to empty and clear it daily, to return it to its owner. As I sit writing at this beautiful desk, with its cubbies and drawers and the lovely line of it, I feel somehow connected. I wonder who used it, and what was written throughout the years. I am a dreamer so I imagine letters, professions of great affection, declarations of love, important meaningful communications to have been penned atop this very surface. And I, I have had the privilege of enjoying it.

It is a peculiar thing, beyond sentiment, how I attach such emotional value to inanimate objects. As though to extricate them from my life might also extricate the feelings I have associated with them. Just the thought of returning this desk seems to punctuate an ending. I can already anticipate an emptiness in the room, even if I fill the space with another piece of furniture. It’s as though it will leave an empty spot in my heart. I question shouldn’t I approach it as marking a beginning to something else? Yet I don’t. Day after day I say tomorrow, as though magically it will be easier tomorrow to break the bond. As though I will suddenly feel nothing.

This desk filled a need; filled a void. It added immense richness to my life; brought to me through it’s owner a wonderment of feelings I thought I’d never know again. It was the bridge, a connection of the space between there and here. Its presence holds, quite possibly, one of the most treasured parts of my life, to love again. Perhaps I have sought something tangible to represent that which is intangible. Unholdable. Unkeepable. Like air, something ever present but invisible and untouchable. Though I realize it is not mine, does not, can not belong to me, still parting is so very difficult. To let go is an act of faith that is seldom easy.

It will reunite at some point with its rightful owner. I’d hoped at one time the reunion would occur in this room, it in its current place, but it seems not to be. Though I thought I might pen a final letter professing great affection, declaring love, an important meaningful communication from this desk, I reluctantly release it without words. Beautiful things do not stay in our lives and we need to appreciate the moment while they are here.

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Raw. The Telling of Our Stories

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Lisette d. Johnson

So you tell me your stories because you need to tell them. Need to say aloud what rattles around your damaged heart and I become a vessel, a container to hold your pain in with mine. I don’t sometimes know whose is whose as it churns and mixes and blurs. How many stories make one story? Where does mine end and yours begin or yours end and mine begin? Our parallel lives intersect and merge and diverge within our mucky catharses.

I didn’t ask, you know…didn’t want to be assigned this role initially
Only tried to recover all that was lost in that second, or maybe it was a minute.
Suspended in that 9th floor hospital room, looking down on the white house
so simple, small, pure and clean. Distant, like a lifetime ago, though so close I could see it. Dreaming of freeing a butterfly that struggled against its tethers on the window sill. Helpless. Screaming in the night that I could not cut the ties, long ago beyond my reach. It was there you brought me your stories. What a terrible gift to bestow. Terrible. I was already so injured, in such pain. Yet you confessed as though I held the power to absolve us.

You gave it to me, all of you, revealing your secrets once you saw mine were undeniable; exposed to the world. Permission granted through my silence. I took it on. Sought it, asked for it, to compare. Is my pain greater or less? Always, always, me against mean. Where am I on the gradient scale of gray, looking for more, hoping I can say there, there, there it is! There is someone whose suffering is more deserving than mine. Spreading light while collecting darkness.

Is my voice mine or is it yours? Was I appointed because I am fearless to say it, to tell it? While you are still hurt and meek and hiding I can thrust my chin forward, narrow my eyes, be bold and brave and stare it down, that bewitching demon left in our soul, deposited in us but not by us. Impossible to extricate the fallen angels who are one with us, these demons who prey on us in our darkest hours, obverse unwelcomed companions, these stories we have lived that we don’t want to claim as ours.The weightiness, the damage; carried, tolerated, impossible to exorcise no matter our best efforts as I declare FUCK YOU! to it and carry on, determined to win, to claim the victory.

So now I say bring it on. Give it to me. I know what to do with it as much as I know what to do with mine. Still I’ll try to kick it to the curb, to crush it and reform it, reframe it until it becomes so unrecognizable you no longer cower when it comes into view. Even though it is what it is. I enlist you to help me see to it the ugliness gives way to something beautiful, a seed from something evil to sow in the most barren of soils and souls, paradoxically capable of bearing beauty. Nurture it with me. My bright shiny world is yours for the asking. Here… I offer it; invite you to begin to imagine you see what I see. Come look through my eyes towards color and light and life. Come with me. Come alive.

ldj 29may12

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