Shameless Survivors

PTSD is a monster. An ugly, sneaky, frightening beast patiently waiting until all is quiet to attack. It sits like a dormant virus waiting for just the right combination of conditions to reactivate. After all this time, it still packs the same frightening punch as the very first time it knocked me down and overtook me.

It is a delicate balance to stay centered post trauma, and the video my mind replays a thousand times is extraordinarily easily set into motion through the most imperceptible of triggers. Thoroughly unconscious of the subtlety of opening a bedroom door to the outside on an unseasonably warm February day, of walking into the bathroom to get ready for church, of pulling open my makeup drawer, my brain remembers. The tears precede the actual conscious memory, and the cascade that follows is as unstoppable as willing a heart attack to end. A primal system which is designed to protect is now an overloaded circuit gone awry. I am swept up and transported back to getting ready for church many Sundays ago, and that gut feeling I pushed away that something was going to happen.

I no longer wonder what would have happened if he had gone to his sister’s house that day as he said he was, or speculate if he had ever intended to or just told me that to get my guard down. I accept that he planned it in advance, that my going to church delayed his execution that day and that is why he argued for me ‘to get my priorities straight’ and stay home with my family when I insisted I was going. I accept that he had to shoot me while he could, before I left the house again to meet my friend Gretchen for our walk at the park, and before I moved out of the house to my friend Mary Ellen’s.

I have mourned the man I loved and the relationship I hoped for. They have been removed from the equation. What my brain has so efficiently stored is the abject fear, the deepest sense of foreboding that I couldn’t pinpoint in the confusing escalation, then the calmness before he struck.

This beast is in me, of me, a foreigner living within. PTSD is an unwelcomed house guest I wish it to univite, having overstayed its usefulness. Yet it stays to remind me, protect me from what it processed and stored as not safe, insisting the threat still exists. All the unwrapping and reprocessing can’t fully erase an instinct of self-preservation so deeply embedded. I’ll never grow accustomed to the interference into my peacefulness, the awful feeling of being dragged along the process. Even though I understand it on an intellectual level, it is paralyzing and emotionally exhausting.

Today I gave in and let it run its course. What once felt like defeat I have now relabeled as self-care. There will be other days for church, other times when I am able to keep the door firmly closed and the monster at bay. Today I’m slowing it down and sitting with it.

Yield to overcome. Tao

He always said I lived in a fantasy world. And I did. I created a place that was filled with happiness to share with the children, joy in my friendships, enthusiasm for my business ventures, wonder at the beauty in the world, faith all would be well.

But his poison would find a way to invade my world, leaving me feeling ridiculously stupid for believing I could stay in that place without being knocked down a few pegs, as he’d say. Such are the waves that pull me from peacefully moving forward and back into the dark abyss haunted by his voice and actions.

Growing up, I loved Christmas. My parents were of the spiritual truth over church attendance mindset. While church was not the centerpiece of my childhood Christmas, socializing was. My mother loved hosting a Christmas Eve open house, inviting neighbors for libation, food and good company. Christmas dinner was a time for the orphaned and otherwise disenfranchised to come into our home and share a meal, one which she began to prepare early in the day. Gifts were not the highlight, presence was.

Once my parents moved to Colorado, Christmas was increasingly isolating for me. The second year they lived there I spent Christmas Eve and day alone while he worked. He took any joy and anticipation I had away by refusing to participate in things I lined up or attend my friends’ holiday gatherings. We’d go to holiday parties, company parties, club parties where no one was ever the wiser that I was pretending all was well when it was actually awful.

Thanksgiving and Christmas, once favorite holidays, became synonymous with sadness and yearly culminations of the accumulated emotional pain I endured. He hated for me to decorate, complaining that I spent too much money and that I asked for help, insisting I should not buy him a gift though I took great pleasure in giving. He would threaten to not buy me a gift because of something I said, did, didn’t do, and sometimes followed through reminding me he told me he wouldn’t be getting me anything if I persisted. He complained about attending Christmas services at church. He was too tired, it was too hot, too crowded. When the kids came along he would leave the house in the middle of them opening presents, or be gone when they would awake; excited to open their presents. I had to answer their questions on where he went with lies because I didn’t usually know where he went.

After Christmas he would complain about having to see my relatives in Baltimore, presenting a laundry list of everything that was wrong with my family and ending in a tantrum that I should see them with the kids and let him stay at the hotel. There was always something. It was a lonely place.

The first Christmas after I was shot was filled with peace. A friend helped get the tree in the house and up in the stand. The kids and I decorated it and the house in a quiet welcome to the season. They were acolytes at the Christmas eve midnight service at our church. Though I feared Christmas morning they would miss him, the absence of arguing and pleading, of wondering when he might come back, the gratitude for having survived, were unexpected gifts that year.

We’ve managed to do unconventional things since to celebrate. While I still eschew holiday parties, we do try to go out to dinner Christmas Eve or to the movies Christmas day. Even now I am still fragilely perched. PTSD slyly intrudes even on the best of days, keeping me stuck in a twilight where I can’t quite access the brightness of the sun and the darkness is eerily visible.

I don’t know the answers on how to quiet the voices and move fully into the light. I only know how grateful I am that I am free, that we are free, and how saddened I am for those who are still trying to navigate holidays without losing their sanity or lives.

As I sat down this morning in my sunny living room, coffee in hand, I was transported back seven years ago to my then my husband greeting me with “Good morning”, barely looking up from the newspaper he read.

I vividly recall sitting quietly for a few minutes, mustering the courage to tell him I wanted a divorce. As someone who doesn’t give up easily, this was an enormous defeat in my eyes at the time. The months leading up to the decision were filled with example after example why my singular efforts to make the marriage work would continue to be futile. I’d finally accepted we needed to live apart.

“Can you put your paper down?” Moving the paper to the side, peering over his glasses, he looked over and asked “What’s going on?” When I asked him if he was happy, he replied cheerfully “You know me, I am always happy!” It struck me as almost comical how out of touch he was with how he actually acted, which was not only unhappy, but unhappy about every single thing any of us in the house did, and very vocal about it.

I continued “I’m not, and I haven’t been and you know we haven’t been for a long time. I think we need to talk about separating.” Any doubt as to whether my perception was askew was immediately quelled when he reacted angrily exclaiming “You’d deprive your children of a father?”

I took a minute to try to make sense of what he’d said. “How would divorce deprive them of a father? You’ll always be their father.” His response was that if I ‘left him’ he’d never want to see any of us again.

I had grown accustomed to this sort of extreme nonsensical thinking and responses, and continued on unemotionally. “Well, that would be your choice, not ours.”

Realizing his first assertion didn’t elicit a reaction in me, he tried another tactic. Not skipping a beat, he glared at me and with a controlled calm voice he declared “If you think you are leaving with the kids, I will go for full custody, and you’ll never see them again.”

“Wait, you just finished saying you’d never see them again. Now you want full custody?” I stood up to leave the room, realizing there was no possibility of working out a reasonable arrangement with him.

As the summer progressed, he refused to leave the house, insisting I leave instead, with nothing of course. Despite his continued verbal attacks and controlling nature, it never occurred to me that the shotguns he kept behind the bedroom door and the hand guns he kept in a closet should be removed from the house until a few weeks later when I walked in on him in the dark putting bullets in a gun.

After that night I demanded all the guns be removed from the house. There was no making a request to law enforcement, there was no legal way to have them removed, there was only me asking someone who proved to be unreasonable in all other matters to get rid of them, on his word.

It’s hard to fathom someone you have spent your entire adult life with, the father of your children, will shoot to kill you. When it happened I believed I was unique, that it wasn’t about the gun, it was about him. These seven years later it’s excruciatingly clear that it is the combination of people like him who have access to a gun. It is the enticement of a detached, clean way to create devastating destruction that lures someone like him to carry out the final act of control. The statistics bear it out, just as I am living proof of it, yet no amount of awareness erases the reality my life, as blessed as I am to be here against all odds, will never be the same and the dividing line was at the intersection of a gun.