Rough Road Ahead

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Lisette d. Johnson

 

There seem to be a perpetual series of bumps in my gravel driveway. Every time I go up or down it I can’t help but think it is some cosmic metaphor for life. I rake the bumps level, and feel fairly secure that the road will be smooth and comfortable. For periods of time it seems that the bumps won’t return when out of the blue, there they are again, making for a really uncomfortable experience just trying to get anywhere. I think once I get out of my driveway, it will all be okay, but dread having to go over them and mentally plot how to avoid it.  However there is only one way out !  

In my odd sense of connectedness, they must somehow relate to my being chronically lost as well.  Although I find myself being lost less and less, I am still amazed at my ability to have absolutely no sense of direction and no mental notes of landmarks with which to prevent my lostness. Even on routes I’ve travelled a few times, I get very turned around.

Although I’ve bemoaned both the bumps and my continual state of being lost, in a metaphoric sense I wonder if both aren’t positive signs that I am moving forward.  We all seem to take some comfort in knowing where we are even if that place is one of pain, dysfunction, addiction, or just plain misery. Many times it still feels more secure to stay stuck rather than venture out into a vast unknown with no recognizable landmarks. As we get a few feet away from solid base of our ingrained habits and behaviors, it sometimes proves to be so daunting we turn back and run full speed to cling to whatever piece of the familiar we can hang onto. Security seems a far better choice than the fear and discomfort we imagine along our route.  We fear wandering, possibly aimlessly at first, and fail to see we might settle into a new, better place.  So deadset on knowing a destination, we fail to appreciate the journey is an experience in itself.

I think I will just accept that my driveway is going to have bumps, try to smooth them out the best I can when they reappear, and accept I’m going to be very lost on new routes that not fully ingrained in my mental map yet. I’m going to go the wrong way sometimes, maybe a lot. I just need to reorient myself when I realize it, get back to a neutral spot, and start out again.

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Mother’s Day

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Lisette d. Johnson

He gave me a locket my first mother’s day, which came just two weeks after our first child, our daughter was born.

Although it is not easy to write about living in an abusive relationship, it is far easier to look at a man who shot me, and could have just as easily shot his children, and be filled with anger at the senselessness of it. Easier to focus on how the years unfolded and how the cycle of abuse became a spiral that narrowed to the point of strangling us as time went on. To realize that a choice had to be made or I would not have survived. I had to choose me over him.

Generally I feel like I’m doing well to move past it, to rebuild my life, begin new relationships, create something useful out of tragedy. I walk in my back yard and no longer recount struggling to run across it to my neighbor’s house that day. I sleep through the night in the room where it happened and nightmares are infrequent now. I touch the scars and tears aren’t automatic. I have adjusted with some degree of detachment on Sundays when I come home from church as I did that day. My heart doesn’t pound like it used to when I hear a siren, though I admit if there are more than one I panic. The sound draws me back to that day and I remember hearing endless sirens that seemed to go on forever.

There are times still, though, that I am thrown back in as though it were yesterday. Especially challenging are things that remind me, as strange as this sounds, that it happened to me. It is easier to write and concentrate on all the things that make him despicable.  Though separating, I still lost the man with whom I stood before God and vowed to love, honor and cherish.  I look at pictures of us the summer before, and see that he had already lost me.  I had already separated.  Isolated him, trying to insulate us.

He made a choice he could not undo and then he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. To imagine my husband’s tortured soul that led him to shoot me, and then himself, is brutal. To imagine him in his final moments with the knowledge of what he’d just done to us; me, him, the children, I would be inhuman not to mourn the wounded soul of the person who did it.

The man who thoughtfully picked a gift I would keep forever.  Who handed me a wrapped box and beamed, seeing my happiness when I opened it on my first Mother’s day.  It is that loss that I mourn, no matter what has happened, no matter how angry I get, no matter how senseless. It is that sadness. Words are useless, impossible to describe that sadness.

Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her. 
Proverbs 31:28

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Juxtaposition

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Lisette d. Johnson

It is a beautiful day. Spring. The season of love seems to have begun. The air is fragrant with it. In the park I watch lovers hold hands and gaze expectantly. Couples kiss openly in public. I wonder as I watch. What I know makes me not trust in what I see.

As they drive to the airport for a much anticipated vacation, he shoves her head so hard against the passenger window she is left stunned and unable to talk.

An everyday dinner. A fork stabbed into a hand.

A sudden rage out of nowhwere, a punch, followed by a push down the stairs.

The first introduction to the family, a whisper at the dinner table ‘do your parents know their daughter is a whore’.

Four women. Our season of love. Suddenly bitter and cold. Our firsts. Random. Shocking. No acknowledgment of what had just occurred. Left to wonder if we’d imagined it. It could not have been real. These were the men that loved us.

It passed, sweetness showered on us, we relaxed for a while. Tricked into complacency, only to be assaulted again when our guard was down. The cycles continued and we soon began comparing ‘normal’, and viewing ourselves to see where we fit in. Wondering how to get there. Sinking deeper, normal seemed so unreachable the goal changed to survival.

Slowly, surely, our partners took away our image of self, and replaced it with confusing images of physical and emotional pain in the name of love. The bait of charisma and charm and wooing infused with sweet lies until we were solidly in. The switch to selfish, brutal men without empathy who wanted us on our knees. When we were there, even then it was not enough. Continually trying to please someone unpleasable, to dodge the assaults.

Slowly, surely, each one of us tucked away what was left of us, in a hope chest saved for ‘one day’. We learned superficial and guarded interactions, lived anxious and helpless. Our struggles inevitably yielded to resignation and acceptance. This is the way things are. Our long view shortened to averting the immediate crisis dujour. Dreams not only stolen, no longer even dreamed. Making the best of what we had to work with.

We are bonded. We share it. This ugly commonality of our lives. Our stories very different, yet the same. Each of us came to a point where the pain became unbearable. Our strength as inviduals is now powerfully united in our stories. Where once were only impossibilities, we now share endless possibilities. I believe we are tasked to help others who are caught in the cycle and can’t seem to spin out. I believe all of us, including each of you, are called to share those possibilities the four of us are now living with anyone who has stopped dreaming.

‘So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable,
and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable’… (unknown)

 

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Soccer

Posted on April 9, 2011 by Lisette d. Johnson

My son started playing soccer when he was 4. Every season, every game, I have been here. The only games I missed where when I was in the hospital. Three weeks after it happened I came back to watch. It took me 20 min to walk from the parking lot to the field. My friend, one in a series of caretakers for me while I recovered, held my hand, literally, while we sat. It was not the walk that was so difficult-it was everyone knew. When no one knew. Our lives were exposed. Odd as it may seem, I was still so ashamed of the life I’d been leading, hiding in, covering up. I was both relieved and horrified to have it in the open.

It is nice to just sit here and feel the cold on my skin and know it’s over. This season I’ve managed to blend into the seasonal Saturday ritual with a few casual hellos in an otherwise invisibility. I feel like I have created a decent life. Even if I revert back to all those old unhealthy behaviors, I continue to try to come back to center. I finally have a center to come back to. As time goes by, I’ll learn how to stay closer to it. I’ve learned so much about where I was, and am, and am going in the last year. I see a ton of  work remains, and that there will always be work to do. That I have to be strong enough to do it. That I am strong enough.

As I watch the game, I reflect back on an observation I made while debating leaving my marriage.  ‘Soccer teaches (kids) a lot about life. They have to understand how close they are to the goal, and make a judgment call to take the shot, or pass. If they decide to take the shot, they have to do it with 100% of their being, and even then, their efforts can be deflected. They’ll have to regroup and try again. Even if the ball gets away from them for a while, they can regain their composure and control, and go for it again until they are actually successful.’

Leaving an abusive relationship is a lot like deciding to go for the goal. If you take it, do it quickly and with 100% of your being. If you aren’t successful the first time, or the second time, try, try, and try again.  Even if the opposing goalie does everything to make it seem impossible. The feeling of a hard fought victory cannot be understated.

We also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perserverance, and perserverance, character; and character, hope.  Romans 5:3

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The Secret Garden

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Lisette d. Johnson

There is a story inside me that longs to be told.  It is a story of an emergence from a dispassionate life created amidst the daily chaos and years of pushing it down and back. I cannot tell you the story; speak the words. I am …. afraid to speak. Still, now. I write because I cannot say it. I can tell you the events, matter of fact, as though someone else’s life. Yet I cannot verbalize the feeling, the emotion. The utter weight of the shame put upon me, which was not mine to assume. My voice cannot be shouted out if I have none. My words cannot be twisted around if they do not pass my lips. I can predict how they are received if I do not say them.

Today I decided to write my life as a novel. My life after. In it I create me. A character that moves between the pages of past and present, public and private. My character breaks free from her past. Like a tethered balloon that once struggled against the ties that bound it, I am finally cut loose and float weightlessly, skyward.

In the book I’ve created, I escape into someone else, if even for just a little while. Someone anonymous. Unknown. Someone who does not have a history. I become the woman who is inside me; without shame, without accusations. The heroine, who against the odds survived, now content to be invisible in anonymity; no scars or events to explain. There are no questions to answer, there is no emotion to untangle. In the space between the words on the pages, lines fade and blur. I write her free of it all in this part of her story. No longer struggling to define what is black and white, she settles to accept the gray in her life. She is the gray.

All the roads we have to walk are winding, and all the lights that lead the way are blinding. Ryan Adams

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