A Walk with God

As I said in my last blog, God has been speaking to me lately in the most powerful ways.  I wish I had written about them each at the time, but I am going to try to go back and remember them now. 

Lately, I feel so empty and dead inside.  I’m always tired.  I have no motivation and I don’t really care about anything.  I don’t want to do anything or talk to anyone.  All I want to do is sleep - I could sleep for 10-11 hours, and I do when I get the chance.  And still, I wake up and don’t want to get out of bed.  I can’t focus on anything or remember anything.  Sometimes I even forget people’s names; not people I am close to but people whose names I should know.  This sounds like the description a “professional” would give of a depressed person, but I don’t feel depressed.  I don’t feel anything.  I thought, after all the stress of my Dad’s visit, that I was just worn out and needed time to recover.  But that was over 3 weeks ago. 

Yesterday, I found a ray of hope in this discouraging period.  I was talking on the phone with Sharon, which is always encouraging, but the best part for me came at the end of our conversation.   She has recently been through a very stressful time, just like me.  She began describing the emptiness that has followed, and she could have been talking about me.  Of course, I was not happy about my friend’s struggle, but as we began to relate similar feelings, a realization dawned on me.  The similarities are more than just a coincidence.  Sharon and I have shared such parallel paths in our walk with God. This is not just some random low time in my life; even this is God’s intentional work in me!  Whatever I feel or don’t feel, God is faithfully accomplishing His purposes in me and answering my prayers for His life in me. It could never be clearer to me than now, when I have nothing to offer, that this is His work, not mine.  “He who began a good work in your will be faithful to complete it.”   

Marriage is….laughing together, crying together, grieving together, celebrating together, working together, growing up together, sometimes growing apart, fighting, hurting, rejecting, accepting, betraying, forgiving (70×70x70), loyalty, doubting, trusting, believing in someone you know will let you down, agreeing, disagreeing, taking, giving, standing by someone even when you dislike them, communicating, not communicating, security, insecurity, feeling love, feeling hate, feeling nothing at times, knowing there is one person in the world who truly knows who you are and loves you anyway, being one and yet separate, the hardest human relationship in the world and yet the most worthwhile…commitment.

…a mom’s advice to my daughter (from a recent IM conversation)

My father left yesterday morning, scared and heartbroken.  The last days of our time together were pleasant.  Caroline surprised him with a visit home for the weekend and he was very happy to see her.  But as the time came to leave, he grew more and more depressed.  While keeping a cheerful face for the rest of my family, he didn’t bother to hide his feelings from me.  He made comments about being unwanted, being afraid, being alone, and not wanting to live anymore.  Though I resented the guilt he was trying to put on me, I didn’t doubt the depth of his pain, and it was distressing for me.  I had no idea how to comfort him.  I know that my father is only reaping what he has sown, and that I should not stand in the way of that, but it is still a painful thing to watch.  All I could do was reassure him of my love. 

I was settling in for the night at Jo’s house when Phil called me.  He said my dad wanted to talk with me.  I had spent all day trying to calm the anxiety I was experiencing and convince myself that I was safe from further confrontation.  The last thing I wanted was to talk to my dad, but I knew I should not refuse.  As I waited for Dad to get on the phone, I chided myself for my irrational fear.

Several people have told me that I should not trust my dad.  I, of all people, am very aware that my father is a manipulator.  I do, however, believe his penitence was genuine, but it really doesn’t matter.  It is not my place to judge another’s heart, and there is no need, for it would not change my response.  My love and forgiveness will not depend on the purity of his heart.  My choice to forgive is necessary for the healing in my own heart.  And, in loving my father when he does not deserve my love, I am only passing on what God has given me.   

Dad,

You asked Phil last night why we couldn’t sit down and discuss this.  I have tried to discuss this with you several times without success.  It is very difficult for me to talk with you because you don’t usually listen to me – you talk over me or just ignore what I say.   You said that I am making a big drama and you don’t understand what it is about.  I did not make this a big drama.  You did.  All Phil and I simply said was that 3 weeks is long enough for you to visit here.  And because you didn’t like that, you have turned this into a big issue.  I tried to give you general reasons why it isn’t a good idea for you to stay longer because I don’t think there would be any purpose in explaining further and I don’t want to hurt you.   But you would not respect our wishes and accept this.  You continued to pressure me to let you stay longer, and try to make me feel guilty, making it harder than it already is.  I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you before you came that I didn’t want you to stay more than a couple of weeks, but I did try to tell you several times and you ignored me.  So I thought it would be better to just discuss it in person when you came.  I didn’t expect you to be planning your life around your stay here.
I am not holding a grudge against you for things that have happened many years ago.  I do not want to allow bitterness to consume my life as I have watched it consume yours, and I have chosen over and over to forgive you.  However, it has been a lifetime process because the woundings continue to this day, and I find that I am continually having to work through the hurt and anger.  I tried to talk to you last summer about my feelings and you denied everything I said and only would say that you were sorry that we had “misunderstood” one another.  
For as long as I can remember, our relationship has been characterized by intimidation, fear, controlling, manipulation and criticism.  I very rarely remember being praised by you or hearing that you were proud of me for anything.  None of that has changed much to this day. You’ve spent years of my life not speaking to me for disagreeing with you.  At one point you declared “WAR” on me and threatened to sue me to have my children taken from me.  You have told me many lies over the years.  When you and Mom divorced, you did not seem to care how you traumatized Sherri and me; we were just weapons to try to hurt Mom.  And you did traumatize us with the horrible things you said about our mother, very inappropriate behavior to me demonstrating Mom’s so-called “slutty behavior”, trying to kidnap us from church, threatening behavior (like the knife in the kitchen floor that terrified us) and many other things.  For 25 years, you cursed my mother to me, trying to turn me against her, even until a year after her death (when you spent an hour telling me how she had wronged you 25 years ago as if I hadn’t heard it hundreds of times) until I finally said I would listen to no more if you wanted a relationship with me.   
Now it starts all over again since you have begun the campaign of bad-mouthing my sister to me every chance you get, even though I insisted when this all started that you not talk to me about her.  You call Sherri a liar and yet you lie about her.  What Sherri said was true.  She did not say what she said just to hurt you and she did not call you a pedophile.  However, the memory of you having us model our underwear is MY memory as well.  I remember getting to an age (10 or 11) when it was embarrassing to me and I refused to do it anymore.  We both know that you meant no harm by it but it made us uncomfortable once we started growing up.   You have made your daughters as well as your granddaughters uncomfortable by not respecting their boundaries as women or their privacy.  I have so many memories of these awkward situations and so do my daughters.  For example, walking in on the girls while they are in the bathroom or changing in their rooms (and trying to hug them instead of turning away and leaving immediately) or comments like “you look sexy” or “if I were your age, I’d have to take you for a tumble” are inappropriate and embarrassing for a young girl coming from her grandfather.  There have been many examples of this over many years.  None of these are things I want to discuss with you and I have tried to overlook them for years, because I don’t believe you intend to be offensive.  I know it will hurt you and so I have avoided defending Sherri.  And maybe you will be angry with me and call me a liar who just wants to hurt you.  But it is not true.  I say this only because you have pressed me over and over to explain myself to you.  And because it is unfair to my daughters to continue to remain silent about it.  And it is unfair to my sister to allow you to call her a liar for bringing it up to you. 
I could say more but I don’t want to.  Sherri and I have both had a lot to overcome in our lives for all of these reasons.  Sherri’s point (that you missed) when she talked to you was that she has always been scared of you (not of being molested); we both were – because you wanted us to be.  It’s a form of control that worked on us for many years.  You have been rejecting Sherri for all her life (and her family).  You’ve never admitted or even acknowledged any of this.  You never seem to think you are wrong about anything in ANY of your relationships. It’s always someone else’s fault and you miss the “coincidence” that you have problems with almost everyone you have a relationship with.
You asked Phil what was so bad that I wanted to end our relationship over it.  I never said anything about ending our relationship. You are the one who seems to be doing that.  All I said was it was time for you to leave soon.   Your needs have always come first in our relationship, but for once, I’m going to have to put my needs first.   If our relationship ends, it will be your choice.  You may think you are easy to live with, but you are not.  I have forgiven you for much, I have tolerated much, and I have given much to our relationship.  But I have to stop putting myself and my feelings aside for you.   I know it is hard for you to admit any fault in yourself and therefore you might be very angry for what I have said and choose to end our relationship and demonize me for it.  And again that is your choice. This is a lot of really hard stuff for me to say to you and that’s why I have avoided being specific about why our relationship is stressful to me and why I would rather write it than say it.  But you demanded an explanation so I now I have given you one.   In spite of it all, I do love you and I understand that you have wanted to be a good father.   I’m sorry that we couldn’t just end this visit pleasantly.  I would have if you had let me.   I’m very, very tired of the confrontations with you that have been going on my whole life, so I’m not sticking around for anymore of them.  The stress has become unbearable for me and it’s making me ill.  I just want peace but I’m not willing anymore to accept it if it always has to be on your terms.
You have once again made this about money. If you want your money back because you are angry with me, you are welcome to it.  It won’t hurt me.  I was fine before I had it and I’ll be fine without it.  Money doesn’t have the value to me that it does to you.  If you don’t trust us with it, you never should have given it to us anyway.  But if you decide to wait until you actually need it, it will be there and we will give it to you when you ask.  And if you want to ask us for more than you gave us and say we stole from you, then you can live with that lie but my conscience is clean about your money.  I did just what you told me to do with it and I only spent what you told me to.
I’m still here to be your daughter and love you.  I just need a little space right now.  If you want to honestly consider and respond to this letter, you can write me back or we can talk at a later time. 

Everyone has always told me that I am my father’s favorite child.  It’s funny to me that this could be  considered some advantage to me over my sister.  My sister has always felt unloved and rejected by my father.  I certainly understand how painful it is for a child to be rejected by their parent, even when the parent is abusive.  All children long for love and acceptance from their parents, and when they don’t receive that, it is very damaging.  But it is equally damaging to be the focus of attention by an abusive parent.  Yet the sympathy has always been for my sister, and I have spent my life being made to feel guilty for something that was not in my control, that I did not ask for or even want. 

We moved to Atlanta when I was 14 years old.  The distance from my father, whom we left in SC, was helpful.  I didn’t see him or talk to him very often during my high school years, although every contact I remember having with him was stressful and usually ended in a fight.  He took every opportunity to malign my mother and her family and, as I grew angrier and angrier with his brainwashing attempts, I became stronger and stronger in standing up to him.  Since my father is not one to be crossed, we didn’t get along well.  If it wasn’t about my mother, it was criticisms of me or someone else.  He was always negative and it was miserable to be around him.  I just wanted him out of my life. 

After struggling for two years to make it on her own, my mother regretfully conceded the need for help.  She decided that we needed to move in with her parents in Pensacola.  I did not want to move again, but I knew we had no choice.  We just couldn’t get by on Mom’s salary.  My mother, having to this point been carefully oblivious to my increasingly wild lifestyle, was finally forced to face the problem one night when I came home quite evidently drunk.  As a result, my sister and I were immediately sent to Pensacola, while my mother stayed in Atlanta to work.  It was, no doubt, a relief to hand over her troubled daughter to the parents she trusted.  But my poor grandparents, having raised three sweet daughters in the innocent 1950s, were not prepared for dealing with a problem like me.  It was two years before my mother actually joined us in Pensacola.  She worked and lived in Atlanta, and even became involved in a serious relationship there.  It didn’t take long for me to fall right back in with the bad crowd.  They are never hard to find.  And I needed escape more than ever.  Because, while I might have told myself it didn’t really matter to me, the truth is that, while my mother had long been something of an absent parent, this time I truly was abandoned. 

When I visited this IMT recently, she indicated to me that there was physical evidence in my body that traumas occurred in my life at the ages of 12 and 16.  Don’t ask me how she knew that.  When she first asked me, I thought, no, there’s nothing really special about those ages.  Then I began to think back and realized that she was right. 

My parents divorced when I was twelve.  Most people would say that is a very traumatic event in a child’s life, but I have always seen it as the day I was freed from my dad’s oppression.  It was not sad to me; it was a relief.  I guess that’s why I didn’t immediately think of it when the therapist mentioned my twelfth year.  But as I began to recall all the events of that year, I realized that it was actually a very traumatic time for me. 

I was told my mother was having a hysterectomy and my parents sent my sister and me away for the entire summer.  We spent one month at our paternal grandmother’s home and one month at our maternal grandparent’s home. It was a long time to be away from my mom, especially since I was worried about her health.  It was hardest being with my father’s mother because she was so strange and was not very nuturing.  Once we went to my mother’s parents, it was much easier as they were very loving and comforting. 

I remember the day we came home and my mother was still in bed.  My father told us to come to their room because they wanted to talk to us.  My mother said that they were separating.  It was a surprise because my parents had kept their problems very private and we had no idea how unhappy my mother was.  My father started sobbing and so did my sister, who went to comfort him.  I just sat beside my mother feeling contempt for my father’s self-pity and thinking how happy I would be to see him go.  I didn’t shed one tear. 

Once my father moved out, I felt as if I had been released from a life sentence in prison.  I went a little wild with the new-found freedom I felt.   My friends and I started experimenting with cigarettes, alcohol and marijuana. My mother escaped her pain by keeping busy with work and social activities such as participating in a local theatre production, and she was rarely home.  I was on my own.  That’s when the trauma began.

First, my dog died - Timothy George O’Leary, we had named our beautiful Irish Setter.  We called him George and found out when he was still a puppy that he had epilepsy.  He was my best friend and would sit with me anytime I needed a shoulder to cry on, looking at me with those big, brown compassionate eyes.  He was my first dog and I loved him so much.  When my dad first moved out, my parents tried to work on restoring their relationship.  One day, they were on a date and we were home with a babysitter.  George was having seizures all day long and I couldn’t get his medicine down him.  We went for a bike ride and when we came home, I called George but he didn’t come.  I joked that he was probably dead, which was the last thing I really expected.  But when I went upstairs, I found him lying still in my parents room.  He was indeed dead, and the guilt I felt over my flippant comment was like salt in the wound. When my parents finally came home, my dad wanted to bury George but I begged him not to do it.  I couldn’t accept that George was dead and hoped that if we were patient, he would “wake up”.  He was only two years old.  My dad had to wait until I went to bed to bury him.  George’s death to me was symbolic of the death of our family.

My mother wanted her marriage to survive and tried to get my father to go to counseling with her.  He said the only thing wrong with their marriage was her “shitty” attitude.  But when he saw how serious she was, he put on all his charm to win her back.  He even started going to church with us.  I don’t know about my mother, but even at my young age, I could see through his guise of being a changed man. When efforts at reconciliation failed, my dad went psychotic and things got very ugly.  He wrote a letter to my mother’s parents, trying to win them to his side and convince them to straighten out their daughter.  To this day, he has never forgiven them for standing by her.  He began to harrass my mother at work, calling her constantly and vacillating between begging for another chance and threatening vengeance. 

I didn’t know about any of these things until I was much older, but I did know what he did to my sister and me.  He began a campaign that lasted for 25 years (until my mother’s death) to turn us against our mother.  He told us horrible things about her.  One day, we came home to find a butcher knife stuck into our kitchen floor - a sign from my father.  We were terrified.  I remember the creepy feeling he gave me when he told me that he had a private detective watching us.  I also recall the night my father came to our church to pick us up, though we knew our mother was supposed to get us.  He was acting very suspicious and sneaky, and we were afraid.  Apparently, it was his plan to kidnap us that night.  Fortunately, we refused to go with him.  When we went to visit him at his apartment, he would spend the whole time talking about what a bad person our mother was.  One night in particular, he scared us so bad that I called Mom and asked her to come pick us up, which she did.  He was trying to demonstrate to me how my mother was flirting with men at a party and behaving like a slut, using me to illustrate this.  I was so angry and scared of him that night; his behavior was crazy.  I locked myself in a bedroom until my mom arrived.  My sister was already locked in a bedroom, so terrified by whatever he had done to her before I came in the room that she blocked it all out from her memory.  It never seemed to matter to my father how much he traumatized and hurt his own children; we were just weapons to use against our mom.  This was not the temporary insanity of a jilted, heartbroken husband; this was the beginning of a lifelong pattern. 

We begged our mother not to make us visit Dad, but she insisted that we try to have a good relationship with our father.  I suppose she didn’t want to be accused of doing what he was doing - trying to turn us against our own parent.  And I’m sure that we didn’t tell her all that he did and said to us, in an attempt to protect her from being hurt further by him.  But my sister recently said that she thinks Mom was wrong to force us to have a relationship with an abusive, mentally disturbed father and I think she’s probably right.  I never thought of it before but, there again, our mother should have protected us from him.  Unfortunately, she was too busy trying to survive herself.  Finally, however, Mom decided that we had to move to Atlanta to get away from Dad.   I wish I could say that my mother, sister and I lived in peace after that, but my story isn’t over yet.   

“Tell me about when you were ten, Kim,” the therapist asked.  This was not a psychological therapist, but an Integrative Manual Therapist that I went to see a few days ago.  IMTs use a total body approach to treat physical ailments, working with all the body systems, which would, of course, include the emotional components as they have such a huge effect on our physical wellbeing.  They certainly have taken a toll on mine.

I don’t remember much of my childhood, but I have one memory of my tenth year that has always stood out to me.  I told the therapist about the family vacation we took to Washington, DC.  As with all vacations that have included my father, it was miserable.  We were touring the sights of our nation’s capital, which should have been fun, but it wasn’t.  We went to take a tour of the Mint, and see how money was made.  In his typical selfish, ungentlemanly behavior, my father had my mother drop us off in front of the Mint and then go find a parking place.  We waited and waited and waited for my mother.  As my sister and I became more and more frightened for her safety, my father became more and more angry.  Finally, he forced us to go take the tour without her.  ‘He’d show her’ was his attitude. We didn’t want to go; we wanted to wait for mom.  I don’t remember a thing about the tour; I only remember worrying about my mother.  Why wasn’t my father worried about his wife alone in a big city, I wondered?  When we finally came out, my mother had arrived.  She had spent all that time driving around trying to find a parking space, and then had to walk a long way to get to us.  I’m sure she was stressed, frustrated and upset, and my dad was still angry with her for inconveniencing him.  He spoiled the day, punishing my mother with his cold, hostile attitude.  Another seed of hate towards my father was planted in me that day - one of many.