11:26pm
Called Dubya.
Told him that I loved him, and Tiger, even if they didn’t love me back.
Asked him if he could please remember the good times that we had, instead of just the leaving, that I did to them.
The absence of a mother.
A broken family.
Ripped apart.
By grief, trauma, and addiction.
Told him that it was the worst mistake of my life, walking away, that I was addicted to drugs and couldn’t possibly make good decisions.
Told him that I thought that I was bad for him and Tiger, and that’s why I left.
I had just buried a daughter, for Christ’s sake, when we got together.
I buried Kaylee in March of 2008.
Tiger was born in December of 2009.
It was too fast, too soon.
I was still reeling from the shock, the anguish, of burying two babies.
But Dubya had that innocent, child-like charm, that hope-filled existence, like anything could happen, if you just tried hard enough.
And so I fell in love with him.
In love with hope, really.
That there could be a day when it would all get better.
After she was born, I picked up the addiction like I hadn’t even left off, nine months before.
I had to be sedated to survive.
Tiger would cry and I would hear Ethan’s plaintive, hoarse howling from the pain that I couldn’t stop, in the end.
The feeling of helplessness would just come flooding over me, any time she cried, and I would experience it all over again–the visions, the smells, the sounds.
It was always at night when it was the worst.
Always at 3am.
When I was alone with a screaming infant that I could do nothing to protect, nothing to save him from this constant, excruciating pain.
I couldn’t be near Tiger.
Infant Napalm, I remember thinking.
Every time she cries, my brain explodes into horrific memories of blood, blisters, and bandages.
Every time.
This is how PTSD works.
I held it together for 14 months, with that one little psychotic episode when she was five weeks old, when I couldn’ t stop screaming at the pouring rain that was coming down in sheets from the black, moonless sky that night.
I was blacked out for most of it.
Don’t remember a thing.
That is how the brain protects you from trauma.
Your conscious brain just shuts off for a while, because what you are experiencing is too painful to bear, as a human being.
My body needed to release this pain somehow, so it found a way.
It couldn’t possibly stay inside me any longer, and so it came out in screaming, wailing at a God, at a Universe, that I thought hated me, had forsaken me, and thrown me to the wolves, to suffer and suffer, until they tore me apart enough–until I lost enough lifeblood, that my heart would finally give out.
Wolves…dismantling me, piece, by piece, until I died.
That’s how it felt.
To be a disemboweled doe that is still standing still while the giant dogs start to eat the flesh that they have torn from her body.
Until she finally falls down, succumbs, and dies.
When Dubya came to visit me in Clarion Psych, I was so happy to see him.
I put my arms out to hug him, walking fast toward him, when I heard his deep, comforting voice behind me, and he picked me up–swept me off my feet, really–and carried me, like a baby, to a chair, and then sat down and held me, while I told him about the new friends that I had been making in the looney bin.
Held me hard.
I weep to write it, the memory is so raw and painful.
That kind of love that we had for each other.
Wild and crazy–doesn’t make sense to anybody–but plain as day to see–love.
We were so in love.
He just wanted me to be fixed, to be better, and nobody knew how to fix my shattered heart.
We all wanted that.
Nobody knew that the antidote to grief is time, life experience, and helping other people.
I know that now.
But there is no vaccine to prevent it, and no Band-Aid, no quick fix, to stop it.
While I was struggling with my profound grief of my first two children dying in my arms, Tiger and Dubya were struggling with their profound grief of the sudden loss of a mother, a wife, a family.
The sudden destruction of a family unit, as if a wrecking ball had targeted our nice, beautiful, yellow house, that Dubya had bought, in anticipation of a family.
“I just want to be married and have a family,” he had told me, on the first date, even–which shocked the hell out of me.
So we tried to do that.
I failed miserably.
He was never the same again.
In a terrible, angry, resentful, broken way.
In a truly awful way.
My doctors tell me that my heart has been damaged, and that there is scarring on it.
I’m not surprised.
What surprises me is that I lived through it at all.
And that the reason for me living through it is to tell my story, so that others will learn things like empathy and compassion.
And so I wrote it down.
In journals, that became books and blogs, that are available to anybody with an Amazon or WordPress account and a few dollars.
The blog is free, of course.
Amazon doesn’t let you put ebooks on it for free, or I would do that.
But here’s the thing–people with no empathy or compassion don’t read.
They don’t learn new things.
On purpose.
And so they never change, never grow.
They are like Dubya is now, stuck in the pain, the rage, the anger at the crap hand he was dealt in life by accidentally marrying a drug-addicted whore, which is how he describes me to others, in other words.
Choices, he says.
I made bad choices, and so now I have to live with the fact that my now 16-year old daughter will not speak to me, hasn’t spoken to me in well over a year, save for two conversations, both of which ended up with her hanging up on me.
The truth hurts.
But it turns out that the truth is also how you grow into a whole human being.
The truth lets you make your own decisions, instead of basing your choices and your mental and emotional well-being off of what other people have told you.
The truth will set you free.
And so I tried to tell her the truth about me.
And I’m sure I failed miserably at that, too.
But I am a whole person now.
So I am hopeful.
That some day, in some way, she will open her heart just a tiny crack, and let some light in.
Shed some light, and truth, on what actually happened to her.
To all of us.
I still have hope.
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