Authenticly Transformed

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Just D on Thursday

Let me ‘splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up…

I am married. I have kids. I love my husband.
I am a Christian, I go to church, I love God.
I am a mom, a caregiver, a nurturer.
I am a doula, an educator, a giver.

Somewhere in there, the enemy has been silently laying down a trap and I fell hook line and sinker (bible, concordance, and highlighter?) into it.

he laid down a stepping stone pathway in places so soft and tender that I was misled. Where I stepped was not the place of love, obedience, authenticity, light, truth, or created by my Saviour.
Where I stepped was greed, selfishness, self desire, pity, fear, pride, self righteousness, self reliance, faux truth, justification, and worldly treasure.

God is so good though, so faithful, so present. He found a crack and shone in His light. And as the saying goes, “and even darkness flees from him…” And once the darkness receeded I was actually able to see the places I’d misstepped. It wasn’t pretty.

I was straddling the line… I fell off and tried to stay the course… and I went from D to Just D to Anonymous, Anonymous D, FC anonymous D… and I’m tired of trying to be someone other than me.

I need to focus on some big important stuff in my life. I hope you’ll stick around…

Daughter

Not too many more gardening cover ups here… just the facts.

I spilled my heart and soul to a church member the other night.  I happened to come across his comment here and panicked because I thought I’d been so careful to leave no trace of myself, my real self, anywhere.  As it turns out, yes, he had backtracked and found this blog, but had no idea it was me… so there was this interesting and awkward long pause after I hysterically confronted him, and then I just unloaded a whole delivery truck full of fertilizer onto him.  And let me say, this guy has his very own pile of fertlizer and one small shovel.  Poor guy – here I am sobbing and wailing and spilling out my whole entire garden worth of fertilizer and he was so calm and sweet.

He gave me some great biblical based premises and the one phrase that is in my heart over and over is this: ”Jane, you are a daughter of God!”

How cool is that?  I mean, I knew that already, but to hear someone else proclaim it to me as a fact, a given, an undeniable truth, was so comforting.    He also told me how one of satans tools is to keep us individually isolated.  My determination to keep this issue private, to keep it only between myself and whoevers house I was staying at, was another form of destruction.  To share my pain and confusion with christians who can minister to me is a way to defeat satan… that was news to me.  But it makes sense. Especially since my heart is driven to authenticiy.

Today I am a daughter of God.  He is my father and to him I will go for guidance, love, tenderness, comfort. and even to recieve discipline.  Unlike my earthly father who told me to “suck it up, you’ve got an attitude and you need to fix it!” My true father will share my sorrow and will provide clear direction. Or should I say ‘planting instructions’?

Get Real

Well, it’s not like I was fooling anyone anyway.  If you have any clue at all, you’d guess that I wasn’t really talking about gardening. I didn’t really think I’d fool anyone, it just seemed easier to step back a little and recolor the truth so it didn’t hurt so much to look at.

You can recolor it all you want, it doesn’t change it’s foundation.

It’s 12:27 am … and I’m here writing because up until 30 minutes ago my husband was still awake and I couldn’t bear to go to bed when he was still there.  I waited and waited for him to go to sleep… but he kept coming down here and wandering around in a lost kind of way, in his BVDs and his messy bed head, like a little boy who needs his mommy.  I couldn’t help but notice the sweetness even as my stomach tightened and my breath shortened and my hands fisted up in my lap.

I keep trying to remember all the adoration and respect, all the sensual passion and deep seated love I have always felt for him… and I do remember it, but I remember it as then, and not at all as now.  It sounds so trite doesn’t it? That I’ve maybe “fallen out of love” with him.  How ridiculous, because any married person with any integrity will tell you that the passions of love come, and go, but it’s the care and love and respect that hold it together during crying infants, meetings with the principal, and arguements over the Visa bill.  And so, I think, that it’s not so much I’ve fallen out of love, as that I’ve lost the vital parts of respect, care, concern.  That is so painful to say. 

It’s entirely possible, with all due respect, that all this shit is my problem to begin with.  I’m the one who is mostly unhappy, I’m the one who is mostly wanting out, I’m the one who actually left.  I’m the one sitting up waiting until the other is asleep.  Maybe it is all me. 

And even if it is, there is a time for realizing that as shameful and degrading as it may feel, my truth is my truth and if I can’t be honest, then I can’t be at all.

All of which is fine and dandy to set my thoughts upon until I imagine the anger and betrayal my boy12 will feel. I see his cheeks flushed, the skin around his eyes tight and pale. I see that he won’t look me in the eye, nor will he release the well of tears pooling in his lashes.  He won’t bend, soften, give mercy, or forgiveness.  He is my son, my man, my buddy.  I don’t know if I could stand that distance, and the knowledge that I built it by myself.  I imagine my girl10 and her bewilderment.  I wonder at the conflicted turmoil in her heart because she really doesn’t quite comprehend why mommy left.  I think about how she needs me to physically tuck her in, to smooth her hair back from her brow, to kiss the fleshy peachy cheek of hers with it’s galaxy of freckles.  How she needs to touch me, whisper to me, hold on tighter and longer every night.  And my girl18… she barely got this far with me along, what will happen if I’m gone?  She’d never forgive me either, although she’d pretend. 

I can ruin one life, my own, but I can’t ruin three lives of helpless bystanders. 

Or can I?

I pray.  I pray.  God, take this feeling from me.  I refuse this satan driven selfish emotion…

… and it only grows stronger.  I know that God does NOT want this thing for my family, but I also truly trust in Him to mold me and shape me, and to do the same for my children, in the way that He sees fit. 

I wish we saw eye to eye.

When all else fails, try try again…

…or just burn the fucker down.

I went home… I slept in my bed… alone. And I thought it felt awful, tense and stressfull.  I was trapped in there and I hated it and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it again… but then I came back again anyway just because I really did want to devote myself  to us… and I woke you up and asked you to sleep in the bed with me… just to be there, not for anything other than the sake of being spouses.  And it was good and sweet.  And I wanted it to go on… but then it just all went flying out the window. 

Too Much Fertilizer burns out the soil completely.  I’m burnt.

Nothing is growing here in this garden and the root of that one weed last week disrupted soil all over the entire garden, dropping the ornamental shrubs one at a time leaving just destruction and waste in it’s path.  Damn those weeds and that cheap store bought fertilizer.  Never again…

I hate how quickly the sticker bush weeds grow.  One minute you get a small fragile self twining vine with soft hair like coverings and the beginnings of a bloom… and the next minute it’s a full blown stinky, prickly, seeded and self fertilizing plant.

I rip it from the soil, pulling it out, roots and all.  It stubbornly hangs on as ferociously as it can, and then gives way.  Just like my sprit and faith… willful but giving way every time.

To one of my gardeners, thank you for the air mattress, the comforter, the wine. Thank you for listening, empathizing, offering suggestons… thank you for the house keys.  You may never know how much that means to me… But God does.  And so do I. 

And to the gardener who helps me plant the pretties- thanks for being my “family”… my “person”!  I couldn’t do this without you.

This isn’t Kansas, Toto!

I say, I can’t breath! I can’t THINK! I can’t even sort out which way is which and I lose all sense of reality when we do this!

The hysterical rabid tone of my voice is weird to hear, as weird to me as is his twisted grimace of contempt.

I say to others, I love him, I do! He is my best friend, my partner… all I want is to be with him… only not like this. I can’t.

The desperation and tears are oddly disconnected from the words.

I am home in a weird surprised way. I wake him and tell him to come to bed.  In the pitch black storm flattened night, we both clamber into our bed, under our sheets, under our down comforter and atop our individual pillows – down for me, polyfil for him.  We automatically assume our standard positions but in the blink of a sigh we turn away, not in anger, but in respect for the broken hearts that lie between us.

I am gone again in the morning. Rushing off to help, heal, save, salvage…to empty our pockets in the never ending attempt to heal this world we live in.  He is angry again. Let down again. Abandoned again.  He is worried and fearful and anxious under the self rightious pride. 

I call, he snips, I end the call. 

He calls, I ignore the call.

He sends a cryptic text message and I choose to ignore it.  Thinking only instead, of the deep night sky, the shush of tires on the road, the cool air blowing in from the vent, and the thought of endless peace. 

I sleep very little.  I imagine he does too, based on the text message that arrived somewhere around 1am.  I replied in kind… and then tried to sleep more, fitfully dodging “thoughts” and “future” and even “tomorrow”.  The baby wakes and is sick and wailing and inconsolable.  I think that if I were in MY home, I could walk around, use the bathroom, get her some juice.  But I am not.  I am in a basement that smells faintly of cat urine and the cedar scent of a partially created wine cellar.  I am here, and not wanting to wake up my host and I’m so tired… and I can only think: blanket, pillow, sleep.  Blanket, pillow, sleep.  Blank -

In the morning he is angry to see me.  Words fly like arrows, flashing like hummingbirds, biting like mosquitos. In the face of his rage all I can see in my minds eye is the pile of clothes I’d stacked on the ironing board, the toiletries I’d gathered in the wicker tote, and the baby that was sleeping downstairs. 

I hear his words, I can almost almost almost understand them… but his twisting and sarcasm and dry wit overpower me attempts and I become stereotypical… whining, crying, weak.

He leaves.  I stay.  He calls… and I answer.  Why?

Because.

He says, “come, then. just come.”

 I say, “why? why now and not a week ago?”

He cannot answer and just says, “come”

I say I will. Of course.  And I do… getting into my car and driving to where he has driven himself and in the back of my mind I think, darn it, now there is only one car and if I leave he won’t have any way to get help if he needs it, if the kids need it.  I’m stuck

We speak tenderly and carefully, softly, hushed.  We speak in carefully formed translations of our heartbeats.  I drive, he sits.  I try not to hit the bumps but I can’t help it… and there is secret awful shameful pleasure in every single bump I blast over.

In my head I am still planning on leaving.  In my heart I want to go – but it is my obligation that makes me stay.  My standard, “what if… and I wasn’t there?” voice in my head snarking at me.  I stay.  Finally breaking down before dark time and putting on my pajamas.  I accept the beer he offers and the realization that I am staying here sinks in uncomfortably. 

Uncomfortable because I don’t really want to stay… but I’m too lazy and complacent and tired to leave.  The arguing and fussing, the faces he makes and my inexhaustable tears, the torment and trauma of it all is too much. I’ve already been there and done that… I can’t do it anymore.

I drink my beer, here at the computer. He is there, with his.  We exchange polite pleasantries as the hours pass.  Finally, oh finally… He goes to bed and I can take my first full inhale of the day.  Finally I can relax my shoulders, stop clenching my jaw, stop gnawing my nails.  Finally I can rest.

But sleep avoids me.  She darts out of reach every time I think I’ve got her in my grasp.  Yes, sleep is a woman.  Sleep, she is a bitch!  I cannot catch her because, after all, this isn’t my home.  This is unfamiliar territory.  This is ME wanting something… and not automatically caving in, and being able to find justification for my reasons, and shaking my head dismissively at myself.  Stupid lazy cow.

I cannot sleep for the whirling hurrican in my mind, the violent tornado in my heart… and the unmet deepest desire to get away is frolicking in my spirit, erasing the last vestiges of The Holy Spirit and It’s power, hiding over the pureness of my forgiveness with it’s cloudy selfishness, and yet illuminating me under a spotlight for my God to see.

This.. isn’t… my life.  This is… someone elses life. 

And then I hear the thump skweeeeeek of him getting out of bed and walking across the hardwood floors.  I hear the shshh shshh shshh of him walking on the carpeting in the hallway and the thud skweeel of his feet on the stairs and every cell in my body tightens, cringes, deflates.

He stands and stares at me.  Yep. This is my life after all.  Him standing and staring while I am doing and going.