Built a Wall, Watched it Fall...

When life has left me feeling cold, a good story nourishes me like hot supper does a starving person.

I will start the story today, but it will take a few blogs--or lifetimes--to finish it. I hope that readers will patiently wait for the next part before "chopping off my head", just as the King waited for Sheherezade to tell the story so long ago. I, too, want to survive its telling and live into the next chapter.

Stories are vital to me, sort of like a bread crumb trail to find my lost heart. I can track my past by them and I have charted my future while scouting new ones. I believe that everyone was born into someone else's story and then goes on to create one of their own.  I have even found that I was the hero, the villain, the damsel in distress, and every other character, at one time or another. 

There is an untold story in me which boils on the back burner of my heart like simmering kettles of soup on a wintry day.  I know better than to leave the story unattended.  I'm sure that it would either boil over or boil dry inside of me and my story would become a tragedy instead of what it is.

I have decided that the only one who can tell my story right is me.  The bajillion variables in the story, the plot twists, the comedic lines, the dramas, the outcomes...each reflects some of my history, but few reveal any of my heart.  I want to be remembered for my heart, not for the things which happened to me. So, I will just have to tell the story myself, just as I had to live it myself.   

Mine is a story of longing: of waiting, of wishing, of dreaming that things were different, that I was different, that I could start a different story over in a different way. I never knew that "different" was okay, but I did discover that it is a hard condition to deal with and few people want to. Men I met said that I was "complicated". (I had just thought that I  was a little too open and expressive for some people's bland tastes.) That comment only made me long even more for someone to ease the pain of living in a lonely landscape of a life. 

Anyway, my story was  made complicated mostly because I carried so many secrets inside. Few knew anything about my Mothers, my blended family, the explosions at home, and other secrets.  I wanted someone to talk with, to help me forget those naughty stories, and to help me to live new ones. Out loud stories, not secret ones. I wanted adventure! But safe adventure. In my girlish heart, this could only mean one thing. I married at 18.

As a child, I had dreamt of how I would build a castle wall strong enough to climb in and out of so that I could come and go from the outside world at will. That would show my bullies my true powers (which were nil). 

My "castle" became my way of proving myself worthy as an adult woman. It became my "crusade": my marriage, my family, my home, my church. I worked hard at building and controlling each of these institutions. I believed in the value they provided the family and the culture. So my husband and I filled the nursery of that castle with six lovely children and grew them up behind those walls. We had a good institutional life for awhile.

Somewhere along the way, though, those castle walls had to be dismantled so that we could escape the mental illness that grew inside like mildew on moist stone floors.What had begun as a fortress had become a prison. I found that those thick walls closed us off from people--and the rawness of real life which I was trying to avoid. But the walls did not nest us, they only distanced us from life. They proved my stubborn unwillingness to face the very thing I needed to face: uncertainty.  I thought we could live above that. After all, we were different.

There's a difference in nesting and in hiding,  but I did not know it then. Did I really wanted to close us off? No, but was I willing to send us out into the world--knowing that it would cost me my dream of a happy marriage and close-knit family? The day came when I had to make that choice.  I didn't want to. I had to choose between marriage and pain or divorce and pain, and I knew that that would only be the first of many more painful choices.

I could not count on anyone but myself to know what to do. I had asked for help many times; I tried everything short of setting my hair on fire to get someone's attention, but I had kept our secrets too well. No one believed me.  Knowing that I would not be able to blame anyone for my decision or my own inability to hold our castle's position, it took me a long time to make the choice to divorce.

I found a curious freedom emerging from the pain I felt aferward: I could now and forever give up any notion of being perfectly unscathed by pain and suffering. The worst that I thought could ever happen had finally happened, and I had done it to myself. Only knowing that I was starting a new story brought me any relief.  It also brought me more change than I knew I was capable of.

I changed some and I changed some more. My family's story made a hairpin turn. Since the keystone of our walls had been demolished, it was not long before the castle came down, too. First the beams fell and were burned into ashes; then the stones, which were crushed into rubble. We escaped the tsunami-like destruction with our lives. And our story. 

To my amazement, we were now a family bound by our story, not by our bondage. Our story was different than any I could have made up, made more real by the previous chapters. Although some could not tolerate how "real" it was, we found that our changes made us less different and more like the people we were afraid of encountering. It took this to become real. We opened ourselves up to love others; we were now one of them.

The stories that survived the implosion of my many married years were both extravagant and painful. They were extravagant because they cost me everything that I had tried to build into the castle-- especially the respect that I had sought for after the twisted events of my childhood. They were painful because they demolished my hopes for a dreamlike, fairy-tale life: it was now reduced to the simplistic tauntings of a nursery rhyme. Cinderella resembled Humpty Dumpty more than she did a princess in troubled times. I had taken a great fall, if only in my own mind.

And Humpty Dumpty had nothing on me. Thoroughly broken and crushed to powder by the impossibility of living an unworkable life in an unmanageable situation for so many years, I looked to my pastor for help. He understood my problem, but invited me to leave his church. Mine had become one of those messy lives which were a blight on the Kingdom of God, according to him. "After all," he reasoned, "God hates divorce." I agreed, but silently reminded myself of a few other things God also hated as well. Still, I, who had always loved and built the church, had become a hindrance to its mission because I was divorcing. "Really?", I marveled, amazed at my perceived power; I felt that I had none at all.

I needed an infusion of hope in order to go on. I needed a future. I needed sustenance so that I could give support to my grieving children.  It was a dark time because I felt that I had closed our lives off from any future good by my choice to divorce.  We stumbled over rocky emotional and financial roads together during their remaining years at home, dazed and taunted by our untold stories. Few understood us, and fewer seemed to even care. Survival seemed like a luxury.

I read once that the best of childrens' literature is marked by a sense "open destiny", a finish which leaves the characters enduring and hopeful to the end. I wanted that hopeful ending for my own story, and I believed that God wanted it for me, too.  I longed for goodness, for courage and openness to the life which was waiting for me, not for more memories of the lives I had left behind. 

Left alone all at once when my children were finally raised and living their own stories, I was desolate. I empty nested far away from the castle walls I had tried to build around myself. Feeling lost, I hopped from tree to tree (dream to dream) and awakened in a new tree every day, it seemed. I had no place any longer. 

In my confused thinking, it occurred to me that in the past, mothers died by my age; and, I had been taught that Christians didn't divorce. Since I couldn't die-on-demand and I had already divorced, I had two strikes already. When I could not find my place in the stories my children were living, I knew that I had hit a wall: three strikes. Alone and miserable, I missed bumping into their everyday lives. I felt as if I were all alone on the planet and hopelessly unlovable. I could die and they would not know for a long time.  I was afraid that my children blamed me for the messiness in our lives.


I hope that my children will someday learn what I forgot long ago: that they were born into my story, I was not born into theirs. (My story had started out messy.) And they won't know the value of my later story until they become parents.


Without knowing my story, they will never know how I was transformed by being open enough to bring them into my life. Will they be unselfish enough to discover how to do that in their lifetimes? I hope so. Will they feel pain when their parenting ends too soon? I think so. Will they finish their stories strong when they encounter life's insurmountable pain? I pray that they do. I hope that my story helps, as many other people's stories will, too.

On the most dismal of days, gray from the remembrance of a life lost, Hope tiptoed into the darkest room of my heart, trumping my despair. I was filled with purpose and passion again. I did not know that I was turning a corner. I just knew that I had begun asking different questions for a change. Different questions meant different answers.

"What do I do now?" I wondered. "Should I repair the castle walls?" (Could I? Did I even want to anymore?) "Who would live there?", I asked myself. (Not I!) And then I knew that I would now find life ahead of me, not behind me. That revelation moved me into a new chapter like a fast-moving train which is remotely engineered toward its intended destination.

My story would make an unexpected stop in an unknown place called "Happiness". Hope got there first, waited for me and held my place while I slogged along, trying to catch up. I could not have contrived the events which would happen next.

Next blogday, the next and best part of my story. It is why I believe that sometimes all we need to do is just live another day.

Since you have read this far, you might enjoy these song lyrics written during that painful time (I will record the music soon and put it in the blog).

Her Own Hands

Her own hands built a castle wall,
Her own mind said it'd never fall;
Her own hands shaped a family's heart
That'd never break apart.

A man's arms, a woman's hands,
Every formula known to man;
All the best tricks, all the right plans,
Fell apart,in her own hand.

Disillusioned, so dismayed,
So disheartened, so afraid;
In despair she made a choice,
From the wreckage came her voice.

A man's arms, a woman's hands,
Every formula known to man;
All the best tricks, all the right plans,
Who would really understand?

That she was, 'til she wasn't;
She could, 'til she couldn't,
She did,'til she didn't--
Didn't know 'til she did.

In a wide place on the narrow way,
Stopped to rest one weary day,
Shrunk by choices, life grown thin;
Grace spread her arms and she fell in.

A man's arms, a woman's hands--
Every formula known to man;
All the best tricks, all the right plans,
Are now resting in her Father's hands.


Thank you for reading! Please leave comments if this rings true for you, too. Tell me about it.  Have you been through a loss?What has given you hope when things look dreary?  Are there others like me, who have somehow outlived their disasters and wonder what is going to happen next? I hope that this will nourish them today!

Here is a recording (rough) of the music.

surviving my choices...

...surviving my choices...

I hate making choices. They always seem to have a hidden side I didn't think about, something which leads to great moral angst, or a major elimination of possibilities.  Choices are tough for pretty much any creative, perfectionistic person like me, I think.

Just the other day, though, I had this thought:

Having choices to make means that I have a chance to move toward greater freedom and away from greater bondage.  

I'm not sure what to do about this thought, but I am thinking about it. I have stopped choosing diets, for example. I am currently shopping for the best maintenance plan so I can follow it into less weight and more health: la-la land!  Freedom from needing to diet! (It's only taken me a lifetime of dieting failure to achieve this level of backward planning--proof that one should never lose heart.)

I discovered these words years ago: "No discipline for the moment seems to be joyful, but sorrowful; but afterward, it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it." I am trying to pause and ask myself before making choices, "Will the result of this choice lead me into more freedom, or more bondage?"
"Really, now," I wonder to myself. "Can chocolate before supper really be the answer to everything?"

How many times I have chosen poorly!  Then I spend a looooong time untangling knots on the cords that bind me--sometimes years, sometimes lifetimes. Some of those cords won't give way--maybe forever.  Like a shackle which grows into the skin of a prisoner, they have become part of me, part of my story.  Can I outlive the guilt? the sadness? the profound disappointment of a lifetime of mangled, tangled, poorly-chosen choices? Those kinds of thoughts are terminal if I luxuriate in them. They make me feel stuck. Powerless. Small. Not at all like the hero of my own story.

I must survive my choices, and I'd like to do so gracefully.

There are other, more powerful choices ahead of me that lead to freedom (gratitude, happiness, etc.).  I am working toward wanting the outcome of empowering choices more than I want the satisfaction of maneuvering around the past sour outcomes of previous poor choices, but I'm not there yet. (I'm still having an epic temper tantrum. I am sure that God is worried about this.) Sometimes I wish somebody would just  yank the reins away from me and make all of my decisions for me, demanding that I choose greater freedom. But instead,  it's my turn to grow up and leave the self-attended pity party I throw when I've messed up again. I firmly believe that that is why life spit me up on some pretty distant shores, like it did Jonah. I get a reality check, a panic attack, and a chance to choose to change my mind. My thinking at that moment goes like this: "I didn't ask for this..."or,"this is what I asked for why?"

In the tummy of the fish, Jonah must have had one of those reality checks, sort of an "aha" moment--that lasted for three days. He probably felt sort of desperate about that last choice he'd made.  It wasn't supposed to be like this, he was pretty sure. But when the fish spit him out, he was eager to choose what he had been designed and assigned to do, even though it had seemed pretty distasteful to him before. And I'm sure that every time he looked in the mirror at his bleached skin and hair, having been marinated in the gastric juices of a fish, he was reminded that some choices really don't lead a person anywhere where a person would like to be. I doubt that he ever chose quite the same in the future. "Just do the right thing," he might have told himself..."In the long run..."

Sounds a lot like my perpetual dieting thing. I always think that if I ever lose this weight this time, I'll never choose poorly again. Realistically, I probably will--in which case I always hope that the last choice I made is never going to be the last choice I get to make. (Although that's one possibility, I know.)

"...we see through a glass darkly...", or, What Do I Really Know?

Heavy rains pelted us in the chill of the early afternoon the day we scattered my brother's ashes onto his favorite railroad track in a small East Texas town. It was the final request he had made of his rail-fanning buddies, but it seemed rather surreal to me. Waiting in the rain, I couldn't bring myself to ask myself why he had died so young.  Instead, I wondered, "Why had he lived?" 

I knew that life had lied to him. His death at 59 was a mockery; he was more than just a social misfit weighing about 400 pounds. Mike was a very loving man and had a heart which included care for many other people who were considered outcasts, as he was.  He was genuinely perplexed as to why his family could hardly stand to be around him, but knowing his complicated past as I did, it made sense. Sort of. Beginning in childhood, Mike had been scorned by the two women who raised him, and in later life, by the woman he married. He had lived in severe loneliness and in despairing health, never recovering from a lingering staph infection a few years after undergoing the heartbreak of his unwanted divorce. 

Pain had always seemed to seek him out. Born prematurely in the early '50's, he had suffered brain damage that was nearly impossible to diagnose back then, but more than impossible to ignore. For all the charm I saw in his baby pictures as he played with his beloved trains, I knew also that he was a difficult person to be around. In spite of this, when he left home after graduation, he had made a place for himself in the Submarine Division of the Navy, where he had earned two masters degrees, an honorable discharge with full retirement, and enough money to invest in the train shop of his dreams. Brilliant but emotionally maladjusted, his life was an enigma to me:  I was conflicted about him and still am. I wanted to be close to him, but he seldom bathed, never brushed his teeth, and asked difficult favors of me. Similarly, he ran off everyone who tried to help him.  I did not know how to relate to him and I could not be there for him until the end was near.

However, I knew that I owed him my life. As a seven-year old, he had rescued the three of us children just before our schizophrenic mother nearly succeeded in killing us. Even so, I could never figure out how to have any kind of relationship with him as long as I knew him. Visiting him every night after work as he lay unconscious in the hospital the last month of his illness, I could think of few reasons for his life. I was very purpose-driven in those days, and I had long despaired over the apparent loss of his potential for a good life. Only later was I to discover how short-sighted my assumptions had been, for after his death, we found that he had a world-wide network of friends and customers focused around his train hobby. He had helped countless "little brothers" in the Big Brother program, and had a huge heart for messed up kids and many other causes.  He chose not to have children of his own because he knew that he could not be a good parent.

He had often shared with me about his disappointments about life, though, and, like the mourners around Lazarus' tomb, I had grieved with him. I was disappointed that his lack of social skills had disenfranchised him from most people and had kept us from a normal sibling relationship. I wondered, not for the first time, "How can people live all of their lives without anyone around to know that they have lived and died?" I knew that many did, and that my own natural mother had.  My heartache led me to wonder, "What happens to people who go through their whole lives, invisible, as Mike had been, without touch, without kind words, without anyone to play with and without anyone to witness the dailiness of their lives?"  

How could I even begin to understand my brother's pain? I felt close to despair; I would never know how profoundly he had suffered, but I suspected the extent of it, and it was like looking into a black hole of human misery.  Mike's was the pain of being thoroughly misunderstood and abandoned by life.  

He deserved to be mourned, to be missed. He had always deserved to be celebrated, but that also was not to happen for him. Mike was a person. That was reason enough to have known him better.

I think that I "see through a glass darkly" when I see at all.  But my brother's death reminds me to look outside of myself in a way that makes others feel more visible; if I see them clearly enough, as Mike did, they are even luminous.  

I can almost see my brother glowing...