Tag: Remembering

8Oct

Squandered Therapy

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 4 Comments

The piano and I have a long history, a tabloid-worthy on again, off again relationship. I started lessons at five years old—I remember having to rest my hands on my teacher’s large doughy ones while she played… yeeeesh—and shortly thereafter, my mother took over. Mom was, and still is, a sought-after piano teacher. She’s great at it. But (you knew there had to be a “but,” right?), I was the one student who didn’t “click” with her methods. I learned to play quite well, but it was a lot like me potty-training Natalie: we got where we needed to get, but the journey was decidedly unpleasant.

At the first possible opportunity in high school, I swore off the piano. Years of unwilling sonatas and scales had left me bitter, hating the instrument and hating that I had the weight of my talent hanging over me for eternity. (Um, I’m ever so slightly melodramatic.) Every time I walked by a piano in college, it taunted me à la that guy who keeps popping out at Happy Gilmore to call him a jackass. “Hey there, yeah just walk to class as if you don’t see me, YOU SQUANDERER!”

But toward the end of my sophomore year, my lovely friend Q convinced me to play a song she had written for the Battle of the Bands. I didn’t entirely hate the feel of keys and petals for once. And by  my junior year, I was playing multiple times a week in a little campus band. It was fun, man, and bore no resemblance to those stuffy mathematical Bach compositions I had grown up on.

Word leaked out that I was playing again—I’m told my mom cried for joy when she heard—and my husband and parents conspired to give me an electronic piano for graduation. I was stunned, in a good way. Mostly. All except for the little urge to run. That poor piano has sat untouched for months at a time since I got it; I’ve worked on a piece here or there but mostly felt guilty. There is no way I could devote those necessary daily hours to practicing, so why bother? (FYI, I often feel the same about working out. And then I squelch my guilt with a brownie.)

However, something has shifted in the last month and I’ve become a piano addict. I never realized what an effective stress reliever was gathering dust across the room. When I run into writer’s block or need a break from chores, I pull out my colorful Peanuts songbook and channel Vince Guaraldi ‘til my fingers tingle and my mind quiets down. It’s my creative outlet when others fail me.

So now I’m thinking hopelessly grown-up, motherly things about my preschooler who loves, loves music and is the [supposedly] perfect age to stick her toes into music theory. Will she hate it? Will she feel indebted to it? Will it seem like opportunity or dead weight? Will she do better starting at a formative age or when she’s old enough to make an educated decision? Will I make a crappy piano teacher? Will music suck away her life… or turn into a beautiful self-therapy? And how important is this all anyway?

26Aug

Bitter/Sweet

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 2 Comments

Not many people know that I left home at sixteen. It’s one of those facts I tend to keep stuffed in the back of my sock drawer unless it very specifically comes up, and that doesn’t happen often. I can’t help wanting to protect that girl who grew up without anyone to protect her.

That statement would probably confuse anyone who knew my family. We were protected from television, from popularity, from music, from current events, from trendiness, from junk food, from differing religious opinions, from school, from doctors, from other cultures, from puberty, from bad words, from the law. We lived in a double-plated steel bunker of protection. But my heart was left wide open—sometimes even pried apart—to deeper and vastly more sinister dangers than tank tops or measles shots.

I only had an inkling of my own identity, but that turned out to be enough. I snuck out of sermons and found ways to cope. I rose my own money each summer to escape to the Pacific Northwest, Central and South America, Africa. And less than a month after my sixteenth birthday, I left home. No one thought it was a good idea except for me, but I knew. I had to get away to give my heart a fighting chance.

In doing so, I made a surgical cut with iron resolve —no more church or high school friends or employers or family, no going back. And what I struggle with these days is what happened after I made the cut. My friends went on to attend college, marry, have babies, and attend afternoon barbecues together. I’ve contacted several of them lately, thanks to the miracle of Facebook, and they all wave awkwardly from the other side of the chasm wondering, Doesn’t she remember burning this bridge?

Relationships feel odder still with my family, which changed in enormous, unthinkably good ways after I left home. When I visit them—less than once a year since I’ve been married—I hardly recognize them. My siblings are happy and close-knit, every trace of their stress-related illnesses gone. After so many years of feeling guilty that I left them defenseless when I moved out, I am delighted to see them this way. But I am a stranger, by my own choice. They are with their family; I am with mine.

For the first time in my life, I feel pangs of homesickness for the people I walked away from. I chose a life of luggage tags and freedom instead of old friends and permanence, and this is absolutely what I needed. But as most choices in life go, this one has turned out equal parts bitter and sweet.

19Aug

Gargoyle Daydreams

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

I remember her sobbing under blood-soaked sheets, moaning and gasping and stifling screams. She would not go to a hospital. Not to save herself, not even to save her unborn baby. Only when she had lost too much blood to protest was an ambulance called. It snuck down the street in the middle of the night, lights muted and siren off, to carry her to whatever help she would accept. The next morning, her living children woke to babysitters who told them “Your mom is away seeing a friend, now who wants pancakes?” Of course, who would tell young children that their own mother had been willing to abandon them to a darkly looming life and a pile of bloody sheets, all for a misplaced fear of doctors?

***

I find myself immersed in gargoyle daydreams so often these days that the filmy wisps of imagination are becoming stone. I’ve always been good at picturing catastrophe, but these dreams are darker than anything I’ve experienced before.

In every single one, Sophie dies.

I spoon applesauce into her grinning, teething, lovely mess of a mouth and try to talk my heart out of breaking. It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real. I snuggle her against my chest the way we slept in my hospital bed, all cozy curlicues and softness, and nuzzle her perfect dollop of a nose, all the while trying not to panic. This isn’t a goodbye.

I didn’t figure the reason out until tonight, while I browsed sites like Glow in the Woods, other women’s haunting and exquisitely beautiful stories of their lostbabies. One mama in particular wrote about the day her thirteen-month-old died, how she had known he was sick even when everyone else blew off her worries, and I suddenly understood.

It was exactly like that, seven weeks ago. We were at church when it dawned on me that Sophie was not okay. “Of course she is!” argued the other women, the relatives, all the grandmotherly types. “She’s just teething. See, her forehead’s not even warm!” And even though I sensed deep down that something was wrong, I let myself be cowed by the other womens’ years of experience.

After lunch, I couldn’t ignore the heart-tug, so I did all I knew—Tylenol, Pedialyte, kisses. I rocked her back and forth while her temperature climbed from 103º to 104º to 105º (“The thermometer must be broken,” offered a helpful relative) and consciously decided against taking her to a doctor. No American health insurance, and we’d be back in Italy soon anyway. So we went shoe shopping instead, Sophie limp and expressionless in her carseat.

She had the seizure in the parking lot of Famous Footwear while I was inside merrily trying on high heels. I ran straight out and was nearly bowled over by her lumpy lavender skin, her rolled-back eyes, her forced breaths. I couldn’t look at her again, not once on the eternal ride to the hospital. I just held her head and willed us both to keep breathing.

When we first arrived at the ER, the medical staff seemed duly alarmed. They slapped a “Red Alert” bracelet on her tiny ankle, and a team of nurses bustled with needles and machines and pint-sized magic potions. “Just hold her hand, Mom. Just keep talking to her.” It wasn’t until hours later, when the adrenaline had worn off and sheer willpower was holding me upright, that the on-call doctor coolly mentioned, “Oh yeah, this is no big deal; happens all the time. She looks perfectly fine to me.”

At that moment, I felt as stupid as I had that morning in church when the grandmothers pooh-poohed my instincts. It’s no big deal… What kind of idiot must I have been on the trip to the hospital, imploding from the silent pressure of holding back sobs? I felt very distinctly that I had been robbed of my experience and, more importantly, the right to intuitively care for my baby. But the doctors knew best. I stuffed the whole episode into some scraggly Room of Requirement in my memory and locked the door.

Tonight, it finally dawned on me that it was a big deal. Oh, was it ever a big deal. Because when I look at bereaved mamas’ photos, I see my own little girl. When I read their heartbreaking stories, I read mine. My story has a different ending to be sure, and I could never presume to understand the pain these other women are going through, but it didn’t have to end differently. If I had just… or she had just… or we hadn’t been able to… The truth is that a happy ending doesn’t erase guilt. It doesn’t settle this urgency to turn back time and do things differently as some kind of cosmic insurance against my dreams.

It was a big deal, and maybe it’s time I faced that.

Sleeping Sophie

***

I tend to flaunt my faith in doctors around people who are afraid or skeptical of them. It makes me feel wise, I suppose, and independent and so very mainstream. But there is more to healing than textbook medical knowledge, nodes of intuition and loving concern that matter. I know that, now.

3Aug

Prisoner’s Fancy

Posted by: Bethany in Sunday Scribblings 10 Comments

Do I have to go to bed, do I have to, do I have to?

And of course I do, even though undiluted summer is streaming through my window with its heavy perfume of honeysuckle and ripe peaches. The grass is still leaping upward all across our back yard. The flowers are still awake, all color and careless joy like children, and daylight is still blazing trails through our giant pecan trees. Just beyond that door, the bright and busy mechanism of life is humming Come play! Come play!

But I am prisoner in my pink-and-white bed. Stuck until morning, no hope of escape.

I lie quietly, indignant and imaginative, listening to the cicadas playing tag. There go the bumblebees too, pedaling their bikes around the neighborhood, and butterflies cheering each other down the Slip ‘N’ Slide. The chickadees, of course, are playing hide and seek, and suddenly, I am with them, perched on the rafter of an old barn.

There are no rules in Chickadee Hide & Seek. Just a lot of swooping and soaring, little feathered torpedoes zipping around cows and alighting like bobble-heads on a power line, our own trampoline of copper filaments and sky. I remember to bring my teddy bears—Fred and Katie, who are married but have not yet learned the juicy details of procreation—and we fly together, impossibly high. We hide inside chimney-tops and behind clouds, where Fred and Katie get carried away kissing (no tongue, though). My little brothers would never be able to find me in a million years; I am thrilled.

The scenery shifts, and I am Bride Barbie. Katie refuses to lend her teddy-bear husband to me for the occasion, but who needs a groom anyway? My long white gown is studded with diamond drops and teensy pink pearls. And draped with satin. And fringed with rubies. And covered with lace. And festooned with ribbons. And plated with gold. I am breathtakingly grown up, even if the only ones who see it are my woodland creature audience, come to watch me twirl and twirl until my veil is tangled in pine branches.

I live in my own stories for hours until I finally grow tired and drift to sleep somewhere in the South Pacific. But the next night, I am back. This time, my bears and I must escape a dismal orphanage, and the night after that, we take a tire swing up, up into space. My stories overlap and twist into complicated candycanes, yarn and fancy fraying together into fantastic landscapes. And night after long childhood night, I weave gossamer threads of imagination into a new home for myself, a place to retreat for those lonely times when summer is locked out of reach.

28Jul

Beware of Mantras

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 6 Comments

Growing up quasi-Amish taught me how to bake bread from scratch, sew my own dowdy jumpers, grow organic wheat grass in a pan on the windowsill, and hide. Good lord, was I skilled at hiding. I had a lusciously guilty stash of sugar cubes that grew over the years to include Thin Mints, Warheads, Pixie Sticks, and some fundraiser candy that called itself World’s Best Chocolate (and really was! at least to a chronically deprived sweet-tooth…) and none of my five hundred siblings ever found it. Talent, non?

I also learned how to hide my feelings, my opinions, my idiocies, and my problems. It’s a little-known fact about families who isolate themselves from the world: rather than creating a safe haven, isolation breeds like an insidious form of bacteria until you can no longer reach outside your own skin. No one allowed in, period.

I can’t begin to tell you how powerless I was raised to be. I have a lifetime of poisonous mantras stashed in my mind: Do not ask for help. Your feelings mean nothing. We do not talk about that. Doctors want to harm you. Policemen want to harm you. Your instincts are wrong. NO ONE CAN HELP. Honestly, the two best things I’ve ever done to fight off those mantras were meeting Dan, who tirelessly chiseled away at my mind with rock-solid compassion, and starting this blog. It’s not easy, of course. I constantly want to censor myself (and I often do, if you want to know the truth), and I revert several times a day back to Your feelings mean nothing. We do not talk about that. No one can help, no one can help, no one can help, no one can help.

Writing about depression, in particular, feels like stripping in front of the entire world. It comes with a host of other confessions like failure and weakness that I would much rather keep hidden, and it looks so raw and grotesque out in the air. Hi, I’m Bethany, and I can’t manage to take care of two teeny-tiny little girls and one teeny-tiny little apartment by myself and oh my god, am I actually admitting this aloud?

But your comments and e-mails have given me exactly the boost I needed to shrug off my Amish mantras and do something unimaginably frightening: Ask for help. I went to the doctor today, all of my own volition, and I told him the truth. And now there will be tests and further appointments and possibly referrals, and though we know nothing yet, I feel hopeful. I don’t know how to explain what hope feels like after this long, but thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

8Apr

Mortification Monday, Ch. 5

Posted by: Bethany in Mortification Mondays 6 Comments

Mortification Monday, v. 1.0 (Disclaimers here)
Chapter 5: Not Your Typical Crush

Sometimes, a Monday just falls on the wrong day. Between a caffeine-fueled cleaning blitz (Lavazza coffee: Different kind of bean, different kind of gas!) and the subsequent mental crash, the author loses her funny. And perhaps her three-year-old coerces her into spending the morning “fishing” with a plastic straw, which is THE MOST BORING of all boring games in existence. Yes, even more than The Quiet Game, which was invented for the purpose of torturing prisoners of war with EXTREME BOREDOM. Anyway, things start going awry, and then haywire, and then dropped dishes/hunger-striking baby/stubbed toe disastrous. And then, because she is not thinking straight, the author looks online for a new swimsuit and subsequently changes her name to Flabby McBlimple. And by the time she opens her old diary to share it with the Internet, she is so overwhelmed by the patheticness and irresponsible use of underlining therein that she gives up on life and goes back to fishing.

So you see, sometimes, Mortification Monday has reason to fall on a Tuesday. You are kindly asked to get over it.

::Clears throat::

When we last peeked into preteen Bethany’s diary, there was mention of liking Igor and unholy amounts some underlines. That pretty much brings us up to date:

Tuesday, February 25th (Age 12)
“You know how in most crushes you usually don’t look at the guy you like, you usually don’t talk to eachother1, and you probably only see him once or twice a week or2 month?3 With Igor and I, we talk all the time, look in eachother’s eyes, (he has hazel-blue eyes just like mine) and see eachother4 quite a bit (not by ourselves, obviously5). Today when he got a haircut that I didn’t like a lot, that didn’t change anything. He’s still the same guy, ugly or cute.6 I’ve made a list of character qualities in a guy, and he gets 22 out of the 26, and the other 4, I’m not sure of.7”

1 In elementary school, I spent long portions of every day doing grammar exercises and practicing penmanship like a good little Colonial girl (I also knew how to cross-stitch, evade the Tories, and throw tea into harbors, but that is beside the point). I only started to love the English language, however, during my rebellious stage when I looked up bad words in the Dictionary (I also started listening to Oldies AND wearing tank-tops in secret… shock! Though this, too, is beside the point). I started to love English even more a couple of years later when I fell head-over-heels for a boy who said things like “nary” and “hoary debacle” in an excruciatingly charming way (“Cogsarned!” “Tickles my lollies!” “Homoerotic binge with Yoga!” Swoon, I know. Yet still beside the point). I enjoyed tutoring writing classes in college so much that I married a tutoree, and my creative writing class was basically chocolate-flavored crack, and sometime in there, I decided I might as well get my degree in the field I love (as opposed to elementary education, which gave me seizures, or psychology, which made me neurotic and has nothing to do with the point). The Point is that I eventually learned “eachother” is actually two words. Glad we cleared that up.

2 Remember last time? When I promised this entry would have absolutely no underlines whatsoever? And through my clever lie got you to come back this week? And you’re still reading even though there is, in fact, an underline? HA.

3 Quick poll: Do you ever look at the guy you like? Do you ever speak to him? Do you see him more than twice a month? No? Well, congratulations! You have a Typical Crush™! If you’re interested in progressing to the next level, that being Social Contact™, you may want to try incessantly stalking him until he asks why you’re hiding in his shoe rack again. Casually mentioning his Social Security number is a good way to break the ice.

4 TWO words. Just a friendly reminder to diary-prone preteens everywhere. (Also two words: “All right,” “this morning,” and “anal retentive.”)

5 Obviously. Because unsupervised Social Contact™ could lead to other vices such as playing footsie, listening to rock music, and me stealing his pencil because it smelled like his delicious, clean, guy smell. Not that any of those things ended up happening, of course…

6 I was quite the saint in those days. First, I was not angry when the love of my life put his arm around me. Then, I was not offended when we got to play a pretend couple. Finally, I continued to feel twitterpated EVEN THOUGH Igor’s hair was temporarily on the short side. Folks, this kind of selflessness is what relationships are all about.

7 Regrettably, I do not have a copy of this list, but I can imagine some of the character qualities I found appealing:
+ Hazel-blue eyes
+ GOOD HAIRCUT (temporarily suspended from list)
+ Is really sweet
+ First name Igor
+ Last name Dreamboat
? Has already picked out my engagement ring

Next time on Mortification Monday: The saga of the unfortunate haircut continues!

4Apr

The Story

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

This story starts like a mystery.

A long, green-brown river snakes across Texas. Early Spanish explorers named it “Los Brazos de Dios”–the arms of God–but God’s reach only extends into the Great Plains, forgotten. Along its banks, stubby trees twist out of the clay, staking their claim in the eternal flatness of the Southwest. The river is quiet. Lonely. Uninhabited. Except for them. The 510-acre compound is a dense patch of green in the dusty fields north of Waco. Nestling among the shrubbery are a gristmill, a blacksmith shop, a communal farm. Work horses shuffle wearily in their stables. Small green lizards scurry under rows of sunflowers. Her face is dappled by the early morning light filtering through the church windows. She could have been one of the women in their floor-length dresses with each strand of hair obediently pinned out of sight. She could have been one of the close-cropped men sweating submissively in their long sleeves. But she was just a child, and not just a child but an outsider, cowering under a pew while hundreds of plain-dressed men and women simultaneously screamed in tongues.

This story almost ended a mystery as well. My memories flutter in confetti bits like young children’s often do… Chigger bites at the stained-glass shop. Pecan pie made with some healthy alternative to sugar. Six lanky brothers playing bluegrass on homemade banjoes. A gray-haired grandmother’s pregnant belly. Group songs about a man whose limbs were cut off for praising God. Moonlit rides home after the adults’ hushed meetings. The point is that I remember. When I finally got up the courage to ask about this group, several years ago, I was told I was never there. We both knew it was a lie–the forced shrug, the too-casual change of subject, the thin hope my questions would go away. But some questions can’t be shrugged away. I desperately needed to understand the first fourteen years of my life and why they were kept so far from my grasp. I’ve asked questions, I’ve scoured my memory, I’ve Googled every term I could think of. And finally, today, I found the answers. The group has taken a new name and is under investigation, but nothing has really changed. This part of the story is a history text, the factual treatment of shocking information that you expect to culminate in disaster. 

It started with a group of disillusioned New Yorkers and a mishmash of Pentecostal and Anabaptist beliefs, but mostly with a man. He claimed he was the voice of God. He promised to simplify their lives if only they packed up, moved across the country with him, and promised to pool their future resources for “the church.”Most of his followers enjoy the chance to play Little House on the Prairie in isolation from the secular world. They carve their own furniture and bake their own bread. They plow their fields à la Pa Ingalls and sing together instead of watching television in the evenings. But not all their beliefs are so innocuous. Wedding rings are banned for being a “pagan” custom, as are Christmas trees and makeup. Members are discouraged from visiting doctors, treating sickness instead with herbal remedies and prayer. They do not get Social Security numbers or college degrees, trying so hard to disassociate themselves from the outside world that they even cut off family ties. They are advised to use severe physical punishment on their children, including infants. Any member who disagrees with the leadership’s spiritual “revelations” is publicly humiliated and kicked out of the group. People are free to leave, of course, but they are reigned in by the terrible fear of lost salvation. The leader’s interpretation of theology says that no one’s place in heaven is secure, and his followers live a desperate existence of trying to adequately please God. Children who don’t speak “in tongues” (supposedly a special language that God understands though it sounds like gibberish) are told they aren’t saved. Families are told that their relatives living elsewhere in the world are not true Christians. Women are required to home school their children, men are required to work on the compound, and everyone is required to follow strict dress and conduct codes–all to earn their daily salvation at the word of the leader.

Maybe this story is really a John Grisham thriller and I’m the witness that escaped… names lodged in the recesses of my memory, faces peeking out like magazine scraps. However, I feel much more like a character in a psychological tragedy. Emotions broadside me in quick succession, each hit heavier than the last–shock, repugnance, comprehension, affirmation, pain. I’ve heard of support groups for cult survivors; what about those of us who were never officially part of the cult, but didn’t escape either? This kind of thing is only supposed to happen between book pages, snapped shut on a shelf in quiet disregard… Not in the real stories, the ones that are still being written and rewritten and survived.

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