I’m counting down towards a year as a member of this community. And it is a community, regardless of the limitations of this medium. Those of you who know me here….my friends, know that I’m fairly open with the details of my life, my feelings, my hopes for this country, and this world. You might also know that I’m a fighter, among many fighters gathered here. I’m an activist, a protester, a dissenter. I never feel the need to yield. In truth, yielding ground in any fight is an alien thought to me. Today an old friend revisited me and my family. This friend, as I call it, is called Mental illness. Something my family has been living with for twenty years now. I need to explain, to purge the sadness dwelling within me, as to the source of my decision to yield today.
Time has come for us to pause
And think of living as it was
Into the future we must cross, must cross
I’d like to go with you
And I’d like to go with you
You say I’m harder than a wall
A marble shaft about to fall
I love you dearer than them all, them all…..
There is one person in my life who I’ve rarely, if ever talked, and shared about here. That person is my wife. I wish I could tell you her name, because it’s a beautiful name, almost as beautiful as she is. But I would never do that without her permission. I met my wife twenty years ago on the 24th of this month. She sailed into my life like a whirlwind. So full of energy, enthusiasm, and love to give. In a matter of weeks I was perfectly, and irretrievably in love with her. She was unlike anyone I had ever known. I think back now and I wonder, why didn’t I see that what was so different about her was the one demon, lurking within her, that would lay challenge upon challenge, heartache upon heartache, and fear, despair, and weariness in my path. And yet, as each hurdle, each obstacle was placed before me, my determination to remain with her, beside her, never wavered. Never. Today that changed.
In order for me to convey the source of my wife’s illness I need to reveal details of her life. Her childhood to be exact. I don’t do this lightly. But it is essential in order to understand her as I do. My wife was molested by the man she thought was her Father, from the time she was 7 years old until he left when she was 10 years old. Later on, as a teenager, she found adoption papers in her Mother’s dresser drawer. The man she thought was her Father was her stepfather. Think about that for a moment…. As an innocent 7 year old girl, she was taught that molestation was the way her father showed her love. To find out later, on her own, that this man, and I say man only because he is male, this beast had not only stolen her childhood, and her future, he’d also stolen what tiny sense of security and love that she’d EVER HAD by not really being her real Father. I know that the logic here is twisted. But when a child is raped, repeatedly, there is no such thing as logic. No conventional way to approach an understanding of the wounded baby living there inside her. Personally, and forgive me my rage, but I would torture that craven animal for days, weeks, years, before I killed him with my bare hands.
Later in her teens, she did manage to locate her real Father. Though he was as real as that ghost of a Father that has lived inside of her all of these years. He’s another one who needs to meet my hands. How they are allowed, to live free of punishment is a question beyond my ability to answer. You see, her mother, if you want to call her that, didn’t believe her at first when she finally told her what was happening to her when she wasn’t around. Her Mother then BLAMED her. BLAMED a child for her own rape. Someone….please….explain to me what parent, Mother or Father could blame this atrocity on thier child. She was told not to walk around in those little white panties and tank top. Mother Fucker!!!! How many children have had to bear such a thing? How many children have died a long and unforgiving death because of such things? My wife died when she was 7 years old. She just found the courage, somehow to bring herself 32 years into the future….dead all the same. I’m beginning to think that it’s just a matter of time. That is something that no family should have to live with. Yet somehow we’ve come to this day, still breathing…….
….And as we walked into the day
Skies of blue had turned to grey
I might have not been clear to say, to say
I never looked away
I never looked away….
We have three children. A son, and two daughters. Twice in those twenty years I’ve had to be a single parent because of our old family friend. I used to blame my wife, but no more. I blame her abuser, her rapist. Now it seems my third chance has arrived. She is hospitalized again. I can’t remember now how many times my wife has been hospitalized. Those experiences, and those years have all melded now into one long jouney. One long, mind numbing fight for sanity and normalcy. Despair so deep that it’s a wonder any of us can function in the world at all. But for all these hardships, I, and my children have endured, they will never begin to compare to the loniliness and emptinees, the inner desert that my wife has been destined to wander across within her own soul.
I apologize to you if these words and thoughts that i’m laying out here seem broken and convoluted. There’s a good reason for that. Living with someone who is mentally ill, for long enough, tends to have the effect of making the whole family unwell, even ill. I struggle to convey all the fleeting glimpses of years. All the whirring thoughts racing in my head right now. I held tight to hope for so long. I joined in every effort that all those doctors made to retrieve her from hell. I traveled back and forth to hospitals, to groups, to halfway houses. I listened to counselors tell me she had this, had that. Needed this medication and that. Needed to be away from her kids in order to heal. Needed to be away from me in order to heal. I went along. I had no choice really. Go home….broken, lonely, tired, yet….unyielding. All the times she raged at me because…..I was still standing there. Still standing there. I hate you, don’t leave me. How much do you love me? Will you leave me? Go away from me. Please…don’t leave me. I never left her. How could I? I love her. I’ve been all she’s had. More a Father and protector than a husband. How can you leave a soul like hers…alone in the world? How can you leave when you know in your heart that the things she does to you, to your children, has a name, a reason, a perpetrator? How can you leave a victim? I don’t know. I really, really don’t. But leave i must. Because I look in the mirror now, closer than I’ve ever looked, and I see a man who hasn’t lived his life in 20 years.
And though I’m feeling you inside
My life is rolling with the tide
I’d like to see it be an open ride
Along with you
Going along with you
My wife has begged me over the last week, as she slowly slipped beyond my reach again, not to take her to the hospital. I tried…. to keep her out, against my better judgement. I tried to give her the time and support, all over again, to find something solid to grasp onto. She couldn’t do it. Though I know she tried hard. Her courage is….well, beyond anything I could ever express to you. Her fight for all of these years has been heroic. But in the end it was someone else, her boss, who made the call. The call I should have made.
The time we borrowed from ourselves
Can’t stay within a vaulted well
And living turns into a lender’s will
So let me come with you
And let me come with you
Tonight my kids are out with their friends. I’ve perfected the art of mirrors. That they are all out while their Mother sits in a hospital is very telling. This has become our life, their life. It’s no life at all. In no sense does it feel like a life would feel if I knew what a life felt like. Or remembered what a life felt like. And while she sits there, and I sit here…..I miss her. I want to get up and fight for her….but I can’t. Not this way….anymore. Because now I feel dead too. This is a lot to leave out there. But it’s the truth. I’ve never been afraid to leave the truth here.
And so….I remember the day she walked in my door….and I smile
And when we came out into view
And there I found myself with you
When breathing felt like something new, new
Along with you
Going along with you
