Comfortable in Our Own Skin

2008

I close my eyes and wonder what it would be like if we were comfortable in our own skin, my family and I. The pictures of us together are few and far between because the process of standing and smiling and making it look carefree and natural is painful. Save for a few pleasant surprises, the snap of the camera finds us frozen and stiff. Our discomfort is frozen in time for all posterity.

I tell myself that the color coordinated pictures other families pose for with abandon are only artful cover stories. That behind the white shirts and blue jeans and away from the sandy beach where their smiles gleam like polished pearls, they are as itchy in their own skin as are we. I sit in the dark while the tears slip down my cheeks. I wait for God to show up and tell me why. Why can't we be comfortable in our own skin like those picture perfect people?

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

If emotional work made itself known in the way of physical labor, I'd have bloody fingers and calloused hands from the arduousness of the effort. I look at my hands and imagine my heart as ragged and bruised as it feels. I put on my mask and smile and pretend we are one of those families on the beach, smiling back at you making you wish you were me. If only you knew the truth I am hiding.

The night is quiet and dark, and morning is on a relentless march towards me. Still I wait. “God. Are you there? Are you here in this lonely brokenness? Will you bring joy in the morning after the tears of this long night? Do you remember my name?”

Where has he been as my heart has broken in prayer? Has he heard my unselfish prayers crying out for the faith to keep believing and to keep reassuring my family even in the darkest of times? I have not asked for wealth or fame. I have asked for faith. I have asked for eyes to see when my heart is too weary to recognize reality. I have asked that my children have faith even stronger than mine. Still, I wait. I do the next thing and wait for God to show up.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

This week. This week has ground along with bone crunching agony. Waves of despair swept one of us away. In the heat of battle, despair over-washed us all. The very reassurance for which I have prayed mocks me. It flees from me as quickly as the dark from the dawn.

I have given chase until I feel as tho' I am chasing a fairy tale Gingerbread Man who will never be caught. All around me are reasons to give up. If I give up, how will we go on? What will become of us? Even tho' I don't want to, I move again. Doing the next thing because it must be done.

I am fighting to overcome 13 years of chaos. Chaos has consumed us for more than half of my children's lives. One grew to adulthood while we waited for normal again. In reality, chaos stalked us even when I did not know it was there. He hid in our lives like a suicide bomber waiting to make chaos even more chaotic at any given moment. How did we survive? How much longer can we survive?

It feels as if we will never escape. It feels too late. It feels as if chaos swallowed us up and spit us out again. The place we landed is so foreign and remote that we will never find our way back to where we should have been. I shake my head and clear the image. We will survive intact. We will find a way to thrive. Even if it kills me. We will.

2006 - A New Beginning

It has been 6 years now since I looked the monster in the eyes. I did not know all I would come to know. I knew enough. I staked my claim. I drew my boundaries. The room grew deathly quiet. The eyes looked back at me, unflinching, as if a 2^nd pair of reptilian eyelids precluded the need to blink. The stiller the frame the greater the need for fear. I knew that truth without being told. Still I forged on.

My breath was measured, deliberate. My heart pounded as if at the command of a drum major in a marching band. I straightened my back and locked eyes. “I am not afraid of you. I may be the only person who will look you in the eye and tell you that. I am not. I do not know how we will escape this situation. As God as my witness, we will. We will move past this chaos. We will put our life and our family back together. I don't know how or when. We will. If it is the last thing I do.”

2011

Six years later, life has returned to much of what it was before it disappeared all those years ago. Strangers passing on the street have no clue we are the walking wounded. But, we are different. Wounded. Faltering. Unsure. Uncomfortable in our own skin as individuals and as a family. A shell of what I had hoped we'd be or what we might have been.

I am weary of the war. I want to see my sons laugh with abandon and move thru life with a sense of well-earned ease. I want them to move forward without always checking over a shoulder to see if disaster is again waiting to pounce. I want them to have a sense of roots and community which was torn away from them because chaos was always at the door. I want God to lean close and whisper, “Welcome home. Take a deep breath. It is ok to be comfortable in your own skin.”

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

Hello, fraidy cat. I do not know what your chaos is...only that you do not have to explain it to me. You are both safe and welcome here. One must not be a super hero of the faith to belong. We live in a fraidy cat world where everyone needs a safe place to call home. I hope you will find this a warm and comforting haven as you journey through your days. Come again often and bring a friend. Love you long and strong. See you soon? 

Courtesy B. Creasy

Hebrews 11: 1(ESV)

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 

 

Hebrews 10: 39 (NIV)

But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved.

Remembering Who We Never Were -- Homeless Pt 6

Even now, 6 yrs later, I grow numb when sudden news of someone else's crisis plunges me back into the darkness. When it happens, I no longer panic. It's just my old, newly named friend, 'traumatic stress reaction', reminding me that the past is always there. The sense of numbness that paralyzes my heart slithers along my spine upon viewing a simple status update on Facebook. I see the veiled allusion to a life Tsunami, and I know.  Behind those matter of fact words, a heart cries out in confusion and pain too raw and fresh to describe in detail.  I find myself falling into step beside the one whose suffering has erupted like a frenzied volcano. No words are needed. I just walk.

As far as I feel from God these days, I know this reaction is, in part, that sense of comforting others with the same comfort we ourselves have been comforted (2 Cor. 1: 3-4). No one has to tell you how to do it. It's like giving birth. Once you've walked the walk, you just know how to fall into step. You also know that trying to say anything is fruitless. There is a peaceful solace in knowing that it is ok to walk in tandem without trying to give answers or frivolous consolations. You've been there. You know there are times that no answers are sufficient to stem the flow of blood from a broken heart. The process is unavoidable even for Christians who believe in a loving God that constantly watches over his suffering children. The only thing you can do is hunker down and live thru the process...or walk with someone else while they do.


I had bled every day for 6 yrs from the time Jeff got sick until the new landlord said he'd take a chance on our sorry butts and condescend to let us rent from him.  Yea, he was more diplomatic than that. Behind the mouth noise I knew he felt he had to make, I also knew what he was thinking. And, that was pretty much it!

survivors

We set about to figure out who we were even as the shock of our long awaited and sudden change of circumstances left us reeling. One phone call changed our lives, but it took a while for us to accept the change as real. Stress is stress whether it is good or bad.  I could feel our long knotted up nerves begin to unknot.  We moved along tentatively stopping to check the ends of our ropes. We realized that in the years that lay behind, some of our ropes had frayed beyond repair.


I realized I felt like an invisible nobody.  In our country, so much of who we are is defined by who we look like on paper or what we possess. What we had left had been in storage for 2 yrs. Our cars were no longer trendy, and they'd have to last at least 3 more years. On paper, we were failures whom no one dared do business with. Even if we had wanted to 'do business', the officer of the court held us in tow until July of 2008. Without the court's express permission, we would be in contempt of court to do anything but pay cash as we went. Even tho' we'd never been 'credit hounds', that reality was a chain around our souls. That bondage was the price we paid for failing.


I could tell myself all day long that we had always been good stewards. So good, in fact, that it had taken the buzzards 3 yrs to pick our bones clean. But, now we looked just like every other yuppie out there who couldn't delay gratification. Why, I wondered, had I deprived myself of so much in the interest of fiscal responsibility to end up like this? An invisible nobody.  All those extra payments I had scraped together to pay on the interest of the house the bank gave to someone else for a pittance of what we owed on it – for what?  How many spa treatments could I have enjoyed in the moment while I was living for the reward of compound interest derived tomorrow.

I thought all those things in the shadows of my heart. In the light of day, I told myself and my boys that God had a plan. It was a good plan. He had just kick-started the good part of that plan into motion.  We began to revel in our privacy. I became the kind of mom who no longer expected her kids to do chores. It was so amazing to have my own house to do chores in again that I didn't want to share the joy. (Yea, I was one sick puppy! I got over that little dip into insanity, trust me!) We spent an hour every night talking as a family about our list of 'thankful things'. We had made it out of the valley of the shadows.  We were survivors!

We immersed ourselves into the normalcy of life and began to accept that the locust had eaten their fill and moved on to other still green pastures. And yet, there was a hollowness at our core. The sense permeated my days. It was as if our souls had been robbed by some soul eating zombies that had left only shells of people to go thru the motions of life. We were  a pretty picture of hope borne out of despair. We might as well have been a carefully stitched representation of the picturesque implication of a stress free life. We were pretty on the public side.  The mass of chaotically knotted thread ends on the back of that framed masterpiece would have been closer to the truth.

Ours had been a hard marriage complicated by dynamics that had perplexed and puzzled me for 16 yrs. I had spent countless hours rearranging the puzzle pieces of our lives together. I was always trying to make our journey as a couple make sense. There always seemed to be a piece missing as if we'd come from the marriage factory an incomplete, defective kit.


We had been thru nine marriage counselors in 16 yrs. We would, frankly, have been divorced but for one thing...we were too broke to hire the lawyers to seal our fate. We were out of the valley of shadows, but the light purely revealed that we were strangers. We lived as housemates sharing chores and responsibilities but none of the perks of the vows we took all those years before. I had once heard being single was not nearly as lonely as being lonely in a marriage. If that phrase was defined in a picture dictionary, I would have been the poster girl.


One sad, lonely day, my marriage cum business partner turned to me and said, “I've made an appointment with a counselor. Will you go?” I looked at him thru zombie dead eyes and said, “If the first 9 didn't fix us, this one won't either. You go if you want. I'm done.” And, he did. Every other week for the next 6 months, he did.

Oh my. Like I said a few posts ago, we had no idea how much deeper the shadows could get. Like I said on my 'about me' page, I've been thru enough that the fraidy cat in me is well acquainted with the fraidy cat in you. This is hard work. I don't blame you if you don't come back. I hope you will. I hope when you do, you will bring a friend. Fraidy cats rule, but only if they stick together.

To ready part one of our story, click here: Writing My Way Back to God