Saturday, July 26, 2008

Gods Plan (VII)

10:02 PM by Christi Bowman

My brother and I talked for a while. I let him know that I would be there for him; I would be the person to hear all of the ugliness if he needed someone to. I was honest with him, I told him that if he allowed himself to be sober the world be a scary place for a while. He would have to allow himself to feel the pain that sent him running to his next high, and not pick up his addiction. That hurts. When I did it I had anxiety attacks. I remember our first party I attended without alcohol. I remember the first day I forced myself to stay home from the gym. I remember my first run without angry music. I remember going to church for the first time without dressing to the hilt to keep people away. I panicked because I was going to have to face people as myself...no more pretending. God walked me through it though, little by little, and Kevin was there to let me talk about my feelings along the way. Almost ten months later I have emerged a different person. I am confident and clear headed. It is so much easier for me to give and receive love. The past seems like a life time ago. I am no longer in bondage...in prison.

I hung up with my brother and called Kevin. I told him about the conversation with my brother. I told him that I felt ready to call my mom. I felt strong. I felt like God was leading me through this...now. He was giving me the strength to call my mom that very moment. Kevin told me not to. He reminded me that I had no one there if things should go badly, and we had no reason to believe they would not. He told me I had a plan and I should stick to it. I wanted to call my mom and at least open some lines of communication with her. I wanted to tell her I loved her, I thought that would be a good place to start. Just because I called to say I love you didn't mean I had to say anything else. I told Kevin that is what I was going to do. He warned me against making that phone call. He said that if I called her I would end up telling her everything, and then I would be hurt with no one to turn to. He had been my strength at every point through this. He was concerned about not being there for this moment. This was going to be the hardest yet of everything I have had to do over the last ten months. He wasn't sure I could do it without another person there keeping me grounded in my reality. I told him I had to make that phone call. It was time. He said o.k., and we hung up.

I sat there looking at my phone for quite some time. I found my mom's number in my contact information, and hovered over it. I would hover over it for so long that my phone would go blank and I would have to push a button and find my mom's number over again. I am not sure how many times I did that. Finally I pushed the green call button...and waited. I thought maybe she wouldn't answer the phone, but I wanted her to. It was my time. I needed this to be over. She answered.

I immediately told her that I loved her. I let her talk for a while, but every few minutes I would just tell her I loved her. I did. I told her that I had talked with my brother, and that immediately sent up a red flag. My brother and I have always gotten along, but this secret has always led to weird estrangement. Relationships are just weird in my family, and no one has ever been able to put a finger on it. Instead there has always been blame...blame for someone not meeting someone else's needs. This has always led to the frustration of everyone. As the family has grown up we have learned to live with it, but, as a friend has put it so eloquently, it is as if there is an elephant in the room...and we just put a table clothe on it, and tip toe around it as if the obvious is not in the room. This has created a real emptiness. I have gone weeks at a time not making a phone call because I have had nothing real to say. I have felt unknown by my own family. We have all been in this prison in some form or another.

My mom asked me what my brother and I had talked about, and that is when I knew there would be no turning back. I started talking about AIM, and the preparation they do in getting people ready to go. I explained the tests to her. I explained the results. I told her that I would be needing to talk with her about some of the things the test had uncovered. I told her that it was nothing bad that she had done, but stuff had happened that I needed to talk about. I told her I may not be able to talk about them right then, but I just wanted her to know what was coming. She said o.k., and again I just started sobbing...and it all came out. I was able to describe there house...every detail. His room...the shag carpeting, and the change jar that I would stare at to escape. The stool I would sit on and wait, for what seemed like hours, for him to come in. They had one of those high beds and that stool would help you climb up to the bed. I told her what he did to me. I told her what she did to me. I told her about the ice cold baths we were made to sit in and the slaps, beatings, and the berating we received for the tiniest of accidents. Nothing we ever did was o.k. I told her I remembered my brother coming home black and blue. I told her I remembered feeling relieved that we wouldn't have to go back, and I remember the betrayal of having to return the next day. I told her I remembered when I would act out, I told her I remembered what I did. I told her that as a parent now, if my children ever participated in anything like that I would get help for them, and I would desperately recall the people they had been alone with. I told her that I remembered that to her I was just dirty and gross, and that I did things that good Christian girls didn't do. I told her that I didn't fault her for any of it, because I understood that back then there were no signs to look for. She was able to shed some more light on the situation as well.

She told me my dad was oversees nine months out of the year in the navy. She said she was basically a single parent. She said she was made to feel bad when she would question any ill treatment of us. She was alone, and they were her friends. They always reassured her that they loved us and she was desperate to believe them. We used to always attend ultra religious churches as well. Places that looked down on soft disciplinarians. It was expected that you allowed others to corporately punish your children, and you weren't really supposed to question there judgment. You were supposed to be the kind of household that punished your children more if you found out they had been punished elsewhere. Once we were school age we attended private schools that subscribed to this ideology as well.

After I told her everything she began sharing some of her own memories. She remembered his bad temper, and how on several occasions he would come in a room yelling his head off. Once they finally did remove us from there house, both of my parents remember them leaving town very quickly. My mom also began questioning whether he had done anything to his own daughters. She remembered one of his daughters, especially, acting out in some of the ways I did, but at the time she was just as disgusted with her as she was with me.

We talked for a long time after everything came out. My mom and my dad went through all sorts of emotions in that time frame. I have never had a good relationship with my dad, or men in general. We talked about that for a little while as well. A lot of things came out into the open that had lain dormant and in the dark all these years, and for the first time we were able to talk about them. We were finally talking.

More tomorrow.

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