“I keep trying to find a life, on my own, apart from you. I am the [Queen] of excuses – I’ve got one for every selfish thing I do. The disease of self runs through my blood – It’s a cancer fatal to my soul. Every attempt on my behalf has failed, to bring this sickness under control. Tell me, what’s going on inside of me? I despise my own behavior. This only serves to confirm my suspicions that I’m still a girl in need of a Savior.”
(D.C. Talk)
🎶
This song is my mantra, yet how many times have I listened to it? Over and over and over again, but I can’t actually swallow the words. Instead, I just swallow every bit of rage and sadness that is hiding within me, then release it into a dark and obscured oblivion that I cannot find my way out of.
My “disease of self” has overtaken my life. My teeth are rotting, my throat is raw, there’s a permanent scar etched across my knuckle, and oh, yah, I think I’ve given myself cancer. My heart is arrhythmic, I feel dizzy when I stand too fast, and I’ve cracked open some blood vessels in my eye. I’m seeing a doctor tomorrow and I think I may have to cop to my little secret for the first time in my life. Dear GOD, please give me the courage to tell the truth! I’ve been locked inside my bathroom every night while my precious daughter sleeps peacefully just footsteps away from the door with this slow and steady process of suicide.
I never thought I would be one of those women who let an eating disorder control every aspect of their lives, and I don’t believe in “statistics”. I’ve known long well that this was never about the food, but rather, some pathetic attempt to continually purge myself of a lifetime of guilt, shame, and rage. It was the sick sense of order I thought I was maintaining over the contradiction which had become my existence:
My Rules!
My Choices!
My Food!
MY CONTROL!
I’ve worked so hard to plan my days carefully and carve away my quiet time with her. For more than half my life she’s been the keeper of my deepest and darkest secrets. I’ve trusted her unconditionally with the most painful of my feelings that I could let to the surface, yet somehow, she has betrayed me. My lifelong confidant brought me a comfort and safety that I’d somehow forgotten to know and satiated the emptiest places inside my body and soul with a satisfaction of fullness and order. We were euphoric together, and sometimes almost magical, but that calm, quiet happiness we shared never lasted for more than a moment, and all too quickly brought the continual shame and self-loathing which is all I can see in a mirror. My euphoria would end, so we’d begin the dance again to the most hypnotic rhythm of them all.
Well, perhaps actually penning the words to a complete and total stranger was the just the pin prick my heart valves needed to effect the slow release of toxins from my system. I mean, so much of what I wrote to her was true, but then again, so much of it was a lie. Everything about her and what I could gather from her story showed me that somehow, somewhere, there is a light at the end of every tunnel. Could it be that my resurrection is much closer than I know? It truly feels as though I am getting a little closer to bridging that proverbial gap.
My “surface level only” policy where relationships are concerned is fast becoming a sham and I desperately need to make the words therein my letter to her real. In the meantime, I’m still alive, though not-so-well here in my beautiful ivory tower as I continue my rule over a magical kingdom where everything appears to be perfect. “Queen Catherine The Perfect”: Perfect life … perfect family … perfect house … perfect car … perfectly happy, with all the perfect things that accompany my perfection. I’m the envy of every woman I know, covered in diamonds from head to toe, with a loving husband by my side at every turn (or so it seems). I play this perfect role so that my family remains happy and blissfully unscathed by all the secrets from my past, and so the painful memories I have yet to leave behind don’t interfere with their lives in any way.
It seems like only yesterday when a stranger took my innocence, and since that moment Fate has continued to rape me. It’s been just about a year since I entered that hospital, spirit broken, but body still somewhat whole. One week later I walked back out, leaving behind the last remnants of what once made me a woman. The physical scars that I wear now are now clear and tactile proof that I am nothing but an empty shell. These years were not imagined – they were real! At night sometimes I cry, grasping my pillow tightly so the precious baby girl sleeping beside me doesn’t hear. Then in morning I awake and prepare myself for the day that awaits and walk out of my bedroom an illusion. My children greet me with their glorious smiles, ignorant to my pain, and this is the way it is.
Despite the seemingly outward perfection, my soul is hollow, and I feel alone, abandoned, and sick, if not “a cancer” to the entirety of mankind. The mental camera in my head just can’t seem to help itself from constantly flipping back and forth through all the erosion, toxicity and filth inside my mind.
Each day that passes is drawing me closer to something spinning hopelessly out of control. My day of reckoning is fast approaching and may be just around the corner. I can feel the ripples just beneath my skin as my realities are boiling to the surface. The unrelenting knot in the pit of my stomach and heart is getting tighter with each day that passes and it’s getting harder for me to breath. I am shaking, anxious, and, oh, yeah, a total fraud!
Just up ahead, I think I can see the front of the proverbial bridge, but how can I make my legs actually move across it? If I actually make it across, what there will I find? Are there secrets about myself and even my “seemingly perfect childhood” that are still yet for me to discover? We shall see. Dearest Catherine, “Queen Of Perfection”, surely you can perfect this dance?
THE REAL LIFE
I wanted to find somewhere to hide, and I opened up and left those fears inside. And I wanted to be anyone else, only to find that there was no one there but me. But I woke up to real life and I realized it’s not worth running from anymore. When there was nowhere left to hide, I found out that nothing’s real here, but I won’t stop now until I find a better part of me. I let those hard days get me down, and all the things I hate got in my way. I could have screamed without a sound, I found myself silenced by those things they say. But I won’t stop now until I find a better part of me that’s out there somewhere, and it can’t be that far away. That’s where I’ll find myself, and I’ll find my way out. That’s where I’ll find out. {3 Doors Down}
Christmas came to find me still deeply grieving, but trying desperately to keep my eyes upon The Cross. In all the Christmases we’d been divorced, however, He and I had always managed to go shopping for Christian together during the holidays. This year, however, I didn’t want to go, as I was still feeling very sorry for myself and not that much like shopping.
This particular Saturday, however, would be a day to surely remember. He came to the house that morning, walked into my bedroom where I was still buried under the covers, opened the blinds, ripped off my blankets, and told me to get out of bed. We were going shopping for Christian that day and he wasn’t gonna take no for an answer. Despite my best efforts to avoid any Christmas joy, and after much cajoling by Him, by noon we were out the door and headed to the malls for a day filled with holiday shenanigans. We shopped and laughed, ate and laughed, then shopped some more and ended up having some dinner. It was probably one of the most beautiful days that I’d ever had in my life, and one that I still fondly carry in my heart.
The next day, we decided to spend more time together, only this time with our son. We shopped a little more, then went to have some lunch, and they even went to a special Christmas themed service with me at my church.At the end of the evening when the two of them drove me to the parking lot where I had met them and left my car, He leaned over to give me a hug goodbye. Instead however, He kissed me. When the kiss was over we both turned to see the look of astonishment on Christian’s wide-eyed face – his hands were over his mouth and he was smiling:
Kiss her again, Daddy! Kiss her again!
… at which point he physically pushed our heads together with his innocent young hands, and the rest is merely history.
INTO ANOTHER
Slowly I heal the love that’s found it’s way on to another path in times of change. Crossing that bridge alone, hoping our strength will hold. Should they let go then let me lay. Let me lay. Show me a sign to a light that shines one direction into another – sheltered peace of mind. Somewhere I lost a piece of memory, but somehow I know my legs will carry me. Searching for circle’s end, hoping the wounds will mend. Should this scar, then it was meant to be. {Skid Row}
On this cool, crisp day in November, John asked me to meet him at a church in Sachse, Texas where he had been invited by one of my new “Christian” friends and mentors,Angie, who he’d befriended as well, to attend a Power Team evangelism show and also be baptized afterwards. He said he had something exciting to tell me that night, and based upon the tone and context of the conversations we’d been having, I had every reason to believe that he was going to propose to me. Imagine my surprise then when after the baptism I was led into a room in the back of the church where he was standing beside Angie and her entire family of people I’d truly come to admire and respect. It was then that John told me that he was “so sorry”, but over the months, “God had called them together”, they’d fallen in love, and had been hiding their relationship from me.
There I stood, just as I had 20 years before, numb and sick with the same stinging, disconnected pain just beneath the top layer of my skin on the day of the Spic and Span. I walked out of the church heartbroken and alone and just started driving on a 300-mile round trip to Oklahoma City and back. I’d just danced with the devil, a narcissist of unspeakable proportion, who after all was said and done “hoovered me” for years to come, but that’sanother story for another time.
When I arrived back in Dallas, it was just about time for the Saturday parking lot meet with Christian and his dad for our weekend custody switch. I was wrecked beyond belief but doing everything I could to keep it all together for my son’s sake. I needed not to let what had happened the night before break me down completely, and by this stage in the game I was a pro at stuffing painful things down and pretending they just didn’t exist. Despite my best efforts, though, I consciously decided to pick a fight with my ex-husband so I could just run away and avoid having to fake my way through a “normal” weekend visit with son. I hadn’t slept in over 24 hours, had just experienced the second biggest bombshell of my life, and although I didn’t know it, was less than 15 minutes away from the first of my nervous breakdowns. I went back to my parents’ where I’d been living at the time, swallowed every single pill, capsule, and liquid medicine I could find in my bathroom. I JUST WANTED TO GO “HOME”!
The details of that morning were never very clear, but I do remember lying there, just rocking back and forth and screaming that I wanted to be with God. It was my sister who first realized what I had done to myself and called 911. Meanwhile, my ex-husband and son had followed me home because he’d been concerned that something was just “off” at our meeting and was worried.
My parents were ballistic as my sister frantically pulled me out of the bed to the bathroom to make me vomit everything I’d swallowed. While I cannot and will not ever say that I actually died that day, what I can say is that something did happen within my body and soul in that moment that not only defies logic, but as well everything I’d been taught to believe about life, death, and “hereafter” in my cradle Catholicism. It was “something”. I went “somewhere”. “Somewhere” I can still hardly fathom. No, I never saw “the light at the end of the tunnel” we often hear people speak of when they’ve had a near death experience, because again, I don’t think I was actually dying. Rather, there was a numbing, soothing, lulling void in my mind, as if I were being cradled in blissful nothingness by every single hand from every single shred of the universe at once. It was ethereal to say the least, and even still when I think of it I want to cry, but not in a sad way, in a joyous one. That moment devoured and immersed me in something so much bigger than my simple mind will ever understand, yet at the same time I very much do understand it.
Meanwhile, my Christian, a mere five years old at the time, managed to slip through all the chaos and come to me. He, too, was ballistic and frantically crying, but had taken hold of my wrist and was patting my back as though HE were the parent consoling their child. Up until that point, I hadn’t been able to focus on anything in the room, because everything around me was just “dark”, yet I could very clearly hear everything my son was saying:
Mommy, God’s not ready for you to go Home. He wants you to stay here and be my mom.
It’s imperative to note that although I could see his mouth moving and hear the words he was saying, it was not Christian’s voice I was hearing. I firmly believe, and will never be convinced otherwise, that it was God. God, Himself was speaking to me through my son. He’s real, my friends. HE’S REAL!
I stayed in the hospital for a few days until the state committed to a psyche ward where I underwent intense treatment for clinical depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the sorely delayed but much needed rape counseling I’d never gotten. My whole family was involved in this process, which was something that by then that we were all in dire need of.
Looking back now, I realize that I didn’t want to die that morning, I just couldn’t pull myself out of the black hole that I was in. I was lucky. Very lucky. I made it home in time for Christmas that year feeling lighter and happier than I had in years, clear-headed, focused, and internally combusted with a fire in my soul of epic proportion. Despite the unbelievably selfish horror I had put them all through, my entire family welcomed me home again.
As for the devil? He never ONCE turned back see what he had done! It was such an easy choice for him to just discard me as the unwanted “baggage” he’d once referred to as my son. As for me? It was everything, because I loved him (or so I thought), trusted him, and had given him every piece of my already broken heart I could have given.
As for her? Her betrayal of me “in Jesus’ name” literally murdered my soul and caused spiritual damage within my heart and psyche that would take years to recover from. Perhaps you’ve heard it said:
The devil doesn’t come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you’ve ever wished for.
Well, it wasn’t for years that I’d finally understand that they were two of the actualdevil’s own. He, the consummate wolf in sheep’s clothing, and she, by the name of “Angela”, the most beautiful angel of Light I could have known. My friend, mentor, and “sister in Christ”, with a pit viper’s tongue, a knife in her hand, and a smile on her face as she plunged it into my back.
Indeed, it was my darkest hour to discover what really lied beneath the surface of two of the most truly evil “things” I’ve ever encountered. How starved these vile creatures must have been that my heart became meals for his very small affect and her insignificant, insecure and thirsty, insincere ego.
WHAT LIES BENEATH
Take a breath. Hold it in. Start a fight. You won’t win. Had enough. Let’s begin. Never mind. I don’t care. All in all, you’re no good. You don’t cry like you should. Let it go if you could when love dies in the end. So, I’ll find what lies beneath your sick twisted smile as I lay underneath your cold, jaded eyes. Now you’ve turned the tide on me ’cause you’re so unkind. I will always be here for the rest of my life. Here we go. Does it hurt? Say goodbye to this world. I will not be undone. Come to life. It gets worse. … Don’t carry me under. You’re the Devil in disguise. God sing for the hopeless. I’m the one you left behind.
Although I’m only four years old at the moment, how little do I know that a beautiful, tremendous MACHINE that is running the race of his life today is going to become such a bittersweet, beautiful, and beloved part of my story:
If there were just one moment in time I could travel back to and personally witness, it would be the Belmont Stakes when that magnificent, TREMENDOUS machine defied every odd stacked against him and made a mockery of all the people drunk on SHAMpain up in the crowd. If you’ve never seen the movie or read about “The Horse That God Built”, do it! It’s so much more than just a movie about a horse. It’s the story of what can happen when one living creature truly believes in another and how faith can make miracles out of anyone. That’s what made OUR little family what it is today, by the way … a miracle of FAITH! I’m so damn lucky to be surrounded by people I ‘ll never stop believing in as I watch them run their races with no reins!
The Diary Of My Perfection 