faith is believing in something when common sense tells you not to

I don't know how to start this. I was going to do the November recap, but something really incredible has happened that has not a whole lot to do with the rest of the month, but a lot to do with the past eleven years.

Two days ago, I started EMDR. That is an acronym for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. And actually, I did it for the first time (lost my EMDR virginity, you might say), the previous Tuesday, wherein my therapist and I set up my "safe place." Although I have been there only once, and it was over five years ago now, I was captivated by the whole place. I took pictures until I ran out of film (this was 2001, just as digital cameras were first beginning to go mainstream. Randy had a digital with him, he took lots of pictures too, but his camera...urm, how you say? Sucked. My pictures were better--not because I am better than he is at picture-taking; he IS the Audio/Visual MASTAH, after all--but because his camera was digital yet assy). I was captivated. And I would love to show you some of the pictures I took, but I don't have a scanner, so I am using other people's pictures.

That is a photo of Frijoles Canyon, New Mexico. It, to me, has got to be the most perfect place in the world. Ancient Pueblo (Anasazi) Indians once lived in the cliffs, which are volcanic tuff and have huge holes in them.





The cliffs are very sheer; I took pictures looking up and became immediately dizzy.




And then, there's the creek, just down from the cliffs.






This is my safe place, though I picture it at night, complete with stars and moonlight, even though I never saw it that way. I have dreamed about it since the day we we were there well over five years ago. In order to do the EMDR, which can bring up frightening, painful memories but is instrumental in healing, I had to have a place I could go to where I felt safe, even if it was just in my head.

We had to set up my target sheet, too. This was about the traumatic event that I was going to focus on, to bring up repressed black sludge so I could get over it and move on.

That was hard. Just the target sheet. Very hard. Very emotional. Scary. Things I have not allowed myself to think about for well over ten years...I had to pull them from the back of my head where I had pushed them, because if I allowed myself to think about them....

Well. I think you can understand what I mean.

Keep in mind that this may not be common knowledge. It's not talked about in my family unless I bring it up, and I normally don't, since you might as well be punching me in the stomach when I'm talking about it. I'm going to talk about it here, now. That, in itself, is almost miraculous.

Right around my 20th birthday, though I was ignorant of it at the time, I was severely depressed, horribly anxious, and pregnant. It was about five months since I had eloped with a boy (yes, a BOY) I had known for 3 months, and I was pregnant. We had no money--when I say no money, I mean it. None. Zip. Nada. I found out I was pregnant because my extremely regular menses never...erm...mensed. My mother finally figured it out because I was sick all the time, both from "morning" sickness ("all day all night AUGH" sickness, more like), and because, hell, I don't know, she's got radar for when I fuck up. Anyway. I don't remember exactly when I might have conceived the baby...sometime in April, I think.

My mother was so mad at me, so disappointed, hated my "husband" so very much that I thought her face might fall off at any moment, she pulled it so tight. It was a bad time. I had eloped because I wanted to be a grownup. I was tired of my parents running my life. I'd turned into something of a tartlet the year before; not so much "sleeping around" as just...well...not being as virginial and discretional as I'd once been. I had started smoking, too, and don't even bother me about that, because that was only one in about a million moronic things I managed to accomplish since I'd graduated from high school in 1993. I had lost a lot of weight, felt confident about my looks for the first time in my life, and I wanted to be seen as an adult.

It backfired fantastically.

I gained back the weight I'd lost fast. I got married on November first of 1994, and by Christmas had gained back the almost thirty pounds I lost after high school, plus about twenty more. I ate and ate and ate, living with my new husband and his parents in their double-wide trailer ten minutes away from my family's lakehouse.

Christmas was awkward because I was heavier than I'd ever been, and a blanket of tension and disappointment lay thick over everything. My mother's oldest sister, who had never been mean to me in my life, was snappish and rude. My grandfather was on the downward slope to his passing, but he and my mother's middle sister were the only adults in my family who were kind to me. My paternal grandmother was very sick, and in January, she passed away. I despaired because I felt she died disappointed in me. If there is such a thing as a good funeral, hers definitely wasn't--at least not for me.

My new in-laws were just as different from my parents as they could possibly be. My mother-in-law, Beverly, was a very short, rotund, bipolar waitress who refused to get treatment because she said it made her fat. She cooked and got mad if you didn't ask for seconds, then got mad if you did. She would stomp around that trailer until I wanted to throw up, I was so miserable...you never knew what she was mad about, just that she WAS; therefore, she stomped. My father-in-law, Butch (Oh my GOD, I could not remember his name for a minute there!), was a truck driver. Though he was not the type of person I was used to, he was kind to me, and he was not crazy. He slept on the couch because his wife was, however.

My husband, Brian, was a high-school dropout with a propensity to lie. I soon found he would lie about anything. He made up stories about anything and everything. I regretted the marriage almost as soon as the ceremony was over, but I thought when you got married, you stayed married, so I stayed married.

Then I got pregnant.

I don't know what my father did when he found out, I only knew that he avoided me like the plague, wouldn't speak to me, just like he had ever since my sad, stupid little wedding. Very briefly, on my birthday, he gave me a hundred dollar bill and spoke fairly lovingly to me, though I don't remember what he said.

To this day, my father and I have difficulty communicating. We are both so afraid of getting hurt by each other that our topics are rather limited. We mostly just tease each other about what we watch on TV. Maybe someday it will get easier; I certainly hope it does, but for right now, he's being careful not to say anything that will hurt me, and hey, that's better than a whack on the nose with a rusty poker.

Anyway, my mother decided she'd had enough, as I remember it, colored as it is by the years between now and then. She told me rather bluntly that it would be extremely difficult for me to keep the baby. She said if I had it I would not be able to give it up for adoption. She wanted me to have an abortion. She and my dad both did.

I suppose I could have refused, but let's remember that I was a basketcase. I was broke, practically homeless as Brian's mother had flipped her lid in finding out neither one of us had a job (Brian didn't want me to work, and I was just stupid and trashy enough at the time to think that was kind of cool...except he couldn't keep a job to save his LIFE), pregnant, sick as a dog, married to a loser, and I did not want to be an adult anymore. I wanted it all to go away. I didn't know it, but this was my first near-suicidally depressive episode.

I waited almost too long. I didn't want to have an abortion. I'd always said I'd never do that, ever. I was pro-choice--it's not my place to decide what other women do with their reproductive parts, but I wasn't ever going to do that.

By the time I did, I was ten weeks pregnant. Eight weeks is when you're supposed to have it done, if you're going to, and you can't have it done before that because it's too early.

I did not allow myself to become attached to the baby. I was alone a lot, because Brian was pretending to work and he took the car and I just read the same book over and over again. Before my parents knew I was pregnant, but I knew because I was sick sick sick and not smoking because cigarette smoke made me hurl, I would stroke my fattening belly through the only pants that still fit me and wonder what it was like to be a mom. Sometimes I would talk to my stomach, but deep down, I knew that I would never give birth to that baby.

June 23, 1995, I was numb. Brian didn't want me to do it. My parents did. I felt they were incredibly angry with me, that I had done something wrong. I was unbelievably ashamed. I wanted it to just be okay. I wanted my parents to not be mad at me. I am sitting here, remembering my anguish, and if I was alone, I would be bawling.

All I wanted was for someone to hold me and tell me it was going to be okay. That's all. I never got it.

I don't remember going to the clinic. I don't remember where it is, just that it's somewhere in Austin, probably over by Seton downtown somewhere. I remember sitting between my mother and my husband, not knowing what I was going to do after this was over but still desperately wanting it to be over so I could erase it. I wanted a do-over. I wanted to go back in time and not marry him, not meet him at all. I wanted look down at my life and pick him out of it and put him way the hell in someone else's.

I remember watching my mother's hands give white-latex-gloved hands four hundred dollars in cash.

I don't know how I got from the waiting room to the pre-surgery counseling room. I was there with a bunch of other girls who were disgraced, and I remember it was a drab room with dark, ugly paneling and orange shag carpet. The nurse told us all what was going to happen. It would be uncomfortable. We would be allowed one blue valium before the procedure and laughing gas during. We were given hospital gowns and told to put on the socks we'd been asked to bring.

In case you are wondering, valium and laughing gas are insufficient when a cold-faced doctor is vacuuming a baby you really didn't want to give up--in any way, but especially not this way--out of your body. I imagine that, if there is a hell, that's what it's like. That would be my hell. I am not entirely clear on the procedure but I remember the vacuum. I remember how much it hurt. I remember the nurse was entirely uncaring as she stood over me and watched. I remember being led, bleary, bleeding and in anguish, to a recovery room, where I was given a pad and sat in an easy chair with orange juice and cookies. I remember thinking, well, at least it's over.

I do not remember the drive home.

At home, I was put to bed. I was not allowed pain relievers that worked, like ibuprofen, because they might cause my blood to thin; so I took tylenol, which has never worked and didn't work then either. I was not allowed heat, just an ice pack. And at home, my nurse was my angry, sharp mother, who seemed to have no sympathy for me at all. I was enduring this unending physical and emotional pain, tied in knots of tension and terror, while she went in and out of my room, glaring at me and looking as though her hands itched to slap me.

The misery I thought would end once I did what they wanted me to do was only made worse by how cold she was as I attempted to recover from it.

I had signed papers stating that I understood it might be necessary to come back and have the procedure done over, as sometimes they didn't "get it all" the first time. Something about percentages. Oh, God. I thought, well, that won't happen to me.

I realized I was wrong again when I started hemmorhaging.

I remember the drive back, over a back road, a bumpy back road with plenty of potholes, just me and my furious, disgusted mother and my ice pack and my despair in my grandfather's old car with the interior the color of dark blood. I remember that I wished I could die. I wished I would die. It seemed that, despite what I thought when I agreed to the procedure, that this was never going to be over, that it would just keep going on and on and never end and nothing would ever be good again, ever.

I remember sobbing through the second procedure. I remember there was a different nurse this time, a kind nurse who held my hand and stroked my hair and whispered soothing words to me as I took another trip through hell. I wish I knew who that nurse was. I wish I could tell her how much that meant to me...it felt like a million years since anyone had shown me tenderness.

I don't remember much after that. I should have been immediately plunked into counseling. I should have started therapy that very day. I felt so betrayed, so unloved by my parents, by my mother with her icy anger, by everyone around me in my life, that I went straight back to Brian. I felt like he was the only person who cared.

My marriage ended a year and three months after it began, but it was really over after the abortion. Reality had come and it had kicked my ass all over town. I had done what I'd set out to do--I wasn't a kid anymore.

I've been haunted by it all these years. I can't tell you how many times I have prayed for forgiveness, how many times I have worried about going to hell for what I'd done. A couple of years later, I tried to talk to my mother about it. Things had certainly improved, both parents speaking to me again, and I mentioned how I felt like I'd been forced to do it when I didn't want to. She reacted defensively and said she never forced me into anything, that it had been my decision.

I realize how bad I'm making my parents sound, but they are only human.

This was my first target. I did EMDR and went to my safe place, because the same way as EMDR decreases traumatic things, it increases pleasant ones. And it's true, it did. There is nothing bad in my safe place.

However.

Before that, we'd done the target sheet, so I was thinking about the abortion and all the stuff I'd pulled out of the back of my head while the EMDR was enhancing my safe place. I went to the hike-and-bike trail afterwards and walked along it in my flip-flops as disgustingly healthy people whizzed by me, the ones on bikes shouting "ON YOUR LEFT!" I sat down on a park bench and thought about my baby and wondered how anyone could see me since it seemed like that therapy session had made me disappear.

After the safe place EMDR session, I went home and I printed a bunch of stuff about depression, anxiety and binge eating disorder for my parents, because they are still not getting it. I took a bath and I looked over at the toilet and I flashed, clear as a picture, on me, 20 years old, sitting there, horrified at how badly I was bleeding, terrified and hurting and alone. It all came back to me in a rush, and the tears that had been wanting to come for hours, if not years, just came, and there was nothing at all I could do to stop them. I just let it go, because really? How long do I have to deal with this? How long?

I took the 40-odd pages of information into my bedroom and began highlighting all the things I felt were particularly relevant. If I felt like I was going to cry, then I just cried, because I am through holding all this in. I am through being a martyr and I am through pretending that I am okay when I am SO not okay.

My mom knocked on the door and came in when I responded. I'm sure it was obvious that I'd been crying. She asked me if I was okay and I lied (DONE. LYING) and said yes. She said carefully, "You didn't sound okay when you were in the bathroom."

I shrugged. I had no voice, there was no way I could deny it and I didn't want to anyway.

She said in the same tone, "Was the water too hot?" This made me laugh, and I said yes, to which she responded, "You shouldn't make the water so hot that it makes you cry."

I told her I would keep an eye on it next time.

Then we talked, really talked, for the first time ever, about my abortion. She said that when I went in the second time, she went out to the car and cried, and a nurse came out to check on her. I told her what she'd said those years ago about it being my decision...and she said she shouldn't have said that, because it wasn't, not really. She said that she and my father had kind of made the decision for me. I didn't have a whole lot of choices. I mentioned feeling resentful and sad about their relationship with Reid, since it seems to me that they didn't want my baby but were fine with my brother's. I know the situations are completely different, but please try to explain that to my heart. She said it's not that they didn't want mine, it's that they wanted me to have a life that having that baby wouldn't have allowed. She said maybe it was the wrong decision.

I could feel myself healing during this conversation. Not all the way, but much, much better.

My baby was a boy. No, no one ever told me at that clinic, and why would they have? I don't want to think about what he must have looked like when he was ripped out of me. I just know. I have never thought for a second that it was a girl. It was a boy. And he would have been blond, he would have had my eyes, and this coming January, he would have been eleven years old.

On the tenth anniversary of the abortion, right after I had finished what was unmistakably a year so similar to that one ten years before in terms of complete torment, I named my baby, the one I never met, the one I think about every June 23, the one over whom I have worn a hair shirt for so long. I named him and I quoted a song lyric that summed up what I was feeling. His name was one I think I would have used when I was 20, because it wouldn't make sense to name him something I'd use now. I'm a different person now, but I'm still his mother, and nobody feels his loss like I do.

In the EMDR session, Robyn started out asking me to think about that drive back for the second procedure. She asked me to think about it and then just notice...whatever came to me, just notice it. I noticed that my mother didn't say a word to me the whole time she was driving me back. I noticed that it was inhumane to not give me anything but tylenol and an ice pack for that kind of pain. I noticed that the road was full of potholes and the interior of the car was the color of blood. I noticed how paralyzed I had been with fear.

The machine stays on for thirty seconds to about a minute, and when she turned it off and asked what I'd noticed, I told her...and then I talked about how I have always worried that I would go to hell because of this. She assured me that I wouldn't, and used my obvious remorse as part of her reasoning. Then she asked me to think about worrying about going to hell, and turned the machine on, and I leaned back and closed my eyes.

It was like there was someone talking, but there was no sound. It was like there were letters making up sentences, but I couldn't read them. Whatever it was, it was on a loop. Maybe it was a feeling. There were three sentences.

You are not going to hell.

You have been forgiven.

He forgives you, too.

I swear I am not making this up.

She said that happens sometimes, though nobody knows why. It was so unbelievably awesome. For the first time in nearly twelve years, I felt forgiven.

Before I knew it, the session was coming to a close. I had, by then, envisioned him at the age he would be now. She asked me to picture him and then go to my safe place...and she said, "You can take him along, if you want."

How could I not?

We sat next to each other on the bank of Frijoles Creek at night. He called me Mom. I told him I was going to change his last name to mine, and he was fine with that. Ha! Maybe he knows his dad is worthless too. It was just the coolest thing. I felt at peace. I felt like I finally got to be with him, got to know that he doesn't hold it against me.

Later on, I decided to change his middle name too. I wanted him to keep his first name, the one I would have chosen at twenty when he would have been born...but his middle name needs to reflect the fact that we have been reunited.

I thought I made up the name Kagan in high school, but it is Irish and it means "thinker," which I thought was interesting. I have no idea what Blaine means, but when I say or think it, all I hear is Duckie from Pretty in Pink screeching about how that's a major appliance, not a name.

Levi is newly beloved, and it means, "joined." He will always be a part of me.

I am still pro-choice. I still don't think it's any of my business what other women do with their bodies, and I don't think it's Dubya's business, or any other politician's either...especially if that politician is a MAN or a REPUBLICAN, or--AUGH, GAH--both. I can say now that, if you can possibly avoid it, if you have any feeling for children at all or you think you ever might, don't have an abortion. The physical pain lasts for only a little while, but the emotional pain will tear you apart. It's not a simple surgery. There will never be anything simple about it. It's frighteningly complex and probably the trigger that started a decade-long major depressive episode for me, not to mention the anxiety, the shame, the feelings of helplessness and worthlessness and anger and despair and regret.

If you have any doubts at all...just don't do it. Give your baby to someone who will love it, if you don't think you will. Keep it and raise it yourself if you do and if you possibly can.

If I could do it over again, that's what I would do.

It's just not worth it. It's not worth this.

I didn't know if EMDR was going to work. I was skeptical--hopeful, but skeptical. It worked better than I ever dreamed it would, and I am going back for more on Tuesday.

I have faith that it will continue to help me to heal.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kagan Levi Jackson--June 23, 1995

I loved you more than you'll ever know

and part of me died when I let you go