Escape from Rest Haven- Darin Harbaugh

When I was in 7th grade, December of 1985, my junior high church youth group went Christmas Caroling at a nursing home.  My father was one of the chaperones, the one who drove the over-sized maroon Dodge church van.  It was supposed to be a fun Saturday night.  As is the case with a group of pubescent kids, some flirting, some rowdiness, but in the harsh setting of conservative Christianity, also some singing and good works in the name of Christ.  Christian teenagers out on a Saturday night! Whee!

We went caroling at a nursing home called Rest Haven.  When we arrived, the director escorted us to an activity room, announcing, “We are pleased to welcome a group of young people from The Christian Missionary Alliance Church.  They are going to sing some Christmas songs for us.”  The director then led an applause for us that no one else cared to follow.  Then we started singing Jingle Bells, a musical vista of sleigh rides for people who probably couldn't walk.

It was really sad.  There were all of these old people, some asleep, some awake, some seemed to be asleep but then you would realize, Nope, they're awake.  Usually one or two women would light up and beam with joy at our “Silent Night,” but the rest would not register any acknowledgement at all.  

I didn’t like to sing and I didn’t like Christmas, but I liked old people.  I was fascinated with old people.  So instead of caroling, I just looked around, watched the old people, and wondered if someday in 2042, if I would find myself in this very same place.

That evening, as my peers and our youth group leaders were singing, I noticed just how depressing this place was.  To my side, a nurse jostled an elderly man, waking him up and demanding that he listen to us.  On the television, MTV was on.  A Sting video came on and even though we were singing, a nurse went over and turned up the TV and stood watching Sting sing about the Russians.  Other nurses went about their business, dispensing little cups of medicine, each one appearing to be rather brusque and rough towards the patients.  It became apparent that none of these adults had any control over their own lives.  At that moment I decided…

I DO NOT LIKE HOW THESE OLD PEOPLE ARE BEING TREATED. I DO NOT LIKE THIS PLACE.

The fact that I had a strong antipathy for Sting and the Police probably did not help.  It just seemed so empty, to be singing these songs that would have no impact on the quality of these people’s lives.  We were Christians, told by our church to do bold things, to ease suffering, and here we were singing “Joy to the World” while people were, at worst, being roughly jostled and scolded; at best, being ignored.  

My church had raised me for martyrdom, quite literally. This was during the cold war, and in our church, the bogeyman of Communism seemed more real than anything else save Satan.  The Devil and Karl Marx.  We were constantly being fed stories about the "Evil Empire," and America's eventual demise at the hands of socialists, feminists, scientists and public education.  We memorized the scriptures because when the communists took our Bibles away someday, they couldn’t remove those words from our minds.  I was taught to take a stand for God.  I didn't like the situation before me, this sad smelly activity room.  If we Christians couldn’t take a stand against this pathetic tyranny of nurses and orderlies, how could we ever stand up to Mother Russia?

My youth group stopped singing and the plan was to breeze through the hallways, singing for those who had stayed in their rooms, those who were too infirm to leave their beds.  “Watch out for puddles of urine on the floor” we were told.

As I was making my way, a hand grabbed for my jacket sleeve.

Standing stooped over with a cane was a really old woman.  She had clear blue eyes and a cardigan sweater.  She looked like a skinnier version of my own grandmother.  This nursing home patient wanted to talk to me about religion, about Jesus.

I do not remember what all she said, but what I do remember is that her version of Christianity was very different than the product that was manufactured at my church. This woman seemed to have a sense of wonder and gentle respect at what Jesus had said.  She was so very sad, but also open and kind.   Likewise, her God was kind and loving.  Years later as an adult, I would learn that what she was talking about was something called “Grace.”

She told me about how mean the old nurses were, how the residents were all mistreated at Rest Haven. She told me they took her Bible away from her to torment her.  How they would secretly pinch the residents. She started crying, telling me the address of her home, a place she would probably never see again.

I stood there listening to this woman who was half preaching, half recounting accusations of institutional elder abuse, all through a veil of tears.

Then she asked me, “Please take me away from here and take me to church tomorrow.”

“Well, I err…can’t, I mean…you… have to stay here…”

“Please, I just want to go to a church on a Sunday morning.  That is all I want.” She pleaded.

“But, but, you, um, How? You live here.  I am sorry, but you have to stay here, maybe you could call a pastor or something?”

“Please. Pleasssssssse…” she kept saying, “Please take me to your church.”

This went on for a while, and I will never quite fully comprehend what happened next, but finally that nice little old woman wore me down, and I said

“OK.”

It all happened so fast, but I found myself giving her my arm and we walked down the hallway to her room.  A nurse passed us and just kind of looked at me.  I guess she just wrote me off as one of those teenage Christmas carolers, underestimating my intentions.  Because little did we know, neither the nurse nor I myself, that I was going to bust a patient out of this nursing home.

The woman gathered some things from her room.  I stood in her doorway purposely blocking the view and made small talk, a little louder than normal, trying to make it all look like nothing unusual was happening.  Someone from church walked by and said, “Come on Darin, we are leaving now.”  

As the woman was finishing up grabbing whatever she needed, I heard the director yell after my youth group, “Thank you!” and then all of my friends yelled back “Merry Christmas!!”

By the time she was ready to go, the hallways were mostly clear.  The next couple of moments were very tense.  I would go ahead in front and look for nurses.  When it was clear, I would give her my arm and get her walking, leading her forward a little faster than she probably  felt comfortable with.  “Are you OK?” I whispered.  “Yes” she said as she smiled up at me.

We went through a couple of corridor intersections, waiting to dodge a nurse. Finally we were getting closer. I couldn’t believe it, there was no one stationed at the front desk.  Probably off watching “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” or some crap.   

Now we were totally out in the open.  

I whispered with urgency “We have to hurry now, we're almost there!”

As she held on to my arm and I looked down at her feet and her walker, worried that she would trip, we got to the front door, a regular swinging door, and my heart sunk, because I suddenly realized that it was probably locked and we would be stuck in that entrance way, with the nurse returning to the front desk any second.  

“Shoot!” I grunted under my breath.

I pushed at the panic bar with one hand and with the other guided her waist, and…

Whoosh…the door opened.  The door opened!  

The sound of the busy road moaned as the cold December air wrapped itself around us.  The glow of streetlights illuminated us, a skinny 13 year old boy and a bent-over 80 year old woman in white.

Like the Dead Sea parting with pharaoh’s armies behind us, God had surely provided us a way. God had delivered us to the promise land of the Rest Haven Nursing Home visitor's parking lot.  And before that wall of water could come crashing back down, we made it to the waiting maroon church van.

“Open up the door! Open up the door! Quick!” I yelled.  The panel door slid open and I saw all of the youth group, the group leaders and my father, their eyes staring with their mouths open.  Just staring at us.  Staring.

“Quick, make room!  We have to get in and get out of here! Quick!” I yelled.

My dad said, dumbfounded, “Who is that?!”

“Oh, this is Betsy.  She wants to go to church with us tomorrow.  Betsy, this is my church youth group, that is father.  Everyone, this is Betsy.  That nursing home won’t let her go to church, so I said she could go to ours. But we can talk about this later, we really have to go, like now!”

My father stuttered, “She can’t go to church.  We, uh, don’t know her.  You can’t just take people out of nursing homes.  You could get us all in trouble!”

“But she just wants to go to church, we can bring her back after church.” I explained.

“NO.”

“She can sleep in my room tonight.  That is OK with me.  I don’t mind.  I’ll sleep somewhere else.”

“NO DARIN.  Take. Her. Back.”

Betsy kept looking at me, then looking at my father, then back to me, waiting to see what her fate would be.

My father started to yell “DARIN! RIGHT NOW!  YOU TAKE THAT LADY BACK INSIDE THAT NURSING HOME.  NOW.  I AM YOUR FATHER AND YOU MUST OBEY ME.  YOU TAKE HER BACK INSIDE THIS INSTANT!”

I was no match for the fourth commandment.  I realized that with my father in charge of the getaway car, there was no chance of actually getting away.  And also, no one in the youth group had scooted over to make room.  Betsy wasn’t going to be able to go home with us tonight, and she certainly wasn’t going to go to church with us tomorrow.

“TAKE HER BACK RIGHT NOW DARIN!!”

I looked at Betsy and she started to cry.  I told her that I was sorry, that I was going to have to take her back inside the nursing home.

We shuffled back across the parking lot.  The whole time I said to her, repeating over and over and over again:  “I’m so sorry.  I’m so sorry.  I’m so sorry.  I’m so sorry.  I’m so sorry.  I’m so sorry.  I’m so sorry…”

I opened up the door and guided her back inside the doorway.  “I am so sorry I have to take you back here.  I wish you could go home with me.  Good bye.”

As I pushed the door shut, Betsy just stood there crying, tears running down her cheek.

I slowly walked back towards the van.  

The van pulled out and I looked out the window, Betsy still in the glass entrance way, crying.  I gave a sad little wave as we passed by, maybe she didn’t see me, but I think her heart was broken.  I could see her just standing there following the church van with her eyes.

I had wanted to do what I thought was right, wanted to sacrifice myself like the martyrs who we were told smuggled Bibles into Russia.  I saw my own moment and my own version, smuggling a frail octogenarian over the razor wire of Rest Haven's glass foyer.  I would like to think that I was trying to help another person, but I think what I really wanted was to prove to myself and God, that I was a good person, a faithful servant.

Instead what I had done was to dangerously remove a nursing patient out of care without any real plan or knowledge of her physical needs.  It was a case of reckless good intentions. Rising to a task that as a teenager I could not have possibly understood.  I would like to claim the faith of a child, but it was the stupidity of a child. That woman wanted me to help her, but I was not the one who was capable of truly helping her. What pushed me and made me angry was that seemingly no one else was willing to try.

The church van drove away.  My heart had already sunk out through my feet long ago.  I just sat there in dark of the van, the giggles and intrigues of teenagers swirling around me as I looked out the window at the passing trees.

11:11: Abdulsalam Hdadi

Marilyn Monroe once said, “I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” There is a time in our lives when we think we are special; we are the chosen ones. Like Winthrop when he believed that he was chosen by God to lead America which, in his mind, was chosen for a great destiny. Well, I have known that I’m special since I was 13; right after I made that wish.

As a child I had my ups and downs; my downs were a lot. I was a weepy. And whenever I wept I used to close my eyes and run. I believed that by closing my eyes I could see a path to my mother who was always there for me. However, the wall of my grandfather proved me wrong. I was running with my headlights off before I crashed, face-first, into the wall. I broke my nose and was in coma for around three hours. A few days later, I was helping my sister get down from the second floor just before I fell down, back-first, onto a table. I broke my back and slept in the hospital for 30 days. I fell in a hole. I broke my arm in a soccer game…etc. I can go on forever describing my troubled childhood, which I have no one to blame for but God.

See, a child needs hope; needs a dream; in my case I needed a wish to come true. One night I went with two of my uncles to buy some t-shirts. It was late, and for a 13 years old kid that “trip” was a milestone in my life. When we were heading back home after shopping, I looked to the clock, “11:11” it said. I don’t know why I did that but I wished that I could see this exact moment again. I wanted to feel that same feeling of happiness, which was hard to get for a child like me. After that night I tried to have this “11:11” moment again but I failed. I reached a point where I thought that moment which I was seeking was my salvation from my childhood. I didn’t know that life is simple. With plans, life wouldn’t have the spontaneous taste.

I burned myself out to get a scholarship, hoping that America was hiding these moments. At that moment, on September 25^th 2012 when I entered America for the first time in my life, I didn’t recall my old “11:11” wish. Anyway, I started in a humble ESL school. It took me a month to adjust; a year to feel like it is home. I wanted to go to see the 76ers basketball game in October but I was late for registration. I waited for the November game. $40 was the cost of the ticket. And I went to my first basketball game. It was indescribable. I had the time of my life. I felt it this was the moment that I was really waiting for. I knew that everything God did to me when I was a kid had its payback GOOD time. I went home overwhelmed with happiness. I closed my eyes and wept. I missed my family I wished that they were here with me. I opened my red eyes; put my hand in my pocket; took out the 76ers game’s ticket; and I saw it again “11:11” my row and seat, was printed all over my ticket.

I’m special. I knew that every choice I make, starting with my wish in that old car, was leading me to this moment right now.

Abdulsalam Hdadi is a student of English as a Second Language in Philadelphia. He is originally from Saudi Arabia. 

Parable: Rabbi Zusya

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?”

More or Rabbi Zusya

Lessons in Love From Kylie Minogue: Darin Harbaugh

Removed at the request of the author. 

The Journal I Lost in Central Park: Chris Wild

I was walking to the subway station, to get on in Brooklyn and meet friends in Manhattan.  My mom was dying far away.  She had been sick for many years, but pressed on and lived a good life.  A few days earlier, I had gotten a call from my dad that I knew was bad.  Her health had taken a turn, and I should prepare to fly back home soon.  I had to wrap up part of my life in New York to prepare, which took a few days.  

During this time, I felt simultaneously like I was walking through a daze and as if I were viewing the world with the veil pulled away.  I moved very slowly, and most day-to-day things didn't register with me, but I felt that I could make eye contact unhesitatingly with anyone, looking deeply as if their eyes may hold some sort of response.  I noticed things I didn't normally notice and the world made a different sort of sense.  It was evening as I walked to the train.  The setting sun lit up the sky--beyond the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower, the sky was a gorgeous watercolor spread of purples, pinks, and blues.  I wanted to stop everything and watch it as long as I could.  I didn't normally notice the sky, I guess.  It must do just about this same thing every evening.  I felt I should enjoy it, and I had missed it so many days before.  I wished that by looking at something beautiful I could rise above my physical body, walking in the stream of people to the subway, and pause the progression of the world--stop aging, stop cancer eating away at flesh.  I knew that by the time I got off the subway, the sun would have disappeared, the sky would be dark, and the moment would have passed.  

After my mom passed away, I returned to New York.  The haze continued, but the magical feeling of being able to reach beneath the surface of everyday events and see something meaningful had gone.  It was winter now, and bitterly cold in the city.  I spent my days wandering around, ostensibly looking for a job.  I had a backpack full of resumes that I randomly distributed to shops, hotels, and restaurants that I passed.  

There must have been something repellent about me, because finding a job was nearly impossible--no one was looking to hire.  Or no one was looking to hire me in particular.  My memories started to wind in on themselves, and I would periodically forget that my mom was dead.  I would wander past places we'd been when she had visited New York. I'd get a idea in my head and have to act on it.  Illogically, I would walk from West 90th Street to East 23rd to look into the window of a restaurant that we'd eaten in.  I'd stand outside the window and try to see the  table we'd sat at.  I was disappointed often--either the restaurant had closed or the tables were rearranged in such a way that the table I wanted to see no longer existed where I wanted to see it.  

I fixated on a journal that I'd left in Central Park, years before.  I could clearly remember the bench I think I'd left it on.  For several days in a row, I made my way to Central Park, thinking that if I could just find that journal...  I could picture it clearly, sitting on the park bench.  In fact, I must have had no such recollection.  In fact, I'd simply walked away without looking back at it, which is of course how I'd forgotten it in the first place.  The image in my head was false, just an image my brain had created to complete the story I'd created in my mind, which until then I had entitled "The Journal I Left in Central Park."  I was good at leaving journals.  I'd left one on a train from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, in the fold-up shelf on the upper berth of a sleeping car.  I told myself afterward that it might be interesting reading for someone later.  Not too likely, so I re-thought that it might be interesting practical reading for a student of English. 

The story of the Central Park journal changed during this time.  It became "The Journal That Will Change Everything Once I Find It."  It was never clear in my head why it was important to find it, but like recapturing the scenes in a restaurant where we'd eaten, I felt that by seeing it again, I could bring something back.  I was afraid that maybe I misremembered where the table had been in the restaurants, when I looked at them.  If I misremembered that, what else was I misremembering?  What else was I forgetting?  The journal became a talisman.  My primary source--it would help remind me of all the things I was afraid I hadn't remembered.  It would bring back the part of my that existed when my mom was alive.  From time to time, while wandering through Central Park (where, by the way, nearly every bench looks the same), I would think that this was crazy.  A lost journal doesn't sit on a park bench untouched for two years, through two sets of each season.  But most of the time I focused on the task at hand: looking intently for a journal that I knew no longer existed. 

Our Pregnant Weekend: Nadine Friedman

Monday

I went in for Q-tips. But at the Walgreens, I was reminded of the persistent, recent... bigness of my boobs, and the little nuggets I’d found on my last self-exam. My insomnia had been out of control, and I'd been crying. A lot. I’d missed my period in September, but that wasn't strange. I always skip, with vague confirmations from gynecologists that my PCOS was culprit. I picked up the two-pack EPT anyway  –  plainly, I just felt eerie. I must have  known, because when I was grappling with the immutable plastic wrapper over my bathroom sink, my hands were shaking. 

The digital stick blooped an hourglass while the other, a '90s standby, spread pink to indicate it was working. Minutes later, I was howling on my living room floor, faced with a faint blue + sign in one hand, and the digital's definitive, tiny text — ‘Pregnant’ — in the other. I left the detritus of receipts, plastic, boxes and the digital test on the floor and got on my bike, the + sign burning a decision in my jacket pocket. I rode, trembling, with no cell, ID or money on me, just a pregnancy test. I hoped I wouldn't get hit in my distraction — what an awful CSI:NY opener. I marched into my friend's kitchen and laid the test on her counter, demanding she say the vertical line was too faint, that all the antibiotics I was on for chronic Lyme Disease (oh fuck, what about that?) created a false positive, that there was no way. Not a flincher by nature, she ignored that I’d basically laid a urine sample inches from her olive oil collection and we went through the facts. Jared and I had an accident the month before and I'd taken Plan B immediately, confident in its ability to perform its only role. It was the one time we'd had sex in weeks. I tried to figure out how to tell Jared. He'd be thrilled, I knew. He wanted to be a dad more than anything, and we'd been talking more and more about the future and its hypotheticals. I had to get home before him. Finding a plastic stick with the word 'Pregnant’ lying on the living room floor wasn’t an optimal way to tell him. I zoomed home, called some feminists, cried more.

Later, we were on the same couch, different planets. Jared was shocked, thrilled and confused as to why, at the other end of the sofa, I soaked my shirt with tears and snot and listed all the reasons this wouldn't work. I wasn't well yet. We had no money. We weren't ready. I wasn't ready. And now I had to make a choice, and for all the Second Sex parroting I’ve done throughout my post-undergrad life, I didn't want my freedom to choose. I wanted it just to go away, which isn't really the hallmark of pregnancy.  

I stayed up all night, guilty for disappointing him, horrified by my prospects. I couldn't have a baby. The Lyme Disease — I’m septic, inhospitable to a child. Worse, I am a child. You can't trust me. Selfish, stunted, I don't want anything that relies just on me. I had a terrible relationship with my own mother. I wasn't ready to eat carbs for the sake of another person. When the sun came up, I made an appointment with an OB/GYN to confirm the false positive. I made an appointment with my Lyme doctor, who’d say this wasn’t viable, as I’d just started a new, aggressive antibiotic protocol. My new insurance company wouldn’t cover this pre-existing condition. I’d call my father, who’d gently say this wasn't the right time. Tuesday would be full of outs! Someone would tell me what to do and none of it would be my fault.

Tuesday

No outs. I was pregnant, my blood said so. At one point, as I lay in the stirrups, the OB, Jared and I all had our iPhones out, calculating conception date based on a particular episode of This American Life. At 4.5 weeks, there was nothing on the screen, but, abstractly yes, there was a scattering of cells hanging out in my groin. At the moment they wanted nothing from me, vice versa. I didn't have to make a choice for a few weeks, she said. She also told me, with her hand on my ankle, everything I felt was normal. That motherhood was never exactly The Right Time. No out from my compassionate, impartial Lyme doc, either — plenty we could do, she said, if I wanted to keep it. Safe antibiotics, a 1% chance of passing the disease on to the baby. The insurance company? Totally fine, they said. "It’s a pre-existing condition plan," the polite but confused gentleman told me when I said he was probably wrong. "You could have 10 conditions besides Lyme and you'd be covered. Thank Obama." Jared and I sat over speakerphone as I lost another opportunity to avoid choosing.

Finally, my dad. He'd tell me what a bad idea it was. "Congratulations!" he said. Oh. Two smart, silly, creative people making a baby is a beautiful thing. We need more of that. Money would come later. For now, "It's your choice, my daughter".

No outs. Jared and I had to talk about it ourselves. I was calmer. Points and counterpoints and hours. He supported me either way. He understood the fear, as much as a man can. I asked if he'd stick by me, but we both knew he wasn't the one we needed to worry about.

Wednesday 

Began the brief period of Ambivalence with a Side of C-Cup. I told a few close friends, who had happy but restrained reactions. Jared told his parents. The concerns were equal — my health was paramount, as I was the real person here, but if there was a likelihood this would work out, what a joy this might be. I began to be infected with peoples’ love. With the sense that maybe my practical fears were a cover for insecurity. Maybe I could do it? With all the odds — the Plan B, the PCOS pessimism, Lyme, the One Time thing — maybe this little packet of cells, soon to resemble a Jordan almond, soon to resemble me and Jared, was snuggling in, sticking to my sides, sticking by me because it believed in me. I didn't have ideal health. I didn't have money. But I had love. Love is more than many mothers have. Mother? Girlfriend. Artist. Reluctant sick person. Self-centered fraud in therapy. Mother? I pored over thebump.com, a site I had visited probably as often as gunworld.com. I thought about names. I thought about how bad of a thing it would be to raise a tiny, brilliant boy to respect women, dress him in seersucker.

Thursday 

I rolled over and looked at Jared and told him we would go for it. I didn't feel good, or happy. But I knew what the right decision was. I wouldn't meet him in his cautious excitement, not yet, and asked him to be patient with me till I got there. I wasn't happy, but I was right.  He kissed me over and over. We discussed names and the benefits of baptism, which I had previously considered baby waterboarding for superstition's sake, but is apparently an effective way of preventing a baby going to limbo plus a significant dollar amount in gifts.

I dazedly filled the progesterone and prenatal vitamins prescription. I got a crash course in acronyms and hormones from a midwife standing at the pharmacy. I asked the guy at the health food store what he recommended for juicing. I looked at us from the outside — to him, I wasn’t an immature, self-indicting, scared 31 year old who had been thrust a curve ball and was trying out new dialogue on a stranger, rehearsing. I wasn’t those things — I was just a pregnant woman from the neighborhood. I rode to the park and sat by the lake, watching the dazzling reflections over the water. I called my dad and Monday's friend. She believes in miracles and said a baby is a miracle.

That night I started spotting. A rush of terror and protective love swept over me when I saw it.

The palette I won't go into, but from what I gathered from the obsessives on the internet, this was common. Googling "spotting," I was overwhelmed by the size and inconsistencies of message boards. "It's totally normal, don't worry!," one board chirped reassuringly, the next page advising "Go to the ER immediately." I should get off my feet ASAP, plus go for a nice walk. Creeped out, I searched "miscarriage." Biologically it just happens, I learned, and also, it's God's will. Though the Internet offered such consistent insight, I still went through a roll of toilet paper that night, obsessively checking texture, color and changes. I called the OB who said to stay calm. I went from ambivalent to afraid. 

Friday

More spotting, more toilet paper, more Googling. The irony of timing gnawed. I Facebooked Tamara, a midwife friend, who wished me well, “whether this pregnancy is what brings you to motherhood or is the pregnancy that makes you realize you want to be a mother." But why would it show up at all if it wasn't going to stick around? Why would it leave me the day I told it I wanted it? Jared played bluegrass into my stomach.

Saturday

More spotting. Laid down. Jared prayed. I looked at the wall while he did it.

Sunday

The blood became unmistakably red around 8 P.M.. I sat on the toilet and stared. I tried crying, because I figured that's what you do: that weepy trip to the toilet that 1 in 5 women take in early pregnancy. It was okay. We had gotten attached to an idea. We'd never seen a heartbeat. There was nobody even there. Still, I sat and stared. He came home around 11. His crying made me really cry. I cramped, bearably, and we watched TV. I figured we were done. 

2 A.M. it started. Blood. Pain. I couldn’t have imagined this pain. An hour later, I was too weak to get to the bathroom and could only lie on the couch, wiping myself pathetically, mounding the trashcan next to my head with red toilet paper and a little vomit. He sat next to my head, wiping blood from my hands while I pictured whirring blenders filled with shiny springs and razors inside me, of a pinball machine shooting a little ball made of fire. I saw a sickly yellow ocean. The waves would crumble into ochre parchment when a particularly bad contraction would happen. Hours. The on-call OB told a stammering, panicking Jared there was nothing we could do; the ER would give me ibuprofen. All we could do was wait it out. A natural miscarriage means endurance and certain suffering. It hurt to breathe or speak but I whispered apologies for whatever I’d done. The blood flowed black and red. Around 7 A.M., the cramps had slowed to about three minutes apiece. We got in a cab and returned to the same OB office where, not a week before, I’d sat confused and crying. But it felt like years ago.

Monday 

I sat on a cotton pad to keep from bleeding on the exam table. Her tone was the perfect physician's balance of frank and sad, and after conferring with my ultrasound, confirmed there was no longer any trace of anything. She was sorry, but reminded me that, on Tuesday, I wasn't even sure I wanted it. That we'd meet again when the time was right. Some bloodwork, to confirm my body didn’t think it was pregnant anymore — sure enough, my once-blossoming hormone levels had shrunk to numbers I now imagined as pitiful, humiliating. A failure. We went home.

Today 

What I figured out, exactly a week later: that physical pain is very, very relative, as is the definition of health. I can see a reason to regain my health, outside wanting to get back into my former five mile runs/stay a size 8. I want to be healthy for a role bigger than myself. That Jared and I are in it, even if it’s blood and loss. That this is a loss, no matter when. That Tamara was right — this one forced me to see I want it.

Here's what I don’t get — why this happened? Why it has to be so excruciating, that knife twist of trauma plus physical pain and all that blood that’s still flowing as I write and will continue to for another 10 days or so, a reminder I'm a woman and that we gotta carry so much? I also don't understand why someone would ever try this again, knowing how terribly it might go. Today, I’m trying to let Sunday night become merely a haunting, while grasping at those few Thursday moments at the lake where I believed I was much more than myself. That I could, in fact, be grand.

Reposted with permission from Nadine Friedman. This piece originally appeared on thehairpin.com 

Chris vs. Sobriety: Chris Braak

I am going to write about this one way or another. There are a lot of people for whom dealing with their problems anonymously is helpful. I don’t want to disparage that, I think if that’s what you need then good, it’s good that you have access to that. But I also think that you shouldn’t HAVE to deal with it anonymously, because you haven’t got anything to be ashamed of, and the only way that’s going to change is if people start talking about this stuff openly, regardless of the consequences.

I will take the hit on this one.

I gave up drinking on April 1st, 2013, but I didn’t tell anyone until April 2nd, because I was afraid they would think it was an April Fool’s Joke, and I didn’t want to deal with that. I gave up because the day before was Easter Sunday, and we went to my wife’s parents’ house for Easter lunch, and then to my parents’ house for Easter dinner. I am not Christian, but I am free-mealian, so I was moderately enthusiastic about the whole enterprise.

Anyway, I drank an entire bottle of red wine on my own that afternoon, and then a half a bottle of bourbon that night. I’d have drunk more, except there was only a half a bottle left. The next day I was so hungover I had to leave work early.

I liked to blame my drinking on social anxiety, and there’s a certain amount of truth to that: I don’t like being around other people very much, and I don’t much like having my routine disrupted, and when that happens I can get very uncomfortable in a way that alcohol provided an effective balm. Certainly, in the past, I have used alcohol to assuage that anxiety, especially at parties.

But at my in-laws’ house? At my own parents’ house? Please. I drank because I liked it, and I didn’t stop because I didn’t want to. This has always characterized my relationship with alcohol: I drank whenever it was available; I stopped whenever it ran out.

There are other people who have it worse than I do, I don’t want to make any mistake about that. I never really passed that stage where I just drank whatever was around to the one where I was constantly seeking out more – though I did definitely take care at night to pour my drinks quietly, so my wife didn’t know about it. That’s a bad sign, I know, it made me feel like I was having an affair.

I am explaining all this for the purpose of context.

I thought I was managing pretty well, and then the other day I was at a friend’s house, and a mutual friend poured himself a drink, and I lost it a little bit. (I don’t want to level any acrimony at anyone involved here; I didn’t make a big deal about my having quit, and certainly didn’t say anything to anyone about it at the time – probably this is misplaced pride in the fact that I take it very seriously that I not disrupt another person’s household; possibly I am a little embarrassed about the whole thing; possibly I just felt like my problem shouldn’t be someone else’s. Whatever the case, no one else did anything wrong.)

(Furthermore, I don’t know if you noticed this – I have definitely started noticing it – but America is a culturesaturated with alcohol. I am never not going to be around people who are drinking, or talking about drinking, or where drinking isn’t available. I’m going to have to learn to cope with it eventually; I may as well start now.)

He was drinking bourbon, and man but I was crying I wanted it so badly. I had to go outside and stand in the rain for minutes at a time, hoping the feeling would abate. I finally came back inside and drank a pitcher of lemonade, on the grounds that if thinking about bourbon could make me literally taste it, maybe tasting lemonade would make me think about lemons or something. It worked, eventually, and the craving passed, but it gave me a little bit of a better perspective on the word “craving.”

It’s not like having a taste for something, the way that you crave salt, sometimes, or ice cream. This was a kind of existential, whole-body yearning, coupled with a mad desperate hopelessness at the idea that I was never going to be able to have bourbon, ever again. It’s the kind of complete and intense and utterly involving experience that standing in the ocean and being knocked over by a wave and thrashed around in the surf is.

What’s interesting to me about it is that I’ve had an experience like this before. Back when I was in college, I was involved with a girl; the relationship ended, and I responded…well, let’s say that I responded very poorly. (I want to be clear, this was not a bad relationship — I’ve had those, too – where two partners sort of realize they aren’t compatible and are maybe sometimes kind of horrible to each other; this was the end of a relatively minor involvement after which I reacted very badly.) The experience was very similar: a kind of hopelessness, a sense of desperation, an emotional buckling that happened whenever I saw her around or (worse) when I saw her with other people. Obviously, I didn’t want to break down every time I saw her and have to go hide in the bathroom until the experience passed, but what was I supposed to do? Knowing that a feeling is stupid or inappropriate does not, apparently, obviate the experience.

So, I want to say that my experience with alcohol is like being in love, but that’s not exactly right. I don’t think what I experienced in college is what love is, even though “sleepless nights” “uncontrollable weeping” and “preoccupation to the exclusion of all else” are often cited as characteristics of that affliction. It was manifestly unhealthy when I was doing it, and I don’t think that, whatever love is, it’s something that’s unhealthy. It might be more accurate to call it an obsession, but we use that word so casually and pointlessly that it’s got no real meaning.

Whatever you want to call it, outside of my family, my relationship with alcohol was probably the longest successful relationship of my life. (Debatably successful, I suppose.) From about eighteen to thirty-two, that’s a good thirteen years, and I don’t think I ever realized how essential to my identity it had become. In retrospect, I suppose that was obvious – I’m pretty sure almost every fifth sentence I said in public was about booze – but I was not prepared for the profound sense of loss that would come with giving up drinking. There it is, though: the way that I responded to alcohol was exactly the way that I responded to the thwarting of my whatever-you-call-it. “Love,” “obsession,” that little bit of all-consuming insanity.

It seems like an exaggeration, I know, but the absoluteness of it is so intense –when you see a bottle of bourbon and you feel like you want a drink, and then you say, “no, I can’t have a drink right now,” your brain immediately starts to perseverate over the idea that you’ll never be able to have a drink ever ever again EVER — that if someone told me that this is what it’s like to have a limb chopped off, I’d believe them.

I’d believe it if this is what you told me it was like when your long-time girlfriend dies, only the key difference here is that I can start the relationship back up again whenever I want. Nobody died, no limb was cut off. I’m doing this to myself, and all I have to do to end it is to start poisoning myself again.

I guess that’s the point of all this. The point of it is, when you meet someone who’s an alcoholic, and you find yourself unsympathetic to their difficulties, or when they fall off the wagon, instead imagine their experience like this:

Giving up alcohol isn’t like giving up potato chips or coffee; giving up alcohol is like having your wife die, and then spending the rest of your life knowing that all you have to do to bring her back is to open up a bottle.

Reposted with permission from Threat Quality Press