the village

“The human heart cannot heal with a Bible, a cup of coffee, a journal, and a good view out your window. It can’t.” – Adam Young

Oh shit!

I listen to the Pirate Monk Podcast with as much regularity as someone with ADHD can. I’ve included it on my wanted resources page. I really identify with Nate, one of the hosts of the show. We have many similarities in upbringing, life experiences, and addictive behaviors. This most recent episode of Pirate Monk Podcast was with Adam Young. I also listen to his podcast quite often and have received a lot of therapeutic-level learning from Adam. It’s also listed on wanted.

This particular episode was a slow-starting train for me, but I kept riding and whoah!! It picked up steam towards the end, taking me places I wasn’t expecting!

The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, it’s connection. My addiction is disordered intimacy. Disorganized attachment. The opposite of any disorder is connection. Healthy connection.

It takes a village.

I need others helping me cross the threshold into my own reality – a threshold many of us fear because there is no village, no “other”. No therapist, friend, confidant, person who has done enough of their own work and with whom I can be seen, soothed, safe and secure. Healthy and mature enough that they can hold my big stories, my big trauma , my big feelings.

We need other people. That’s God’s fault. He made us to need the village. I need other people to name me accurately in my story. I don’t know how to tell my story truthfully and accurately by myself. My experience was just normal for me.

Nate and I shared a very similar normal. Like Nate, normal for me was going to church every time the doors were opened. Normal for me was being there, as a 9 month old, even the Sunday after my mother died. With my dad telling people not to worry about him. All he needed was Jesus.

Normal for me was, literally growing up seeing my dad sitting at the kitchen table every morning, with a Bible, a cup of coffee, and a half decent view out the window.

A journal might’ve been an improvement, I think. But that’s not the point.

My mother was a beautiful, fun-loving, caring, selfless, gregarious young lady who died, too young, so I could have a chance at life.

My dad became a widower and single parent of two very young children. His response to losing his wife and being slammed into single parenting was to write a letter to all of his coworkers in the huge insurance company where he worked. On mimeograph paper, no less (before the time of emails or email policies). I came across the letter some time ago, and it made me so angry! The content of his letter communicated to his hundreds of coworkers that he didn’t want them to feel sorry for him, didn’t want them to bring gifts, flowers, meals, or show any gesture of support. He just wanted them to know how much Jesus loves them, because that’s all his wife / my mother would want them to know.

Umm, yeah. Sure, Jesus loves, no argument there. He would surely also have a lot of compassion and sorrow for my dad, for my sister, for me. For my grandparents and other family members and friends who lost someone precious and dear to them. Jesus has other feelings besides love, dammit! And love isn’t love if it doesn’t allow for compassion, sorrow, or grief! Love isn’t love if it isn’t with.

And then my dad went on – business as usual, putting my sister and me in the charge of others, working long days at the insurance company. Spending his nights getting a teaching degree he never did anything with. Continuing his “bus ministry” – farming off his kids, or sometimes taking us with him, so he could literally drive around a full-sized bus and take other people’s kids to church every time the doors were opened. Because that’s what Jesus would want him to do.

For a long time, I perceived my dad’s commitment to reading his Bible every single morning, devoting himself to prayer and coffee, as the epitome of dedication. But along the way, my perception of what that really meant morphed into something else: a feeling that I would never measure up to his impossible standards. I couldn’t seem to do what he did. I didn’t find the richness that he spoke of. And I didn’t see him living out his faith towards me.

My dad didn’t allow others to cross his threshold. Though, when anger – his only expressed emotion – showed up, he didn’t mind crossing into mine. Telling me how I should feel and behave. Beating me until I stopped crying. Or threatening to give me “something to cry about”.

Gee, I don’t know why I have trouble accessing my emotions with any consistency. I don’t know why I’ve carried around this seething rage, just under the surface…

I was reading through my Grandad’s (mother’s dad’s) memoirs recently. I think he was pretty angry with my dad, too. He wrote, about the time of my mother’s death, that my dad was “gone most of the time at work or on his bus ministry”.

My dad told me he went to work like normal the day she died. She had been hospitalized again, and he knew she wasn’t feeling well, but didn’t think much about it. And then, she died.

I think he was afraid. Work seemed easier than considering what might really be happening. Taking other people’s kids to church seemed easier than being emotionally present for his own. Facing her pain would’ve meant facing his.

I used to think that we would’ve been such a happy, blessed family if only my mother had survived. I even wrote that he buried all feelings but anger with her. But, as I’ve been researching my heritage, it’s given me some glimpses into his formative life experiences, and my perception has shifted.

I thought his dad was never around and his mom died early, then he grew up with his grandparents stepping in to adopt him from his earliest days. That was the story he told me, and sure, that much loss has to impact a person – how well I know it! But it seemed pretty rosy, the way he tells it.

I didn’t know until recently that his mom was alive until he was twelve years old. Then I learned he had a brother for a short time, and he was four years old when his brother was born. So his dad was part of his life too, in some fashion, for longer than he has ever let on. His dad was also an alcoholic. This was verified recently by a relative I found through ancestry research. I seriously doubt my grandfather’s alcoholism had positive impact on his son’s young life. Oh…and my suspicion for how/why my grandfather became an alcoholic would be PTSD. He was a two-theater WWII army vet. Thanks for your service, enjoy your party favors!

Back to my dad. Though the picture isn’t super clear, and probably never will be, it seems highly likely that he came to understand that his feelings were unsafe and should not exist or ever be expressed. Add all the loss and trauma he experienced, and he was stuffing his feelings long before my mother died. It was – and still is – his way.

And still he sits each day, with his coffee and his Bible…looking out the window in his study. It’s what he knows. I don’t question that, at some level, it has been helpful to him and has influenced me. But today, he’s a 300-pound shell of a man. His body has kept the score, and is wracked with multiple health issues. It’s obvious he never had a village. Or never thought so. Or maybe never thought he needed one.

And yet, I now live with him, because after my stepmom died it was obvious to everyone that he didn’t need to be alone. Even he recognized it enough to agree. So, here I am…doing what I can to help, when and how he’ll allow it. Yet, I’m not really part of his village.

Me? I don’t have much success having any sort of “quiet time” or “time alone with God”. I do question him, bitch & moan to Him often…and I get the sense He’s okay with it. And, I am finding Him – finding Jesus – in my conversations and connections. I find Him in writing out my stuff, like this. And sharing with my village.

Thanks for being part of my village – and letting me be part of yours!