Get Me Out of Here (25 page)

The rest of us nervously swallowed our dinner in silence, the sounds of the kids in the kitchen a soothing background music. Tim's parents were simply stunned, although politely concealing it.

And I'm the one in therapy
, I thought. If that wasn't ironic, I didn't know what was.

Thankfully, by ten o'clock the house was peaceful again, just Tim, his parents, the kids, and me.

As we had waved good-bye to the last of them, only my parents bothered to say thank you, as if the bitterness of the whole experience had somehow been my doing. No wonder my mother no longer wanted to host these Christmas gatherings.

But it hadn't been the worst Christmas ever. It had been a typical Christmas dinner, much calmer, in fact, than some others. Like the rest of my family, I had become accustomed to it. It was life for us, the definition of the family gathering.

And yet I was devastated by this dinner, witnessing it through a new lens of reality. It wasn't as if such scenes had been confined to the holiday season. What had transpired before my eyes was not only a replay of a dozen Christmas pasts but also a mellowed-out replay of family dinners nearly every night of my childhood. It was a picture of just how screwed up, just how dysfunctional our “all-American family” had always been. It was yet another portrait of life and truth I wished I didn't have to see but knew I had to accept.

Jeffrey and Melissa, in their flannel pajamas, had finally begun to settle down after all the hyperenergized excitement of a house full of cousins. Barely able to keep their eyes open as they sat under the Christmas tree, reacquainting themselves with new toys, they were obviously content and sleepy. Somehow they'd escaped all the toxic words and interplay of the evening. They'd had the time of their lives.

Dear God
, I prayed,
please never let our family turn into what my family was. Please let our family be like Tim's and not mine
.

Ever since I had started therapy, visits with my family had disturbed me. During a visit and in its immediate aftermath I was convinced that I had prepared myself for it, that I was immune, that I had come to understand them for who they were. But it almost never failed; by the next day a deep depression would set in.

Only after several occurrences did I see the connection between family gatherings and my horribly down moods. Apparently, as much as I consciously tried not to let things bother me, my subconscious was greedily absorbing every nuance of the dysfunctional family dynamics.

I had dreaded Christmas for precisely this reason, knowing it would literally take days to get over such a dose of family exposure. And Dr. Padgett was on vacation and could not be reached, not even by emergency call. It had given me a real bah-humbug attitude about Christmas.

My dark mood of despair after Christmas dinner had lasted a few days and seemed only to worsen as the week went on. Thoughts of running and of suicide overwhelmed me. I was beginning to panic, as was Tim, fearing that this incident might be the one that pushed me over the edge permanently.

Undoubtedly, had such feelings arisen at any other time, I'd have called Dr. Padgett right away. All I had, however, was a slip of paper with the name of another psychiatrist to call if there were medication problems or a serious crisis. I wasn't sure whether my feelings constituted a bona fide crisis, but I was sure I had no interest whatsoever in talking to some doctor I'd never met before who couldn't possibly understand what I was going through.

It was a bitterly cold night three days after Christmas when I was consumed with the desire to go on a midnight run. As suicidal as I may have been, however, death by freezing was not what I wanted. And deep down I knew that if I engaged in such an impulsive act of self-destruction, Dr. Padgett wouldn't be around to pick up the pieces. Instead I picked up the car keys and decided to go for a drive, claiming the need for milk and bread to appease Tim, who wasn't at all convinced but let me go anyway. He, too, had run out of ideas to lift my spirits.

Passing the church, I decided to pull into the rectory parking lot. Although I'd seen the pastor frequently since the initial hospitalization incident and would occasionally update him on the progress of my therapy, I hadn't gone to him for help for fear that doing so might have confused the issues.

Alas, Dr. Padgett was unavailable, and I desperately needed someone. I sat in the car with the heat on and the engine running, deciding whether or not I should bother Father Rick, uncertain whether I was up to facing the priest, who, from all my upbeat accounts, probably thought all was going well.

I compromised.

I picked up the car phone and dialed the rectory number. I could see his silhouette through the second-story window as he answered the phone.

We exchanged pleasantries and Christmas greetings and were about ready to hang up on what appeared to be a trivial call when I finally mustered the gumption to tell him that, once again, I was in trouble.

“Let me check my appointment book and give you a call back,” he offered. “Are you at home?”

“No. Actually I'm on the car phone.”

I heard a barely audible gasp on the other end of the line. The man had seen me at my worst. He probably figured I was parked on the shoulder of a bridge somewhere.

“Where are you?” he asked anxiously.

“In the rectory parking lot,” I admitted.

What kind of an idiot drives three blocks to make a phone call?
I wondered.

“I'll meet you at the front door in just a minute.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Father Rick smiled as he opened the door, his Roman collar peeking from underneath a vintage Notre Dame sweatshirt. A cherub of a man, no taller than me, his rounded belly and soft, puffy features belied the toughness required of an urban pastor.

Looking down at the cuffs of his black trousers, I noticed he was wearing slippers. Obviously I'd interrupted an evening of relaxation. How many times had I done that to Dr. Padgett?

In his office the priest lit up a cigarette and offered me one, which I readily accepted.

I told him my story, the stress of the family gathering, the steady decline into the depths of depression, the fact that Dr. Padgett was on vacation and I was completely lost without him. They were the same things I'd written on the ledger pads over the past few days, the same things I would have told Dr. Padgett had he been accessible. But somehow, in this context, it didn't seem to be enough. Self-disclosure in the presence of a man with a Roman collar had a way of becoming a confession, complete with all the guilt.

“Fact is,” I confessed, “I can't stand the sight of them. My own family. Right now I'd like to kill them. I hate their guts. Not exactly a Christian attitude, is it?”

“Perhaps not. But it doesn't sound like they were acting very Christian either. Or that they did when you were growing up.”

“But aren't I supposed to love my enemies? Turn the other cheek? Forgive? The whole thing? Somehow I just can't do that.”

“Maybe you just aren't ready for that yet. It sounds like you still have a lot to work out on your own.”

Was this a priest saying these things? Surely my words deserved some punishment, some penance—ten rosaries, fifty Our Fathers—anything. I was confused, which obviously did not escape him.

“You know,” he said, extinguishing one cigarette and promptly lighting another, “there's an interesting theory on original sin I'd like to share with you.”

I nodded.

“Some theologians believe that the true original sin wasn't about Adam and Eve eating the forbidden apple but about child abuse.”

“Child abuse?”

“Yes. Can you think of any other sin that passes its legacy down through generations? Child abuse spans generations. The abused children, hurt and damaged, become abusive parents—who in turn abuse their children, who become abusive parents themselves. So the abusive sins of a parent can have a ripple effect to descendants twenty or thirty generations removed.”

“Interesting theory.”

“With real-life implications. The message of Adam and Eve is that all of us, somehow, are interrelated—even amongst relative strangers. When we act in a hurtful way to another person, the hurt doesn't stop there. The pain is spread. Maybe someone gets told off by a customer or a boss in the workplace. And that person comes home angry and says or does something hurtful to his spouse. Who may, in turn, inflict the anger and hurt on the children. It goes on and on and on. A chain effect.”

“Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers …”

“… that you do unto someone else,” he finished for me.

“Scary thought. What ends the chain?”

“As Jesus said, love ends the chain. Acts of kindness end the chain. Had the boss or the customer given words of kind encouragement rather than cynical criticism, that same person probably would have come home and spread the kindness to his spouse, who would have spread it to the children.”

It was astoundingly similar to Dr. Padgett's analysis of the power of love versus the power of hate—the tiny drops of love we give to the most casual of acquaintances that feed our souls and keep us going. Perhaps, despite his refusal to directly discuss his religious views or notion of God, Dr. Padgett was a more spiritual man than I had thought. As a priest, Father Rick was obviously going to be quite open in his references to Jesus and scriptures, yet the underlying themes were almost identical.

“It makes sense.”

“I would guess that your own parents were abused, weren't they, Rachel?”

The truth was that I had been so consumed with coming to grips with the legacy of my own abuse and filled with anger toward my parents with every new discovery that I hadn't much given this question much thought.

But … yes. Dad's half-joking references to his own childhood, becoming the fastest kid on the block to dodge his father who had come home drunk once again. Mom's refusal to talk much about her childhood at all, the telltale signs of an awkward and cold relationship with her mother that persisted into adulthood. Both of them had told tales of rising from the roots of poverty, the same kind of family folklore that surrounded my own childhood, much of it, when I considered it, also abusive.

They were at a point now where I had been before I had come to face the truth in therapy, still recalling their childhoods through the rose-colored lenses that spared them from the pain of reality. But, like mine, it was a pain that could not ever be avoided, only submerged—with destructive results.

I had long since come to recognize myself as a victim. But now I could see them as victims too. They were the legacy of abusive parents who had been the legacy of abusive parents themselves. And on and on and on. Nancy, Sally, Bruce, and Joe—all of them were victims as well. I still hadn't reached a point where I could excuse my family's behavior, but at least I was beginning to find a basis to understand it. It was easy to accept Father Rick's theory of the ripple effects of child abuse.

A larger question filled my mind, however:
Where is hope? Not in the past, but the future?

“So what ends this cycle of child abuse? It sounds like it just goes on forever and ever—a cancer of sorts with a terrible path of destruction. Pretty depressing, to tell you the truth.”

“Miracles,” he said, “stop the chain. Miracles turn it around. The miracle of love. The miracle of forgiveness. The miracle of a change of heart. No one can force these miracles on anyone else—not even God. It's called free will. We can choose to be open to these miracles, or we can choose to keep our hearts closed and run from them out of fear. It's an individual choice.”

A miracle. Stopping the chain. I could not rewrite the past or change history. But I could change the future.

“So what you're saying then is that I can't stop what my parents did or their parents did, but I can stop it from happening to my own kids.”

“Exactly,” he smiled. “As painful as it is for you right now, you are part of a miracle. You are, at least in your little corner of life, stopping a legacy dead in its tracks. The legacy that may well have been passed down through dozens of generations. It takes a lot of courage.”

“But how can that be happening?” I asked. “A miracle. That's quite a thing. I've got to be honest with you. Even though I go to church, even though I sing in the choir, I'm not at all convinced that God even exists.”

“You might not be sure you believe in God, but God clearly believes in you. He has chosen you to end the cycle, and you have been open enough to take that journey.”

I could feel a tremendous burden lifted from me, a respite from the depths of pain. As embarrassed as I had been sitting in that parking lot fearing the stigma of being the lady who “just couldn't pull herself up by her bootstraps and get over it,” I now felt a sense of pride. A purpose to the pain. Once again Father Rick had come through in the clutch. I knew it wouldn't be easy. I knew I had a long way to go. But I felt a new surge of strength to forge ahead, to not give up.

“Thank you, Father Rick. This means the world to me. I may not believe in God, or Catholicism, or in any of it. But I'm really glad you chose to be a priest. Thank you.”