Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (21 page)

Experts and clinicians know that trauma patients have to deal not only with whatever event brought them into therapy, but with every mini-trauma that had been abruptly knocked loose from wherever it had been stored before they got PTSD. Like they didn’t have enough to do already. I found myself suddenly assaulted by visions and emotions around all manner of historical ugliness large and small come to slap me as intrusively traumatic now. I started to conceptualize the remnants of any bad stuff that had ever happened, which had fossilized and been packaged safely away, as having forged a little trauma asteroid that floated around harmlessly inside my body. I pictured my first weekend in Port-au-Prince as if it were a force, a shockwave that radiated outward from an explosion in a movie, a barely visible but deadly tremor that slammed into my system, wreaking its own devastation while shattering the asteroid, the shrapnel puncturing my organs. The wounds were infected, inflamed. If I was going to regain function, Denise and I were going to have to find the abscesses and acknowledge them, drain them and dress them, one by one.

*   *   *

In his day, Freud speculated about the connection between old trauma and new. An incident that triggered hysteria, even one that was nasty in its own right, he argued, could trigger psychological damage from an older incident, which he thought was often the true cause of the symptoms.

More than a century later, the importance of old trauma was reasserted when researchers started screening soldiers and cops before and after deployment in their quest to answer: Who gets PTSD?

According to the contemporary studies, having parents with mental health issues, including depression, is on the list of risk factors that make a person who experiences trauma more likely to develop PTSD. A history of child abuse or neglect is on the list, as are having other mental health problems, and having no good family/friend support system. So is “being female,” which suggests that the female body is constitutionally unsound, lacking the integrity to withstand trauma when all other things are equal, when in fact it’s on the list because being female means being subject to far more threats and violations to boundaries and sexual and physical safety. Which means being exposed to more trauma, not a predisposition for not being able to handle it, and therefore it should not be on the list at all.

And then, in addition to childhood abuse, there’s the more general “previous trauma.” Whether it had made me more susceptible to PTSD or was just creating more work now that I had it, Denise wasn’t surprised to see it coming up. But as this was a work injury, she wasn’t the only one who would be interested in my past.

I was paying Denise out of my savings, some $600 a month. Later, when I started seeing her more often, it was more than a thousand. I had health insurance through my job, and it did cover therapy, but only group therapy, they told me when I called to inquire. It hardly compared to the intuitive, specialized care I was getting from Denise (and some experts considered group inappropriate during intrusive symptoms and inadequate for recovery), so I kept seeing her, as a matter of survival, while my employer’s insurance company buried me in workers’ compensation paperwork and requirements to get her individual sessions covered. I had to prove that I had PTSD—and that if I did, that I hadn’t secretly had PTSD before, from something else. They couldn’t take Denise’s word for it. I had to see a State of California Division of Workers’ Compensation Qualified Medical Evaluator.

Dr. Aaminah Shere’s job was to determine whether my initial onset of PTSD was strictly due to work-related activities. Before the insurance company would pay for any of my treatment, I had to go see her for an evaluation in a bland room in a bland office building. I was my usual self—which, at that time, meant crying and shaking a lot—while she assessed and grilled me for two hours, looking for something non-job-related that could be blamed. And she couldn’t do that without asking me a lot of questions about every bad thing I’d ever gone through before.

*   *   *

Sigh.

OK.

Number one.

A few months before I graduated from college, in 2002, my parents came from Cleveland to visit me at my apartment at Ohio State. My father sat on a couch across the living room from me, and my mother, in a chair to his right. Calmly, my father said, “I’ve been seeing someone else.”

I didn’t believe him. Though I also couldn’t think of why he’d make something like that up. When I looked over toward my mother, she was suddenly on the floor, halfway across the distance we’d been sitting from each other, crawling to me on her hands and knees.

What a superweird joke they were playing! My parents were the couple that my friends and other married couples wanted to be, the way they were always going on dates and sexy tropical vacations and singing songs together while my dad played guitar. Plus there was no way he could have a girlfriend without my knowing it because we were best friends. The first time I remember seeing my father cry was when I told him that I filled out his name next to “Who is your best friend?” on a survey for a high school religion class, which, given the strength of my friendship with Stacy Morabito, was quite a statement. I had built large parts of my identity on the foundation of our father-daughter ties. The fact that he had, too, was evident in my mother’s saying to me that day in my college apartment, the two of them on either side of me on the couch now, “Tell him you’ll never speak to him again if he leaves.”

Instead, I said, “I can’t believe what a dick you are.” Before they left, my mom gave me a cherry-cobbler pie from Bob Evans and a bottle of Percocet, while my dad kept apologizing for “rocking my world.”

My father’s mistress, who was of course about my sister Jessica’s age, turned out to be one of two mistresses. He needed more sexual freedom and adventure, he told me in a fancy restaurant several weeks later. It was a long life. He couldn’t be expected to stay cooped up with my mother for the rest of it.

But then he decided to come back and heed my mother’s pleas to stay together. But within weeks he had left her again. When I drove up to the house my parents once shared and found my father’s Cadillac in the driveway shortly after I graduated, I wondered if they’d got back together again, again. Or if somebody had died.

Rocking in an expensive patio chair on the back deck, my father confirmed that they were talking about getting back together—but that, more pressingly in that day’s news, over the course of much of my life, he’d embezzled millions of dollars from his company and had finally been caught.

He was cutting deals to avoid prosecution. But all of
this
, my father said, gesturing vaguely around us, encompassing the house and all of our belongings, was “going to go away.” My mother didn’t look at me. She seemed to have become catatonic.

For the previous few years, I had noticed that my father was spending money as if he were famous, or delirious. There’d been a lot of extravagant dinners and hundred-dollar bottles of wine. More vacations than seemed reasonable. We were poor when I was born, then middle class as I got older, and my dad had kept working harder and working his way up until, when I was a teenager, we seemed solidly upper middle class. From that point on, my father always reminded us that there was no sense in saving because we only lived once.

He said that his crimes had started a few years after Uncle Timmy died in the car accident and we’d adopted my cousins. The court-mandated family therapist said my parents needed to give the grieving youths their own bedrooms, so we’d moved quickly from a small house to a doubly large one. My father, who was solely responsible for our finances, never discussing them with my mother, underestimated the costs of that mortgage plus the higher utility bills—we had a rule after we moved that if we left the lights on in an unoccupied room we were grounded that night. Plus there was the cost of the new van he bought to fit the whole family, and the extra groceries, and the therapy and the custody-lawyer’s fees. He’d started paying our gas, electric, and phone bills along with the company bills, with company money. It’d devolved into a consumption addiction, living up to our big house and new cars and then to his new, fancier colleagues as he’d worked his way up in the company, eventually buying it, along with car phones and new tailored suits and nicer cars and an even bigger house filled with custom furniture and art.

He said he’d survived the guilt of the stealing and the inevitability of getting caught by going numb. That while we were all having parties and vacations together, he hadn’t felt anything. While we all thought everyone was having a blast, for some fifteen years, he had faked his laughter, and enjoyed nothing.

Now, despite the amount of money he’d stolen, he had only a few hundred dollars in his checking account. Everything we had was leased and mortgaged; the house and the cars would all have to be relinquished. My own new car was a weeks-old graduation “present” that, my father explained now, he had leased in my name with no money down. He’d also taken out tens of thousands of dollars of extra college loans I didn’t need that I was going to have to repay. I remembered signing the papers he’d handed me, saying that though my name was on them, he’d pay it all back himself, and that there was no reason not to take it in addition to the maximum loans he’d taken in his own name because with the low interest rates it was “free money.” I’d turned large amounts of it over to him after it was deposited in my bank account so he could go to Mexico or a dinner club or Palm Springs.

Having just graduated and not found a real job, I was working at a moving company, the same manual labor I’d been doing during summers at home throughout college, but it wasn’t going to cover the sizeable debts I now apparently owed. The morning after The Fall, as my mother came to call this culmination of their marital and financial ruin, I sat in the family room trying to figure out a game plan. My father swirled around me, gathering valuable things out of our house, while my mom shuffled around, heavily medicated, like a hospital patient. He hocked his dead brother’s guitar. And his golf clubs.

I went back to Columbus and got a waitressing job. And a housecleaning job. And a job in the admissions department at a vocational school, working maniacally to pay the monthly dues on my surprise deficit. I worked overtime to hoard money for a trip. I was an accomplished traveler already, and over the next year and a half, while I waited for my boyfriend, a college senior, to graduate, I saved enough for us both to travel for the six months between his commencement and the start date of whichever grad school would give us both free rides. While planning the vacation, I realized our stop in Fiji would be a perfect place to get married. “Someone needs to do something to bring family together and have some good news,” my mother said approvingly of the idea; “Don’t you think you’re as ready as you’ll ever be?” my best friend asked when I expressed last-minute doubts. Though the correct answer was definitely
No
, for having gone into something as serious as a marriage with the wisdom of a recently rattled twentysomething, I got married to an amazing guy, the smartest and most reliable, the funniest and most supportive man in the Midwest, on Taveuni Island, under a waterfall, in 2004.

When the trip was over, my father-in-law picked us up at the airport. It was an abrupt return to reality in my home country when he said he wouldn’t take us back to his house because long-term guests hadn’t been cleared with my mother-in-law, and we couldn’t go to my parents’ houses, either, because both of them were homeless, living with friends.

After The Fall, my parents’ lives unraveled personally and materially, their divorce impending as my father left again. They had both called me constantly. And I’d had little sympathy for them. That I kept wishing my father, who started making mild threats of suicide, would please suck it up, dismissively reminding him that he still had his health and his looks and his intelligence, is less surprising, since he’d done what he did to himself. But my frustration with my mother, too, was considerable.

Have I ever mentioned how much
I
hate victims?

Yes, I acknowledged, something horrendous had happened to her, and it was undoubtedly tragic. But there was no time for sitting around moaning about it. She hadn’t supported herself since the seventies, and the possibility of living off my father or alimony forever was over now. Neither of my parents had gone to college. She needed a strategy. She needed to get her shit together and move forward. My irritation overwhelmed my feeling bad for her as she stayed holed up and helpless, her husband having left her three times, growing more despondent and poor, waiting for the bank to repossess the house while the gas company shut the utilities off around her.

My own handling of the crisis may not have been perfect. The workaholism and the marriage and the trip—which had, in addition to motivations of genuine curiosity and adventure, a ring of escapism to it. But I did exhibit the normal range of human emotions under the circumstances, sadness and anger and disappointment, but also excitement and joy and intimacy, and continued making goals for myself and meeting them, plans for my future and executing them, for that trip and beyond. I maintained relationships with my parents, who dropped all pretense of acting like parents. My family turned out to not be everything I had thought it was, but I continued to believe, even if I’d based much of my worth on my dad’s word, and many of his words were lies, that that didn’t have to change the better things that had always been true about me. Though I did worry about it sometimes. It wasn’t the charmed kind of wifely exasperation my mom used anymore when, if she disapproved of something I was doing, she told me I was just like my father.

*   *   *

Number two.

The other divorce. My divorce.

My marriage was probably over several months before it started. It perhaps was obvious, the way we’d slept together five times on the six-month trip—the week in the enchanting Fijian honeymoon cottage included—that we were mostly friends. Before Fiji, in Borneo, I had become infatuated with the thirty-two-year-old Malaysian who guided us deep into the jungle, though he drank too much and admitted heavy patronization of $8 Chinese prostitutes. One night, after a long evening of drinking homemade rice wine in a village, I got up at two in the morning from the floor of our stilted longhouse to find him awake and still drinking by candlelight at the table in the adjacent room. I considered, when he asked me why I wasn’t asleep, slowly walking to him and sitting on his lap. My wanting to lead him past my sleeping future husband and into the hall to press him to a wall and to ask him, while he watched me with his wide mahogany eyes, if he wanted me, and to tell him he could touch me anywhere he liked, I chalked up to extramarital fantasies being the nature of desire. Not to a sign that desire was lacking in my relationship. Later in the trip, scuba diving just a week before our wedding, I wanted a British dive master who was neither smart nor good-looking, and I took it as further confirmation that people who are responsible—who get steady jobs and husbands and move on from a life of wanderings and making out with backpacking Italians in Spain—still fantasize madly about strangers, but rise above by not acting on it. My feelings were indicative of nothing more than the grown-up truth, I reasoned, that all married people must just always want to fuck everyone they meet out of town.