Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (22 page)

My brand-new husband and I returned to Ohio two months before the school that gave us both the biggest stipends—the University of New Orleans—began. If I hadn’t noticed my marriage was in trouble yet, it might’ve struck me the day we were getting ready for bed under the soaring ceilings of our just-moved-into Crescent City apartment and I said, “I think we should be allowed to make out with other people.”

Just because it was true that my marriage was not going to make it didn’t mean I was ready to accept it. I did not like failing. I did not like hurting people. I never made promises I couldn’t keep. For a year after we’d made the agreement, neither one of us used our right to extramarital relations, and we continued on as usual, the world’s most amicable grocery-shopping team, me uncharacteristically developing crushes on unlikely friends, starved for a certain kind of connection. In retrospect—naturally—it seems we were missing more than one kind. He didn’t understand why I had such strong feelings about things, and I couldn’t relate to his too-even keel. During our four-month Katrina evacuation I took up with an ex-girlfriend. My husband and I had a hundred tearful conversations about how we could make it work and salvage our elaborate plans to build our life together; my ex-girlfriend/now girlfriend and I tormented each other, she inconsolable that I wouldn’t leave my husband for her, me starting fights as an outlet for the stress and doomed affections and guilt. A year and a half and yet another mistress later, I moved to San Francisco, pointing to my career rather than our marital death. It took us several more months to admit that it was both, and untwine our futures, and our bank accounts, and finally file for divorce.

*   *   *

But what all should be counted as
trauma
? Any tear-soaked event that, as my dad put it, rocked my world? Or the world of those around me, since by definition trauma includes witnessing threats or injuries to others? I think I barely mentioned to Dr. Shere, my psychiatric assessor, what, considering the size of its disruption, would probably be number three: the adoption. Though it was a big deal when it happened, I’d never felt that it had long-term ramifications for me personally.

From the moment my parents told me that my newly parentless, out-of-state cousins, whom I’d met only once, were going to be my new brother and sister, my excitement was uncontainable. My parents had to keep telling me to stop, for Chrissake, bouncing up and down around the house or dragging my new little sister about, with her blond hair and dimples and wild Southern accent. But my lightheartedness wasn’t shared. My excitement aside, my adopted siblings were in fact two recent and uprooted orphans, and my parents, two young married people trying to negotiate the financial and emotional shocks of burying my dad’s brother and doubling their child load. And then going to court to keep it, as my cousins’ maternal grandparents fought to have my parents’ custody revoked and given to them. I must have been more susceptible to my household stress than I realized, because at Christmas a couple years later, the post-adoption therapist presented me with a miniature calendar featuring teddy bears in various poses, and I threw it at her.

It was the most disrespectful thing I’d ever done. It probably still resides on my list of top five. I was a behaver. A laugher. I was pretty demanding and tended to get my way, but I did what I was told. A chores-doer. A rule-follower. Not a Christmas-present-thrower. My mother was stupefied. Had the perpetrator been one of the other kids, this might have been dismissed with a routine grounding, but in my case, it called for a full-on all-parent conference when my dad got home from work. The three of us locked ourselves in my parents’ bedroom that night, my mother pacing worriedly, my father saying softly, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand,” sitting on the edge of the bed while I cried, my wailing face pressed into their comforter, which I’d never done like that before.

Because I didn’t understand, either. I
had
told Julia the therapist that I was in a bad mood, and I
didn’t
feel like she was listening when her response was to give me a teddy bear calendar, even if I wanted it. I remember having a sense that those teddy bears were an insult to, not an acknowledgement of, my pain, which I hadn’t recognized myself but was suddenly drowning in now that I was aware of it on my parents’ bed. It still didn’t really seem like it called for throwing Christmas presents at a therapist. Over and over, I just repeated to my parents the only thing that felt true, wrenching its way all through my sick guts.

“I’m just having a really bad year,” I said.

It had passed. I had cried it out, and afterward, gone back to being a generally effervescent child.

But the stress among the rest of my family, even if I didn’t feel that involved in it, continued. Four years after the adoption, my thirteen-year-old brother moved back out of our house. He had behavior problems—always had, even with his own parents—and my parents thought it would be better for him and the whole family if he lived with the maternal grandparents who’d been fighting for custody of him, and with whom he’d been screaming he wanted to live, since his parents died. His sister, my adopted little sister, stayed with us until I was fourteen, when she went to visit her brother and grandparents in Florida, as she did a couple times a year, and never came back. While my parents were trying to figure out what the hell had happened, an official came to our house. I couldn’t help thinking of the episode of
Full House
that my little sister and I had recently watched—in which Stephanie’s new friend is taken away from his abusive father—when the official on our doorstep delivered papers alleging, out of nowhere, that my parents had abused and dangerously neglected her. My little sister had gone with her grandparents to the police in Florida and given this testimony formally. My older sister, Jessica, and I read through it, shocked. A social worker came to make sure we weren’t battered and were clothed and fed. My parents could go to Florida, possibly face criminal allegations, have to prove they weren’t true, and go through another custody battle, or let my little sister stay in Florida. It was evidently where she wanted to be. So, after a lot of fretting and legal consultations and, ultimately, resignation, the number of children in my house—some ten years after it had suddenly doubled—was, with the serving of some court papers, just as abruptly back down to two.

*   *   *

Hurricane Katrina. Number four.

Because my husband had made me leave, I was well out of the city by the time the floodwaters poured in. Making our way east with my best friend and neighbor, Lauren, we’d left the frazzled mothers in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express in Jackson, Mississippi, who were nearly in tears about paying $85 for a smelly smoking room. They consented because it was better than returning to the car at 1
A.M
. to tell their children they had to keep going. We’d continued on and found an interstate-exit dive twenty miles beyond Jackson whose $50 nightly rate was more in our price range and, we discovered, included unlimited free porn. When we woke up the next morning to see on the Weather Channel that the storm had strengthened, it looked as if we might not be going back to New Orleans anytime soon. And as if the storm would hit Jackson, too. Our resources were going to run out quickly. Lauren was from Iowa, and my husband and I from Ohio, so the closest that anyone could put us up was in the Midwest. Since my parents were homeless, house-crashing interlopers themselves, we headed for my in-laws’, who lived not far from where my family had recently fallen apart. We were in Greater Cleveland by the time the winds had even kicked all the way up in the South.

The ripples of the flood’s devastation easily reached us there. The CNN coverage we watched for weeks didn’t tell us whether our neighborhood had flooded, or our school, and certainly couldn’t tell us if our university jobs or graduation plans for the following spring were still valid. FEMA’s hotline was answered by an automated overload message that told callers to try back another time and then hung up on them; when I did finally file an application, by staying up until the middle of the night to get through, we were ultimately denied assistance because, I realized after several weeks and two dozen additional phone calls, we’d answered a question wrong and that answer couldn’t be changed. The lady on the phone suggested we go to the Red Cross.

We had done this already, one day after putting Lauren on a train to Des Moines, realizing that it was probably time to get ourselves some help. After half an hour of filling out paperwork at the local Red Cross branch, we had reached the question requesting directions to our apartment in New Orleans.

“Like, directions from here?” I asked a worker.

“What should I put here?” that worker asked a female coworker, pointing to the “Directions” spot on the application. “I mean, it’s not like we’re going to go
there
,” he said. The city was still flooded.

The coworker shook her head. “No.” She looked at the man, and he smiled. “No, I guess we’re not.” She laughed, and he laughed, while my husband and I stared at them. They gave us a $75 grocery voucher, a $260 clothes voucher valid at Super K-Mart, and two tiny plastic bags containing mini toiletries.

Anyway, I told the FEMA lady, not only had we been to the Red Cross once, but when we’d called them again later and asked for more help, they’d said that they had already given us a grocery voucher, and when I replied that between the two of us, we ate more than $75 of groceries a month, they cut us a check for a couple hundred more and told us never to call them again. When I went to Walgreens the next day and the checkout kid asked me if I wanted to donate money to the Red Cross for Hurricane Katrina victims, I swore at him.

It was four months before we could go back. Though all our belongings were intact when we finally returned to New Orleans in December, not so our neighborhood, or city. Or us. In four months of living with my none-too-thrilled in-laws, regularly visiting my post-Fall parents where they squatted, in the
last
city my world had been destroyed in, I’d felt keyed up, unsettled about our uncertain future. My husband and I barely even tried to pretend as if we were interested in having sex anymore. Determined to continue doing the right thing, I’d told Lauren when she came back to Ohio from Iowa for Evacuation Thanksgiving that if I had to give up sex in order to have a husband as wonderful as mine, I was prepared to do it. But no matter how I wanted that to be true, I wasn’t. It wouldn’t be long before I would get into a pattern of get-togethers with my ex-girlfriend that involved alcohol and very heavy petting.

Finding our personal and collective grounding wasn’t any easier once we got back to Louisiana. Lauren went from crashing at our in-laws’ to crashing with her own parents to crashing with us in our New Orleans apartment, since she’d lost her own apartment and everything in it, just a few blocks away. The state of my marriage didn’t help uplift me from the conditions of the rest of my surroundings. But I avoided the pit of alcoholic despair everyone else seemed to fall into. Unlike a lot of people—who probably had PTSD, if you’re looking at the diagnostic checklist—I didn’t have to drive around way out of my way to avoid seeing certain neighborhoods, or have a nervous breakdown when I did see them. I did my job teaching English composition at the university, though it was still full of broken glass and mold, and finished my master’s thesis. My self-preservation instincts survived. I broke off my turbulent affair. It took a couple times. But I persevered, and it did eventually stick.

Years later, in San Francisco, my disaster mentality persisted in the form of my having no real furniture or valuable belongings. Everything but my clothes was something someone else had junked. I didn’t count on nature, and the future, under even normal circumstances anymore, and according to the United States Geological Survey, the Bay Area’s next big earthquake would happen by 2020. My way of coping was accepting from the outset that everything I owned would be destroyed, and therefore owning nothing I was attached to.

But unlike a staggering number of New Orleanians, if the research was accurate, I didn’t want to die. I was taking steps to live, to live healthier, moving out of the city before the next hurricane season because I had the resources and because I knew I didn’t want the stress. I took the initiative, moved on from my marriage, staked and built my life in another city perched on the edge of certain geological doom, sleeping on a possibly gross bed I bought for $30 from a transient lesbian but sleeping well, never staying awake all night waiting for the building on top of me to collapse in the great impending quake, even on the nights when smaller, sneak-preview quakes would rouse me, but only briefly, before I went back to sleep.

*   *   *

Number five.

The rocket scientist. One can’t very well go crazy following a couple of rape-related incidents of various sorts and not have to consider, at some point, the rocket scientist.

I suppose the most succinct way to explain what happened with the rocket scientist is the way I opened a journal entry dated early December 1998. I was not a regular journaler; this was a note to myself on a special occasion. I was eighteen years old, a freshman in college. “The day before yesterday I had sex with some boy I did not know,” the entry says. “I told him probably about ten times to stop and go to sleep but he kept trying. ‘Attacking me,’ he called it.”

The rocket scientist was a friend of a hometown friend’s. An aeronautical engineer—an actual rocket scientist—he offered to give me a ride back to Ohio State after Thanksgiving break on his way to his own, prestigious university. I’d met him in Cleveland the Saturday night before we had to return to classes; my parents were relieved not to have to make the drive themselves. Because of the traffic that post-holiday Sunday, the usual two and a half hours to Columbus took five, and he had at least that many more to go after dropping me off, so when he asked to spend the night in our dorm, my roommate and I said fine. We talked about math. He was cute and supersmart. When it was time to go to bed, I wasn’t sorry we had to cram close on my twin mattress. Then, according to my journal, “[h]e kissed me and I hated the way he kissed, and I told him to go to sleep.” Then “a couple times he started kissing me again and I kept telling him to stop. I told him we shouldn’t have sex.”