30 Year Reflections: Part I

PART I

You know the old saying "don't wish time away because it will get away from you" well there is a reason for some sayings. There is truth to it. I simply can't believe I am standing on 30's door step.

It feels like just a short few years ago I was eagerly anticipating starting Junior High (middle school). I remember all the friends I made in elementray and how we or most of us were transfering to the same junior high. I was starting to get a bit boy crazy, in fact I had developed a crush on a certain someone who held my hand at our end of the year 5th grade party. I remember some fantastic games of wall-ball, tether-ball, four square and all the great tricks I had learned on the monkey bars.

Ah, the simplicity of those years.

I also remember another story. A story of many missed school days. A plot that included many many days/nights in a hospital bed, wishing I could be outside playing with my friends. A story that includes children being mean, making fun of me and down-right harrassing me all because I had CF. A disease they didn't grasp and a disease that their parents didn't want to take the time to understand thus influencing their children's mean spirited ignorance. But I was 10. I was a mere child whose feeling where deeply hurt because I couldn't understand the hatred, the meanness, the fear they held.

Ah, the simple-complexity of those years.

Time marked on. Much of the time without me knowing. One thing that I can say for myself is that time is a great healer. Many of those children who were mean, started to learn (though school and their parents) that CF wasn't scary. Wasn't something they needed to fear. Some became my friends.

My health also started to make a small but miraculous changes for the better. The medical advancements were starting to really take a running start. Many drugs were introduced that dramatically changed the quality of life for so many. I was begining to participate in school sports. I was able to do so much more than I ever had before. The trips to the hospital became less frequent.

While I was becoming more of a teenage and leaving behind more and more of my child-like behaviors, some truths remained etched on my soul.

Early death. succumbing to an terminal illness.

While I knew God, I didn't believe Him or trust Him. Not yet anyways. I also didn't believe that the new drugs that were currently making me feel like a rock star would last or have any bearing on my longevity.

I was a difficult person a lot of the time. But a few folks never left me. They never gave up on me. Even when I began to sabotage the relationships they pushed forward, they carried the strength for me, they saw past the rough exterior.

If I knew then what I know today, I would not have let time just march on by.

~Doodlin'

Love thru my diseased teenage eyes

Is love in our teen years really possible? I can pose this question now but in the moments of being 11-to-18 yrs old this question had a definite answer, yes! I sought out to find deep meaningful love from boys, not men or young men but boys. Of course that’s not how I saw it then, they were strapping young men ready to love so fiercely that I had to have their love in order to be someone. In order to be recognized as someone worth more than the disease my body harbored from both male and female peers. I simply thought that if I ‘became’ the person they wanted I could at least get a taste of what love was.  I suppressed so much of who I was, who I wanted to become that I actually became a person I hated.  I became a menace to society. I began dating boys whose hobbies included; stealing, drinking, drugs, sex, and where in and out of juvenile detention. This in my heart was not the road I wanted but the only road I thought would lead me to love.

The other aspect was that my dad had been a rebel of a teenager and I loved my dad. So I thought that if he is capable of love then so are these boys. The saying that little girls grow up to find partners like their fathers is true, unless, they have been raised in an environment that fosters self-esteem that will give them the confidence to reach higher, no matter how great their fathers were.

I went thru many boyfriends and after the end of each I truly felt like I would never find another. The cycle of dating and breaking up was crushing to my already invisible self-esteem. I was hiding so much of the true me and trying to fit a mold of someone I was not that it lead me to want to end my life.

In November 1999 was my first attempt to end my life. After having broken up with a boyfriend for infidelity (can that word even be used in teenage romance?). A boyfriend who was very close to my family, who had on a very basic level supported me thru some hard times in my illness along with my dad’s death, cheated on me. That experience was horrific for many reasons and it only etched deeper in my heart that I was damaged and was not worthy of truly being loved by a boy or man or anyone for that matter.

The idea that I was damaged goods was so powerful, mostly because no one every said to me that I wasn’t. No one of influence in my life ever spoke to me about my self-worth; that I was worth everything the world had to offer. Just a short year after my first attempt to take my life I tried to take it again. Looking back the first attempt really was a plea for help, a cry for attention. The attention needed was NOT my CF but rather my worth as a young impressionable female. The second attempt really was a true wholehearted desire to leave this world. I wanted to be free of discrimination, free of societies idea of value, free of the pain that accompanied CF. All of these things I could not or did not have maturity to express in verbal format.

During the second attempt my mother worked with healthcare professionals to help get me the best care. Their recommendation was an inpatient stay at Emanuel Hospital’s psychiatric ward. In preparation for this stay, I was taken directly from the psych ward at St. Charles Medical Center in Bend, Oregon to Emanuel in Portland, Oregon by security car without my mom or anyone. Just a locked police car of sorts that way I couldn’t escape with my bags that my mother had pack for me. All the clothing she packed had to meet certain requirements; like no drawstrings, as I could use the strings to hang myself. This was and is a very serious side of illness or depression. Upon arrival and after check-in I was in my barren room that consisted of a bare mattress on the floor and toilet whose flushing system was controlled outside my locked room, to my surprise I found a note that my mother had written while packing my bags….. “ I will go the ends of the earth for you.” Writing that makes me cry to this day. That statement was so powerful and still is powerful. I realized that I could push my mother, who loved me more than anyone else on earth, to a point of breaking and she would still write something like that. She, no matter whom else, would love me thru my darkest days. These boys would come and go. I would love and hate. I would find happiness only to have it taken. Yet my mother will always be there, to go to the ends of the earth with and for me!

I never did find that one and only during my teenage years. He never came along. I did find my strength and started to uncover my self-worth, but just a glimpse.

~Doodlin'