Thrive Anyway

(a howl-esque)

Caution:  Triggers

I

I see a little girl ravaged by a father’s beer-stinking idea of what love is while his second or third wife beats her for her promiscuity; such a little vamp at the age of five. 

I see her mother pretend that her perfect little girl in the matching coat, shoes and hat is happy, so shut up with those dirty tales from your overactive Sarah-Bernhardt imagination, just stop and let me have my weekends and summers away from a child. 

I see a child look at her and think, “I used to be a child.”

I see her thrive, anyway.

I see a young bride, slender and beautiful, with fear encircling her white gown like a black lace border, and a young man smiling in his entitlement and superiority;

I see her seven years, three babies, and three attempts to leave him later, bending down to kiss goodbye the son she never meant to conceive while her husband, arms folded, furious, points to the highway because that son was not conceived his way, that son is not his flesh-and-blood and if she wants them to reconcile that son must go;

I see him give her Sophie’s choice — these two or that one, the bastard son, choose now or else lose all, and I can hear her heart ripping in two when she finally has the courage, six weeks later, to kiss her son (her beautiful bastard) goodbye and then walk away through a cascade of tears;

I see her almost exactly one year later as she finally walks away for good from her husband’s cocksure, what-for, pointing-to-the-door, it’s-YOUR-problem-not-mine attitude, taking the two children she threw away a son for.

I see her thrive, anyway.

I see her when she lies petrified on her family doctor’s table as he explores her body in ways that only a lover should while she doesn’t…say…a…word not even when he calls from jail (where other patients put him) and asks her for a character reference; even then she only jokes and says, ‘oh no I don’t think my life is good enough to be anyone’s reference.”

I see so many lovers use, abuse, take, shake and throw away her still-beautiful body that her soul begins to fray around the edges like a teenager’s Playboy until she feels dirty, hidden, and pressed between the mattresses of her false face and inner sorrow to hide the truth.

I see another child born, a son, after one night with one lover because one is enough to do the job and, “…good Catholic girl that she is, she doesn’t believe in birth control, isn’t that just hilarious?”  This son, now that her husband is gone and she and her children are alone, she gets to keep, and she holds onto him fiercely, passionately.  This son is the one who will save her.

I see her thrive, anyway.

I see her meet her childhood sweetheart and in her new richness of motherhood and slenderness seduce him from his lover that he, ultimately, cannot leave.

I see her, a year later, her heart freshly broken open wide inside a mental hospital where her counselor of three years strongly suggested she go because she had become unable to keep her heart weeping blood through her blouse or her eyes leaking tears over everything.

I see a little Napoleon, head of psychiatry, her therapist’s therapist, when she tells him about that other doctor (the one in jail), ask her with disdain, “Why did you just LIE there?!” and then tell her, “It was your fault, because you didn’t move, didn’t speak, you did NOTHING.” 

I see her believing him because of course it was her fault.

I see her blindly taking little pink pills called Haldol which he gives her and insists she needs because she does not see life the way normal people do, she distorts it and reorders it with her (admittedly) high intelligence until it looks something like what it should.

I see those little pills strip the colors from her world like a rain of acid while she wanders through a grey-scale, two-dimensional twilight nightmare world straining to hear the alarm so she can just (please God) wake up.

I see her heart finally stop bleeding as it shrivels up inside her, a cold grey thing too, and she is finally, for the first time in her life, relieved of pain because she doesn’t feel anything; her kaleidoscope is broken and all the colors are gone.

I see her stare at a bottle of Xanax in her hand one night after countless nights of feeling nothing but despair and thinking, “maybe after this I will wake up, somewhere” and then swallow every pill.

I see her close to death’s door, as she walks through an in-between place, not quite alive and not dead, and stares down a tunnel at what her children’s lives would become if she died and left them alone; where she sees her death inflicts a jagged wound in their souls which eventually hurts so bad and for so long it turns their love to hatred.

Instead, they never knew, because I see her three days later, as she comes home and into her children’s arms from the hospital where she tells them she was “suffering from acute internal inflammation of the something-or-other…” and they are overjoyed and profoundly relieved because she is home, thank God alive.

I see her thrive, anyway.

I see her, two years later, venturing out from her newly healed life like a soft wide-eyed doe only to be raped again in the back of a van by a man she had known for years who spiked her champagne then almost carried her, stumbling and unaware, out into the night as dancing people pointed and grinned while he smiled and murmured to their amusement, “Yeah, cheapdate. Real cheapdate…”

I see her nine months later, when her daughter is born, conceived by a rapist she chose to forgive, and in that room are two people who only hoped to have a child, two people she chose from hundreds of others. I see their joy balance the scale with her grief. 

 I see her nursing that baby girl for the three days she is given as her mother before she signs the papers (like the ones she signed when she gave away her beautiful bastard) that legally and officially say she is not, and never will be from that moment on, that child’s mother.

I see her when her heart starts to break again not allowing herself to feel anything, just a strange emptiness like the ghost of pain from an amputated limb to match the one from her bastard son, “primal wounds” she knows will never truly heal.

I see her, needy, empty, still working, caring for her three to the best of her ability, five months later meet a man with an angel’s smile and a devil’s heart, a man she came to call the soul eater, the worst man she had ever known.

I see her saying vows in candlelight as she glances at him in fear, not sure if she just saw a reptile shift beneath his skin or only imagined it.

I see her heavily pregnant again, married, and trying to keep her false face in place and pretend that all is well while little postcards from hell flash up her spine in a never-ending line, whispering, like a quiet rattle in the night, the cold dead truth.

I see her, bruised over and over hurt again by his hands, one day stop in horror to realize that she hasn’t felt her baby move in too long a while, much too long; I see her call the doctor who says in soothing, half-contemptuous tones that it was just her imagination, everything was fine, and once again I see her say…nothing…at…all.

I see her standing by her son’s grave, this last son the one she asked to go home because his father was a soul eater, grieving because he had heard her and listened, grieving because her watanee, littlest one, was gone.

I see her cling to her husband until he, in startling suddenness which shouldn’t surprise her anymore, lashes out and blames her for his son’s death, and then, just to prove it is her fault, puts his stinking hands on her 15-year old daughter one night for only seconds but long enough to shock the truth through her daughter’s mother.

I see her hold her daughter all night long while she fights the red-bordered, white-hot persistent picture in her head of her hand holding a kitchen knife as it plunges repeatedly into his chest.

I see her get up at dawn, call her daughter’s father, then go into the bedroom where her husband of five minutes more lies, awake, as she tells him, “You should go now.  My daughter’s father is on his way, and he’s about to kill you.”  I see her not even inclined to smile as he scurries around in a panic to gather his things and then slithers out the door but not before he casts one cold look behind that vows revenge.

I see her thrive, anyway.

I see her visiting her son’s grave with her little boy, only five, who sings a special song to his baby brother who couldn’t get born while his mother reaches down and finds a white piece of paper on the grave that reads, “You’ll be sorry,” in a hand she knows well.  That is just the beginning of a new kind of hell.

I see her running from him, from job-to-job, and finally from one coast to another, while her first husband takes her children and her house and her dog then puts everything she ever owned out from inside her heart and house on the curb on the street for her neighbors to carry away like giant uncaring carrion…

…in the space of four months, he was done.

I see her finding courage in a dream and coming back to face the Soul Eater in a courtroom where the judge sternly vows to put him away for a very long time if he ever comes near her again, and I see her unable to celebrate even this monumental victory because it is too late for her children, they are with their father now, subject to his wasp whims, his knee-jerk convictions — all but one, that one-night son who is her savior and her sanity.

I see her thrive, anyway.

I see her find a big job big money big benefits and, six months later, fall down a flight of stairs in a subway in a city for no reason at all; I see her as the doctors say RA but they don’t know, for sure, and I see her tell her new bosses who, upon hearing “RA” decide they have to panic and replace her. 

I see her sent away to a consolation desk job that goes nowhere, where soon the pain and her pride are too much even for that.

I see her living on savings, sending her son to school and mixing her morning orange juice with vodka, spending all day in a bathrobe and slippers, building a fat suit little by little, not a bit worried because that bathrobe is one-size-fits-all!

I see her six months later lying nearly comatose on her bed as her little son shakes her on a Saturday morning then shrugs and goes downstairs to eat cereal and watch his favorite cartoons unaware that his mother almost broke her promise and died by her own hand even if it was a slow, slow death, years in coming.

I see her wake up to a poisoned body, every inch of her skin inside and out painful to the touch, painful even to breathe, and I see her looking in the mirror and saying, Enough.

I see her walking with her son to the bus stop, where the sun grinds through her eyelids and sears her brain, and boarding that bus that takes her to a little town with a tiny church with a cramped basement which is crowded with ordinary people who smile at her sincerely and say, Welcome.

I see her feel so welcome she goes again and again, sometimes two or three times in one week.  I don’t see her drink, no matter how bad the pain gets.

I see her thrive, anyway.

I see her going to her father’s third or fourth wife’s funeral because he called out of the blue and asked her to. I see her looking at her father’s face and realizing that even though she hated him she loved him too, and I see hope blooming.

I see her wanting to forgive, live and let live, try to build a relationship with a man who, she discovers, never did and never will understand what it feels like to have a sober day, who will never know how to say, “I am sorry.”

I see her fourteen months later sit by his bedside night after night in a hospital where it is easy to be overlooked, listening for his whispered commands, fighting for his rights, adjusting his pillows, holding his hand as the tumors in his brain eat away all his memories.

I see her tell him goodbye, and I see her, heart once more alive, cry and cry, as a new man, her second or third husband, along with his new son, her one-night son, along with her grown children (who miraculously have come through it all relatively unharmed and still fairly fond of her) comfort and love her, every single day.

I see her, and I see her thrive, anyway.

 II

Continued, ad infinitum

Copyright © 2003. 2022. Sara Michele O’Sullivan (Niki Flow). All rights reserved.