Unanswered prayers

A week in my life... Unanswered prayers Posted 9/20/2009 10:13 AM CDT A week in my life….Sept 19, 2009 When do you know that fate is tickling your toes? When do you know that something is a little different or out of place in your life? In your soul? There seem to be events that thread in and out of our lives that remind us at times where the seams are that truly hold us together. The challenges that guide us and make us who we are. Unanswered prayers that seem to devastate us in their unanswering but make us more solid and grounded in our futures. I will reveal a little a myself to you in this writing that will go far beyond the experience of my week this week. To share an experience that happened this week that sent me reeling back in time to a place that made my heart skip a beat. I hesitate just a little to open up so much of myself as that tends to make us more vulnerable… but, so be it. I won’t say that it is easy being back in your hometown with all the haunting memories of your past…trying to make a future for yourself and redefining what your place is. I am trying to focus more on my future than my past but sometimes it still just slaps you in the face and reminds you who you are and what has brought you to this place in time. My son is five and fun and fills my life with so much that redefining my life is much more fulfilling than reliving the past, fortunately. I volunteered this week to “walk to the fair” with my son’s kindergarten class. I find myself running to any event that he welcomes me to. I know the day will come when his independence will invite me out of his life more than in. I take advantage when I can. I feel so blessed that I work for myself and that I can take these opportunities to be involved in my son’s activities. I feel blessed that he wants me there. I even ate lunch with him on Wednesday in the cafeteria. It is so cute the maturity that five year olds trying to accept their independence can display. They so love attention and diversion though. At lunch I had my son’s class surround me and ask me all sorts of questions about who I was and “what I did?” and “where did I come from?” I got requests to open milk cartons and juice boxes. I suspected they were quite apt at this without me as they somehow surely weren’t going thirsty all the other days I wasn’t there, but they loved the attention and I loved it too I must admit. To really invite you into my psyche a little I ask you to go back in time with me. I will tell you before you embark on this journey it isn’t pretty. It is at the least awkward and at the most excruciating. It is a time in my life’s journey that I don’t like to think about much, relive or invite others too. So this is a rare glimpse and if you choose to come with me be warned it may bring back unwanted memories of your own and take you back to a place in time you may not be thrilled about going back to. I was probably nine or ten when my parents informed me that I was not “normal”. I would not date or mingle with the opposite sex in any way shape or form (until I graduated high school) except for what minimal male exposure I obtained through my brothers. Even they were a bit protective and kept their friends and members of the opposite sex at a comfortable distance from our house for the most part. I learned to appreciate “boys” from a distance and feared desperately my father who had decided at an early age in my life to protect me from whatever life in a small town had to throw at me in teenage years to come. My father was very FBI like in his efforts to keep his “little girl” protected. He was not above eavesdropping on the party lines of our phones and policing any entertaining I did with my friends. He used guilt trips to instill some of his control and fear when that didn’t seem to work. It was on a church trip when I was fourteen that I met “him”. The boy of my dreams. Dark, olive skin and a soft spirit. Handsome and demure. I knew then that he would carve out a place in my soul that would forever change me. It was a river float trip and we ran into some rough waters on the White River after a heavy rain. He and the other boy who had invited him along on the trip pulled us from brush and a few dangerous situations on many occasions that day. He was more than just a vision he was a “hero” in my mind. As the days went on I could not forget him. I dreamed about him and soon began living my teenage years around obsessing about him. It was perfect. He seemed to not show any interest in me so I could be totally infatuated with him from afar. It seemed that the less disinterested in me that he was the more I chased and soon was a bit of a stalker in most definitions. I learned everything about him. Where he hung out, where he worked, who he was friends with, where his locker was so I could watch him go down the hall. Let me tell you that as we go back to this place in time. I was as awkward as they come. I was tall and gangly and could not appreciate at the time that these were attributes of supermodels and people who could eat almost anything and not gain weight, enviable? I thought not. I have always had a challenge with my American Indian ancestry wiry hair and while the other girls were easily styling their 70’s puffy bangs I was dealing with frizz and the nightmare of “bad hair days” perpetually. I was nervous. I desperately wanted to “fit in”. I had no outward attributes that would attract much of anyone and friends were few and far between. I guess I was smart but what teenage girl appreciates that? I was reclusive. My home life was a demanding father who was on the eccentric side and often physically ill. I was horribly embarrassed by going out with my parents as he had a terrible seizure disorder and I was petrified that he would have one of those horrendous grand mals that sent him into frothy fits and attracted much more attention that a homely teenage girl could stand. Then there was his over protective nature and the fear that if I so much as “looked at a boy” my life would be over as I knew it. Dismal as it seemed in my limited little life. I longed to walk down the hall and hold hands with a boy or giggle with my friends about first kisses and crushes. I kept my dreaming to myself and spiraled into deep depression without much hope of ever being with my ‘prince’… the boy who hung the moon and when he smiled at me sent me over the top with every emotion that a teenage girl can feel. For four years I followed this boy and prayed for times when we would be “thrown together” in circumstance as I didn’t dare enlist it or invite it. I think my mom felt sorry for me, because on my 16th birthday she went to the laundry where he was working and invited him to my party. I almost died of embarrassment when she told me the night of my party but she forever changed in my mind at that moment. She was on my side. She was not in my father’s enemy camp to keep me isolated and spinster like my entire existence. She knew what true love was. She knew what I was feeling and missing. She hated to see the pain in my eyes in my soul. As any normal handsome young teenage boy would do he found a girlfriend. A real one. One that could actually talk and breathe with him. She had been an acquaintance of mine at times, though I didn’t know her very well. She must have felt a little threatened by me as there was no question that I had been in stealthy pursuit of this boy for several years and was not very careful to hide my infatuation with him. She made a threat to me. It was open and there was no question that she would resort to physical violence to protect her new found boyfriend. I didn’t care. I continued to admire him and obsess. I soon went off to college and continued my dream of one day being “normal enough” or “good enough” to deserve a dance in his life. Years passed of course. I read in the paper my mom sent me that he had married her. My life was over! I kept busy and went on with my life. Then I met my husband. He was real. He was my prince. He was everything I had given up on. I chased new dreams and found that medicine was something I could sink my teeth into. That helping people and fixing things allowed me to achieve a level of acceptance that I never knew existed. Nerds could be heroes. Gods, even. ] And so here I am. What most people see is an accomplished physician. They can’t imagine that I am inside still that scared intimidated little girl. That the popular people who once scared me to death are now my patients and look to me for answers. Oh, how life can be so strange… So, why am I telling you all this? It turns out that this prior love in my life had a daughter almost at the exact time that I had my son… a little ironic as I was in my late 30s when I had my son. It turns out that of all the kindergarten classes, his little girl was in my son’s class. It also turns out that I in the line on the way to the fair I was in line next to the little girl and her “MOM”. The girl in high school that had earned a place in my heart where “enemies” fill. For the duration of the march through chicken coops and pig pens I watched her. Wondered, what she had that I did not. Thanked God for unanswered prayers as I traced the freckles in my son’s face and knew that everything happened the way it did for a reason. There will no doubt be other encounters as fate throws us in the same circles. I am grateful for life’s challenges as they make us who we are. I think it is what we do with these challenges and how we grow from them that allow the greatest growth and healing in our lives. When we are young and awkward we think we are the only ones in the universe that are dealing with the strangeness and pain of youth. We are convinced that we are unique and it is only later in life that we appreciate this uniqueness forms who we are and makes us what we are to become. I had a patient this past week that confided to me that she had been raped violently in her youth and another patient confided to me that she had been sexually assaulted by her husband’s father. There are so many experiences that people tell me about. Hoping to heal, hoping to find acceptance and forgiveness. I wish that I had the time to tell them about the mistakes that have haunted me and the skeletons in my own closet. All I can do is reassure them that the events in our lives shape who we are but do not have to define us. I think the biggest challenge is moving on and finding healing in our future not in our past. What might have been, or could have been is irrelevant, insignificant. Sometimes the unanswered prayers are gifts to our future but they seem to always remind us and make us appreciate what was not meant to be and “what is”. Till next week… Dr. Tammy