September 22nd

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. OK. I have it. I got it. Several times over. From the abusive brother, the alcoholic mother, all the bad characters that followed fulfilling their roles as symptoms of my younger version of PTSD. Then came my husband. The walking chaos generator. Enough that he had undiagnosed, unacknowledged ADHD which is hell to live with. Then came the topper, the icing on the cake. A lovely Mild Traumatic Brain Injury which all the literature assures me is nothing like Mild.

I survived fine, Ok, I was doing all right even after the abuse, beatings, character assassinasions and rape and threats of my spectacularly normal dysfunctional American Working Class Upbringing. I made it all the way through that. And More: 6 Pregnancies, two miscarrages, two abortions, two births. Made it through the surgeries, through two graduate schools and moves to 7 cities.

The came the clincher. The clincher from hell. My now ex-husband's brain injury and its repercussions.


Seven Years, one month after the brain injury. Not my brain injury, but I am not the same.

Happiness hurts now. Or perhaps it isn't happiness. I sit down to read. I look around, all is peaceful for the first time in seven years. I can see there are no emergencies, there are no devils, no more bad guys waiting around the corner to take apart all I have manage to reconstruct today. It isn't like that anymore. But after seven years of it, I cannot let go. The choices seem few now. Life with this resident anxiety or what? I don't know.

I sit down to read papers for my eleven year old daugther's upcoming trip to D.C. with a Leadership program. I've had 6 months to prepare, but this is the first day I could devote to it. Last minute like everything I do because I still haven't caught up after 7 years.

I lie down. All is peaceful. Dogs napping. Older teenager depressed. Younger daughter so wanting to be happy, but since Mom and Sister are depressed it challenges her otherwise bouyant personality. I haven't slept more than 4 or 5 hours on average per night in 7 years.

I don't want to sleep. I don't want to go to bed. Not alone.

So I'm quiet. I should be happy, but I sit to read, immediately feeling a sense of relief at this normalcy. A quiet happy peaceful home at last. Immediately tears come to my eyes. This peace is only suggestive of all the loss, all the damage, all the exhaustion, the fear, the lacerating pain that truly felt as if it would never end. Month after month, year after year.

And somehow people find themselves repeating to me that it all will pass. It will all be ok. They say marriage isn't a war. I'm sorry. Mine was a war. It lasted for 22 years and the last year stripped me.

I spent my entire life fighting the system that wanted to metaphorically lobotomize me and now it is what I pray for. Come. Make me stupid, make me unaware, extract my sentience, numb me, make me blind, deaf and dumb.

Oh, I remind myself, as if it were a daily prayer. I cannot give up. I canoot sleep, I cannot relax. I have two children to shepard into their respective futures.

To cure this thing I am told I should try something new called EMDR. A light or other physical therapy that uses an odd mechanical means to help the brain transfer the memory of the trauma from the primitive part of the brain to a more lately evolved managerial, executive part of the brain where I should be able to manage the emotional memories of the event, the war, the extended trauma.

I will have to relate each and every incident. I told the woman we could be at this for some time. She casually rattled off every kind of incident that is likely to cause PTSD. I stopped her. I had experience nearly all that she mentioned.

Too much. Too much. I will have to travel back through time to scrub the system.

Back to the insults, the frustrations, the time-killing inanities of a courst system, divorce system entirely corrupted by its own failures. The bad lawyers, the crook lawyers, the incompetent social workers, the tired justice system representatives that speak nice cultural values but fail to implement them.

Back to the land of the living dead and back to the world of realizing there is no justice. Do not seek justice from the Damned. Try to eradicate their significance is the best I can hope for.