Surviving Phoenix Part 2

He always would tell me that I never had enough Joy. “Happiness is fleeting” he would say, “stop trying to be happy and just have some fucking joy.” It is an incredible paradox that feels surreal, like trying to make out your facial features in a fogged-up mirror, to be told how to be content with your life from the person who is literally tearing it and you apart piece by piece, picking even at the scabs that have tried to heal until the wounds bleed anew with fresh sorrow.

What he really meant by not having joy was that I did not believe in Jesus enough. If I just believed enough. If I just had enough faith, then my heart should be overflowing with joy and I should be content in all that I had. I should be content in the plans that he – not the God he, but my husband he - had for me. Plans to be his, under his control, barefoot in the kitchen pregnant making his supper while juggling a million other responsibilities like the cartoon character mom who is vacuuming and ironing and cooking and holding a baby and talking on the phone and everything is being done though she is obviously almost catching on fire, and he's always there in the background telling her to move faster, do better, be more, and be joyful doing it. I should be content completely and utterly subservient to his every whim, the perfect image of an old testament Christian wife – a slave.

There are times even looking back on it now where I think that maybe he had a point about my lack of faith. In all the darkness it surely was a struggle to see any light at all, including the light of God – to doubt, to question, to wonder what the plan was for me and my life. How could it be that God wanted me to suffer, to live a life unloved? Was it my lack of faith that had gotten me in this mess in the first place? Did I somehow deserve this? How many times did I beg and plead and pray to God for help, for answers and heard nothing but silence? Where was God when I was crying on the floor of the room among the broken pieces of a door beaten down to find where I was hiding? Where was God when I was sweeping up pieces of broken glass amongst the shattered pieces of my dignity? Where was God when I was covering up bruises with makeup that could never hide my shame? I could not see God in any of it – He was as far away from me as the whisper on a breeze half a world away.

So, there was no joy in my days, either from faith or from life. There was only this unsatisfying semblance of being. “I think, therefore I am” to coin a phrase that sums it up perfectly. It was painful to just exist, go through the motions like an actor on a stage. Some days I did not go through the motions – the effort of it far to heavy to even lift myself to rise to the occasion of it. There was no refuge from the anxiety and the depression that pressed down on me from the very walls that were supposed to be a sanctuary. How are you supposed to feel safe in the very place where your very soul is crushed by the person on this earth who has promised to take care of it?

It was not for myself but for my girls that I got good at faking the joy over the damage - though it was despicable – dancing the jive in the middle of a murder scene kind of despicable. Focus on the fun of finding a new door for the one that got broken down. Focus on the pretty paint colors to cover up the holes patched in the wall. Focus on the nice new shirt to replace the one ripped off you. Focus on the happy, Focus on the joy, Focus, Focus FOCUS! Find the smiles for them. Make joy for them, and if not joy then just make life OK for them. They deserve to be happy, to feel safe, to feel protected. They deserve to see the light. But the more I faked it the further I sank into that chasm, the further away God was, the less I saw of any light in the world. And I didn’t understand then that by faking it, by denying the truth that I wasn’t making things ok for my girls – I was putting a band-aid on the bullet hole that was our lives and praying we wouldn’t all go down with a sinking ship. I didn’t realize we were all already drowning.