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Fall Into Freedom
Excerpt
1
My Driving Force
What is love?
It was the most terrifying time of my life. Into the tunnel of
darkness I fell. Still, in the moments my mind found peace, an
inner voice let me know that as long as I let love guide me, I
would somehow survive. Living became a matter of survival.
Trapped like an animal in the cage of my own mind, I had to fight
for my life. If my existence represented life, then my life felt like an
initiation into hell. The thought of any human being having to live
in such a mental torture chamber destroyed my sense of what
was real. The inhuman treatment of humankind toward
humankind: How do we endure it? Why do we treat others that
way?
I knew three weeks after my fall that I had to write my story, my
feelings, my reactions. Like an adult instinctively knows to hug a
child who is crying, the crying out of my inner world because of
the fear I came to live in and my sudden burst of compassion for
humanity told me I must write. I wrote because I wanted to tell the
world the only way for me to survive fear depended on living my
very existence through love. Otherwise, I would find myself
trapped in a place I had seen all my life. A place where people
were sad, tired, angry, bitter, hateful, lost, and finally destroyed. A
place where freedom existed no more.
When I fell, the question in my mind became my answer . . . to
be . . . or not to be. . . .
July 17, 1987 Friday
What a beautiful summer morning it was in southern
California, USA. We were an all-American family of four living in
an ideal house and neighborhood. John, the man of the house,
was six-foot, three-inches tall with sandy-blond hair and baby-
blue eyes. At 43, he still looked like the stereotypical California
youth. I had been proud to marry such a handsome man on
August 13, 1969. Now 40, my long brown hair, brown eyes, and
trim five-foot, six-inch frame went well with my husband’s boyish
good looks.
On May 4, 1971, one year and nine months after our marriage,
weighing in at a healthy eight pounds, Cherisse, our first child,
was born. Entering the world on September 15, 1973, two years
and four months after her sister, weighing in at an equally healthy
eight pounds, eleven ounces was Tamara, our second perfectly
planned daughter.
Not a cloud appeared in the brilliant blue sky. It looked like you
could see forever. The rolling tree-covered hills surrounding our
house encapsulated us in a virtual Garden of Eden. John mixed
cement in the front of the house. Single-handedly, he had
landscaped almost all of our 2.6 country acres. His newest
project, a large circular driveway, was turning out better than any
of his previous landscaping projects.
Inside the house, I worked doing everything necessary to
maintain five thousand square feet, two teenage daughters, two
dogs (Mickey and Suki), one horse (Telly), two birds, and
miscellaneous goldfish. My duties were never done, but no one
noticed, especially me. Woman’s work, while considered
necessary though unimportant, I performed gladly. After all, that
was the American way.
Summer vacation had returned for Cherisse and Tamara.
Busy in their rooms doing something important as teenagers
always were, our fourteen and sixteen-year-old daughters were
more traditionally clean-cut than their classmates of 1987. Times
had changed drastically since I had grown up. Though untrue of
their personal friends, most of their peers had given up on trying
to be traditional or clean-cut. As their mother, I felt my daughters
were perfect. Although perfection could be debated, their
exceptional mental and physical health could not.
I believed health related directly to the way people were raised,
so Cherisse and Tamara were given my unquestioned respect.
They were my equals and my best friends from the day they were
born. Watching each daughter lead her own parade gave me
great joy. My job was to guide with wisdom and honesty and
support their choices. What I felt to be the most important
requirement of mothering, however, came to me easily. What I
did naturally was to simply be there for my children and make
sure they knew they were loved.
As morning progressed into midday, so did John’s
consumption of beer. In the past year or so, he had started
drinking earlier in the morning and consumed more liquor daily.
John lived in a world distant from mine, a mental world that over
the years ran further and further away from my mental world. He
worked five to six days a week, leaving the house at 5:00 in the
morning and returning home as late as 11:30 at night. His days
off were spent working on our property from dawn until he
consumed enough beer to make it bearable for him to come
back into the house where he knew I would be.
Something was causing John to appear more miserable every
day. His suffering, so visibly obvious, had begun to give me the
feeling he wanted to die. My concern for his state of mind made
no difference to John. He refused to let me get close enough to
his thinking process for me to understand why he lived in a world
filled with so much pain. With the exception of our noontime
breaks for making love or having sex as John called it, his
relentless words reflected mostly disgust for me.
John’s words of disgust were full of daggers aimed straight
toward my heart. From the beginning of our marriage, I learned to
emotionally suppress my husband’s daggers. Suppression
blocked the pain his words threatened from penetrating my
conscious thoughts.
Suppressing my emotions enabled me to defend myself
without anger. Allowing no anger protected the integrity his words
attempted to steal. My lack of rage, however, did not stop John. It
encouraged him. Whatever defense I came up with, John never
stopped trying to break my spirit.
Because we were tired of living above our financial means,
our house had been up for sale for more than a year. Although
moving from house to house had been ongoing throughout our
marriage, selling our unfinished dream home ended all hope
that John would ever stop running away from me. Before we put
our house on the market, I had made the silent decision I would
not continue to live in a relationship full of hate. No longer did I
want a man who gave me only two choices of how to
communicate: fight him or ignore him. I wanted a kind, caring
companion, a friendship based on mutual support, a lover who
would talk with me before, during, and after sex. I wanted
intimacy. I wanted trust. I wanted . . . I just wanted more. No, I
wanted it all! I wanted true, unconditional love. . . . When our
house sold, I would tell John I wanted a divorce.
I stared out the window watching John stir cement in his old
corroded wheelbarrow. The cement-encrusted jeans hanging
just below the crack of his buttocks looked as if they were going
to fall down any second. Again, feelings that told me my husband
wanted to die haunted me. Regardless of my intention to leave, I
fell in love with John the night we met and loved him with all my
heart every day since. Yet, from the day we became husband and
wife, my inner voice repeatedly warned me that our relationship
contained feelings of quiet desperation.
Desperation was no longer quiet. If John wanted to die, his
death was his choice. Whether John wanted to die or had some
secret alternative plan, the time had come to tell him I wanted out
of our marriage. John and I were given one life on earth. Each of
us had to make individual decisions about how to live that life. My
driving force kept telling me to start being responsible for filling
my world with love and stop feeling responsible for a man whose
world was full of hate.
That’s how it was that Friday afternoon, July 17, 1987. John
quit working early because I had planned for us to take one of
those timeshare tours. We owned one timeshare week and had
not discussed buying a second week. John agreed to go
because we would receive a free radio just for taking the tour. On
the way home he suggested we stop for a drink at a
neighborhood bar. Stingers was new, cute, and friendly. I was
happy to stop at Stingers. Stopping would give us a chance to
talk about our relationship.
As we sat on barstools at Stingers, the expression on John’s
face made it clear that he had things on his mind other than our
troubled marriage. A dream-like state of mind made him look as
though his thoughts were in some heavenly place, a place very
distant from Stinger’s bar and from the man I watched mixing
cement earlier. I remembered seeing that glazed flush on John’s
face but could not remember when.
My husband’s state of mind did not especially bother me,
though. Whether his face had that outward appearance of inner
suffering, a snickering sneer, or a grimace of disgust for me,
even this unexpected dream-like gaze, none of his mental states
bothered me that much. Nothing bothered me like it bothered
other people.
You see, all my life I lived in a bubble. My bubble protected me
from real pain and fear. It allowed me to be free. My bubble was
filled with love, and I knew with love everything would be all right.
Everything had always turned out all right and it always would. My
bubble of love was my driving force. My driving force of love gave
me the ability to look past our troubles. It gave me an iron will that
made me fearless. Fearlessness allowed my spirit to fly free. It
did not matter that our marriage was in shambles. When Diana
went out, Diana always went out to have fun. No, nothing
bothered Diana when Diana was having fun . . . nothing until
today. . . .