Tachycardia

“I can’t catch my breath…”

“You’re experiencing what we call tachycardia. Do you know why your blood pressure and your pulse is so high?”

I sigh. I remember ten years prior when doctors would ask me the same thing but look at me with disgust, imploring me to lose weight. Not understanding that maybe I was carrying extra weight as protection.

“I don’t know…everything?” And the nurse comes back across the room as she can tell I’m about to cry.

“Yeah, it’s been a week.” And we both look down, not knowing how to discuss my blood pressure and the current administration. The nurse then asks to hug me and as much as I dislike affection from strangers, I nod because I think more than I realize, she needs this hug and to hold onto someone bearing witness to this horrible moment.

When she leaves the room I think back to the text exchanges of my ex-husband earlier this week and realize if there was ever a correlation it’s to the abusive man from my past bothering me during this abusive administration.

An hour later I find my way to my son’s car after he patiently awaits for me. No one wants their 21 year old child to take them to the doctor but I have a pinched nerve so driving is challenging in my midwestern town of Cincinnati, which requires a car. My son can tell something is wrong but I am happy that the doctor let me refuse fluids and to leave where I promised I would buy some flax seeds and try to meditate twice a day. But the anger, the remnants of feeling disbelieved linger and I need to vent.

“If it’s okay with you, I would like to return to having some space with your father. I thought I could help but it’s doing too much harm to me.” This is big. Normally I put my body and self on the line, anything that is required of me for my son but having been divorced from his father for almost 15 years, my nervous system feels like it was just yesterday and doesn’t understand the past from the present.

“I understand and you need to do what is best for you.” He carefully drives home, knowing my neck is damaged and the bumps hurt my fused spine as well.

“Thanks for understanding. I want to not be affected but I don’t know…” and I trail off. I suggest Cincinnati chili on the way home for lunch. I get these magical moments with my son occasionally and I know soon they’ll be over so I try to lap them up, excited when he agrees to spend any time with me. He knows the truth of the relationship of his father and me. He’s let me keep those secrets for now but my body is erupting with the truth.

*

I’ve just had my first fight with my son. My first bad, ugly one and I am halfway across eh world in Australia, having run off to a writing residency in the Wollemi forest, a world away from my family and my life. I ran off thinking my only child’s freshman year of college would be jarring to me and so I pmade a plan, perfect for distracting me for almost two months. But now I am across the world and he has fallen in love with the first person he’s met at college and I am terrified he’s recreating my life. He’s making the mistake I made and I am terrified. But things are still burbling to the surface and I still haven’t said the word “abuse” out loud. No, not me. Never.

I run downstairs in the art center to have a cup of tea and sit outside with the other artists when can already hear, Carol talking about the current Johnny Depp and Amber Heard legal case going on in the US. I almost drop my tea. My stomach is in my throat. Amber is a bad victim, a classic case in reactive abuse but Carol is going on about women making false accusations and how she has a 22 year old son. I inquire if someone has made false accusations prior and she shakes her head and asks me why.

“So you’re worried about a totally imagined scenario versus an actual scenario and a woman’s lived experience?” The other artists seem uncomfortable as Anna, John, and Linda are not American and uncomdorabtel it seems with the passionate sounds of our voices.

Carol shakes her head, clearly irritated and walks inside away from us. I follow, because I have a fear of people being angry with me.

“I apologize if I offended you but I am currently processing the abuse of my ex-husband and this is triggering for me.”

She rolls her eyes at the word “triggering” but acknowledges my experience. The rest of the visit there, besides accusing me of giving her covid although I test negative, goes smoothly until she asks me for a ride to the train. On the way she discusses rape and how we just need to move on from it and how surprised she is that I was actually heavier at one point than I am now. When I drop her off she proceeds to ask me to take her bag to the train and is frustrated even after I explain I can’t carry my own bags.

“I’ve got a bad back with a twice fused spine.”

She is not impressed and while we exchange one email, I never hear from her again.

When I return to the house, Rae, the art residency director and herself a retired sculptor, invites me for a tea. She talked me into writing poetry for my exhibition day. I wasn’t sure what to do for the final project exhibit since I was a writer and not an artist until I got the idea to take some photos of the scars from my surgeries. From my pain. And so Linda very kindly takes some simple shots and Rae prints them out for me to put on the wall with correlating poetry. The whole process was terrifying but gratifying and at the end of this experiment, I feel ready to return home.

Rae and I sit for a tea and she asks me very little. We just sit and it’s quiet and peaceful, just birds cawing from the bush. I start to slowly tell Rae my story. Just the bullet points, just the facts. She takes it all in and says in her broken Serbian accent, “Now you write it. Now you share.”

*

We’re at Madtree Brewing to see what my son has been up to the past year as he did the impressive landscaping during his break from college at this new location. My family of sisters and their partners meets us and they pretend to be impressed as I snap photos. I am his biggest fan, my lovely son with the kindest heart. He is 21 now and it is weird to see him order a cider at lunch. It also makes my stomach drop, but I remain quiet. I’ve warned him enough about his father’s drinking problem. I worry the alcohol distracts from what is truly wrong with the man and that is cruelty. But my son is an adult and wants to be an adult in front of his aunts.

My brother in law comes closer and remarks about my tolddler niece, “Do you remember what it was like when Max was that little?”

“Ha, yes I feel like I’m 25 again around her.”

“But they sure have less stress than you did,” he remarks to me as he looks at my sister and her wife. Yes, yes I do remember the stress. How I turned off my body because the pain became so bad during that time. Through the lack of sleep and utter loneliness, lacking a true partner and instead becoming a parent to two people, managing my son and my ex-husband. But at the time I thought I focused on the greater good, the sacrifice for my family and so I worked nights as a bartender while taking care of my son during the day while my ex went to law school. I worked so that my son wouldn’t know daycare as he was a sensitive child and I worried about strangers not attending to his needs. Yet sometimes I would come home from work after nothing had been cleared around the house, even after I had made dinner before going to work, and I’d realize that maybe his needs weren’t being met as well as I’d hoped from his father.

I’m so happy my sister has a real partner and it makes raising a child so much better and hopefully easier, but it’s tough to confront the memories I still carry. The memories I seem to refuse to admit were less than perfect.

*

I remember the first time I left my husband. And I remember the reason I returned and it wasn’t because I was so in love. I retuned the next day because a level headed friend convinced me if I were really going to leave, I needed to have a better plan and I had none. I had a car that even though I bought it was in his name and he could report it stolen. And I’d left my son with his father but that would be seen as me leaving inpulsively. I suddenly realized only two years into marriage that I was in an even more trapped situation than I realized. And I was terrified.

A few months later he would push me into the stereo, me falling against it all and him complaining that I might break it. Not that I might break. But I was already cracking…

*

My father tried to get me out of my marriage after I’d barely been betrothed for a month. I’d gone down to St. Croix on a prearranged trip prior to my sudden marriage out of wedlock pregnancy and I was getting ready to leave when my dad arrived home from work. I thought it was to take me to the airport but instead he had me meet him outside. He had paperwork for me to look at. I was confused.

“I have two documents and two options. One, you can keep your trust fund and use it for graduate school if you sign this other document which will annul your marriage. Or keep the marriage and sign away your trust fund.” He lit a cigarette.

I was speechless but stubborn. I instead signed away the trust fund and he sent me to the airport in a taxi, telling me, “ You’re on your own now.”

It would be the last time we would see each other until a month after my son was born. A dead mother and now an estranged father? Loneliness didn’t even describe it.

*

Later in the week after the doctor visit, I attend physical therapy for my neck. I’ve somehow increased my range of motion three centimeters and I no longer care about the brain MRI or any of the other health complications. I feel invincible. Jackie, my PT, is quite proud of me and implores me to contact her for anything I need online.

“So what exactly happened to you?” And suddenly I don’t know how to respond.

“Just a perfect storm,” is all I can think to say. I smile and laugh until I get out to the elevator and tears form.

I can’t hide it much longer, I worry.

*

When I did finally seek my father’s help it wasn’t to end my marriage but to borrow money for a car accident. It was 2010 and I had a car accident after a night out at an art opening where I drank too much. I was terrified of my husband because I had defied and went anyway and he was constantly texting me to get home. I was afraid he would order the car stolen. But this point he’d shown me more and more of what he was capable of. But on the way home that night, I tapped a car. The police officer wasn’t going to arrest me as he was confused if my husband as acting as my attorney or if he was having me arrested. When I finally go to the police station, the officer begs me to call anyone else and whatever I do, to not use my husband as my attonrey.

“But he loves me,” I can hear myself to the officer. But he loves me. I said it more as a questions than a statement.

I drive down to my father’s the weekend after the DUI and once I am there, my father is gentle and asks simply, “What’s going on, Corkie?”

And I sob. He knows I am in trouble but it isn’t until we both sit outside on his porch, rocking that I calm down and he tells me what I need to do. He’ll loan me the money but I need to get out of this marriage and he’ll help me if I want. But now I have a DUI and an attorney for a husband. How on earth would I get custody?

That day my dad helps me scheme with what I need to do to get out of this and that is simply, be cool. Start my graduate school program and slowly separate while I tried to build my own life up. But it will take me seven months to finally file for divorce from this moment. And a month after filing, my dear husband , the man who saw me give birth, will slam me against a wall and threaten to take away my child simply because I had the audacity to file for divorce on my own volition. He will make me pay.

*

“You’re doing so much better than you realize,” Brynn reminds me at therapy this week. I certainly don’t feel that way. It’s been almost three years since Australia and the only person I’ve been able to talk about the abuse with is my son beause he is the one who insisted. He says he respects me and everything I have done for him, especially managing to leave his father when he was just six but the divorce was another fresh hell.

“I feel like a loser and the Trump administration is like an abusive ex. I feel discombobulated often and I’m not sleeping,” I share with Brynn.

“You’ve only been seeing me for over a year and the EMDR just started up again. You know that your nightmares return. But it’s good, I’m telling you.”

I trust Brynn. She’s the first person who helped me really piece together my health issues with my emotional ones while also reminding me who I am. Who I was.

“Abuse doesn’t just stop. It lingers. And it’s part of systems that you have head to go through so of course it is especially jarring for you.” Brynn is kind and so I feel safe telling her some of the more morbid bits, especially how the abuse escalated after the divorce filing and even after the divorce agreement. He would steal my son’s housekey and go into my home when I wasn’t there. He would sit on my street and threaten to sleep in his car if I wouldn’t let him in. He used my son repeatedly to get to me and yet I just did whatever he wanted because I love my son so much. That’s what no one explained to me about motherhood: how I would literally let someone light me on fire if it meant protecting my son.

“Will I ever feel safe again?” I ask Brynn.

“Slowly, but I think the thing that will help the most is learning to tell your story.”

And so I leave my appointment with Brynn, sharing my first instagram post about Australia, three years later. And I share about abuse vaguely. I share so I can slowly release the pain and make more room for joy. My son notices and if anything, my crowing achievement is he will always be the man who helps a woman instead of hurting a woman.