Low Tide

Our faculty hosted a dinner last evening for our graduates and their families. There were wonderful tributes given by husbands, mothers, and sisters--and plenty of tears to go around. We faculty mingled. It was one of the few times I haven't wanted to drop out of sight when faced with such a task. Most of the students were known to me and seeing them with their families created the context that made sense of many things.

There was a slide presentation with pictures of all sorts of funny scenes. People loved it.

Then I sang.

It's not that I was nervous, because I rarely get nervous when I sing. The students didn't know I could sing but they had heard I knew how to sing, yada yada. It just happened that I was wearing a pair of pantyhose that I picked up on a sale table. The color was perfect, there was no reinforced toe thickness to show through my open-toed shoes, and they were control top. By all counts, they should have been the perfect accompaniament to my outfit.

When I pulled them on, they felt odd. They fit oddly around the waist and seemed to be lacking in elasticity or something. I gave them an extra tug to keep them in the right place. It is not unusual to have pantyhose feel catywhompus, and these were no exception. At least I hadn't pulled on them so hard that my fingers went right through them.

By the time I got to the dinner venue, the pantyhose had rolled down to my hip bones. Getting out of the car, I tried serreptitiously to yank them back up while greeting students coming alongside the back of the car. "Oh, hi Marilyn!" I yelled, hauling up the waistband as I held my very large purse in front of my stomach. "Did you see the sign at the front door?" I asked. They turned to look and I dropped my purse on the front seat of the car. With both hands I pulled on the waistband while they looked confusedly toward the building, the opposite direction.

In the door I went, and straight to the ladies room. By this time, my pantyhose were not only starting to slide to parts unknown, but so was everything else. A few moments of adjusting and pulling in the bathroom stall restored order down below. Back out into the auditorium I went, clutching my purse over my errant waistband.

It only seemed appropriate that I move from table to table, greeting family members and hugging students. Every step, every grasp, every moment, my pantyhose slid a bit farther down. One girl leaped out of her chair and clasped me to her for some minutes, whispering her thanks to me for helping her get through her studies. I was focusing on something sliding down over my bottom at that moment. I only hope that when she let go of me and looked into my face, she saw compassion and warmth, and not the panic and horror that I was feeling about my impending humiliation.

Feeling as though I should walk knock-kneed, so as to keep my pantyhose from rolling clear to my ankles, I minced back over to the table where I was to sit. As I smoothed my dress over my lap, a rolled up linear wad of cloth was apparent. I scooted my chair closer to the table, hoping that the tablecloth would cover it. I couldn't exactly eat with one hand doing a tug-of-war, but God forbid if it rolled any lower. I had to get up in front and sing at some point!

As the program progressed, we heard from string players, a poet, and the chair of the department handed out awards. Every few minutes, while people were clapping and looking elsewhere, the pantyhose got another tug northward. By the time our table was dismissed to go to the buffet line, I had been able to rearrange things to almost normal. That was a major victory. Perhaps it would be over.

Reaching for the salad at the buffet, it all started to slide again. What in the world did I have on down there? I managed to get back to the table and got started on my lassagna. It was good food, good conversation, good feelings. I forgot all about my little secret. Then my student announced that I would be singing for them.

Standing up was agony, because what had been at the cusp of trouble immediately became a bad situation. Walking up to the front of the room, everything shifted about 10 inches lower. I felt like I was in slow motion. The words of the song, Amazing Grace, came out of my mouth. I could look out into the crowd and see familiar faces, but I couldn't really focus on much. Something was sliding down over my bottom again, I realized with a sickening pang. All of it was sliding down, down, down. I wondered if my pantyhose would start to sag and wrinkle around my knees. Fortunately, my dress came to just below my knees and it wasn't clingy. But it wouldn't keep people from seeing the tide going out. Rolled into my pantyhose was the elastic from my underwear, and in one undulating movement, all was on the skids. Feeling drafty where I typically didn't feel a draft, I realized that there was potential that these good folks would know more about me than any of them cared to know in about five minutes if I stayed up front.

I'm not sure how I got through that song, but I did. Mincing back to my seat, all that mattered was that I could get there, and then to the bathroom to put everything in place once again. Why was this happening? I'd never had such a defective pair of pantyhose.

Long story short, I never did manage to get into the bathroom afterward, but was carried along with the crowd out to my car. I found that by taking large steps I could prevent everything from rolling any further down my thighs, which was where things were at this point. I just about made it to my car, feeling like a goose-stepping woman on a mission, when one little student came rushing toward me. "Thank you doct, for the flowers!" he said, hugging me. Something deep in my layers of clothing went ping! as I reached for him. I suddenly felt breezy under my dress in an alarming way. Oh Lord, don't let me be humiliated right here. It was a brief moment, and I was quickly in the car, driving away. Every bit of decency I had was rolled together and clung to me about six inches above my knees. I had made it to the car just in time.

As I pulled up into the driveway, Sam was just taking a load of clothes out of the drier. I drove inside and closed the garage door immediately. "Why did you do that?" he asked, clearly irritated that he'd have to climb around the car with the clothes basket to get into the house.
Getting out of the car, I turned my back to him and lifted up my dress. "That's why."
The moon rose early that night, in the garage on Butterland Avenue. No layer of "Town Taupe" could be seen.

Evangeline

This is a view of North Mill Pond--a sight that I grew up seeing every time we drove down the long hill through town, turning left to go to Daggett's store. On a road that went past the mill lived a family who were quite poor whose children attended our school. The boy in the family was someone that I didn't like--and now as an older person, I realize that it was all peer pressure. He liked me and because some alpha male in the school didn't like him, no one else was supposed to, either. Now I feel stricken about how we must have been to him.

But I loved his mother. She taught our primary class at church. There we'd sit in the basement of the church on our wooden pews, while she tried to help us memorize scripture. She always had pictures, stories, and really cool artistic things for us to do. She had a beautiful name--Evangeline. How perfect for her role in our young lives, too.

This dear lady was so poor, and she walked with her toes pointing outward at 45 degree angles from a straight line. She had a lisp and always looked tired. I don't remember what she wore, or what kind of car she drove. I only remember that she gave us her all in our class and that she really wanted us to know Jesus. I absolutely loved her.

One of the things she did to help us memorize scripture was to hold up pictures that indicated what the next verse in the chapter was. There are so many memories of us chanting Psalm 8, as a whole group of wiggly, uncertain nine-year-olds. I shall never forget Psalm 8, nor could I ever forget Evangeline, particularly when I think of North Mill Pond in front of her house.

O Lord, Our Lord

How excellent is Thy name in all the earth.

who hast set thy glory above the heavens.

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou

ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou

mightest still the enemy and the avenger.





When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy
fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast
ordained;


What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?



For thou hast made him a little lower than

the angels, and hast crowned him with glory

and honour.





Thou madest him to have dominion over the
works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:






All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;







The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and
whatsoever passeth through the paths of the
seas.

O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!

Out of the Mouth of Babes

It was at a British family's home one day after church. A group of rather distinguished personages were assembled for lunch, seated around a large table, laden with Indian food. The patriarch was holding forth about his time in Delhi while we all listened attentively to his very proper English diction. Other family members were from South Africa and the States. A beautiful little curly-headed blond child, Megan, about three years of age, eyed me across the table. She shyly smiled at me every time she caught my eye. As the adults' stories became too complex for her to follow, she began ducking down, plate level, to see if I was still looking at her--making eyes at me the whole time. Megan was delightfully flirtatious in the most wholesome, childlike way. I pushed around a fork-full of chutney hot enough to lift me straight up out of my chair. It was incredible that anyone could eat such a menu item. Besides, it was laced with putridly spiced raisins--foul on two accounts.
I was lost in fantasy about how to rid my plate of this noxious mixture unobtrusively, when I felt a gentle nudge at my elbow. Megan was leaning against me, like a cat in a barnyard. "May I please sit with you?" she asked, wide-eyed. Across the table, Mama squirmed. "Meggie, maybe the lady is trying to finish her meal. It might be best to wait."
Megan looked terribly disappointed and started to back away.
"Oh no," I said. "You sit right here on my lap. Will that be a good thing?"
She nodded vigorously and clammored up and settled on my knees, head against my chest. She was big enough to sit still and small enough to be able to hold her and still spoon food over her head into my mouth.
Megan leaned back against me, looking satisfied with herself.
The conversation turned from the patriarch's ventures to the younger brother's experience at work the day before. I mixed the chutney in with some rice to disguise it and pushed it to the side of my plate. Megan wiggled about, moving her head back and forth against me as if to find just the right place to lean.
Brother had just finished his anecdote and quiet reigned momentarily after the polite laughter subsided.
"Mama!" Megan exclaimed. "Barbara's boosies are much bigger than yours are! Did you know that?"
Now I knew why she was rolling her head back and forth across my chest. Mama was as red as a beet root, choking back her embarassment.
"No, Megan. I didn't know that." Looking at the hostess, she added without taking a breath, "Were you going to explain how to make this delightful chutney?"
There was muffled throat-clearning and chortling around the table as the hostess, who was partially deaf and hadn't heard the exchange about our "boosies," began her discussion of where to find the most nefarious admixture known to mankind.
Megan looked up into my face. "They are bigger" she said, still waiting for validation for her finding.
"I think you may be right" I whispered back. She smiled, satisfied and leaned back into me, fingering the tablecloth contentedly.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see our snowy-haired host regarding Megan, dabbing at his eyes, his glasses held in one hand and a huge smile on his face. "Lovely," he chortled. "Simply lovely!"

Stories

Found here

So you have now read six different accounts of the same story. If you were asked to tell the story, what would it be titled? Who would the main character be? What would the common thread be? Would you be able to come up with something that incorporated all the perspectives you read? Do you lean more toward one than another? Did you have a strong negative reaction to any part of one of the views? Is there a more true version of this story? If one view is true, are the other views untrue?

It has been said previously that our stories can be our prison. People typically find meaning in the occurrences that match their overarching, internal story. If a person feels less than worthwhile, then whatever happens will be seen through the lens of whether or not they have been validated or given approval. Many other features of the event will be overlooked because they are all about how other people treat them. Everything that happens is examined to see if their hypothesis about themselves is confirmed or disconfirmed. He wasn't respectful of me. I don't trust someone like her. I know something bad is going to happen at some point because of this. This is why some people's wounds devastate them and wreck their relationships for years to come. They have a real need for emotional connection and input, so they look everywhere for someone else affirm them. They are especially sensitive to what people say or do. Or they have become desensitized to bad behavior that they find themselves attached to a series of people who hurt them. Their story becomes the organizing principle around which they live their lives. Whatever story they hear, whatever event ensues, issues of belonging and connection are almost all that they attend to.

I know a woman who visits churches at times if she feels particularly blue. When I ask how she liked the sermon, or how she felt about the pastor's theology, or what the service was like, the only answer I get is, "I got so many hugs there!" and she tells one story after another about who hugged her, what they said, and how she felt about it. Can you guess what the story of her young life is? Sadly, it is no longer a story. It is who she has become.

We hear things differently, we perceive things different, and hence, we believe different things than someone else might. People who live in the same family often have different perspectives on what has happened, what the relationships mean, what constituted fair play, etc. Not only do we have different temperaments (that make us take note of different things), but we also have different lenses through which we view the world. Therefore, different people in a family can have quite varying opinions about things.

We see this in clinical work with families of people who have Alzheimer's disease. One family member may feel that their (senile) father is merely being difficult. Another member will recognize the degree of dementia for what it is. Still another may feel that the father needs to act demented just to tolerate life with his wife--and it goes on and on.

I well remember one Thursday afternoon, sitting in the classroom, listening to my professor drone on and on. Suddenly, one thing he said made me sit upright in my chair: "A good therapist isn't the one who sees what something means when it happens. A good therapist is someone who sees 100 things an event could mean, and who stays open to whichever one of those meanings, or another yet undiscovered meaning, it has for their client." We are not to assume only one possibility. We need to assume that the possibilities for meaning are endless, and entertain the idea that something can mean anything at all to someone else.

Here's an example: a couple came to me for therapy complaining that all they did was argue. It soon became evident that they had locked horns about which reality was the correct one. As long as the man bowed to his wife's interpretations, the conflict would blow over. But if he dared to assert that his reality was correct, she would just about come apart at the seams. We worked a long time together before they learned how to listen to the perspective of the other and recognize that each of their stories came from a deep place of the past. And when the other could acknowledge their perspective, they became less entrenched in testing the hypotheses that arose from that story in the here and now.

Stories are interesting, to say the very least.

View Six

Found here

Well, I'm Melanie. It happened to me. And I don't remember one bit of it. I was 17 months old according to the story. I grew up hearing that this was the event that God used to indicate what my future would be like. I felt really special and thrilled by hearing this story. I did get tired of hearing about it and having the tears and well-rehearsed narrative. But I think that the story created a context for who I was in God's sight: beloved, used of God, cheerful and someone who rose above the pain of life.

As I got older, I remember that I used to have this recurring, strange fantasy every time I sat down in front of my computer. It was like I'd get a flash of an image in my mind's eye of a deluge of water bursting out of the screen right at me. I'd fight the urge to duck down but realize it was only a mental picture that wasn't based on anything real.
There were other things about me that I wondered about. For example, I absolutely hate going to bed at night. It's not like I'm afraid or worried, or thinking about anything in particular. I just feel like I'm being punished, to have to be in a bed all alone and have no one else around. I used to argue with my mother about how I should be allowed to stay awake longer. I would do anything to stay awake. After my parents realized that even with lights out kinds of rules, I'd still get up and creep around upstairs in my room, they bought me a light for my headboard so I could read. It would just be my responsibility to get up on time in the morning. Nothing could have made me happier. I read voraciously at night with my door closed, mostly religious books. When I got into my 30s, my staying awake late was to the point of being ridiculous. Why sleep? I would be tired, but I'd fight and fight to stay awake. Why, on earth?

One day I was reading a book about the Chowchilla bus kidnapping. The author, a psychiatrist, described all the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder in children: grim, joyless, repetitive play; magical thinking; the sense of a foreshortened future; daytime fantasies involving something related to the trauma. I put down the book and called my mother. What really happened? Something much bigger than God using me had happened and I wanted to know what it was. Indeed, something much bigger had happened.

Mother told me that when I came home from the hospital, I was dazed and withdrawn for at least six months. That was the first time I had heard this, and I was 39! She said that it was hard to engage me emotionally and I seemed removed from what was going on around me. I asked if she ever considered taking me to the doctor or a psychiatrist or something. No. Back then, people only went to psychiatrists if they were a bona fide crazy person. "We just hoped that you'd get over it and we ignored it."

Why had she been running steaming water in a bathtub in a house with two children under the age of five? Had I been left alone in the hospital for any length of time? She said that I hadn't, but as we talked, I had vague recollection of being in a white enamel crib--one with a lid on it. I couldn't get out and I remember--in another flash-type memory--looking down a long empty corridor and wondering where everyone was and why I had to be there all alone. I must equate going to bed with being all alone in that crib. Why is it that so many people love to retreat to a nice, soft bed to drift in and out of sleep in the middle of an afternoon? I'd rather have my toenails pulled out with hot pincers! Why? Because it was reminiscent of being in pain, being alone, abandoned. Being in bed feels punishing and I avoid it.

What really stood out for me was the sense of a foreshortened future. I never could picture myself as a parent or teenager, or an adult. It was like there was no picture in my head of an older Melanie. Just a blank where the future should be. I even thought about this phenomenon when I was an preteen.

It's interesting too, that I found myself at one point in my life, taking care of injured babies. I would go completely nuts if I felt that the children were afraid or treated in less than a sensitive, attentive manner by the caretakers. My reaction seemed out of proportion to the event. There it was again. Heightened psychological and physiological arousal in response to a reminder of the traumatic event.
I had also heard somewhere that many very first memories in traumatized people are tied to traumatic events. What is my first memory of life (beside the flash-view of being in a crib with a lid on it)? It is of being held by my father, with my little bottom in his big hands, me leaning against his chest and his face against mine. He is lowering me down into the bathtub for the first time after I got home from the hospital. He was saying sweet, gentle things to me so I wouldn't get scared, and I was putting my feet in the water in the bathtub. I looked up and saw what seemed like a mile of white tiles on the wall. I wasn't afraid. I smelled Phisohex and heard his voice rumbling in his chest, against my back.

Oh.

I also had an exaggerated startle response, was hypervigilant, and quite anxious about a number of world events. When a person with PTSD doesn't get treatment, every other thing that causes anxiety piggybacks onto the original trauma, until their response to a frightening stimulus is extraordinary.

I read and re-read the book, thinking about myself, examining what I knew to be true about my responses to life. I had PTSD. That was what I came away from this story with. What I couldn't get over was how I'd been given "the party line" about God doing something wonderful through me. I've even told this story in sermons and church retreats. I do believe that God was very gracious and that I've learned from this story that one doesn't even need to be sensient in order to be used by God. Even the rocks will sing out if no one else praises God--if need be. So He used me--a tiny little 17-month old child. And I still got PTSD and my attachment and abandonment issues germinated in that traumatic event.

It is important to know the whole story or else someone will sell you a whitewashed version of it that somehow supports who they are, while ignoring the impact of it on you. Good thing I found out the truth about myself. It has made all the difference. You also can't let something define you that you know nothing about and that you don't remember. Get out there and make your life what you want it to be. Be defined by what you do and how you treat other people. You just can't rest on the definitions of life or yourself that other people give you.

View Five

I grew up hearing the story of what happened to Melanie. She is four years older than I am, and I wasn't even a gleam in my parent's eyes. In fact, my mother was pregnant with a baby when my sister was burned. If she hadn't lost the baby, I'd never have been born. That's wierd to think about.

What do I remember about Melanie's burn incident? Nothing. But I have lots of memories about the stories we heard about it. My father always got teary when he told about washing Melanie's burns and what a special time it was for him. I guess he really felt important or like he was being a very good father--which I think he was. But he has a lot of emotion about it all.

My mother talks a lot about how God was using Melanie by her being in the hospital and singing to some angry old man. When Melanie became a singer when she was older, I wondered why God would do something like that for her but not for me. I'm a really good singer, too. I wonder sometimes, about how God does what He does--how he makes the decision to give a sign to one person but not another.

Melanie never really talked about what happened to her, even when she was older. But Mother and Dad seemed to have a lot of emotion about it and loved to tell the story--to us or anyone else who would hear it. It made me feel like I lived in a shadow sometimes, especially as she became more known in our town.

I know that God has certainly worked in my life. I'm glad my sister didn't die of her burns. I don't think about it much because as I said earlier, I wasn't even there.

View Four

I never saw what happened, but I heard Diane screaming across the lawn one day, all the way to the neighbor's house. I was in the tree in the backyard. She was hysterical, running to get Daddy, crying and screaming that Melanie was going to die. Daddy came running back across the lawn ahead of her and into the house. I quickly got down and went inside just in time to see Daddy, with a very worried look on his face, rush into the kitchen with Melanie wrapped in a towel. "Get a blanket!" he ordered, and he unwrapped Melanie on the kitchen counter. She was lying very still and crying. He was putting butter all over her before he wrapped her up inj the blanket and took off with her. The neighbor lady came over and stayed with us while they went to the hospital. She told us that Melanie was burned very bad and that we should pray for her. So we knelt down and did that.



I don't remember very much about what happened in the next couple days except that Mommy and Daddy weren't with us too often. They took us over to some people's house to stay while they were in the hospital with Melanie. The people had turkeys at their farm. As soon as I got out of the car, I went across the lawn to go see something. There was a funny sound behind me and I turned around to see a whole bunch of turkeys coming after me, looking at my head. I was scared to death and I started to run. They ran, too. I climbed up on top of a picnic table to get away from them. But they jumped up on the bench part of the table and were starting to come up onto the table with me. I screamed bloody murder, and Daddy came over and scared the turkeys away. He was laughing his head off. I was terrified and awfully glad he got me out of there. He laughed and joked about that happening for years.



Later that day, Daddy drove us over to the hospital lawn so we could wave to Melanie upstairs. I had become so worried that she wouldn't come home again, that I wanted to see her real bad. So we went onto the lawn and looked up to the fourth floor. There, who we saw didn't look like her because she had all this white stuff all over her. I couldn't see her hands or anything. But I knew it was her because Mommy was holding her up to the window. I felt really good to see her because I loved my baby sister.



When Melanie finally came home, I saw the way Mommy and Daddy treated her and I realized that she had to be taken care of carefully. I made sure that she didn't get her bandages dirty, and I played with her and told her stories so she wouldn't feel sad. She acted different when she came home, but I saw her looking at me to cheer her up, so I always did. I have a picture of us from that time: Melanie was dressed up in a white dress with a white dresser scarf over her head like a veil. I had on a bowtie over my striped T-shirt. We had Shultz, our Daschund, with a white bonnet on him and a white dress. We put him in Diane's doll carriage and took a picture of us, all getting ready to get married in our make-believe game. Melanie liked to play those kinds of games with me and I think it made her feel better.



I look back at that picture and remember very fondly, how I protective I was of Melanie. We used to be very close and she needed the help I gave her. I worried for awhile about her dying because Mommy and Daddy would cry about her, especially when they told other people about what had happened to her. But soon she didn't have to wear bandages at all, and she could run around and fall down like kids do without being hurt. Her skin wasn't tender after awhile. I remember this time warmly and have always been so glad Melanie made it through.

View Three

I was 8 and a half when Melanie was burned in the bathtub. It was all my fault, too. I always did what mother told me to do--help John or watch Melanie so she wouldn't get in trouble. I always was helping out, always doing something for someone else. It was my job--I was "Mother's little helper." So when mother was running hot water in the bathtub for our baths, and she asked me to stand in the doorway to keep Melanie from getting near the tub, I was used to doing that kind of thing. I did stand in the hall right outside of the bathroom. But I didn't get what my mother was asking me to do, I guess. I kind of followed her to the doorway of her room because I didn't realize that Melanie would go toward a bathtub with steam rising up off of it.

When Melanie shrieked, I thought she was dying. Mother shoved me aside and rushed into the bathroom, pulling Melanie up out of the water. Then she turned off the faucets. I could see Melanie's eyes shut and she was leaning back against Mother, and she was crying so hard she could hardly breathe. Mother was looking down at her legs that were as red as tomatoes. "Diane! Quick, run and get daddy--hurry!" And so I ran across the lawn to where Daddy was. When I told him that something terrible happened to Melanie and that Mother said to go hom quick, he dropped his tools and ran out of the neighbor's house to our house. The neighbor lady asked me what happened, and I told her that my baby sister had fallen into a bathtub full of very hot water and was probably going to die. She looked horrified. I turned and ran home so I could see what was going on.

The neighbor followed me and said she'd stay with me and John while Mother and Daddy ran out the door with Melanie bundled up in a blanket, off to the hospital. All I could think of was that I had disobeyed my mother and that I would be in terrible trouble when they got home. Especially if Melanie died--boy, I'd be killed. Daddy had really gotten after me and spanked me pretty hard several times before for other things I'd done--that I didn't know were bad things. So there was no telling what he'd do to me when Melanie died.

The neighbor made us supper and I could hardly eat it. All I could think about was that I hadn't done my job, had disobeyed, and now I was very, very bad. Something awful was going to happen to me. I just knew it.

Everyone had always made over Melanie because she was so cute. People would stop on the street and remark to Mother how cute she was. "Such a face, such a face!" an older woman had effused. "What a beautiful girl!" someone else had said. I just stood by, like chopped liver. I wish someone would tell me that I was beautiful, or that I had "such a face." Mother told me that I had a fat tummy, but didn't really tell me much about how I looked. Neither did Daddy, even though I knew he loved me. People even commented about John--his blond-white hair and smiling face. He was really cute. I was just someone who tried very hard to do all the right things so someone would tell me that I was good and pretty and nice. Maybe if I took good care of John and Melanie people would see how responsible I was and that I was good-hearted. But now, since Melanie might die, I thought I was the worst person in the world, both inside and out. The thing was, I was so sick of hearing how cute Melanie was that I had once wished she would die, or that she was never born. Because before she was born I was the only girl and I was special because I was cute and did cute things. Mother used to tell all these stories about what cute things I did. I wanted to be cute and nice. Maybe this is why Melanie had fallen into the hot water--because I'm not nice, I'm not good, and I'm not as cute as she is.

I could hardly think of anything else except of what would happen to me when Mother and Daddy got home. Daddy came home after I had gone to bed. But I wasn't asleep. I heard him come into the house and I wondered if he'd come back to my room and spank me or tell me how terrible I was. But he didn't say anything when he came to my door and looked in at me. I pretended that I was asleep.

The next morning, Daddy told us that Melanie was burned very bad and that she would need to stay in the hospital for a few days. Mother was there with her, so we'd need to go to some friend's house for the day while Daddy was at work. Daddy looked worried, but he didn't look angry at me. Maybe he'd wait until Mother got home and then they'd both yell at me.

The next day, Mother came home and made us a meal before she laid down to sleep in her bed. I knew that it was my job to keep John quiet so she could get a nap. Mother had taught me that if she fainted (she was pregnant and sometimes felt faint), that I was to go get a wet washcloth and put on her head until she woke up. So I had to take care of my mother sometimes, too. I wondered if she'd take me aside and spank me, but she just looked tired and very sad. She laid down on her bed and went to sleep. I thought that if I just kept everything clean and quiet that she wouldn't get angry with me when she woke up. So I straightened my room and tried to clean up the kitchen a little bit. I wanted everything perfect so I would be a good girl, too.

Mother woke up and ran to the bathroom. She was in there for a long time and I could hear her crying. See, it was because of what I had done. But when she came out, she called Daddy at his office and told him that he should come home. He did, and they went into the bedroom and I could hear Mother crying in there while Daddy talked to her. I found out later that the baby that Mother was pregnant with had fallen out into the toilet and died. It made me feel so terrible--now not one, but two deaths would have happened because of me.

A few days later, Daddy took us to the hospital lawn where we looked up at the fourth story window and waved at Melanie. All I could see was a white blur up there. Daddy said that she had bandages all over her and that's why we couldn't see her fingers, or any clothes on her. All she had was bandages. I could see Mother up there, but not much of Melanie. I prayed and prayed for her that night. "God, please don't let her die!" and "I'm so sorry that I said I didn't want my baby sister."

A few days after that, Melanie came home from the hospital. She looked really different and she was real quiet. I couldn't tell if she was glad to be home or what. Mother said that I had to treat her very carefully because her skin could come off and lots of it had come off already. She had these two long places on one hand, between her fingers, where Daddy said the doctor had to cut apart her fingers. Three of them had cooked together. It was sickening to think about.

John and I tried very hard to watch Melanie so she wouldn't fall down, or get her bandages dirty. Mother and Daddy hovered over her and Daddy changed her bandages every day. I watched him talk real sweet to her and put her in the bathtub and pour white gooey stuff over her hands. Then he'd carefully scrub her skin. She never cried, but she looked kind of blank. I thought it might hurt her.

All the while, I kept wondering when Mother and Daddy would take me aside and punish me for what I had done. Life while waiting for the other shoe to drop, can be really interesting. I did it for years after Melanie was burned. I wish someone had told me that it wasn't my fault, but no one ever talked to me about it. I lived with nightmares and fears for a very long time. After awhile, I just got tired of waiting--waiting for someone to notice me; for someone to tell me I was good and pretty; for someone to tell me that I could do special things and that I was a special person; that God had a special work for me to do. I tried to do all the things that I was told and even other things--taking care of Mother and trying to help her in the kitchen and stuff. But no one ever told me any of the things I wanted. So I got angry with Melanie and took it out on her for a long time.

I remember one time when she was going to sit down on a chair and I quickly pulled it out from behind her. She fell on the floor on her bottom and hit her head on the bedpost. I think she fainted or something, because Mother was in the room in a flash, holding Melanie to her and asking me angrily why I did such a thing to my sister. I didn't know. I just knew I was heartsick that no one noticed me and that she got so much of the good things from my parents: attention, love, compliments. If only I could have what she did.

View Two

I think it may been a Friday when an awful thing happened in our family. I was helping the neighbor lady with her plumbing, and Diane, my eldest daughter, came racing in the door screaming that Melanie was dying. She screamed that my wife wanted me to come right away. I dropped my tools and ran across the grass to our duplex and into the house. First off, I heard my wife trying to comfort Melanie, who was wimpering. She was sitting on the toilet, holding Melanie on her lap--holding her very gingerly because her skin looked horrible--translucent, peeling and bubbled up. I could see that she was badly burned. As I looked at her, I was grateful that I had been a medic in the Army and had been taught what to do for burns. Melanie was turning pink and looked like really dazed. My wife kept looking at me with pleading eyes, hoping that I'd know what to do. Well, I did.

Scooping up Melanie, I ran into the kitchen and reached into the refrigerator for the oleo. I was in a real hurry, spreading it all over her burns, just like I had been taught to do. I wrapped Melanie in a towel and rushed to the hospital. Even though I was sick at heart about how terrible Melanie's skin looked, I felt good that I'd been able to help prevent her burns from doing the worst damage possible. As I ran into the Emergency Room, the doctor was there to meet us. As I handed Melanie to him, I gave him a rapid report, just like I would have given the doctors in the Army. I told him that she had been scalded in the bathtub in our home, and that it appeared that she had second degree burns over most of her body. He looked inside the towel and asked what was on her. I was glad that I could tell him how I had administered First Aid just like I had learned to do. The doctor snatched her from me. "You've got to be kidding!" He yelled, as he ran behind the double doors into the ER with Melanie. "That was the very worst thing you could have done!" And he disappeared.

I was so bewildered. I had done exactly how I'd been taught in the Army. Why was this the worst thing I could have done? It didn't make any sense. I had just been humiliated in front of my wife, who looked up to me. My mind was spinning as I sat down next to my wife to wait until we could see Melanie. As I was trying to figure out what I had done wrong, and how to save face with my wife, I could hear Melanie crying and wailing in the distance. It made me almost throw up, I felt so helpless and unable to do anything to help her. Even my efforts hadn't been good enough. It was just like so many other things in my life: I tried to do well and it blew up in my face. If what I had done with the Oleo made Melanie's burns worse, I just didn't know what I'd do.

We sat there for a long time waiting for Melanie to get out of there. I wasn't sure what was happening, but I imagined that all the Oleo that I had put on her had to be scrubbed off. It had to be terribly painful for her because her skin was fragile and tender. When she finally came out, she was bandaged all over, including her chest, arms, hands, legs and feet. She was one big gauzey lump. I felt so guilty and helpless. She looked up at me with big eyes that were frightened and distant. I had let her be hurt. In fact, I had hurt her. I wondered if I could ever make it up to her, or if she would ever trust me again.

I had to run home that night to pick up the older two children and get them to bed. So I kissed my wife goodnight and drove over to the neighbor's home to get Diane and John. They were full of questions about what had happened to Mel and when they could see her. I got them to bed that night but it was hard to sleep. My wife stayed in the hospital. I had to work the next morning, so I got the kids up the next morning in order to get them to some friend's house for the day.
When I got to the hospital my wife looked haggard and bedraggled. She was pretty far along in her pregnancy and I didn't think she could manage the stress of staying with Mel and the worry about whether or not she would survive. One look at her face, and I asked the doctor to order a sleeping pill for her so I could take her home and put her to bed.
Apparently, that was the wrong thing to do too. My dear wife went home and miscarried because of the medication that I suggested. I tried not to think about two bad decisions I'd made but I felt terrible. Tears and loss at home, fear about Melanie's survival (I knew that burns over 40% of a toddler's body could be fatal), trying to keep up with my job, and take care of the kids. It was almost too much. And I'd been wrong again.

The next day I took the kids over to some friend's house for the day. They had a farm menagerie of sorts and the kids were thrilled. As I was leaving them off I heard screaming. It was John. There he stood on top of a picnic table with hissing and clucking Tom turkeys closing in on him. His hair was so blond it was almost white and it sparkled in the sun. I think they were entranced by his hair and they followed him across the yard and up onto the picnic table benches, trying to get close to his shining head. I laughed my head off and got him away from the turkeys. He was hysterical.
A few days later, after my wife was well enough to go back to the hospital to be with Mel, I took Diane and John to the hospital lawn. My wife held her up to the window so the other two down below could wave at her. They were thrilled.

I got over to the hospital every day to see Mel. The doctor told me about her singing everywhere, and my wife told me about Scotty hearing her sing in the night. It was beautiful and brought tears to my eyes to think of her singing like that. The doctor allowed Mel to come home early because I knew how to clean her wounds, since I had been an army medic. Taking care of her burns when she got home was one of my best memories of being a father. She trusted me back then, and she would look at me while I talked gently to her, taking off her bandages very carefully. I'd get the Phisohex and a sponge, and slowly lower her into the bathtub to wash off the dead skin from her burns. She'd just look at my face very seriously. She'd never cry, just watch my face and then look down at what I was doing. I think she knew that I was trying to help her and she knew that I was trying not to hurt her. I loved her so much for how much she trusted me...it makes me cry now just to talk about it. I was very faithful with the debridment--so much so that she has almost no scars now--even over her knee where she lost quite a bit of skin. Her fingers had coalesced on one hand--burned together--and looking at her hands now, you'd never know she was burned. I think it was due in part to how carefully I managed her care when she got home. It was such a pleasure to do this for her.

We could have lost her. When she was a pre-teen, she hated showering and bathing. She'd go to bed with dirty feet from running around bare footed and I'd tease her that she had a complex about not wanting to bathe--still turned off from the tub since she was burned in one. She always laughed or rolled her eyes at me.

Those were the best and most frightening of times for me as a father.

We send out ripples

Found here

I never knew that I could irritate and offend someone just because of the color of my skin. But his whole family was turned off with me because I am White. Because I am a native-born American. "You've got to break off with that woman" they told him, emphasizing their disdain as they enunciated, that woman.


I thought I was a good woman since I had worked hard to behave as a respectable person, get an education and live a good life. Besides, he had the exact same skin color as I did. Bewildered and hurt, I asked him what I had done to deserve this. I never received an answer.


The story began in another country. His parents were poverty-stricken, eking out an existence in whatever way they could. They were good people, just very poor. He was the illegitimate son of the man for whom the region was named, and as such, had to pay for the poor judgment of his parents by bearing the scorn of the entire population. He married a very sweet girl who decided that his unusual princely bearing and happy personality would more than make up for the ignominy of his parentage. She worked hard to make a life for the two of them. Often there wasn't enough to eat and she was hungry. Sad to say, she had several miscarriages because she simply wasn't nourished well enough to carry a pregnancy.





Then the American Christians came to their town. They were nice people who taught everyone how to live better lives, and in the process, taught them a new way to think about the God of heaven. They helped her have enough food so she could carry her baby to term. Over the next few years she had a daughter, followed soon thereafter by a son. The missionaries oohed and ahhhed about the babies--cuddling and carrying them about.





After a time the American woman got pregnant and had a baby herself: a little girl that was like an angel, with blond curly hair and the fairest skin the people had ever seen. The village mother went to offer her help for the missionary woman but was turned away by her husband. Maybe he is helping her, she thought. It must be the American way. I'll wait until she needs me.


When the missionary woman was out and about again the village mother again went to offer to care for her baby girl. She was told she could not hold the baby. She could only look at her, dressed in a pristine blue and white pinafore that had been freshly ironed by the maid. "You'll get her dress dirty" she was told. So she washed her hands with soap and water and returned to the missionary's house. There were no reasons given but the woman declined her offer. Wanting to somehow repay this woman for helping her with her own babies, she swallowed her pride. Holding out her hands to show how clean they were, she hoped she would be allowed to give something back. But the American held her baby a little bit closer to her breast and shook her head, no.





This was a loud message about the value of the villagers and about the double standard that operated for the missionaries. They could enter her home, hold her baby, eat her food, but this was not a reciprocal process. She would never be good enough, look fair enough, be clean enough, or do the right things. She simply couldn't enter that world.


This woman and her husband left that village and each worked two jobs in order to support their three children through college. They were poor, but determined to give their children the gift of being important--to be good enough for other people.





When their children were small the father drove the children over to the hospital parking lot. In the visitor's lot were all sorts of beaten up jalopies--rusted fenders, cracked windshields, patchy paint. "Do you want to drive a car like this when you grow up?" the father would ask.


"No Daddy!" was the rejoinder. "Take us to the good cars!" And he would drive them over to the physician parking lot where the clean, new, big cars stood in orderly rows. "Do you want to have a car like this someday?"


"Yes, Daddy!" they'd squeal and laugh.


It should not surprise anyone to learn that all of the children in this family became physicians. Two of them worked in a hospital unit where the missionary's daughter had to take orders from them. One married into wealth and lived in an exclusive area of New York City. But the most ironic pity was that one son married a woman who would not allow his mother to tend to her own grandchild. For some reason, she was just not right, somehow. And once again she was wounded by not being enough for someone else's baby. She died from cancer a short time later, but I am convinced that she died from a broken heart.


As I've reflected on this sad story over the years, I've wished that this family's rejection of me could have somehow paid for the actions of the American missionaries. When I see what has happened in this family because of the attitudes careated by oppression, I am willing to have been rejected several times over if it could have brought healing to them. But neither my rejection, nor all of the positive, good missionaries of the world can reverse the harm that was done. Their story lives on and comes alive every time I see pictures like the one I've posted today.


Our actions send out ripples in all directions.


Some of those ripples can drown people.