One Piece Leads to Another

Well, goodness knows, I’m tenacious. I certainly wouldn’t be here writing if I weren’t. On my kitchen table right now sits a 28 x 22” slab of foamcore board and on it is a partially complete jigsaw puzzle. I wanted to write “nearly complete,” but I’m not a fool. If I’m fortunate, the image of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night will finally come together in another few days (I hope). I bought the 1,000-piece test of endurance any number of years ago, when TJ Maxx was still practically down the road, and I was visiting at least once a month. The kids and I had once attempted this fine art fiasco a few years ago, but we didn’t get far, and I was this close to giving the thing to Goodwill, but then, I told myself that I wouldn’t let it defeat me, and I pulled it out of the Goodwill box. Sam has been a big help with the cypress tree, but otherwise, I’ve been on my own—for weeks.

This dogged determination may explain why I still haven’t given up on my relationships with my parents—20 years after my dad’s death, 17 years after my mom’s. Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead,” and I’ve tried. I even thought I had tucked in my tangled connection with my mother ten years after we laid her body to rest. It turns out that I had merely shoved the wiry mess into the cluttered closet of my soul.

From 2006 to 2014, I—apparently—memorialized my mother’s death each October by being an absolute bitch to my husband and children. I didn’t realize this until a review of an old journal or two showed the pattern all too clearly. I’ve been an on-and-off journaler most of my life, but opening a bound book with blank pages was a go-to strategy whenever I was angry enough to need an outlet and didn’t want to break any more dishes (or children’s hearts).

Then, in June of 2015, when I was in the thick of a poetry habit, I composed one about my mother, as her birthday approached in June. I remember that I was going round in circles, literally: wearing a path in the floor around the kitchen island, into the foyer, then around the pool table in the living room, and back to the kitchen. I started doing these laps to rack up steps on my Fitbit (which is long gone and replaced with simple, untraceable pedometer), and more than one of my kids has adopted the route. I have to say that, over and over (round and round?), it has provided valuable thinking time with no worries about weather or running into neighbors I’d rather not engage in conversation. So I composed the poem while I was walking and then typed it up. Soon enough, a funny thing happened: October 21^st showed up one morning, and I was fine. What’s more, it kept happening. Every October, I was fine. I figured I was golden—but not so fast—I should have known.

One thing led to another and another and another: a deep dive into the history of the Catholic Church; an intellectual journey to figure out why one Church teaching could not possibly be true if this other one was; more books on the subject; a tweet by a survivor of Satanic Ritual Abuse shared by someone I follow; videos and blog posts by others (far too many others) who had been trafficked and used and mind controlled (yes, mind controlled); a virus shutting down the world and nonstop fear porn designed to make people so afraid they couldn’t think straight and ask logical questions; the Catholic Church selling out to elite criminals (with whom the Church’s elites have spent plenty of time) trampling Constitutionally guaranteed rights and illegally shutting down small businesses, schools, and churches but not liquor stores or multimillion-dollar hardware chains; tweets and Instagram posts that managed to get beyond gatekeepers and expose the truth of what was really going on in the world; an article by Celia Farber on PCR, Kary Mullis, Anthony Fauci, Peter Duesberg, and the HIV lie; Peter Duesberg’s book (Inventing the AIDS Virus—thankfully purchased before getting my hands on one would have cost me slightly less than a thousand bucks); Kary Mullis’s autobiography; an Instagram post from Joe Rogan promoting an interview with a guy who wrote a book on Charles Manson (Wait. Did I see “MK Ultra” in the caption? It’s real?); watching the interview; reading the book (Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) and coming to understand that the world is a lie; being absolutely floored that anybody could not see through the George Floyd/BLM narrative to the real story of money laundering and election stealing; then more digging and reading and watching and researching, researching, researching.

And in the midst of all this, I was trying to get healthier on a mostly carnivore diet that left a lot to be desired and left me unable to eat just about anything. So, I started digging into that with more books: one on allergy elimination, one on enzymes; then a phone call to the acupuncturist I used to see in Denver for allergy elimination treatment. That’s when I probably asked the most important question of my life: “Dr. Stebbins, do you ever have to clear patients of emotional issues to make an allergy clearing stick?” His response: “Ninety-nine percent of the time.” And I began to understand that I might have an emotional eating disorder.

What to do next? Turn to my wise and wonderful daughter Bridget, of course. She recommended Brené Brown’s book, The Gifts of Imperfection. I devoured it and started a journal specifically about my emotional eating issues, then found myself eating more foods with fewer worries.

What else? Believe it or not: the senior thesis that Bridget was writing on the “Catholic novels” of Graham Greene. Preparing myself for the finished product, I started re-reading Greene’s books, along with Faith Hope Love by Joseph Pieper, because Bridget was looking at the stories through the lens of Pieper’s philosophy, and that book was instrumental due to one simple point that started the first fissure in my surprisingly fragile armor. Pieper pointed out that without trust, there can be no genuine communion between persons. Did I really enjoy genuine communion (and communication) with anyone? Probably yes, but I soon came to realize that there were not nearly as many of those relationships as I had imagined. It turns out that, like Frances the Badger in Russell Hoban’s A Bargain for Frances, I almost always had to be careful, even though I wanted to be friends.

Without all of that (you think it’s a lot, but I was seriously condensing), I don’t know that I would have bothered to click through to the Amazon link when I caught a tweet flying by in my feed that included an image of a book cover featuring Matisse’s Icarus. Interestingly, though, I never purchased that book, The Body Keeps Score, because a reviewer on its Amazon page wrote that Alice Miller was the pioneer in the effects of emotional trauma on physical health. So, I skipped Keeps Score and searched up Miller, immediately ordering The Body Never Lies. Turns out that it wasn’t that compelling, but after I read it, I purchased another one of her titles and read it with page flags in hand, marking far too many paragraphs. Then I did it again, and again, and again. My second healing journal is now nearly filled, and just the other day, I received five more from Paperblanks.

So here I am, still fingering the pieces and fitting them into place, but unlike the Van Gogh jigsaw, there’s no picture on the box to guide me.

I wonder what I’ll end up with.