Thoughts on Prayers

Stuff Gets Tough, Choose Love

I had no real beliefs about big life and death things, but felt like I had to come up with some. Especially when I started getting questions from my darlings and I didn’t even know at first what, if anything, I actually believed. Then I had to think of ways to talk to them so as not to terrify them.

One of my favorite people and favorite writers Joan Didion said on the topic of crushing and the inexplicable ways we behave when grieving, “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”

About ten days after my first baby was born, I almost died of an ailment strictly set aside for particularly healthy women. Ain’t that a kick? A rare and delayed blood pressure spike, that two sets of emergency room doctors (at the ER of the hospital where I actually gave birth) passed off as a response to a headache. Only had I left the third time, that “headache” and their response would have killed me.

I’d been to the ER twice already that week, alone, complaining that I could hardly use my hands and my legs felt like they were in cement. And that it felt like someone was piercing me with an ice pick straight through my neck to my eye socket. Twice they sent me home with painkillers that only made me vomit and did nothing for the pain. Like I was some weirdo mom looking to get high.

The third set of ER doctors had no choice but to dig deeper, as I finally allowed my husband and baby to escort me inside this time, and we refused to leave until I was actually treated in some way. When they tried to pull the same bullshit, maybe out of laziness, maybe out of being overwhelmed, my husband shouted about my insane blood pressure numbers. He demanded that they call my obstetrician, who, once informed, couldn’t believe that no one had connected the dots, especially with the crying newborn at my side. Oh - and the fact that I had given birth to the newborn at the exact same hospital. So much for health information technology.

I was suffering from post-partum pre-eclampsia. Yeah, you probably haven’t heard of it either, but if you’re a reasonably fit person considering having a baby, maybe make a “Quick Note” on your iPhone, lest you end up dead for no good goddamn reason after a perfectly healthy pregnancy.

As my partner whisked my baby away from side for the first time since she was born, I started to feel myself letting go. She was all I wanted. Without her, and this would last to this day, I didn’t feel like I needed to be here. There was no time to waste. I had to be hooked up to a magnesium drip to save my life. Thank God my husband advocated for me, some might say. I just think everyone needs an advocate when it comes to your health.

A couple of months later, we were robbed in the light of day while my newborn daughter and I were out for a walk. Only a few very sentimental and meaningful things were taken, like my engagement ring, next to the baby’s changing table, and my Aunt Myrt’s (one of my favorite people in the world) wedding ring, deep in a jewelry box, and our laptops, from deep within random drawers in different rooms, in different pieces of furniture within the apartment. All my work. All his work.

The attack felt deeply personal and that it was meant to scare and hurt us. And boy did it work.

After the police came to the apartment and left, promising to “investigate,” no one every contacted us again, and no one was ever charged with a crime. The mousy building manager claimed that the cameras at the entrances, exits, and in the parking garages stopped working “for six hours” that day. Huh.

She did call the cops again though. On me. I was disturbing her and the other tenants. I stood outside of her office, demanding that she figure how exactly, in a building that required a fob for entrance, plus a door man who had to announce visitors, had somehow just let folks walk in. Why cameras in the lobby and in the garage that stopped working randomly for that one day for those set of hours. She did zero work to figure any of that out. Was she in on it? Did the government pay her off to get our computers? I don’t know. Of course no one will ever know. That’s some John Grisham shit that’s not supposed to happen to regular people. But I’m telling you it did.

When she wouldn’t see me in her office, I just stood there in the building lobby, howling and crying, holding my new baby, who was doing neither.

Apparently, I was doing enough for us both. 

She was already trying to be a calming force. Both my girls are like that.

I always knew I’d need my daughters to take care of me, I just didn’t know it would be so soon. As toddlers and babies they would sadly stand in front of me and refuse to be apart from me when my ex-husband tried to hurt me and would scream at me and tell me how useless I was. And now as young girls, they hug me and hold me and tell me to take deep breaths. “It’s OK mama. You’re the best mama.” And I’m not. But I’m trying.

I came close to martyring myself and allowing them to arrest me, but I wouldn’t do that to my child. My husband, who happened to be resigning from his job that week, after a year-long battle with a not-so-Democratic appointee of the Democratic President I once helped get elected, packed our entire apartment up and moved us out in two days. I hate to be the shrew who said, “I told you so,” but for fuck’s sake, I fucking told him and he dismissed me. As he often did when his ego was on the line.

If I’d lost my faith in faith at some point, I’d now lost my faith in D.C. law enforcement, the healthcare system and “highly-trained” doctors, the government, anyone in authority because no one seemed to have any, including myself. As soon as I told my husband I was pregnant, which I believed gave me at least some additional value in our relationship, I saw what was happening within in his office and the toxic dynamic with the Chair. I begged him to get the hell out. I knew in nine months we’d need him more than ever, as I would be a new mum.

This from a mum who already had Generalized Anxiety Disorder…

Who would be a new mum definitely prone to Post-Partum Depression…

A new mum with these things AND Post Traumatic Stress Disorder …after nearly dying and being burglarized in the light of day within a couple months of each other. Plus no one in authority really caring.

And now suffering from high blood pressure. And migraines.

And who would be moving five more times.

Three of those times further away from any support system or even a singular friend or family member.

Trying to be treated for all of these things in some consistent way.

I will forever feel so terrible for the wounded animal that returned to my hometown. My heart and head only had protecting my baby on my mind.

As an advocate for the public interest who had been shadow-boxing the world’s largest corporations on behalf of the civilians, I stopped caring about the public and the many forms of injustice suffered at the hands of the powerful and moneyed special interests who control our lawmakers.

That hot day in July, the burglars robbed me of me, too. For months I stewed in cynical isolation vowing to leave the world of advocacy and policy and hole up with my baby. Screw a world that clearly kept kicking us in the ass when we, or at least I, spent a career trying to help people and causes and our planet.

It was only when one of my best friends and mentors was about to go toe to toe with triple negative breast cancer that I realized that I couldn’t let all the people who let me down, give me an excuse to let her down.

Rebecca Jean Wilkins took over as the new Executive Director at the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition when I left to go to New York after my partner “left” his painful government job. She bravely kept her post as long as she could. I knew I had to go see her, because if I sent an email or called she’d say everything was fine.

I asked her what I could do to help her when I went to D.C., Kate back at the hotel with my partner… and she told me not to let our coalition and campaign we built die, too. I told her I’d do everything that was needed, then went back to my hotel and cried.

I kept thinking - if there’s a God, why her? Why take away one of the most brilliant, strategic, and yet most humble humans to walk the planet? There were and are so many assholes in D.C. Why someone who was doing nothing but good with her life?

Rebecca never made me feel stupid when I asked 57 questions about every tax policy, financial regulation, new legislation, or an existing piece of the tax code. And believe me, in a city like D.C., hell, in every city I’ve worked in, I have rarely seen any woman – or man – pass up an opportunity to make a woman look or feel stupid. I’m not being anti-woman, or anti-feminist, or whatever, I’m just speaking from 20 years of experience.

But never Rebecca. My most ardent and loyal of allies, particularly as a woman, in this sometimes nasty game of policy and politics, even before I became a Campaign Director, she always made sure that I sat at “the big table,” (not in the extra chairs in the back), that I “took up space” at said table, and “used my voice” in every meeting. I had to be careful not to whisper something to her, because before I knew it, she’d say, “Excuse me, Nicole would like to comment on…”

And, of course, she also went with me to get my nails done.  But it was usually because she was checking in with me to make sure I was doing OK. Being a single woman in and working in the world of advocacy and politics can be tough, terrifying, thankless, and lonely at times. That’s why a lot of time your only friends in D.C. are people from some job or coalition or news outlet or grad school. If you’re lucky, they aren’t stuffy assholes. Many are truly good hearts and heavy drinkers. Even piano players. Unfortunately for single, straight, middle-aged women, a lot of the guys are very young, very sleazy, very nerdy, or very gay. But they made great friends.

Rebecca had impeccable style to go along with her unimpeachable command of the subject at hand.

I miss her every day.

****

When I had my second daughter, Evelyn Jean Louise, my body declared war on me again, but in different ways. Every month a new body part or joint stopped working and the pain was excruciating.  Each day required braces for my wrists or knees or ankles or tape for my toes or shoulders. 

I had a bizarre, itchy, and painful rash all over my body. Being in the sun was agony and I had two little girls for several summers with an embarrassing mama in board shorts and shirts at the community pool. On top of which, I gained 25 pounds in six weeks.  I couldn’t stay awake regardless of how much coffee, which I’d never drunk in my life, or Red Bull, I’d consumed. These were the most precious years of their lives and I felt physically tortured. But I felt if I complained at all or laid down to rest I’d seem ungrateful for being given the opportunity to spend this time with them. I cried every night when I read to them and told them I was sorry for being such a mess of a mama.

The invasive testing, the inconclusive results, and the extraordinary frustration, amplified the anxiety and depression that continued to leave me in tears daily. 

I held my girls. I’m so sorry, I said, over and over again. I just want to be a good mama. Nothing could have been more true, but I was getting darker by the day. I began to feel that I was a useless husk. And this was before the pandemic, when things would get even worse.

In the meantime, I’d hurt pretty much every person in my orbit. I had so little left. Even when I thought I was trying to help or defend them, I was like Edward Scissorhands, mangling everything in my path, but with no pretty sculptures in the end. I thought I was helping my brother and sister with work or career stuff or my nephew and niece with personal stuff, but it all misfired.

Only my daughters were safe. My girls were the island where my heart and soul parked themselves and attempted to heal while my outer-shell vibrated with paranoia, constant pain, and vitriol.

No doctors could or would diagnose what was wrong with me. I wasn’t nor would I take the myriad pain pills, once again, thrown at the problem. I didn’t have an acute injury. Something was going wrong from the inside. And after all the funerals I’d been to or read about - and not just random people — actual relatives and good friends, due to opioids, I had no interest in finding a new way to fuck myself up.

****

When I heard the sound of what could only be an animal being killed by another animal in the woods, I caught myself being transferred, even confused, for a few breathless seconds.

I wondered if somehow it was me. The tortured howls that repeated over and over sounded just like I felt. When you love and love and then hurt and hurt with a ferocity you’ve never known, and then build and smash everything and feel broken and crushed, again and again, every day…eventually it builds to this level of yawp. Was I lying on my side somewhere in the woods? I had been once before.

One night I went on a long walk in and out of the woods, along train tracks, in parking lots and on back roads to look for that sound. Without my phone or wallet. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was looking for. I was walking and crying and walking and crying.

After several hours I did come back to a very worried household, trying to behave very normally. I was shaking.  I went up to my bedroom and crawled into bed. As if she felt it, my oldest daughter, then four-years-old, sat up close to me on my bed, folded her hands, and closed her eyes.  She said that she was going to pray for me. 

She very seriously asked God to “please help my mama get better. Please.” 

At first I was startled and confused. No one in our family every “prayed” before. It was then that I remembered that we sent her to a Presbyterian Church for pre-school. Then I got past the dumb questions of the moment and got to the things that mattered.

I remembered that religion can be a tool for hope. I forgot about hope. Hope is a dangerous but very necessary thing. And I felt hope for the first time in five years because of this unexpected, odd, and sweet gesture.

Now, we’ll never be a church-going family and I’ll never understand the hateful, cruel wing of the “Christians” that seems to hate the most vulnerable among the living. But my daughter loved me enough to pray and beg the unknown and the unseen for me, to feel better. To live.

A child – or anyone - sitting next to you with their hands folded and eyes closed – doing so because they’re scared to lose you, and because they have already given you all of their love and everything they have – is precious. 

I know that she hurts when I hurt and I hurt when she hurts. It’s must how love builds us.

Just like my mama told me that she hurts when I hurt. I thought that was crazy and that my mum, Lois Ann, was just talking nonsense when she stroked my head and said she felt my pain herself. And not just that, but that she wanted to absorb my pain too, so that I didn’t feel it myself.

If that isn’t the most pure sense or definition of motherhood then I don’t know what is. Dad’s get to dash in on the weekends and go to the amusement park but mums get the mean-girls-drama and first-boyfriend-heartbreaks and the walking-pneumonia-shit parts of life to deal with and only feel bad that they can’t take it away. Only they usually do get sick on the back end. It’s love.

It’s not some generic “thoughts and prayers” Facebook post or Tweet, or a forced weekly ritual like when I was a kid, hating sitting in that hot scary church.

My little girl wasn’t giving up hope, but she needed hope’s helper, which for some is a belief in a greater good and greater power or a God or Jesus or Buddha or the Universe.

We decided to call our helpers “angels.” Like Aunt Myrt, who shares her name with my Katherine Myrtle, and whose ring was stolen that fateful summer. Our angels are “Aunt” Rebecca Jean, who shares her name with Evie Jean Louise, who also shares her name with Grandma Nancy Louise, my husband’s mother, who my daughters never had the privilege of meeting.

Now, if I still believe in this idea, they have their fiercest protector in their Aunt LaLa, my sister Leslie. I told her right before she died that we are all made of stardust, and would meet again.

The first part was true. The second part could be a complete lie.

As for me, I was lucky that I had and have my angels here on Earth back in those dark days, and these new dark days. Like my darling first-born, Kate, who reminded me every day to love and be loved as four- and five-year-old.  And my sweet baby Evie Jean, who almost violently wiped my tears away as just a one- and two-year-old and would tell me that “everything’s OK, Mama. Be happy.”

They gave me hope. They give me hope.

Eventually, I found doctors that figured out what’s wrong and are actually helpful. My hips got misaligned from my second pregnancy. I finally have medicine for my thyroid. I’ve got a number of autoimmune issues. In 2018 we established that I’m allergic to the medication I was on before Evie was born, hence the rash. And I’m being treated for PTSD.

I hope my babies won’t ever give up me, because some days I’m still an awful, cranky, tape-my-toes mess.

I’m grateful to come from a family who is not perfect, and knows that I am not either, but who loves. We show love. We give love.

Because just as hate is taught, so is love. And if I believe in anything, I believe in the strength of love, no matter how you show it. Maybe it’s a hug, maybe it’s a song, maybe it’s a prayer, a chant, a meditation, a phone call. Maybe it’s just stopping for ten seconds and thinking about what someone may have been through before you act out about a slow waitress or cashier on his second shift. Or maybe it’s a smile.

Given the option, when life is tough, choose love.