If I had to narrow healing down to one word it would be Purification.

When I found myself at the bottom. My bottom. The place that made me turn around. The place that was so dark and so horrid and so unpleasant that I stopped and said NO. I am not going any further. I am turning the other way… At this place, I was living the opposite of a purified life.

Nearly everything that surrounded me was dripping with death. Nearly everything I consumed was either toxic or completely empty. Everything I thought was negative and angry and painful and evil.

When it comes to purifying your life, it is hard to know where to start. I know. And when it comes to your individual healing journey, it will be as customized to you as your fingerprint.

Mine began with the mind. I daresay everything must.

I remember the day. It is burned into me. It will be a part of me forever.

That day.

It was sunny. Warm for March.

I was sitting on the floor of my best friend’s apartment because I was homeless. I was hungry. I had a box of white rice, a loaf of white bread, and a jar of peanut butter from the food shelf that had to last me the entire week. I was listening to Ween and writing in a notebook I stole from my mother-in-law’s house. I have no idea where I got the pen.

My three year old boy was at her house. You could say, I stole the notebook, she stole the boy. But that isn’t really fair. The truth is, I lost him. I was self-destructing. And he needed to be protected from such an event. The self-destruction of a mother. So that is where he was.

My husband was divorcing me. He had moved in with the ex-wife of one of his close friends. Ex-friend as it quickly became.

She was lovely in a safe and secure sort of way. A way I had never ever been. She had shoulder length straight hair in a natural mid-tone color. She had large white teeth. She was pretty. I remember going to her wedding. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to wear white to a wedding. When we got to them in the congratulatory line, I didn’t know how to act. I was never around his friends. He never introduced me, just let me dangle off to his left somewhere. I didn’t know these people. When I got to her I awkwardly shook her hand too hard and too loudly declared that I was their friend’s wife. She had pulled her hand away like it burned her. I just didn’t know how to be pleasant. I just didn’t know.

So my husband was gone. With another woman. My son was gone. With another woman. The reason I was in my best friend’s apartment was because my boyfriend at the time had grown tired of taking care of me while I was helpless and negative and depressed. He dropped me off there and drove away.

My best friend and her boyfriend were hiding in their bedroom, smoking pot. I could smell it coming out from underneath the door all hours of the day and night. They couldn’t stand to be around me anymore either.

My parents were not in the picture at all. They were always the tough love sort. My mother was taught to swim by a father who tossed her into the pool at the age of six months old. This actually works. But this is the type of parent she became. She just let me flounder on my own with little help and support. She felt this was the best way for me to learn and build strength. Again, it worked.

I was at the lowest point of my life.

Insufferable to be near even by the people that loved me the most.

Then there were the legal powers that be. The system that was trying to rehabilitate me. I was anxiously awaiting entry of an unknown date into a drug treatment facility. For marijuana use, of all things. They didn’t understand that the marijuana was a safer medicine for me at the time than any of the pharmaceutical garbage they were always cramming down my throat. That it was what had kept me alive. That without it during my explosive gangrenous marriage things would have been much much worse. I had quit several times before only to realize that a sick person, a very very sick person, needs medicine. But this type of medicine was unapproved. Not allowed. It was easy for me to quit. But I awaited treatment, because I was being forced to, but also because there I would be welcomed and have a bed and they would feed me. It sounded like paradise at the time.

I was completely alone. Abandoned and forsaken by everyone, even publicly, at court hearings that announced to large rooms filled with people who did not know me one bit, that I was a low-life who wasn’t worthy of motherhood. I wasn’t just abandoned and rejected by all of my family and friends, but by an entire system of local government. Groups of people who looked down their noses at me. Young girls who had to watch me pee into a cup every week. A social worker who hated the people she worked with and got me confused with other cases every single time she represented me in a court hearing, making wild untrue claims about me that never existed, but I was not allowed to speak to defend myself. A guardian ad lidem whose job it seemed was to make sure I never saw my son again.

And the truth was, I was a very good mother. My son was more advanced than most children I have ever known due to the time and effort I put into his development. I taught him everything. I read to him for hours every day. I showed him how to do everything, I talked to him about everything, like he was a person. I made sure he was in as safe and secure a bubble a boy with broken parents can ever be in. I was just broken. And once everyone started leaving me I broke more and more until one day there was enough of a reason to take him away.

She is emotionally unstable.

She smokes pot all day.

And so there I was on that warm sunny March day. Sitting on the floor of my best friend’s apartment, across the hall from the one I had shared with my husband only months before. Literally, my old door was four steps from hers. A physical reminder every day of what I had lost.

And I was writing in this stolen notebook. I was journaling. And this is where my first purification came. It was a powerful event of the mind that swept through me like a wind. It was divinely breathed into me, I am sure of it, but it was also a very conscious choice. To quit pitying myself and start thinking something that would help me. I decided this was the point where I would finally turn around and start grabbing at life with all my might, because there was nothing else left.

This wind came so forcefully into my mind that everything around me changed at once.

And it was just one thought.

One positive thought that overtook my toxic bleeding soul and made the day seem brighter and full of joy.

My son… is ALIVE.

 

My son.

 

Is.

 

ALIVE. 

 

This one thought was life to me when everything around me and in me was toxic. This one thought saved me, changed everything. It was the first pure thing I had consumed in a very very long time.

I sat on the floor laughing and crying as quietly as I could, saying over and over again, he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive. And I will have him back. He is not lost forever like the children of so many parents. He did not drown in a pool or get kidnapped or lost in some terrible tragedy. He is safe and being cared for while I find some healing. And then I will have him back.

 

Excerpts from my journaling on that beautiful sunny day when everything in my mind changed and the strength and power of joy overtook me…

  

I was admitted to a treatment center the following week. I jumped through all the hoops (none of which were helpful in the slightest at rehabilitating me, unless you count severe annoyance as a character building situation). No, I had to rehabilitate myself, despite the fatally flawed system that made it much harder at every turn.

One year and four months later, my four and a half year old boy was sitting in the backseat of my car.

It was the first time we were alone together since the day he was taken. The first time I was given permission in sixteen months to take him somewhere. We were going to a park nearby for a couple of hours. Then I had to return him to his home. And as we were pulling out of the driveway, he said, Is it just you and me mommy? Just you and me?

The wonder in his tone said it all. We had not been allowed to be mother and son, doing regular mother and son things since shortly after his third birthday. We had only seen each other for an hour and a half twice a week in cold unwelcoming county headquarters while a woman watched from nearby writing down everything I said and did and sending copies to multiple overseers.

He was a completely different boy now. He was still very advanced for his age in his language and emotional maturity but his development had slowed while he was gone, partly because of the trauma of losing me and partly because no one else was as good with him as I was. No one else put the time into him that I did. Nurturing him and teaching him and reading to him. No one talked to him the way I did.

And I was a completely different person too. I was beaten down in the name of treatment and rehabilitation and had to rise up against it over and over again during those long months. I suffered humiliations, rejections, and letdowns during that time that I could never ever fully recount. But I fought like a little hatching creature. And somehow I made it out. And I was much much stronger.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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