PART THREE / CHAPTER NINE

“This is why people drink…”

“She’s going to die…”

And I killed her. 

At least I thought I did. 

My mother-in-law that is. 

September long weekend 2022.

The gas guys were over fixing a pipe to our furnace that connects to the mainline on the street. Finally! A warm(er) winter! The basement hatch was open. Naturally. The guys needed to get to our basement where the furnace and under-dwellers live. A place where no one ventures but me.

And I had forgotten to lock the red double doors that led to the hatch’s opening. 

You idiot! 

The sound of my mother-in-law’s voice crying from our basement seemed implausible. Seeing her sitting, straddling the ancient stringer, knees knocked against the aged stone foundation of our church house… well - that was just plain surreal. 

“What are you doing down there?” I wondered. 

Why are you down there?

Oh. Good. Lord. Help. 

My mother-in-law has fallen down our stairs!

Trying to express the array of emotions that followed the realization that my aging diabetic mother-in-law had fallen in - and down - our basement stairs has proven to be a fruitless exercise. After a dozen attempts I’ve finally given up. Suffice to say - my nerves snapped like dry twig on a dead tree on a summer’s day. The trips to the hospitals, x-rays, and doctors reports sent me on a wild trip of catastrophizing that even I, a seasoned catastrophizer, couldn’t keep up with. Atop Mount Anxiety was the then, only hours old news, that “no, we were not moving east.” Faith did not get the job were were banking on her getting. That sure-fire “its yours” slam-dunk employment opportunity that would have moved us to the border of New Brunswick was over. Every ideation, dream, plan, exit strategy - even my 45 DAY / 45 POINT PLAN that would see me to Thanksgiving and our “inevitable departure” - all of it: done. Finished. Obliterated.

Life. Stopped. Dead. In a single moment without a single movement. By evening’s end, everything had entirely changed without changing at all. Short of actually quitting our jobs and listing our house, we’d said good-bye to the people and places we loved in Ontario. Tail-tucking embarrassing. Somehow, by the miraculous grace of God Almighty, my mother-in-law suffered (only) a mild concussion and broken toe.

“This is why people drink…”

I needed to relax. Settle down. Catch my breath and find some emotional footing. Take baths. Go for walks on the beach. Do yoga. Anything. Instead, I chose to stick to my (then newly formed) plan and write about my spiritual abuse, personal trauma, and the reasons why I left my former church. 

45 DAYS / 45 POINTS. I wasn’t going to let a little life-altering course-correction push me off path. I was bent on telling my story. Sharing it with the world. Bringing it to light. So I wrote. Hour after hour. Day after day. Locked in a trance of memories and hurt.

Editor’s notes:

• First draft: too angry / so much rage. 

• Second draft: still too angry / unbalanced perspective / but better. 

• Third draft: 3000 words / more detailed / less angry / remembered memories / double check facts

• Fourth draft: 4000 words / much more honest / fair / starting remember the deep pain. 

• Fifth draft: 5000 words / very detailed / excellent recall but gapping on timelines and chronology - better triple check / but getting close. 

• Sixth draft: 6000 words / that’s it / that’s my story / trauma staring back in black and white.

Oof… that hurt.

Thursday morning. Early September. The day had come that I had planned to drop my story on why I left my former church as a part of my 45 DAY / 45 POINT PLAN. And then I woke up. Felt like death. Hunched and sore. Tight chested. Creaky hips. Nauseous and heavy. My whole body ached as if I had been struck by a clever and somehow aged 40 years overnight. Something was wrong. And I didn’t share my story… 

“It’s all in the hips…”

The hinge point of the human body. The interchange on the muscular highway. Muscles overpassing and circling about, teaming up, cross-connecting, and collaborating in ways that enable us to move, run, jump, stand, sit, and even use the washroom. All of these muscles - hip flexors, hamstrings, glutes, and pelvic floor - rely on each other. They work together. AND - they stress each other out. Referral pain, I’ve learned, is when a muscle aches or knots because the muscle beside it is spasming-tight due to overuse, injury, or stress. And by mid October, after all the dust had settled with my mother-in-law, our non-moving-plans, and writing about my story why I left my former church as a part of my 45 DAY / 45 POINT PLAN - I had a new problem: hypertonic pelvic floor dysfunction. 

 Pelvic Floor Dysfunction is usually associated with woman who’ve delivered babies. Usually… 

But did you know that men can have pelvic floor dysfunction too?! In fact, here’s a fun-fast-fact, anyone can have a dysfunctioning pelvic floor. WAIT! Before you go to Google to research, or stop reading altogether - don’t fret. I won’t give TMI. Here’s the skinny: my hips were rusty stiff. Everything in my pelvic region ached. My upper hammys, glutes, hip-flexors, and groin. All those muscles hurt. Stuck in traffic in the dead of summer pain! I couldn’t surf. Running became awkward and clunky. Peeing felt weird. And my lower back ached something fierce. 

I tried stretching. Taking warm baths. Muscle relaxants. None of it helped. Ring-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling. “Hey! It’s your body,” my body was saying. “Something’s off. Pick up. We need to talk.” My body was right. My brain knew something was wrong, it just didn’t know what it was, or how to deal with it. I’ve always been a “clencher”, night-teeth-grinder, and tension-headache veteran. I knew that stress causes muscular pain. I’d just never experienced anything like this before.  

“Therapy,” my wife said. “You aren’t dying. I think you need to go back to counselling.” 

My body telling me something that my mind couldn’t yet hear. So counselling, I did seek. Answers, I did find. 

“Guarding,” my therapist called it. Muscle spasms caused by chronic-core-clenching as an involuntary reflex to self-protect. Physical manifestations of psychological stress. My core muscles perpetually flexed to guard my beating heart. And I’d been “turtling” my muscles for so long I’d worn my body into the ground. My muscles were overworked. My hips paid the price.

Who knew the body and the mind were so connected?!

I was protecting myself from something. Spiritual abuse and trauma, most definitely. But there was more. Much more. 

Have you ever stood atop a scaffold? You know, those interlocking mobile stacking ladders with bars and wheels and planks used on construction sites to reach high places? I loved playing on scaffolds when I was a kid. I would grip and jump through the bars pretending to be Spider Man. My dad never stopped me. Whatever job-site, inside or out, he’d let me play. “Just be careful,” he’d say. Scaffolds can be dangerous. They’re wobbly. Unstable. You can pinch your fingers, smack your head, fall off the top. Or have hundreds of pounds of metal and steel fall on you as you’re smacking your head and pinching your fingers. A collapsing scaffold is no joke.

Cause’ that’s how the autumn of 2022 felt. My internal scaffold collapsing in glorious chaos. The infrastructure of my identity toppling in a heap of clanking noise and bent-broke steal. An absolute mess of nerves and tears. It was awful. It was necessary.

“[And] this is why people drink…”