Storms

The old hymn goes,
                "From every stormy wind that blows,
                  From every swelling tide of woes,
                  There is a strong, a safe retreat.
                  'Tis found beneath the mercy seat."

Storms of different kinds have broken over my family this past week. The first was the one which is whirling and buffeting us now: a final straw that broke this camel's back, after three years of emotional, verbal and behavioral abuse at the hands of my own husband. The second was a storm of weather that literally tore through my home hamlet and my husband's home town, 50 minutes from one another, and caused unprecedented damage.

Monday evening, each of my three older children, whose ages are 17, nearly 16, and nearly 14, came to me with different comments about their daddy's recent relations and communications with a former girlfriend. This woman is married, "having marital problems," suddenly dropping in for visits from her home over 2 hours distant, bringing my children gifts, bringing even the goat milking stand that I needed for our new goats, and eagerly inquiring whether MY children like HER alright? My son said, "she's the sort of person who is always calling you once you get in touch with her." Then he told me, "Daddy texts her, a LOT." One daughter told me that she felt the intentions of this woman were to insert herself into my husband's life, that she was flirting with him, and that she made my daughter "feel slimy," by always overacting: if my daughter offered to shake hands to end a cordial visit, she found herself pulled into a hug she had not wanted. Then my other daughter came to me with much emotion to say she had not wanted to tell me, that none of them had wanted to tell me, of their concern over all Daddy's contact with this Jill. I told Emma, that if he could see how deeply it upset her, that it might have the power to shake him back to safe ground, where it could not coming from me, the wife. The children have always been present at the meal table for the past several years, as he berates me for being a Christian, calls me filthy names, impugns my intelligence, casts me as lazy or idle (the depression from the constant tide of this was becoming very real and yes, slowing me down). They have seen me weeping, and not known how to help, and some had been blaming me for the conflict and trying to insist that I must have done something to make him so hateful to me.

All the children were in from their Monday evening chores, then, and I was all set to serve them supper, when I noticed that Emma had gone again, and we heard her out in the barn, crying and yelling as she tried to get her daddy to listen and accept her words. Hannah went to join her, as I quickly made all the other four come into the house, closed the door, and tried to go on with supper.
It was horrible, afterward, sitting on the backyard in the dark with my 3 oldest, learning that my husband, their daddy, had been absolutely stone-faced and denied every bit of wrong-doing. It was shocking to the children to be treated with a measure of the contempt for their hearts and minds, the same contempt that they had witnessed dished out to me from the time these three began to cross over from the childlike mind to the adult comprehension. That night, late, I messaged our Christian church friends, Laurel and Ole, for help, for prayer, for comfort: my husband, I had learned from my children, was on the track to developing an affair with a former girlfriend, and refusing to admit it, had been complaining to her of me, talking all the time to the children while they were captive audience in the barn with him, about all of Jill's alleged virtues, which I didn't have.

Tuesday morning, all 6 children went with me to the Pettersen home for the children to join the Ps' daughter in a refreshing time in her swimming pool. My oldest daughter, my absolute rock, Hannah Scarlett, stayed with me most of the time during my consultation with Laurel, hearing my side of things she had been told by her daddy quite incompletely and negatively, adding her own testimony, and affirming by her own observances that I was totally in the right to have awful concern, and having it all brought home to her with finality, that for years I have been being abused as his outlet against the Christian life we attempt lead. Ole spoke with my son Owen, and encouraged him in his faith, in his own wisdom and in his ability to speak to God familiarly about any and all things. Owen, who at almost 14 is definitely "a guy" and not as emotionally open as he was in childhood, told me sincerely later, that he "had fun today."

Wednesday morning, one of the children told me, as Jeffrey sat at the kitchen table, "Ella said that Woody (hired man, his name is actually Mike) swore at her in the back barn." She noticed something out of the usual routine in how the pigs were cared for, maybe that the grain was not fed them, and commented on it, and Mike said, "don't worry about it, I'll throw some fucking hay down for them." It made her uncomfortable. I do not stand for this. Twice that I can think of, so not often in all the years Mike has worked for us, this sort of thing has come up. Once my husband waited for everything to be forgotten before speaking to Mike hours after the fact. The next time, he heard the interchange himself, and flipped out on the instant, screaming and swearing up one side and down the other of Mike. Well, this time, I looked at Jeffrey, said "are you going to deal with this?" He said he would, but he was going to take some ease first and have his breakfast, and I knew he would not handle the situation at all until much later. I protested that this needed to be taken of immediately, and he challenged me to do it myself. Infuriated, and just needing this sort of typical (I- don't-hafta-so-what-are-you-gonna-do-with-that? ) attitude to set me off, I said, "you think I won't, watch me." I flung out of the house, turned around once outside, and screamed at him, "and then, I'll deal with you!!" and took my way across the road, through the barn to the back barn where Mike would be cleaning out. I knew very clearly as I marched that I was not angry at Mike, not really, that I was extremely angry at Jeffrey for never treating anything as a real matter if it mattered to me. Coming on Mike, I said to him very composedly and in quiet, serious voice, "Mike, I've come out here to talk to you." I told him that we knew he had used bad language to Ella just that hour, even quoted to him, and stopped him from going off into a panicked account of what might have set him off. I told him, "I do understand, I do, that you can get frustrated, with the ways of animals and children, and the job you do every single day. I get that. And I only want you to please watch what you say to my children while you all work together." He sincerely apologized, and I told him it was alright. I offered him my hand to shake, and took his in both of mine. Not once did I yell at him, and I held his gaze straight and truly. When I left that back barn I knew he was still glad to work for us, perhaps even gladder.
I returned to the house, to my husband who was complaining about his breakfast, and unloaded the knowledge that I had gained about his contacts with Jill, as revealed to me by our worried and hurt children. We yelled by turns, Hannah and Emma chimed in many times in support of the case I was trying to make for his return to the sanctity of our family and a return to the years of our happiness together, before he decided to begin harassing and attacking me, trying to drive me to give up and leave our marriage. Now the children all could see, that once I had made it clear I would not be driven away from my children, he had purposed to make me regret it. In the middle of this awful round, Laurel came and took Hannah quietly away for an escape of peaceful time together. My son Owen sat through it all, listening, mumbling a few times in general agreement with his sisters and me. As it all wound down an hour later, I went out onto the back deck, curled myself into a kneeling ball in the corner, and dropped all my composure to sob out, "O God, please" repeatedly. It was the third time in two days that I had wept profusely, not merely had a little cry. Then after a while I saw Owen meandering across the backyard, trying to clear his own head a bit. He had seen me. I went down to weed the garden (again, something I can fix with work), and he came to me and spent quite a while just chatting and discussing plants, the goats, anything but what had just happened. All this week, in fact, Owen, Ella, and Emma, to my joy especially because she has been THE child to knock heads with me all the past school term, and it was brutal...have sought me out every day, and just been there and talked with me. Sometimes it is going over parts of this storm, mostly it is them making an effort, and wanting, to show their love and support by just being present and talking about something nice. I am nearly overwhelmed by this, after I have felt so very alone, and despised by all (except Hannah, and the two little boys who are 9 and 5). I have had many opportunities to tell them that I love them so very dearly and am so proud of them, and so encouraged in them.
But Wednesday wasn't over. Hannah and I went to Bible study, which opened with the song she had chosen, "Til the Storm Passes Over." It was well chosen, but impossible for me to sing. Ole tried to smooth the atmosphere by praying generally and carefully about the storms some of us are going through right now. I took a breath, and said, "I want my church family to know the storm that we are going through right now." And I broke it to Joe and Don that my husband wants to divorce me, and that I was "figuratively kicking, and literally screaming, against it." We didn't give a blow-by-blow account, but they got the picture from our conversation, and helped with their prayers and suggestions. After Joe and Don went home, and we had spent our entire hour and a half study time on that bad news and praying, Hannah and I stayed on some for more ministering talk with Laurel and Ole. I came home feeling like I had reached a game plan for the next day. I was going to make Jeffrey a nice breakfast and give it to him with a smile, no matter he might do or say.

Thursday morning. I milked my goat, cooked bacon, saw that Jeffrey was not going to come in yet, went out to do some little chores of my own in the yard and the coop while waiting for him to come in so I could cook his eggs and toast, and then he of course entered the house as I was out of it. Emma was making French toast in the meantime, and she had some of it in front of him, with some of the bacon, when I came back inside. So I cooked two eggs, put them on his plate, he said "thank you" and I said "you're welcome." Then I thought maybe it wouldn't be so bad. Throughout the day it felt like everyone was being careful, and all was quite quiet. I was greatly encouraged in the evening, when Hannah told me, "he told Jill he can't talk to her anymore. He told her it was upsetting the children." I had told him that he was NOT to have any further contact with her, and that she was not welcome here at all, in the Tuesday hullabaloo. And it didn't matter to me that he didn't want to tell Jill that his wife had forbidden him...I actually thought it was progress that he had acknowledged his children's feelings and wishes. That night, another sort of storm struck. There had been two nights of thunder and lightning, the first with minimal rain, the second with real rain but not torrential.

Yesterday, that is Friday morning, Independence Day began with a phone call from my mother, her voice shaking, describing what a mess she and my father were in, with trees down all over the yards, all the farm chores to be done, and my brother and his wife away near New York City for a long weekend with their twin baby girls. As awful as it was to hear her description, for I know the normal scene well, it was still some relief to tell her, "we'll be right there, Mom. We are coming to  help." And I took 5 of my children down there, marveling all the way at the damage we observed, to face a devastation that I could fix. We could fix this. All the evidence of the damage could be cleared away and what remained smoothed up so that the pain would go away.
We filled two wheelbarrows many times each with all the litter of small twigs and leaf bunches, and loaded the pickup truck bed three times, well mounded, with all the lightweight branches we could break and lift. We worked at this for four hours, ate quickly, and drove home for our farm chores. I was relieved to make it back here in time for everyone to do their work, since we had the annual hayride to a neighbor's fireworks planned. I make special caramel corn as a fireworks snack every year, and so I did that and my goat chores. I was just switching some laundry when Jeffrey rushed into the house, got in my face and said, "Emma told me you told the Pettersens I was having an affair. Now you'll see how I can be a really mean fucker. You're telling them MY business?! Fuck you! If those Pettersens show up for my hayride I'm a tell them right in front of everyone to get the fuck off my property, and there won't be church here anymore. It's my house too. You'll be served with papers and I'll get a lawyer. Everything will be liquidated and you'll be outta here. If I can't have my friend here you can't have yours." and more and more. I didn't yell. In the first place I was pretty sure he had skillfully gotten Emma to say something, about a conversation she had not witnessed, and that it wasn't exactly what he had just attributed to her. But I was worried anyway. I gave him every bit of truth about Jill being on the make, always coming back to what the children themselves knew before I did, and he ignored it at every turn. I pointed out that he would never let me come to him with my own concerns, and how he had been brushing me off, calling me crazy, and talking me down for years. I said I  had gone to a lady, who is a counselor, not to "another man" the way he had pushed me off and gone to "another woman." He kept coming back to how this was HIS business, when in fact, it is very much MY business, that my husband has abandoned me for years and now caps it off with this sort of thing, and denies and justifies and keeps saying I'm "not nice" to him. "Not nice?" He tears me down for three years, for no reason other than that he has decided to despise all the things he once admired openly about me, and then blames me for not liking that he abuses me?! He kept threatening, and gave it up and stormed out while I was still keeping my composure. Then I called up Laurel and explained that I couldn't have them come to the hayride with us, and why, and all the ugly that had passed. We prayed some more.
Mercifully, Jeff's sister, Sue had called me just minutes before his entrance, to say she and her girls would be attending the event, last minute. So I was able to tell the younger children that while the Ps couldn't come after all, just weren't able to make it, cheer up, the cousins will! And since the two older girls came in while I was still sobbing and praying on the phone with Laurel, they heard the whole episode, and Emma took Owen upstairs to fill him in when he came in and wondered. Jeffrey made a couple of remarks about my "big mouth" during the evening, because he could get them in, knowing I'd not make a scene in company. The hayride was fun for all the children of our families and neighbors, the caramel corn went fast, the fireworks were wonderful. It had been a long, very long day, and completely draining.
This morning, Saturday, it felt like two days later, but it was only one, when I called my mom at 8:30 to check on them. My brother still was not committal about whether he would return home today or tomorrow, and I could hear Mom spinning into the day-two blues. I told her, as soon as Hannah and Ella get home from their impromptu sleepover with their cousins at Grandma Smith's house in Herkimer, I will bring some of the children down again, and we will help you with the big project of the day, which was going to be the pretty surgical removal of the London plane tree from lying on my mom's lovely herb and flower garden. Hannah had stayed up very late having a  heart to heart about all the week and the effects of the past years with her sensible and sympathetic cousin, Isabel. So she elected to stay home, clean it up for church, take care of babying the goats with clovers. Owen was intending to go to Earlville with me, but went up to the woods with Jeffrey and his Grandpa Smith who turned up to do some site-clearing for a much talked-of cabin to build up there. Grandpa Smith has always been the bitter and vindictive ear to receive any complaint about me, thinks I am cold to him just for spite, because Jeffrey won't explain to him that he disrupts the homeschooling days to badly by just dropping in any old day, loads the children up on junk candy, and takes all the study time away from us. But it cannot be that he has no manners or respect for my homeschool. Instead, they are happy to paint me as the bitch.

All through the week, and even before this week, there had arisen and persisted a question I didn't even consider should be a question, of whether or not I would go along on the annual drive to take children to a week at DEC camp, three hours away.  Even before the fateful Monday, the children told me, he said to them that he "didn't want her in the van." And he began to demand of me that if I insisted on going, I might as well drive them myself. He wanted to avoid me, and he wanted to split me off from my two children, Owen and Emma, knowing just how important it is to all of us, that I see my children off each time. He tried to make the case that I shouldn't go, anyway it wouldn't matter, because last year I had gone to make the first trip when two went to camp together, but I hadn't gone on the second trip up deliver a third camper for a different week. It is 3 hours each way, and if he keeps getting stuck going around Great Sacandaga Lake, it take 4 hours to get home, on top of the sadness at leaving some of my children behind. Sue me, but I truly miss them and feel not relief, but a big hole when any are missing. And this matter had filtered through all the week. First I wasn't allowed to go, then I'd go and take his mother along, then we'd both go and he promised he just "won't act like I like you" (as if you have acted otherwise for the past three years and more?). But after this last frenzy wherein he threw every garbage thing he could come up with me, that I was in a cult, that he hates me now, he hates me, not to even touch him, that he would go and tell the children that I had screwed a nigger and talked to him while we were married (utter lies, said to make me afraid, and to try to offset all that he is being forced to see of himself), I decided and my children agree, that it is better sense to let him go with Owen and Emma, and drive back all alone. He needs to be alone with his own self and perhaps have a chance to see that if he is as "miserable" as he has been saying to the children, and blaming it on me, then it is what he has created for himself and for ALL of us, by his decision to hate his wife.

I have realized that if he insists on hating me for being a Christian woman, it is inconsistent to say he loves his children...who are all true, real Christians, too. How can he hate (God in) me so much, and love them, who are also in Christ? I know that he has always known what is right, and that this whole storm years in the brewing is born of his rebellion against Truth and God's love. I know that he is being used by the devil, to kill me and my resolve to provide a Christian home and upbringing for our precious children. He can accuse me of brainwashing the children, but this is to say they are so stupid. And they know Truth because they HAVE Truth inside of their hearts and minds. I do not need to "own" my children through a shared belief. They own their faith themselves.

As I head into the wee hours of Sunday, I pray for my two children and their ride with a father who is hostile to their mother and has been very cruel to them by extension. I pray that any more efforts he makes to turn them against me will be struck down and fail. I pray that my intense love for my children will stay at the forefront of their thoughts all the way, and that they can revel in the escape of a camp week, without repercussion from this week of constant storminess.
May God deliver us from evil, and make things new and right.