The Gnawing

I'm sitting on my couch, home from work for the second day in a row. A friend asked me “What do you think is gnawing at you?” I didn’t have a reply per se, only echoes and whispers bouncing around in my head uncatchable, undecipherable. That gnawing became an itch and the itch became a burn and the burn became a hurt, a dull hurt, non-cataclysmic really. An ordinary hurt. The deciphering began with thoughts of my school guidance counselor. We had an affair when I was senior in high school. I thought he loved me, thought he would make good on his promise to disappear over the summer in the BWCA so that his family would think he was dead. Thought he really would run away with me into happy-never-land. I didn’t know that he was doing the mid-life crisis thing. He was 40 (I remember our first kiss – his birthday in his office at school with black balloons floating about). Even after he told his wife about his secret feelings for me (he didn’t mention the actual physical stroking to her) and he dumped me, I still loved him. I also still believed he loved me. I believed in his love until recently. I’m 40-ish now, and a teacher. The thought of kissing or touching or promising a student I’d run away with him makes me sick. I’m just now beginning to transfer that sickness onto my view of what the guidance counselor did. He was sick. I was vulnerable. But that’s not the hurt that’s gnawing at me.

The guidance counselor was a kind man, a pillar of the community, respected in his school and in his church. He had two lovely daughters, one vivacious and outgoing sweet-heart and one beautiful and precious child with special needs. He was compassionate and nurturing. Truly, he was. I looked to him for help with my extremely confusing mental health issues – described my dissociation to him – turned to him for support in my effort to stop doing drugs. He tried to help me with all of it, by turning his comfort sexual. In no time I ceased going to his office for legitimate help and began going to his office for butterfly inducing kisses and thrilling sexual touching and to make plans to finally consummate the love. As upsetting as this story is, it’s not the hurt that’s gnawing at me.

She is a beautiful, funny, outgoing, compassionate woman. She is respected in her community and in her church. She has three successful and charming children. As a child I turned to her for comfort and safety and to meet my most basic needs. Indeed, she did meet some of my needs. I had food and shelter and clothing. She “enriched” my life with camping and ballet lessons and trips to the ice skating rink. Our extended family went on snowmobile trips and cooked hot dogs over open fires and drank hot cocoa from thermoses. But she hurt me.

There is a hole into which I peer sometimes. The blackness swallows me and my stomach twists in knots. Sometimes I see things that are like a movie to me. Sometimes I make up horrible stories to go with the blackness. This is what gnaws at me. I don’t know if the hole is the reservoir of feelings in which I dumped my reactions to my mother and the guidance counselor, or if it is another abomination, darker than the others. This blackness that pours from the hole and swallows my soul is shame, even a deep hatred for my self, a desire to be nothing for I hurt so badly I can’t survive. I have harbored this hole inside for as long as I can remember. It’s who I am. I believe it is beyond what mom did. I believe something happened when I was very young. I know Sarah has some knowledge of it, but even she only has vague shadows of foggy memories.

I remember being pre-school age, and wanting to play in just my underwear because I wanted to be an Indian. And as I paddled my canoe down the hardwood hallway, I was ashamed of my nakedness and felt dirty for wanting to play naked. I remember being 6 or 7 and having a fever and walking into the living room and announcing to my mom and dad that I hated myself. I remember always wondering why my parents loved me, because I was such bad girl, so I had to keep up the act I was performing so that they would continue to love me. I remember sitting on the couch with my sister playing a game and she explained to me that she was the best and I whole-heartedly agreed with her. I remember crying myself to sleep in fear that I would go to hell. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and creeping into my parents’ room to check to see if they were still there or if the rapture had come and taken them away from me, knowing I’d be left behind with my sin. I remember at age 5, singing in church, wondering if I was really the only one singing and everyone else was pretending or if it was me pretending. I remember how easy it was to please my grade school teachers. I remember walking on rocks at a campground when I was 3 and wishing I was dead.

Forty years later I still wish I was dead. That’s what gnaws at me.