Becky
August 2013
Two weeks had passed, and I reflected upon that passage of time as I sat on the plush white sofa and gazed out of the office window. It overlooked the choppy waters of Georgian Bay, and the view was actually quite spectacular. My fingers ran against the threads, listening to the soothing sound of the aquarium behind me.
I’d already spent the last two sessions recounting Mom’s passing, the wake, and the funeral. Today, I’d mentioned Travis. I didn’t go into detail about what happened between us—I couldn’t, I was still processing—but I’d had to tell someone and my paid therapist seemed like the safest bet.
“Why do you think the intimacy upset you so much?” she asked, urging me to open the door to the past. She felt that we needed to get to the root of my intimacy issues.
“I met Richie when I was sixteen. He was the first boy to ever pay me a lick of attention. I’m not counting the way my brother’s friends would treat me—like I was their little sister, an annoyance under foot. He was the first one to see me as more than Brock Miller’s little sister, and to me—that was a huge deal.”
“Why was it a huge deal?”
I pushed my hair out of my eyes as I considered the psychologist’s question. “I guess I was desperate to feel loved, you know? My dad never—he never showed us affection or love. He was just angry all the time…angry and drunk. I think any girl who doesn’t get positive attention from her father will seek it elsewhere eventually.”
“That’s a wise assessment,” Dr. Rootham nodded in agreement, her copper bob bouncing along with her. “So, your brother kept you from making this mistake for a while. Then what happened?”
Dr. Rootham had been my psychologist for the last two years. I started seeing her weekly to help deal with the trauma I’d been through. Although I still wasn’t completely comfortable speaking about my experiences, I knew that in order to heal I had to revisit these wounds.
This wasn’t the first time that I had discussed this story, but each time I recounted it—I revealed more details and dealt with more realizations.
“Yeah, he kept the guys away I guess,” I said, almost chuckling at the memory of my over-protective brother. “Brock wouldn’t let me put myself in those situations, and any guy I was interested in…he managed to scare off simply by being my brother. When he wasn’t around, his friends were. Richie was different because he wasn’t a part of that circle, he didn’t grow up with us, didn’t go to our school and by the time we got together, my brother had already left to compete in bull riding competitions.” I paused, reaching over to the coffee table to grab the bottle of water Dr. Rootham always supplied for me.
“Bull riding competitions?” She smiled and shook her head as if she couldn’t fathom the idea of anyone doing such a thing. Dr. Rootham moved to Parry Sound from Mississauga. She was very much a city dweller, and always seemed somewhat mystified by the strange customs in Northern Ontario, even after living here herself for the last several years. “What made Brock want to ride bulls?”
“The thrill?” I answered, lifting my right shoulder in a small shrug. “The money was good and I bet the freedom felt great…” I trailed off, imagining what it must have felt like for Brock to break free of this town. “We’d always been that family, you know? The family everyone talks about. Brock always dealt with a lot of discrimination from everybody in town—we all did, but he bared the brunt of it. Plus, he had to take care of Braden and me when Mom was working. He was our buffer; he would make sure that Dad would take his frustrations out on him instead of us.”
Every time I confessed this, my heart squeezed painfully in my chest and my eyes welled up with tears. I couldn’t imagine Aiden having the role that Brock had in our house growing up, although I understood why Brock did it. He was bigger than us, and in his eyes, that made him able to withstand it a little more.
Dr. Rootham nodded solemnly, looking to the pad of paper in front of her. She scrawled some notes, and I tried not to let that get to me. I hated that about psychologists, but I knew it was necessary. They couldn’t possibly remember every anecdote a patient tells them without jotting notes down. I took a shaky breath, drawing bravo I didn’t have.
“How did you and Richie meet?” she questioned.
“He moved to town the summer before I started grade eleven. He was a year older than me and I thought he was mysterious, with his dark hair and eyes, and I liked the fact that he wore a leather jacket, rode a motorcycle and lived in an apartment by himself. He would come to the grocery store where I worked and even if I had a huge line up, he’d wait in it. One of those times, he asked me out and I said yes. I liked the attention this stranger was lavishing on me, and I wanted to get to know him…I thought I found my happily ever after.”
I didn’t realize that I was crying until Dr. Rootham grabbed a tissue and held it out to me. The tears were the silent type, they trailed down my cheeks on their own accord. She encouraged me to go on with a gentle smile.
“He wooed me with fancy words and rides on the back of his bike. I fell hard and fast for him. I didn’t question how he made his money, how he was able to stay home all the time and still afford his apartment and his bike, and when I finally did ask him—I believed him when he told me he lived off the inheritance his dad had left him.”
“Why do you think you so readily believed him?”
“I should have known better, but at the time…it hadn’t seemed that farfetched to me because I had an inheritance. I had a slice of land on the lake that had belonged to my paternal grandfather that I was set to inherit on my 21st birthday,” I shrugged.
My paternal family had owned the majority of land around a small lake in the outskirts of Parry Sound for centuries. Heritage land, untouchable by the government. Apart from giving us life, the land was the only other good thing to have come from our father, and technically—it’d come from our grandfather.
I closed my eyes for a moment, knowing that the hard part was coming up soon. I just had to get through it, and then I could press it all back, deep down inside where it belonged.
“Things with Richie were great at first, exciting even. He took me on all kinds of adventures on the back of his bike. The honeymoon stage of our relationship was short lived. I got pregnant a few weeks after we started seeing each other,” I said, looking past Dr. Rootham and out the large window behind her desk. Her view overlooked the eastern shore of the sound. I tried to detach from the story I was telling.
“The pregnancy came as a shock to me. I’d thought we were being safe, we used condoms every single time, but condoms are effective 98% of the time. We must have landed in the 2%. I was too ashamed to tell my family, and I tried to keep it a secret. I had a falling out with my mom a week after I found out, and I used that as an excuse to move in with Richie. I figured it would be easier to hide the pregnancy until we had a solid game plan. I knew that then, I wouldn’t feel so ashamed of myself.”
“Why were you ashamed of yourself?” Dr. Rootham inquired gently, stirring me back to the present.
“Because I made the same mistake my mother did, I got pregnant young,” I shrugged, smiling without humour. “Richie didn’t want the baby, he wanted me to ‘take care of it’, but I couldn’t do that. I dropped out of high school and took a correspondence course to get my GED while I worked at the grocery store. I thought that Richie just needed time to adjust to the idea of fatherhood, that he’d love the baby as much as I did when he held it in his arms.”
I drew in air slowly, trying to strengthen my resolve. Revisiting these memories was hard, so I usually tried to avoid thinking about the past. It was too painful, too jagged. That wasn’t to say that I had completely gotten over it—far from it. The scars of my past affected me even now, four years later. It seeped into my mornings, my afternoons, and any time I tried to get close to someone romantically.
Granted, I hadn’t really tried to get close to anyone romantically. At least, not until Travis Channing.
Memories of the night that I’d spent with him two weeks ago washed over me, and I swallowed hard. I hadn’t been prepared for the heady rush of emotions being with Travis would pull out of me. His gentle touches had been a stark contrast to the type of touch I was used to.
In that moment, he had made me want more, and that was dangerous.
The fear I’d felt that fateful night in that hotel room propelled me to dive deeper into my personal bank of horrors. I had to sift through the complicated mess of emotions somehow, had to make sense of my feelings, and that’s what Dr. Rootham was there for.
I couldn’t talk about this stuff to anyone else; my brothers definitely didn’t want to hear about my intimacy issues, and with Mom gone, I’d never felt so alone. This loneliness prompted me to talk more than I ever had in any session before, and I know my therapist was pleased with this change.
“Richie lost his temper on occasion, but he’d mostly just rant and rave and break things. He’d always apologize afterwards, telling me that he didn’t know how to handle his anger and he didn’t mean it. I told myself he was just worried and stressed about the baby coming. Deep down, I knew that I should leave.”
An ominous cloud had lingered over my head, but I was afraid. I was too stubborn to return home.
“Word had gotten back to my mom that I was pregnant, and I told her haughtily that we had everything sorted out and to not worry about us. I told her that Richie was ecstatic about the baby. I didn’t want to admit that we didn’t have anything figured out, that Richie hadn’t even started looking for a real job, or that he resented the baby and me…” I swallowed, trailing off as I lost all my confidence.
“Why did you lie to your mother?”
“I was angry with her,” I admitted, tears falling freely down my face now. “I didn’t want to admit that I was just like her—too much of a coward to leave someone who was hurting me.” I felt guilty for those feelings now that she was gone for good.
Dr. Rootham leaned forward, catching my eyes with her warm brown ones. “You were not a coward, Becky. You were sixteen and scared.”
I drew in a shaky breath, nodding. I didn’t believe her, not really. Fear and age weren’t good enough excuses for me. I couldn’t look at her while I spoke, so I stared back out at the sound, watching the waves and the boats in the lake her office overlooked.
“The abuse didn’t start until I was in my third trimester. There were signs before then, the resentment and the anger, but I ignored them because I was afraid to admit what they meant. Then he started calling me fat, telling me I was going to be a horrible mother. That’s also when I noticed the drugs—streaks of cocaine on the coffee table, the shady people I would find hanging out with him in the apartment when I returned home from my shift at the grocery store. I discovered that Richie didn’t have an inheritance at all; he scammed the welfare system and sold drugs.”
“We started fighting more, with me trying to tell him to stop doing and selling drugs and stop inviting those kinds of people into our home. He’d tell me “this is my home, not yours. You’re lucky I even let you stay here, you nagging bitch.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. “Sorry, doctor,” I sighed, flushing. I hated swearing, but sometimes I got caught up in the memories; locked within them.
“It’s alright,” Dr. Rootham smiled with understanding, still pleased as punch about all I was revealing. “Did you ever try to leave, Becky?”
“Yes. I tried to leave a few times. I’d pack my bags and go to leave and he’d grab my arm, tears streaking down his face, and beg me to stay. He told me he wanted to stop doing drugs. He told me that it wasn’t him when he was screaming and yelling, it was the cocaine. He said he needed my help, and that he wanted to be a part of the baby’s life. He promised to do better. I bought those lies two times. The third time, I told him nothing he could say would change my mind.”
“What happened then?”
“I went to leave, for good this time,” I answered, forcing myself to pull my eyes away from the picturesque window and the breathtaking autumn colours. This story was far too bleak for such beauty. I’d finally reached the point where crawling back to my mom was preferable to staying with him.
I’d finally opened my eyes and realized that I had it good with her and Braden, and I’d been punishing her for years for a situation that I’d found myself in; I was tethered to an abusive user.
The thing I remembered most about that day was the rage in his eyes before his fist came down and shattered my cheekbone. I’d crumpled like a rag doll, but he didn’t stop his quest to break me. He kicked me in the back and in the ribs over and over again, as he told me I was worthless and the worst mistake of his life. His heavy boots with the steal toe drove each point home. I cried, pleading with him to stop, my arms wrapped around my pregnant belly. I tried to pull myself up, shaking and crying and begging him. He stomped on my wrist, the sickening crunch and the blinding pain had made me black out.
I didn’t speak as the memories washed over me, stealing my breath and filling my lungs with pain—almost like drowning, but without the water.
I still heard his voice in my head, and relived it in my nightmares.
Rubbing at my right wrist—the same wrist that Richie had broken, I looked down at the faint scars from where the doctors had drilled pins to set it. Sometimes, it would ache and throb, reminding me about the past I couldn’t seem to escape.
“I thought we would die that night. Miraculously, we didn’t. He left after breaking my wrist, likely to go to the bar or one of his druggie friend’s houses.”
“The pain was so severe that I faded in and out of consciousness. I hurt everywhere, my eye was swollen shut and my wrist was dangling at an odd angle, throbbing every time I tried to move. I knew it was broken, but the worst part was my stomach. It felt like the muscles were ripping. I knew something was wrong with the baby.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. It sounded foreign and far away, like I really was drowning.
“Sobbing, I’d dragged myself across the floor, to my phone on the coffee table. I dialed home, trying to fight the darkness. My relationship with my mother was still wrought with tension, and I never made social calls—but she was who I called in that moment. I begged her to come to me before passing out again.”
After the phone call, my mother showed up at the apartment with my little brother. I came to, seeing their tear streaked faces as they crouched before me. Between the two of them, they were able to get me into the car and drive me to the hospital. From there, they had to transfer me by helicopter to Mount Sinai in Toronto, as the Parry Sound hospital wasn’t equipped to handle babies born before 35 weeks. There wasn’t time to talk to the police or to press charges; not when my body felt like it was going to snap in half, and not when the hospital staff was more concerned with saving my son’s life and getting me treated.”
I stopped talking again, letting the memory of my son’s birth envelop me. Aiden Miller was born at 31 weeks. He weighed 3 ½ pounds, less than a bag of sugar, and was only sixteen inches long. He was hooked up to heart rate monitors and a CPAP machine that helped him breathe. He had been born with fluid on the lungs, likely due to swallowing so much amniotic fluid when I was in labor.
“The doctors did their best to patch me up; I’d escaped with a broken wrist and cheekbone, and three of my ribs were badly bruised. I hurt everywhere, but the worst pain I felt came from my heart. I’d nearly lost my son, and he was still in critical condition. He was so tiny, so helpless.”
“Where was your family during all of this?”
“They were watching over me, keeping a vigil in the waiting room. Any time I left the NICU—which wasn’t very often and only to use the washroom—they’d be there, ready to force me to eat and take a break. Braden had even called Brock. He’d been competing in some rodeo in Alberta, but he flew back immediately.”
When he came in to meet his nephew, he had vibrated with anger at the sight of us both.
“My family didn’t know exactly what happened to me, but they had a sneaking suspicion that it was Richie’s fault. After all, we’d grown up with an abusive father. We knew what it looked like, what it felt like.”
“You sound ashamed,” Dr. Rootham assessed, the corners of her lips drawn downward in a slight frown.
I nodded. I remember being unable to meet any of their eyes. I was so ashamed that I’d ended up with someone so much like the devil we’d grown up with, so ashamed that I had put my own child in danger because I’d been too afraid to leave when I should have. I felt weak and stupid.
“I felt like my mother, and while I loved my mother…I also hated her for staying with him, for keeping that monster in our home for so long. If he hadn’t died, there was no way of telling if she ever would have left. Then I did the unspeakable…I’d let the monster remain in my child’s life too, until it was almost too late…until he had almost died. I failed to protect my baby.”
There was no greater shame than that, and the guilt of it nearly consumed me to this very day.
“I remember laying my head against his incubator, my shoulders shaking as I cried. The movement was excruciating for my ribs, but I didn’t care. I deserved the pain. Then I met Christina.”
“Christina?” Dr. Rootham asked, her pen gliding across the page as she jotted the name down.
“Over the eight weeks that Aiden was in the NICU, Christina was our primary day nurse. She was the nurse to first place Aiden in my arms, a few days after his birth. She was forever patient and gentle, and she didn’t let me stew in grief or guilt. That woman is the reason why I went into nursing,” I explained, smiling at the thought of the friendly nurse who saw me through one of the darkest times of my life.
“It sounds like she helped you,” Dr. Rootham noted, her eyes fixated on me.
“She did,” I nodded. “She wanted me to talk to the hospital psychiatrist. My patient file had been referred to Dr. Kennedy as the nurse on the maternity ward thought I was at risk because of the trauma, my age, and the fact that my son was born nine weeks early. She was also the one to set me up with a room in the Ronald McDonald House for five weeks, since I lived over two hours away and wouldn’t be able to drive myself to the hospital once they discharged me.”
“You’ve spoken before about your hesitance to seek psychiatric help,” Dr. Rootham pointed out. “Why were you so against it?”
“I was a mess,” I added, shaking my head. “Given the emotional traumas I’d been through, the fact that I’d just given birth and my hormones were completely messed up, and the fact that my older brother was sitting in jail—I was a complete mess. But I hadn’t been able to talk to Dr. Kennedy about it. I was afraid that more people would get hurt with my words.”
Dr. Rootham furrowed her brow in confusion. I knew I was shoving a lot at her, and I gave her an apologetic smile. In our previous sessions, I hadn’t mentioned Brock’s stint in jail. I mostly discussed my grief over Mom dying, and how my antidepressants were making me feel.
“After seeing me and Aiden, Brock went straight to the apartment. Richie was there, and he beat the ever living hell out of him. He inflicted as much pain on Richie, as Richie had on me—broke a few of his ribs, his wrist, and went one further by breaking his jaw. It was a crime of passion, I guess. Brock was sick of watching people hurt me, hurt us. He’d always been tough, but he was never violent. He went to jail because of me. He spent two years locked behind bars, and when he came out…he was different.”
“How so?” Dr. Rootham asked gently.
“He stayed away,” I replied, my heart aching. I still felt like it was my fault, and I worried that he blamed me. “For years, he kept his distance. He took a job far away from home, and he’d send us money and occasionally talk to us on the phone…but he didn’t come back to Parry Sound until Mom was dying.”
“But, you said he was planning on staying now,” Dr. Rootham pointed out with a small smile.
“I guess he is,” I replied. “He built a cabin, he’s seeing someone in town. He’s happy—and I’m happy for him. She’s a really great girl.”
“I sense a but…” Dr. Rootham ventured.
“There’s no but,” I replied honestly. “I just…I guess I sometimes wish it could be that easy for me. I wish I could fall in love.” The revelation escaped my lips before I could stop it, and I inhaled deeply. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t fall in love, the problem was that I wouldn’t let myself.
“Why can’t you?” My psychologist actually sounded surprised.
“I vowed that I would never put myself—or Aiden—in that position again,” I answered, somber. “That kind of love breaks you.”
I purposely avoided thinking about hazel eyes and blond hair. I wouldn’t allow myself to get sucked into another realm of maybes and what ifs. Even if my thoughts had no trouble circling back to Travis on their own.
“I don’t think that’s necessarily true, Becky,” she said, her eyes gently assessing me. “It’s normal, and understandable, to feel hesitant, but I wouldn’t close yourself off to the possibility of something real just because of your past experiences. Not every man will hurt you.”
I said nothing. I didn’t believe Travis would ever physically harm me, but I didn’t expect to feel what I felt in that hotel room. It unnerved me, it wasn’t simple like I’d hoped, and I resolved that it was done between us. It had to be. There could be no more Travis and me, not in any sense. He had to be my brother’s best friend again, and I had to be his best friend’s sister.
Dr. Rootham’s timer buzzed on her desk, and she sent me an apologetic look. “We’ve made a lot of progress today, Becky, but I’m afraid we’re out of time.”
“I understand,” I stood up, bringing my purse with me. “Same time next week?”
“Absolutely. Take care of yourself Becky—and please remember, you are not a coward. You’ve been through so much and you’re still standing. Try to be a little more forgiving and be kinder to yourself.”
“I’ll try,” I replied, knowing that she was right.
Four years ago, I picked up the shattered pieces of my heart and spirit and vowed to get better by any means necessary. In the early stages of my recovery, that meant telling Dr. Kennedy about my childhood and my time with Richie and taking the anti-depressants she prescribed to help me cope with my post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, it meant therapy sessions with Dr. Rootham, just to keep my issues at bay, and it meant keeping romantic love the hell away from me.
I was too fragile for love.
I would only break.