Faith is the Sword Against Fear: Lessons from my Mom

When I was a little girl there were many tests to my faith. However, the hope in my heart was strong. I knew I was born a different type of person. I had different parents with healing gifts dormant in their lives while they learned to focus on the responsibility of being a couple, being parents and being contributors to society.

My mother carried a badge of honor. She had the purple heart but my Dad was given it for his service in Viet Nam. It was a time when turbulence was not exhibited in the home. My parents were married young and living on a military base was quite interesting. We were a community of many cultures melded together but we thrived and we got used to leaving a spot and moving elsewhere and adapting to making friends with new people. Military families have to see life as a moving picture, moving to different spaces in life where it was an adventure and curiosity was a spark to understand the new environment, new home, new schools and churches we worshiped in and new friends. You learned to be friendly to learn and try to get acquainted. As a child your arms are open to opportunities for adventures. 

My father was in Viet Nam and I used to take the bus to school in Pre K. I was always tired as the end of the day and slept on the bus missing my stop. The driver would take me home and I couldn’t help but fall asleep on the bus. One day, as my father was in Viet Nam; he was doing special missions and a Sergeant.

A higher rank officer over my Dad came to my house while I at school; he proceeded to tell my mother that my Dad would not return and that she needed to sleep with him or he would send him to dangerous war zone to make sure that he never came back." My Mother was not intimidated to sleep with him; instead she told him to get out of her house as he stood at the front door between the screen door and he wouldn't move. So she told him again and pushed his body out due to her martial arts skills and he mangled the screen door in so trying to fight her. I came home with the screen door mangled off the bus to ask her what happened? She told me: "Oh the mailman couldn't get the mail in the mailslot and he was mad and broke it." I didn't dare question her about it again. Back to my Dad...He started from nothing and he was very apt at using weapons and surviving as he was a person who would go during summer months or school breaks to the Washington forests to camp, fish, kayak and be one with nature. I guess the Native part of him needed to be restored. But how do we be restored? What were we like before the reservations and all this total isolation, separation and dictation of limitations happens to us? He was a fighter against himself. He fought the demons he was presented with because he had a light in him in his own home. He was in a volatile environment that made him a fighter on the waterfronts. His solace was nature and getting some place to know himself. Was he out there; how he longed to travel around the world but for what cost of losing his mind with the atrocities of war. It’s a service you are told you are doing. Destroy the enemy they tell you is the enemy and when at peacetimes is not even thought of as an enemy. It’s a false cause of self identity and manipulation of the heart and mind that happens in the military. You believe you are not a destroyed of space, people, living beings and communities because you are being bought to do this. They play with your loyalty and minds to make you feel you over time are powerless without being cold, tough and unemotional and a killing machine.

This goes against your soul’s contract with your mind and body. The battles ensue within and the awful truth is that you are destroying another fellow soul wrapped in another type of culture, religion, spirituality that you are told doesn’t compute with your war like brain and then programmed to destroy it. You are trained and triggered by buttons the web creates of non identity. How many are depressed or reliving the atrocities in our minds that we come home unable to forget and destroy the ones we love or innocents that may trigger us walking outside in the civilian world? What can we do? The ones training you will tell you; you’re doing so well, here’s a badge of honor, a patch and a reward. Stay with us in the long haul; you will be something. You believe this in every way. The damage of war is there but you soothe yourself saying I’m okay because I am a good soldier and did everything I was commanded and I am doing such a good job. Yet, in your own heart and mind you want out. You don’t dare say it. You are on the edge of believing this is what a real soldier does and might as well hang in there because the pay is so good at sacrificing yourself. At times you feel depressed with the awful memories you dare not speak. You have applied your own gag trapping yourself from being free to be who you are or to rediscover and be the old you…but you battle in your mind. You go back and forth…unable to make that change and hang out with others that are afraid to say we are damaged by war and you laugh and stay in the masculine ultra persona. You lose yourself slowly and you feel even more trapped. What do you do? Do you continue to show how tough you are and strong because others like you are surrounding each other with the lies and pretenses that toxic masculinity is the way to be, to hold it together and not lose it while you are losing yourself. You have bursts of anger, sadness and feeling misunderstood. You make an enemy and distant self to your family, to your community and you turn to relief. What is offered is medications to numb your feelings, to dull and temporarily stop the pain that is so real and unspoken you retaliate by self destruction and with others along the way with you.You’ve been made to believe that there is no turning back, no way out and then this is where you escape by risk taking behaviors, by addictions and more self destruction…where to you keep your sanity and then too often the choice of suicide is there.

After my father got out of the military; he would have a hard time finding permanent work. He was good at what he did but he would have the demons unfurl and hit his bosses or during a trip on the highway and punch a guy out from road rage. There are times; he found it funny to punch a man senseless for cutting us off and then leave him there. There were times he would try to find a way to ‘rescue’ some waitress in a restaurant or ‘waiter’ who was being treated inappropriately and be the one to enforce the peace but at the threat of violent control. It wasn’t an easy time.

There were times; he couldn’t find work and deep depression set in. We didn’t know what to do with him and my Mother put on her face and smiled. She learned that from the beginning and went to school and started working to help feed us or stay in our home to pay the bills. He would lay there smoking his cigarettes at 2 to 3 months straight. Only to smoke, have coffee & go to the bathroom  and not talk to us and not engage with my mother only for more cigarettes or rage when she didn’t cook the food right with her limited budget and throw it on the floor. She didn’t know what to do but carried on to work and had us go to school. It was our solace and sometimes his friends would come by and take him away for a few days only to drink and smoke their way into avoidance of what he really needed was therapy…transitional therapy to work with him until his demons left him and didn’t make him helpless. He wanted help. At times, he would take his gun and threaten to take his life and my Mother as we got older and married or moved on and get frantic calls from my Mom. He was suffering but she was too and we all suffer when one is mentally ill from PTSD. Yes, I will say it…mental illness sets in and you are trapped and don’t want to engage with the world. It has turned against you but you do not realize you turned against yourself and those you love and you are lost somewhere in those moments of trauma and violence there are pieces of your soul that need retrieving. You need and deserve peace for your huge sacrifices and your family’s sacrifices.

So I let you know my Dad made up with me after my Grandpa’s funeral and bout with Alzheimer’s and he apologized to me for any harm he had done and said it was wrong. It was a day of reckoning for me but was it a permanent one for him? After we met; my Dad gave me his purple heart medal. I touched it and felt so many painful experiences of our family wrecked from a war across the waters in those moments and robbed us of our family cohesiveness, our healthy meals, our family unit was shattered. We became the unsaid victims as he was as well from war. We learned that our suffering was a weakness to speak of and act as if life was good. We were good actors and so everyone believed we were doing fine. This type of environment you have to remove yourself from if you are the child in this environment and find yourself again. I was blessed not to have to go to war…or be in one. 

So I say my Mother that she was the Purple Heart or any partner or spouse is and your own children. When you really find yourself; is where you start loving yourself and try peaceful experiences that keep being your focus.

Faith is the Sword my mother used against fear, prejudice, lies and chaos. She had the faith things would be temporary but I wonder if she asked how long can I hold on? How long must I endure the hell imparted from wars in my husband into my home and into my childrens’ minds? Would my prayers be answered for peace? It is a relentless prayer she kept in her heart? Her smile fooled everyone and they had no idea our home was a war zone. She was the soldier and we were the mini soldiers falling in line and smiling and acting as if and so we had some work to do on ourselves as grown ups. Could we choose the path and methods our father taught of force and violence, of shutting down and finding a fight to avoid the fight in our minds and hearts to be whole and well from this? Would we be able to function who would know our secrets? Who would care? 

Then a ray of hope walked in one day and it was my husband. He told me things that I could do to get out of this hole I dug and believed was my life for life. He said I deserved a better life than settling. He told me that I was different….this I heard all my life even up to High school and into the life I had marrying him. I tried to find myself but it wasn’t him who had the answers; it was me and up to me to find the loving, hopeful and strong and mostly peaceful being I deserved to be. I needed to rebirth and birth myself as many layers as it took. It takes time to have those burials of the old self and sometimes the demons try to tell you your old setbacks and blame ensues, anger and then a fire is ignited. What do I do with this memory? Shall I keep it expanding the point of darkness and hopelessness or shall I say that was then and I am so much better now because I self love myself to do the work, the real hard work digging my way out of the ditch of patriarchal trappings of imbalances and get acquainted with the feminine side of me. It was an effort I wanted for so long and I was taking the leap of faith my mother taught me to do this. Could I tell my story and go forward and heal a layer at a time and be thankful each time? Could I maintain it? Of course you can. You have the power to claim back who you are and when you know yourself that is the foundation to stand on and stay there while working on yourself. No one can uproot or dictate who you are any more…you break the chains of archaic dictatorial systems of control and limitations from the many ditches we dig. We can get out and be free. Our chains are self imposed thinking and looking outward for our answers can only be temporary. The loyalty to your self love and healing comes from your own soldier teaching of commitment. You take parts of the commitment lessons to yourself now…not to destroy or hurt yourself, not to hide yourself and be offered a way you choose for peace, sacredness and unlimited positive possibilities. Take the risk of being you and a loving one and a whole one.

This I hope helps any military family know they are not alone in their secret suffering. It doesn’t have to be a secret and accept what happened and how to move on and look for ways to gain this hope, wholeness back with art, music and poetry with dance and inner child & nature like heart. The spark of your own divinity and positive possibilities needs that igniting and no more fueling the darkness that puts you back in the pit or ditch of limitation. You are no longer of service and sacrifice losing yourself anymore. When you love yourself; you will take the time to heal and find a way that leads to peace in your heart, peace in your mind and what your soul has been waiting for. I love you unconditionally with so much love and with my mother’s faith you will overcome and be free.