“Sticks and stones will break my bones,
But words will never hurt me.”

I remember being told this from the time I was very young… but it’s an insidious lie. Sticks can leave scars, and stones can leave bruises, but words can burrow deep into your bones, infecting your soul and festering for years.

For some insane reason, there seems to be this belief that the best way to help someone to lose weight is to shame them into it. Point out how unattractive it is to be overweight (not everyone feels that way), or how obesity will inevitably lead to health problems (not necessarily), or state how obvious it is that you don’t care about yourself.

Shame doesn’t work. If you self-medicate with food, and someone shames you about your weight, how do you deal with that?

You eat. Because eating makes you feel better.

You Just Need Motivation!

I’ve tried to lose weight many times over the years, but I was very rarely successful; until the last few years I had never managed to maintain a weight loss long term (more on that later). I tried very hard to find things to keep me motivated.

17 years old seeks girlfriend: I “knew” that girls weren’t interested in fat guys. I tried an extreme caloric restriction diet, with Allan Borushek’s little Calorie Counter book. I lost 12-15kg; I don’t remember exactly. I do remember that put it back on, and then some.

21 year old has fiancee, is getting married: Surely getting married would be the thing that finally got me on the thin and narrow? Who wants to look fat in their wedding photos? I didn’t want to, but there I am, round of face and rosy of cheek (largely due to severe sunburn from a Sydney Harbour ferry ride the day before…)

23 year old has first child on the way: Before my eldest son was born in 1997, I started in a group weight loss session with the hospital-based dietician. I didn’t want to be a fat dad; I wanted to be able to run and play soccer with my kids. I failed. All three times.

If I’m on the hook for a gym membership…: I attempted several gym memberships, but invariably I’d overdo it and injure myself or get sick. I’ve wasted a lot of money on iron-clad-no-way-out-buddy gym contracts.

This book will set you free: The Zone, Beyond The Zone, Dr. Phil’s Ultimate Weight Solution. So many books. So much mixed advice. Who do you trust?

My weight just kept yo-yoing, but the trend was always up. The depression was an extra millstone around my neck. Did my weight cause the depression or vice-versa? Does it really matter?

Rejected by the girls I had crushes on at high school, told I was repulsive by a woman I loved, I’d been laughed at and shamed, I’d failed time and time again at losing weight.

It was a battle royale; fighting myself, with each win a pyhrric victory, each loss confirming that I was a failure… every failure fuelling my self-hatred.

One day the hate exploded.

The Argument

I don’t know what triggered it. I’m loathe to apportion blame, because it was just one of those things. A hormonal pregnant wife, and a depressed, obese self-hating husband.

Whatever triggered that argument in the middle of 2003, it escalated out of control. For us that kind of argument is incredibly rare, but we both crossed the line that day; the one where you forget why you were arguing and just start lobbing grenades at each other, just to hurt the other. And then she said it…

“You don’t care about your weight. You’re happy being fat.”

All the years of self-hate exploded into one moment of irrational violence. I shoved past her, grabbed a steak knife out of the drawer and screamed at her “I hate my fat! I’ll show you how much I hate it!”

One. Two. Three. Four.

Four self-inflicted stab wounds with a steak-knife. In my gut. At least once to the hilt.

And I ruined my favourite t-shirt.

I wasn’t trying to kill myself. No, really. Believe me, I had fun trying to explain that to the hospital-appointed mental-health expert. In those few seconds of insanity I felt every moment of shame, every rejection, every failure to lose weight. In that moment, the fat around my middle signified everything that was wrong with me and my life and I despised it beyond any rationality or sense of self-preservation.

Surely this would be the final motivator? Crossing that line and almost destroying my life?

No. It didn’t.

I got some counselling, and learnt how not to berate and hate myself constantly, but it didn’t take away the beast gnawing away at my insides; it could be temporarily mollified with food, but like Audrey II, it just kept screaming “FEED ME!”

The cycle continued.

In 2007 our family doctor started working with me to try and help me lose weight. She identified that I had sleep apnoea, causing a vicious cycle of sleep apnoea -> poor sleep -> depression -> emotional eating -> increased weight -> worsening sleep apneoa -> and so on. She arranged for me to see some specialists.

As a result, in July of 2008 I was booked in for surgery to remove my golf-ball sized tonsils; they had to weigh me so they could dose me with the right amount of anasthetic. I was 174.8kg (385.4lbs). It was the largest I’d ever been.

A week later I went in for surgery, which began with pre-surgery counselling. As I sat with my wife, a breeze gently cooling my exposed nether regions as in my hospital gown designed for someone half my size, the surgeon asked if anyone had explained that due to my weight there was an increased chance I could die on the operating table.

Suddenly my weight presented a clear and present danger.

My life had been on the line because of my weight, but it still wasn’t enough to motivate me to commit. I did try a little bit, and managed to lose a few kilos between then and November, getting down to 170kgs, but it was so very, very difficult, and I still felt so powerless.

Something’s wrong!

Over the years, I’d experienced something that my dad had called “the shakes”. Sometimes, I’d just become really REALLY jittery, and feel like my brain was on the fritz. When he got the shakes, he’d eat something and it would go away. I tried the same thing, except I tended to eat UNTIL it went away. I never bothered seeing a doctor, but because I couldn’t identify the trigger and I felt it was too weird to try and explain.

The “shakes” came and went, but were pretty uncommon. Then, in November of 2008, I had three severe onsets in a fortnight. I felt the second one coming on, and tried to pull some cash out of an ATM to buy some food. I put my card into the machine and then realised I couldn’t work out how to operate the ATM. I stood there for what seemed like an eternity; I started to lose my temper and freak out a little, but then in a moment of clarity, remembered how to withdraw cash.

See, it appears that what I was experiencing was hypoglycaemia. People have been arrested for being drunk and disorderly during hypos. After the third attack, I finally made an appointment with a doctor, who explained his suspicions and ordered blood and insulin response tests.

Although I’d had several blood tests over the years, and my blood sugar levels were always fine, I’d never had my insulin response tested. The results were disturbing. I was producing ten times the amount of insulin I should be. I was diagnosed with “Insulin Resistance Syndrome” (aka Metabolic Syndrome) – or to put it another way: I’m pre-diabetic.

When I asked him what the chances of developing diabetes was, he looked me in the eye and said “100%. You will develop diabetes. Your pancreas cannot keep producing insulin at this rate. It will eventually give out, and you will then have Type 2 diabetes”. This was a big motivator, but it wasn’t the thing that got me on the path to losing weight.

He sent me home and told me to look up the Atkins Diet, and start doing that. His explanation was that in my case, the best way of avoiding a massive insulin response, causing my body to store all that excess energy as fat was to avoid the carbohydrates that cause that response in the first place. I went home, researched Atkins, and decided…

“Hell no. This is crazy.”

What I did do, however, was to take his idea about the carb response, and look at alternatives. I ended up with a low-carb/low-GI/high protein idea, and worked from there. I started exercising regularly, tracking my calories and eating just the number of calories I needed to eat (based on some things I’d learned from the guys on the Fat2Fit Radio Podcast). He insisted on seeing me every fortnight; on the next visit I explained my decision to him – and I’d lost weight. He felt my plan was acceptable.

It was like the weight was falling off; between November 2008 and August 12, 2009 I lost 33.2kg (73.2lbs), giving me a total loss of 38kg (83.7lbs).

And then I gave up.

I don’t know why, but I just did. I stopped doing the things that worked, and slacked off. I still did a few of the things, but started eating a lot more carbs than I should have been, and exercising sporadically and generally not caring.

Over the following few months, my weight went back up to around 145kg, and then hit a plateau. I’d go up and down within a ten kilo range, but that was where it stayed. I continued like that until January of this year. Although I had successfully maintained a loss of 23+ kgs at worst, for over 2 years, it still felt like failure.

#LessWaz

Last year sucked, to put it mildly. I’d been toying with the idea of trying to lose weight again. My physical reaction to refined carbs was getting worse, and I just wasn’t happy with my size. I’m tired of being uncomfortable, of not having the energy to play with my children, of not being able to buy clothes without getting my credit limit extended.

For me, it was time. I knew what to do to successfully lose weight. I decided  that I wanted 2012 to be a better year than 2011, and that 2012 is the year I get healthy – and for me, a big part of being healthy is losing the weight I’ve carried all these years. It’s not a New Year’s resolution, but a decision to finish what I started at the end of 2008.

“I’m fat, I’m fat, you know it, I’m fat.” – Fat, Weird Al Yankovic

I’ve been trying to write the following post for the last few weeks, but I’ve not been able to finish it. I had some ideas I was kicking around in my head about fundraising and the like, but wasn’t sure how I’d set them up. Then Mike goes and trumps me, in this blog post (it’ll open in a new window). That’ll teach me to procrastinate. There will be another couple of blog posts about how and why I’m losing weight, but right now I wanted to talk about how I got fat, and life as a fat person.

How Did I Get Here?

I’m fat. Actually, if you want to go by the World Health Organisation’s Body Mass Index (and I suggest you don’t), I’m “obese class II”.

I started putting on weight around the age of eight. I started kindergarten as a clumsy, skinny, hyper-sensitive kid, and consequently got picked on mercilessly. I found solace in food. By the time I hit eight, I was coming home after school, overeating, and sitting in my bedroom reading. I became a clumsy, fat, hyper-sensitive kid. As you can imagine, getting fat did nothing to help with being bullied incessantly. They just had a larger target to aim for.

This is a large part of why I hated school – and a lot of the people I went to school with. I’m pretty sure I’ve forgiven most of them, although from time to time, I find I still need to work on that.

Soothing my emotional pain with food became a vicious circle that I’ve been in for nearly 30 years; I didn’t matter what I ate, nothing would fill that gaping maw inside me – although damn if I didn’t keep trying. Once you’re in that downward spiral, it feels like there’s little hope of escape. When your solace is food, and it feeds the very thing you’re ashamed of? It’s a constant slow-burning fire consuming everything inside of you. If you add depression to the mix… is it the cause? is it a symptom? Whatever it is, it’s sandbags on the scales of any attempts to lose weight.

Can I have a side of shame with that?

I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t ashamed of my body. I remember being told by my mother “girls don’t like fat boys”; that really set me up for success with the ladies. There was the time a three year old boy walked up to me in the produce section of the local supermarket and yells out “MUM! THAT MAN IS REALLY FAT!”. Out of the mouths of babes, as they say.

In all my life though, there’s nothing like the searing shame of having a woman tell you “I’m sorry, but I just find your fat repulsive”.

You live with people’s stares at you as you walk past, or hear them whisper comments to their friends and start snickering. You wear baggy clothes to try and hide, but you’re not fooling anyone; on the other hand, you sure as hell better not wear form-fitting clothes. That’s much, much worse.

Shopping for clothes when you’re obese is a special kind of hell (all of these things actually happened):

“Oh… this 5XL shirt is getting a bit tight. I have to go to 6XL. Great.”
“Look… 6XL! I have the choice of the bright pink shirt, or the bright yellow shirt!”
“Thank you for this gift of clothing!” (I shall now put it in the cupboard and never be able to wear it)
“Oh crap. This 7XL shirt is getting too small.” (Target don’t go past 7XL).

Eventually, if you don’t find a way to reign in your weight-gain (and I didn’t), you need to give up on shopping at Target or K-mart. The only clothes you’ll find in a shopping mall that will fit you are shoes and hats, and some of the underwear – unless they have a “big-and-tall”-type store. Then you’ll pay way too much for a basic black T-shirt. What other choice do you have? Not only are you failing to lose weight, you’re getting bigger.

You get used to the idea of never finding something “fashionable” – after all, fat people don’t want to look good, do they? Obviously, if they did, they wouldn’t be fat.

Fat is bad.

Stigmatising fat people may be the last acceptable bigotry. We all know it’s wrong to judge someone by their gender, or their sexual orientation, or the colour of their skin. You can’t judge someone by something they have no control over.

But us fat people? Obviously we CAN control it. If you don’t believe it, check out the comments on any news site article about obesity. You’ll see comments, sometimes numbering into the hundreds, explaining how fat people should just lose weight. They should just eat less, and exercise more.

Because if you do, you can conform to “normal”, saving “normal” healthy people from the terrible offence of having to look at overweight people.

What’s more, if fat people can’t be bothered losing weight, apparently “normal” people should feel comfortable in shaming overweight people; publicly, if necessary. Give me a withering glance. Comment far too loudly to your slender beautiful friends “How COULD he let himself GET like that? Why doesn’t he just get stop eating?” “Shhh, he’ll hear you!”

Don’t worry, I heard you. In fact, half the bloody food court heard your stage whisper. It had never occurred to me that I might need to lose some weight. I’m fat?!? Why didn’t anyone tell me?!? Thanks for that gentle, subtle advice. I shall head straight for the gym, and work out until I’m thin and beautiful like you!

Maybe I’m just unfortunate; I suspect most overweight folks have stories like these.

Here’s another idea: put the fatties on TV. Turn losing weight into a competition. Present them with torturous “challenges”, cut their calorie intake to insane, unsustainable levels, provide them with personal trainers to drive them to spend hours every day constantly exercising, and then make them vote each other off until only the most supposedly virtuous and committed remain. Throw the failures back into the outside world where they have to try and keep losing weight for the big finale, because they signed a contract.

Get the contestants worked up, and them whack away at them until they burst into tears and spill their pain like a pinata spilling candy. These shows eat confessions like those up, and shit them out as ratings gold. “Roll up, roll up, hear the secret shame of the obese!”

With every ratings-laden episode you can send messages like ”The only thing that matters is being thin” or “Do you want to be accepted by society? Cut the fat!”

Then there’s the insidious, reprehensible theme of 2012′s Australian Biggest Loser: “Do you want to find someone to love you? Lose the weight, because thin people are the ones who find love.”

Look, I don’t know whether losing weight will help these people find love, but I suspect it’s a symptom, not a cause. If they’re anything like me, then the underlying factors driving someone to find solace in food aren’t likely to be the most conducive environment for a successful relationship.

So… what now? What’s with #LessWaz?

Some overweight people have chosen the path of fat acceptance. More power to them. I think what they do is important, because not all fat people are unhealthy and unfit, and not all slender folks are the epitome of good health.

I’m not judging those who choose a different path, but in my case I’ve been neither fit nor healthy. I respect those working for fat acceptance, but for me… it’s not something I can do. Even if I could somehow accept my body the way it is, and shed the shame, I haven’t been fit or healthy.

So, at the beginning of 2012, I changed my life because I need to – before things go from bad to worse.

More about that in Part II…

“I’m standing on the outside looking in
I’m standing on the outside looking in…”
- Cold Chisel, Standing on the Outside

Over on her blog Grit & Glory, Alece wrote a post today about friendship. I wanted to comment, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep it short – she challenged me to write it up, so here it is. The first line in her post was this “I moved to Nashville to chase down community.”

Although not a driving factor for us, I was hoping that I’d be able to chase down the same thing when we moved to Melbourne in 2005. The church we left when we moved here was a medium sized church in a relatively small town. It was a pentecostal church with leadership that leaned towards fundamentalism. I was increasingly struggling with questions that challenged that theology and with the depression that I was suffering on and off, I wasn’t a very happy part of that church community. By the time we moved, I was attending church sporadically, at best.

Growing up, my family was pretty insular. Part of our “spiritual journey” as a family was attending churches for two or three years at most, then moving on. So between staying away from non-Christians and moving from church to church. It makes it hard to really connect with people when they’re gone from your life after a couple of years.

On top of that, there was my near-complete inability to understand how friendships actually work. I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I’m standing outside the window, peering in at people who seem to intuitively understand how to relate, like some shared unspoken language.

To me, the move to Melbourne presented a fresh start. I thought it was a chance to make new friends, in a large enough place where I could meet lots of new people and connect with some of them, and maybe become part of a community.

And…

It hasn’t really worked out like I’d hoped. We started attending a church; it was fairly small, and… maybe a little bit too similar to our previous church. There were a few young families, and a many lovely older folks, and quite a few youth. Not long after, most of the youth left. Then several of the people we’d connected to and started building relationships with left the church or moved away; excepting a couple of people, I struggled to really connect to those who remained. The church itself was changing too; not in a “bad” way – but I was reacting badly. I now understand why I was reacting, but the upshot is this: I think it’s difficult, or maybe even impossible to be part of a community when you’re reacting to the very things that drive that community, and/or when you’re questioning beliefs that the community considers to be their core beliefs.

As I drifted away from that community, I started spending time with the CafeChurch community. They’re a fantastic group of people, and for the first time in a very long time I felt like I was in a place where I could safely ask questions and not feel threatened or like I’d be driven away with torches and pitchforks (or “prophecies” and “biblical” smackdowns).

I have a family, and we live in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. CafeChurch is in the inner suburbs on Tuesday nights. I’m grateful for the friendships I made there, but the way our life works as a family just didn’t mesh well, and I didn’t feel like on my own I could be an active part of their core community.

We’ve been at our current church for a bit over a year, but I still feel like I’m disconnected, and I don’t understand why. I find myself wondering “Is there something I’m not doing or saying? Is it because these people have established relationships over many years, and we’re newcomers? What is the piece of the puzzle that I’m missing here?” – and what effect will my struggle with faith have?

The ‘how’ of friendships still mystifies me; I’m not sure what to do to make deep, long-lasting friendships with the people around me. Over the years, I’ve developed a few good, long term friendships, but I have no idea how they came to be, and most of those friends are geographically distant. For the friends who are geographically closer, I don’t know what the practical things are to do with the friendship to keep building it. Maybe everyone feels just like this. I just don’t know.

The truth is, I really don’t understand how I came to be friends with these wonderful people – I’m just grateful for their friendship.

A few weeks ago, @LosWhit posted this photo to Twitter, and I recognised a few of the people I follow on Twitter. I had a visceral reaction to that photo; I long for friendships that feel like that photo looks – but how do I get from here to there?

Unfortunately, one of the possibilities of renting is being asked to being given notice to vacate. Of the two houses we’ve lived in since we moved to Melbourne, the first we had to leave because a real-estate agent (apparently) didn’t report anything that we reported back to the landlord – and a switch to a new landlord didn’t end well when the file contained none of the wear and tear we’d reported. Lesson learnt: Small children cause damage, and when you report it, ALWAYS put it in writing.

The second time, it seems the landlord got caught out by the GFC and had to sell. We got the notice to vacate two days after Jessica’s funeral. Timing was pretty poor, but could have been much worse, if it weren’t for our rental agents being particularly awesome and going in to bat for us with the landlord.

We landed on our feet when we got this place. It ticked almost every checkbox we had, and we got to stay with our current rental agents. But the front yard…

We live on a corner. The photo that was up on the rental website showed lush green grass in the front yard. That photo is obviously several years old. Each morning as I walk out to my car, I look at the yard, and it irks me. According to the rental agent, the landlord gave previous tenants permission to park on the once-was-lawn. The lawn took an absolute beating from the years of vehicular abuse. The front yard now consists of areas of lush hard-packed dirt, particularly hardy weeds, a partially-exposed-and-likely-defunct watering system, and a rusty white mailbox. There’s a parking area of pavers that are disjointed and surrounded with weeds. This yard has a lot of potential, but it’s taken so much damage for so long.

We’ve been living here for almost nine months now, and every day I’ve live with the consequences of the years of abuse… and I’ve done almost nothing about it. I’ve made a few feeble attempts at improving things, but each time I’ve lost hope and given up. Sure, I’ve mowed the weeds when they’ve gotten out of control, but beyond that… I’ve let things stay in their sorry state.

Why do I continue to leave things the way they are?

I guess I’m not sure where to start. I want the yard to be awesome, but to get from where the yard is to where it could be will take so much work. There are a lot of weeds, and some of those roots run pretty deep. I don’t have a green thumb, and I’m not particularly inclined to ask for help again. People have their own yards to deal with. There are people I could pay to come and fix it, but there are higher priorities.

Truth be told, I don’t have to do anything about it. I don’t own this house. I didn’t cause the damage, so there’s no reason I need to fix it. I can complain about it, continue to mow the weeds, and leave it as an ugly and constant reminder of the past.

I’ve decided not to do that; I’m going to try again.

A few days ago, with the hard-packed ground softened by the recent rain, I dug a six-foot long, six-inch deep channel and re-buried the worst of the exposed watering system. This weekend I pulled the ugly, rusty letterbox out and replaced it with a new letterbox. I pulled some weeds out of the crevices in the footpath, and dug up a bunch of pavers and straightened them.

There are people who have helped me out in the past, trimming back long overgrown plants, dealing with weeds and things I’ve left undone that I should have taken more responsibility for, but I still can’t bring myself to ask for help this time.

It’s not much, yet. There’s still so much to do. It still seems overwhelming, and I’m not even sure if I can undo the years of damage. There are things there that I honestly have no idea how to fix. I know they’re beyond my capacity to deal with alone, but I’m not sure who to ask for help, or if they’re even fixable.

Truth is, there’s a whole world of people whose yards are a mess. Some of them really want to fix it, some are tired of trying… some just don’t care. There are also a whole lot of gardeners with perfectly trimmed yards. Everything looks like it’s just right, with nary a weed to be found. So many seem to spend their time loudly criticising their neighbours for the state of their yard, or insisting that if they tried harder they could have a better yard, or they get together with other gardeners and complain about people who won’t fix their gardens…

Perhaps their neighbours might just need someone to be with them while they work on it. Maybe they’ll need a lot of help to get things in order; or they might never get things sorted out. Even if they can’t get their yard in order, the world might be a slightly better place for asking a neighbour “need a hand with your yard?”

For now, I’m going to keep working on what I can work on, with some small changes each day. Perhaps in time I can be proud of my yard. I also need to deal with my garage, and there’s no-one to blame but myself for that mess.

The text can be found here.

This sounds like an excellent idea. Finally, the government steps up; they will cut off Family Tax Benefit bonus payments to those who refuse to immunise their children, endangering not only their children’s lives, but also the lives of those children who are too young to be immunised. If you don’t immunise your kids, you don’t get the full family tax benefit.

This is great, right? Wrong.

It does nothing of the sort. What it does it gives people too slack to keep up with their immunisation schedules a stick and carrot approach to stay on it.

Anti-vaxxers, on the other hand?

About half way down the page, last paragraph under the heading “Stronger incentives to get children immunised” is this gem: “Existing exemptions will continue to be available for people who register as conscientious objectors to immunisation.”

That’s right. The anti-vaxxers can get an exemption to continue on in their ignorance.

Just in case you think I’m misunderstanding this, in a radio interview this morning, I heard The Hon. Nicola Roxon MP (Minister for Health and Ageing) say something like “…some people have strong objections to immunisation and this is not to force them to go against their beliefs.” – which is what sent me looking.

If you really REALLY believe that science is lying to you, and you absolutely refuse to immunise your kids, fine. Ignore confirmation bias, and keep your head firmly jammed up your fundamental orifice.

But do me a big favour, keep your kids the hell away from mine. Particularly our baby due in May next year. I don’t want our newborn baby catching some preventable disease because YOU refuse to play your part in preventing it.

If everything had gone to plan, at this point of the year, I’d be cuddling up with my six month old daughter, watching her roll noises around in her mouth and attempt to make words with them; battling with my wife and kids over who changes the next nappy, and wondering how long it would be before we’d need to start putting baby gates up around the house. Excitedly awaiting her first Christmas.

Instead, I live with the loss; I’ve lost more than I expected.

There’s been other things happen, mostly good, a few not so good. Nothing in the order of what happened with our little Jessica. Although we laid her tiny body in the ground on that hot summer’s morning in January, I didn’t realise until much later that I’d taken something away with me too. A seed of doubt, planted by questions thrust upon me by circumstances outside my control.

Oh, I’ve tried to ignore them, to push them away, to drown them. But they refuse to leave me alone, to go away quietly. They nag at me, nipping at my heels.

I know it galls some of my friends, but I absolutely believe in the existence of God. I also believe that Jesus existed and what is written in the gospels about him, and the things he said and did are true. I’ve actually tried not believing it, and failed miserably. These things, for better or worse, are wired in deep in a way that I could sooner disbelieve in the existence of the sun than I could in the existence of God.

The questions about our daughter’s birth defect and death aren’t the only ones I carry with me. They haven’t challenged those core beliefs, but they have affected what comes after. Earlier in the year, after Jessica’s death, I was once again diagnosed with depression; this time was different – I didn’t feel dark, or like I was under a great weight – I just felt numb.

Off to the shrink I duly went. She’s great. We talked over the next few sessions, and I started to feel a little less numb; towards the end of our fourth session, I exploded.

Just like that. One little question, and twenty years of buried rage and anger started boiling over. Where I was storing it, I have no idea. But there it was, a deeply infected splinter in my mind. I know where the anger comes from, and who I was angry with. What I didn’t know – and to a degree still don’t – is how to process the anger, or the questions that it brought to the surface.

I lived through something for an extended period of my life that would seem utterly ridiculous out of context. While I’m not at a point that I feel I can explain it further, I’ll say that what happened was not illegal and did not involve any kind of sexual or ongoing physical abuse. I’ve since spoken with, and forgiven, those who were directly involved (so if you’re reading this and wondering “is he talking about me?”, I’m not). The most important point of this labored paragraph is that what I went through was deeply intertwined with my faith.

There have been times over the past few years when I started poking around at the sore spot inside my mind. I knew something was buried there. It hurt like hell when I poked it. I talked around it with people, knowing it was there, but not knowing what it was. Certain situations caused little flare-ups. Conversations with a certain people caused it to ache. One weekend church conference in particular nearly pushed me right over the edge into the crazy.

It wasn’t until after a couple of months of attending our current church that I realised I wasn’t feeling defensive in church anymore – and how many years I’d been feeling defensive. Truth be told, the churches in which I felt so defensive were full of lovely people, but the similarities within the way the churches operated, and the actions of some of the people to those things in my past made me feel like I wasn’t safe. I just didn’t understand why at the time.

While I’ve felt safe for the past year and a half we’ve been part of our current church, the events of the past twelve months have brought me to a place I couldn’t imagine I’d ever get to. The problem is that between our experience with Jessica, and acknowledging both the events and the anger arising from that period of my life that I’d buried so deeply, my faith has gone from tattered to shattered.

The truth is, right now I can’t stomach another simplistic, pat answer to a complicated question. And boy, do I have a lot of complicated questions now.

There are some who would say that my hanging around those liberal emerging churchy type people is what went ‘n’ done this to me. If so, you’re putting effect before cause. A big part of the reason I “drifted left” was being given the same simplistic answers repeatedly – or getting smacked down for asking the questions in the first place. When you meet people who aren’t afraid of the questions, and are willing to admit they don’t have the answer, there’s a kind of safety there.

Let me be blunt here. This is seriously addressed to no-one in particular, but I’ve been on the receiving end, and witnessed it happen to others:- if you’re a Christian and you repeatedly give the same advice, and it does NOT work out the way you claimed it would, jumping straight to telling the person you’re talking to that it’s THEIR fault and they need to try harder, and not asking yourself – or God – what else might be going on, is a great way to drive people away. From the church, or even from God. Same with giving a simple proof-texted answer to any and every complicated question.

Feel free to console yourself with “they wanted to continue in their sin” or “they refused to repent” or “they refused to submit” or my personal favorite “they have a rebellious/Jezebel/whatever spirit” – whatever helps you sleep at night, and saves you from having to ask yourself – or God – any difficult questions.

Perhaps you’re right, and one of those things I listed above is actually true. The thing is, I’ve met, and read, and talked to enough people in and outside the faith who’ve been shat on from a great height by well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) Christians, that I’m really wondering whether a lot of the church even really know the One they claim to believe in.

When He said “love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” and you hate those who disagree with some theological point, and REALLY hate those who don’t believe the same thing you do, you’re doing it wrong!

To those people who’ve shown me mercy and grace and love as I’ve poked around up until now trying to understand what it was that was hurting so much, and driving me away from the church, thank you. I love you guys. Please don’t give up on me now; but please understand, I can’t unscramble this omelette.

I don’t know if this will make sense, but I still believe those core beliefs, but there’s not much of my faith left any more. Perhaps this is my ‘dark night of the soul’ and I just have to go through it, or perhaps I’m just not “one of the elect” and I have to come to terms with that.

I don’t think I’m depressed, and I’m not giving up. I just don’t know where to go from here.

For now, as a good friend suggested a couple of days ago, maybe it’s time to stop asking the questions over and over, and to wait for the answers.

However long they take to come – if they come at all.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. I haven’t been writing as much as I would like to. When I do write, I can’t finish the posts. They just ramble off into nothing.

I’ve been tweeting too, but maybe I’ve been wasting my words in 140 character bursts.

But that’s not even the entirety of it. I’ve been grasping at words for months. They won’t come, at least not in coherent paragraphs.

They’re unformed, ephemeral. When they do come, it’s at the most inopportune times. When I should be working, or when I’m trying to fall asleep (and I’ve been struggling to sleep for months), or when I’m in the car, with both hands on the wheel.

But when I sit down to actually write, the thoughts and ideas are gone like the fog burning off in the morning sun.

The grief seems to be gone, but it feels like everything is upside down at the moment. The questions left behind are immense. I want to ask them here, but I fear the response.

Really, I fear a lot of things. It’s only over the past few weeks I’ve really come to understand why. I made a comment in a post a few years ago about sitting in a little room talking to someone, that sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t.

After many hours sitting in a little room talking, which seemed to help a little, at least for a little while, everything suddenly blew apart. I finally saw “it”. The deep well, shrouded in darkness where I’d been burying my anger for so many years. Along with that buried rage, came the memories. The things I’d blocked out for so long; the contexts for memories I did have that floated just out of reach of understanding.

The “why” for all the years of depression.

I’m not sure I should unpack it in public, though. Even in part. I know that some of the players in this drama would rather the past be left there. I know that they’ve changed, and asked forgiveness, and I’ve chosen to forgive them.

There’s my side of the story thought; a story with words like spiritual abuse and manipulation. What that stuff has done to me, and how I work through it. See, it might have started over twenty years ago, and ended nearly a decade ago, but I can finally see the truth in all it’s ugliness, and I’m dealing with the consequences here and now.

The forgiveness hasn’t taken away the anger; at first it felt like the Deepwater Well in the Gulf of Mexico, surging away uncontrollably, while I struggled to stop it from catching alight on the surface and burning everything in it’s path.

Now though, it feels like an oil slick, covering everything in sight with a film that I can’t yet work out how to remove.

I’m determined to get through it, to not let it define my future any more, but I don’t think it’s going to go away on it’s own… that strategy hasn’t worked thus far.

There it is. I sat down to write about not writing, and I ended up writing.

We were supposed to be in the last couple of weeks of our pregnancy. Tan lying on the lounge like a beached whale being cared for by her team of enforced volunteers. It was supposed to be exciting and full of anticipation, this last mother’s day before our family of five became six.

Things don’t always go as planned. We’re in surroundings that are slowly becoming familiar as “home”. The cradle and cot are packed away in our new garage; the bouncer lies empty atop a pile of boxes.

Instead of joy and celebrating the ones who are with us, the day is tinged bittersweet as we ache for the one who is not. The undercurrent of sadness is so strong; as we both sat sobbing in church this morning, it felt like it had become a rip dragging us away.

Please, spare a thought or say a prayer today for the mothers whose arms are empty against their will; whose hearts ache for those they’ve lost, or for those that may never be.

Americans celebrating after the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death.

I can’t be the only one who finds this disturbing.

The first video is just an example of what I remember seeing in 2001. I remember how appalled I was to see people celebrating such an abhorrent act of violence.

To see Americans celebrating the death of bin Laden in this way is in turns understandable, and frightening.

The death of a man who so represents that loss of innocence on September 11, 2001 must, in some ways be a catharsis for a country whose character has changed so much in the last ten years. For every inconvenience to an international traveler, for every government intrusion justified as “necessary” for homeland security, and for every person who died because of the plans masterminded by this man, this must feel like a moment of justification.

Then there’s the sense of America having achieved a goal set a decade ago, and this must feel like vindication. Like vengeance. And there’s the rub. At what cost will this vengeance come?

To a Muslim seeing the videos of Americans chanting in the streets, I’m not sure they’ll see the catharsis of a country that’s been held hostage by the schemes of a fundamentalist extremist.

They’ll see Americans celebrating the death of a Muslim, fulfilling the stereotypes promoted by the fundamentalist extremists like bin Laden and al Qaeda. Just as a few weeks ago, when a fundamentalist “pastor” burned a Qu’ran, they didn’t didn’t see an extremist, they saw an American burning their holy book, an act that cost 22 people their lives in violent retribution.

I fear for the effect that this could have on American aid workers and missionaries in predominantly Muslim countries – and what the news reports will bring over the coming weeks.

You may find yourself the willing, or unwilling, recipient of books on pregnancy, childbirth, natural childbirth, child names, name meanings, biblical name meanings, child rearing, child discipline, parenting… until you find yourself wishing you had a personal GPS transponder for someone to dig you out from under the avalanche of books.

Still, it was exciting the first time around. The anticipation leading up to the due date. Being shaken awake with “I think it’s time” in the middle of the night. The second and third times around were different every time, but just as nerve-wracking and exciting.

None of that prepared me for Jessica’s birth.

That excited anticipation was replaced by a gnawing sense of dread. The cold hard knot in the pit of my stomach grew harder and heavier as the date inexorably approached like a freight train, as lay tied to the rails. I questioned myself over and over “Did we make the right decision here? Is this what we should do?”

I’d watched my wife’s emotional state slowly become more fragile as the weeks went by. I struggled not to withdraw into myself. Each day seemed to bring the tale of some stranger or worse still, acquaintance, congratulating her on the pregnancy. Asking her how things were going? When are you due? If nothing else, this reassured me that we were doing the right thing. I honestly don’t know if she would have made it, at least emotionally, if we had gone to term.

I woke up early on the morning of the 17th of January to an appropriately overcast sky. I called the hospital at the appointed time as requested… and was asked to ring back later, as it was “right in the middle of a shift change”. Tan and I stared at each other in disbelief. We rang back 15 minutes later and were told to make our way to the hospital.

When we arrived at the hospital, we were introduced to the first of three nurses named… Jackie. Well, one was a Jacqui, and one was actually a midwife, but it was a much needed amusing moment in a day that desperately needed a little levity.

We settled into our birthing suite, and then… we waited. Just after nine o’clock the obstetrician gave Tan her first dose of medication, and we were told that it might take a few hours, or even a few days. He also reiterated to us that it was unlikely that our daughter would survive the labour.

Nothing in my life could have prepared me for the helplessness I felt watching my wife in an increasing amount of pain as that day went by. Nurses, midwives, and social workers came and went.

The day seemed endless. In that room, I felt like we were cut off from the rest of the world. I moved from uncomfortable plastic chair to the end of Tan’s bed, and back again. Occasionally wandering around the hospital while Tan dozed.

Just after 9pm, Tan knew it was time, and we called the nurse in. This was not like the birth of our other children; there was pain, and tears, but there was no excitement, no joy to mute the suffering. I cried, overwhelmed with fear, holding Tan as her unnatural labour came to it’s terrible end.

The moment I saw my daughter’s face for the first time, I knew that she hadn’t survived the labour. Her tiny, perfect face was bruised, her eyes still closed to a world she would never see. I cut her umbilical cord, and the nurse passed her to me. We took turns in holding her, bathing her in our tears and prayers.

My tears flowed again as I dressed her in a tiny outfit, smaller than her sister’s doll’s clothes; the only chance I’d have to be a daddy helping this little girl get dressed. It was donated by other parents who’d been through what we were going through; I worked with the nurse to engineer a solution to allow her tiny knitted beanie to stay on her head.

A bit later a different ob/gyn stopped by, and proceeded to explain to us how our daughter’s birth defect was a statistical anomaly, and how we shouldn’t be too worried if we wanted to try again. He went on to say that nature was constantly experimenting, and she was just an experiment that went wrong, and didn’t naturally terminate in a miscarriage when it should have, like usually happens.

As he left I thanked him through gritted teeth, and kept both hands jammed firmly in my pockets, so as to avoid providing a visual indicator of what I thought of his considerable tact and wonderful bedside manner.

We both held her tiny body for many hours over the next couple of days. I stared in wonder at her tiny, perfect hands and feet. I apologised to her that there was no way for me to save her. Our children got the chance to meet, and say goodbye to their sister.

Whereas the labour seemed to take forever, the time with her seemed to vanish, and it was suddenly time to say goodbye, knowing we’d never get the chance to see her face, or hold her in our arms again. The next few days were a blur, getting everything organised for the funeral, and suddenly it was upon us.

The Saturday morning dawned with an overcast sky, and we left early to make our way to the cemetery; it seemed a little excessive until I committed one of my classic driving blunders and turned left when I should have turned right, but we arrived on time.

There was another moment of panic when I managed to snap the CD with the songs we’d chosen for the funeral, but between an iPhone, one friend with the correct cable, and another to DJ the songs at the right time, they averted disaster (thanks again for saving my bacon, Liz and Fraser).

The service started; our eldest son carried his sister in her tiny, pink gingham-covered casket from the hearse to the grave, while I carried a flower arrangement. The early clouds had burnt off to a bright sunny day, and the service that had taken hours to organise seemed to fly by in a blur, too fast for the gravity of the situation.

As a final symbol, the five of us each had a purple balloon, with a sixth special clear and pink butterfly-printed balloon to represent Jessica. We leaned in together over her grave, and released our five balloons simultaneously. The balloons stayed together in a group and flew southwards with the breeze. As a family, we then released Jessica’s balloon together.

We watched it fly straight upwards, into the clear blue sky.

That was how we said goodbye.