HDIF about the situation with Sarah, Nella and so forth?.DYFF.

Dear LORD:

Be with my precious wife while I am traveling. I miss her so. Comfort her heart that I am with her and that my heart belongs to her.

MDDL:

Your MEQ today was all of the things that you have done to take care of our family. Jeanae's school. The cell phone account. Jon's car. You are doing a fantastic job of taking care of everything while I am gone. I want you to know how much I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart.

The way I feel about the situation with Sarah and Nella is conflicted. A potent, powerful mix of conflicting emotions.

Sarah was my first child. When she was born, my life turned upside down. How I loved her! I had so many dreams about her. Helping her fly a kite. Playing chess. Listening to music. Being her father.

Those dreams came crashing down when she began to spin, buzz, rock and so forth. And when she stopped talking, potty training, making eye contact and the like.

I am not sure how to describe what this was like. The pain has been there all my life. It is like a part of my heart was ripped out of my chest, leaving an open hole. I cannot explain it any other way.

I suppose this wound has been a big part of my strategy to ignore and deny my emotions for much of my life. Since the wound is so deep and so painful, the only way that I could deal with it was to deny its existence. Anything else made life unbearable. I learned these skills at the Pain Clinic in John Hopkins when I was going through pain management training. They have been with me ever since. This was in my early 20s long before I met you.

You have to understand that intellectual and academic excellence were the only means for achieving any sort of identity or approval in my family. I learned from practically when I was born (at least as far back as I could remember) that I was special and significant because of, and only because of, the stuff between my ears. My ability to reason, analyze and communicate was the only reason I was alive, and the only reason why I was deserving of love, respect and significance.

To have a child who is like a living shell, who cannot do any of those things, is a very personal denial of myself. She is a part of me, and that part is dysfunctional in all the ways that matter. It sounds terrible, but it would have been far more merciful if she had died.

Every time I have seen her since then, I have become clinically depressed. It also tears her apart. I can tell she loves me, and I truly love her as well. But my being around her is terribly cruel, both to her and to me.

Then there is the financial aspect. When I attempted to pay Nella the child support arrearage in 2000, I thought I would obtain some closure on that part of our relationship. How I wish she had taken the money! Ever since then we have been locked into this game. She comes to me with another set of demands, another deal in which she will be able to take the money, saving her financial situation in the process. We come to the brink of doing something to resolve this part of our dealings, and then she simply disappears. I don't hear from her for another year or two. And then we repeat the process.

Every time this happens, it's like claws raking the wound open again. Something that I hold at bay, at the edge of my conscious mind, through the exercise of mental discipline, comes to the fore. It can no longer be ignored.

Another problem: I have a strong sense of honor, having been raised to believe that a man's word is his bond. Your word is who you are.

I am not a deadbeat dad. I offered to pay her the money. She did not take it. And ever since, when we get into this game again, I am somehow labeled as the bad guy. Like I have somehow done something wrong in the financial side of the relationship.

My ability to function in this situation is getting strained. It is beyond me.

Then there is my worry and concern over Sarah and what is happening to her. I have dreams in which she is in a state mental institution being raped daily. Nella is the one who put those images in my head. That is why she has taken care of Sarah all these years. She said that if Sarah was institutionalized that she would be sexually victimized.

I would rather die that see that happen to her. I think often and with great pain and concern about what is happening there in Laporte. Is she OK? Is Nella able to take care of her? Is David still OK?

And now I hear that David is sick, disabled, and unable to support them. At the very time when my ability to do anything to alleviate the situation is at an all-time low.

I sent her the email we talked about. I have heard nothing from her since. I do not know how to live with this. I do not know how to go on. Will we simply return to a stalemate, a condition of cease fire, but not of true peace? But one in which my concern for the situation, and Nella's ability to handle the demands of Sarah, is in grave doubt?

There must be an end. I do not know how to make that happen, and maybe it is simply impossible.

I am struggling to think of a shared experience to describe the conflicted feeling that I feel. It is difficult. I have nothing to compare it to. Perhaps the closest would be the feelings that I had for you when you were gone, you having just left and me not knowing where you were. Being very hurt, angry and confused, but at the same time loving you, missing you, wanting you with me. Like my heart had been ripped out of my chest. Or, as I described it at Ray and Debbie's house, like my throat was being cut by millimeters over a period of two months.

The difference is that that feeling lasted only a couple of months. This has lasted the better part of two decades. Considering everything, it amazing that I have been able to function at all.

I will post now. I have been at this for some time, and we need to reconnect on the phone. I love you.

Love,
Me