Three—Ivy
I
shouldn’t have come here. I don’t belong. I’m a fish out of water in California, and that’s just a fact. But I was not functioning particularly well, and by the time I got on that plane nobody had really asked my opinion anyway—not that I could have answered coherently. Maybe they did. I don’t know, I was not myself. I’m still not. Somehow when you have a southern accent people can take you for an illiterate hillbilly, and when you look like you been run over by a tractor trailer it’s hard to convince them otherwise, and when you just don’t care one way or the other, it’s doubly hard.
The truth is I wake up every morning, and I still can’t seem to find me . I look for that girl, but the me I was before what happened, happened is nowhere to be found. And since what happened, happened, I couldn’t stay in Savannah. I’m never going back there again. But I’m not sure I can stay here either. I do not fit in my dad’s world.
I think I knew—even as messed up as I was—that me being here was too far outside of Daniel’s comfort zone to do me any good. He’s not that kind of father. Mom made him bring me, I do know that, and because of the terrible shape I was in he couldn’t really say no.
Daniel isn’t cruel, exactly. He just doesn’t know what to do with me. His expertise is problem-solving, but if it’s not a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it, he’s lost. That’s why he does things like order me a salad in his kindest meanness when I want a pork chop, or offer to pay for a Planet Fitness membership because there’s one here and one near where I live in Georgia, or fix me up with eight sessions with a life-coach—because eight sessions ought to do it—and then grill me after each one on my emotional progress and then get frustrated with me when talking about getting dumped at the altar thirty-one days ago still makes me cry. I just started my third round of eight sessions. My dad is very frustrated.
I think he means well. But somehow his way of showing it always makes me feel bad.
Pembroke says Daniel just doesn’t understand trauma. That is completely, 100% true. But then what happened to me probably doesn’t strike him as trauma. Even I am ashamed of the caliber of my trauma compared to what others have gone through. So, it’s probably not really Daniel’s fault.
A man in our process group was car-jacked at a red light. A monster pulled Terrance out of his brand-new SUV, hopped in, and took off. When he realized that Terrance’s wife was in the passenger seat, the goon opened her door and shoved her out while he was speeding away. She was hit by an oncoming pickup and is now a paraplegic. Terrance relives three things every day: the feel of his wife’s hand in his the moment before it happened, the shocked helplessness of being yanked out of his car, and the sight of his wife bouncing off the pickup. That’s what PTSD is, a loop of agony on constant replay.
I have no business being included in a group like this. No one was maimed in my trauma, not really. Even though I relive every detail every day, just like Terrance does, just like all of them. Details like the way my wedding dress felt against my legs when I walked down the path. The backyard crowded with friends and happiness. The look on Tim’s face when a very pregnant Angela Doyle stood up and announced to the world that she was having his baby. His choked-up “I’m sorry, Ivy. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…” Those words echo in my head all day long and wake me up at night.
I feel so stupid and so pathetic, and I hate myself for it. Fortunately, according to my life coach, Adam Pembroke, patheticism is not in and of itself a mental illness. That is quite reassuring to all of us—Terrance, Shelly Alawalla who was raped, John Pratt whose house burned down, and Delilah Jones who ran over her German Shepherd. That’s my posse of devastated but non-mentally ill cohorts who meet twice a week, and struggle, like me, to conquer our trauma. And if not conquer it, exactly, then at least figure out how not to be swallowed up by it.
The thing is, everyone in my posse has someone to kind of help them through the dark swamp of their pain. I have Daniel, which means I’m pretty much on my own.