Beauty for Ashes Part 1

Beauty for Ashes—By Crystal Lewis

He gives beauty for ashes
Strength for fear; Gladness for mourning
Peace for despair
When sorrow seems to surround you
When suffering hangs heavy o'er your head
Know that tomorrow brings
Wholeness and healing
God knows your need
Just believe what He said
He gives beauty for ashes
Strength for fear; Gladness for mourning
Peace for despair
When what you've done keeps you from moving on
When fear wants to make itself at home in your heart
Know that forgiveness brings
Wholeness and healing
God knows your need
Just believe what He said
He gives beauty for ashes
Strength for fear
Gladness for mourning
Peace for despair
I once was lost but God has found me
Though I was bound I've been set free
I've been made righteous in His sight
A display of His splendor all can see
He gives beauty for ashes
Strength for fear; Gladness for mourning
Peace for  despair

                               Part 1

I have pondered how to begin this work.  Not knowing exactly where it will end up has had a belaboring effect on the beginning of it.  That is an irony in itself.  But then what is life without irony?  What is life without sarcasm?  For me that would be life without humor and I would be unable to tolerate that.  For it is in laughter that we can see through so many of the sorrows in our lives; through to the other side where there are sunnier days and a sense of well being just on the other side of whatever trauma we are now facing. 

            So much of my life has seemed to be about what has gone wrong, what does not or did not work, and what cannot be.  Yet my faith is stronger with such adversity.  What is the saying?  “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”  I believe more now in the God of the universe than I did when I was young.  I believe He is able to take the messes and those things that were meant to destroy me, and turn them into triumphs for my benefit as well as those around me. 

            This is my story.  I don’t know if it is a good one, for if I ventured an answer it would certainly be biased.  I suppose it would be safe to say it is a story with good days in it and bad ones.  There are parts that are dry and barren.  And then there are parts that seem to flow like a rushing river.  Regardless, it is mine and I’m living it in the physical sense even as I write it out here in the literary one.  I hope only to tell the truth of my journey so that in some small way it may move its reader.

My story is full of information and advice.  It is about war and carnage, life and death, love and hope, and all that fits in between.  Mostly though it is about how God took the ashes of my life and traded them for beauty; my beauty for ashes.

The Girl in the Picture

I sat on a stool at the end of the counter watching my friend, Coleen, inventory merchandise she had just received for her natural foods store.  I cannot remember for the life of me what it was called.  That seems strange, as it was an integral part of my life during the time I went to college at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming.  Coleen and I met at a hair salon where we worked.  Neither of us made any money working there, but we truly enjoyed hanging out together.  Eventually, Coleen inherited the natural foods/used bookstore from her mother. 

Where was I?  Oh yeah, sitting at the end of the counter.  We were just catching up on all the gossip in small town Powell when the door was flung wide, and a woman who looked to have wandered far and away from the red light district of some other state (none of the towns in Wyoming are big enough to have red light districts) made a rather dramatic entrance. 

            “Coleen, where is your mother,” she asked, though it sounded more like an exclamation than a question as she hurled the words like small pebbles at my friend.  She stepped forward slamming the door shut behind her, its little jingly bells that announced a new caller sounded wildly with the force.  The woman took another step forward toward the counter glancing briefly my way, and then dismissing me once she had determined me of no use to her.  I heard Coleen answer, but what she said was lost to me as I stared in fascination at the woman. 

            Her hair was a yellowed, bleached blonde with dark roots of about two inches.  Her makeup was thickly caked on her face, her eyes painted with frosty baby blue eye shadow. She wore a white tank top that was low cut and kept falling off one shoulder.  She had on a wide black belt over her hot pink miniskirt, which was so short it hardly qualified as one.  Leopard tights and high-heeled boots completed the ensemble. She was tall and thin, and I had the impression of taffy having been pulled to distortion.

            But it wasn’t the ensemble that had me entranced.  No, it was something else.  There was an energy emanating from her; a kind of frenetic-ness that had me both fascinated and frightened.  She was hurling words at my friend so fast and with such force, I expected to see Coleen thrown backward from the impact as if hit by bullets.  I realized I was staring openly, my mouth ajar, and quickly shut it.  I felt as though I was watching a human bomb detonating right in front of my eyes.  I couldn’t even concentrate on what she was saying, or even understand it for that matter.  I marveled at Coleen’s composure and ability to decipher what the woman was saying, such was the speed of her dialogue.      

            In my mind it seems as though the conversation was lengthy, but in reality I believe it only lasted a few minutes.  The woman left in the same manner she had come, throwing the door open.  It swung shut with a swoosh of air, leaving a final benediction of the small jingling bells.  I looked at Coleen and said, “What was the matter with that woman? She acts like she’s on drugs.”

            Coleen smiled calmly, “No she’s not on drugs.  She’s a friend of my mom’s.  She has a mental illness called manic-depression.”

            I stared out the glass door, still able to see the woman’s retreating form.  I sighed, looking up at the ceiling for a moment feeling drained and thinking, “I am so glad I don’t have that.”  I was frightened by what I had witnessed and I was so relieved to know I wasn’t like her.

            It wasn’t too many years later as I sat in a doctor’s office looking at another ceiling that I remembered the incident with the woman in Coleen’s shop.  I was in a psychiatrist’s office and he was in the process of diagnosing me with bipolar disorder, otherwise known as manic-depression.  Generally I appreciate irony in life.  It is often amusing.  In this particular case, though, I was not amused.

            My personal journey with mental illness began much earlier than the incident with the woman in Coleen’s shop.  Maybe that is why I was so frightened when I witnessed her behavior because I identified with some part or essence of it in myself.  I have heard over and over again while pursuing my education in psychology that, “we all fit on the spectrum somewhere.”  That is true and is a comfort unless you are one of those unfortunates who fall outside of the norm on the spectrum in the realm of behavior that is unacceptable in society.  I rankle a bit at the summation that we all fit in the same category.  I understand the meaning is to make everyone feel that they may identify with the person next to them, but the person next to me most likely does not have to take medication two to three times a day just to be able to exhibit appropriate behavior.  I do.  So even though we all fit on the spectrum, that day in Coleen’s shop, I identified with a part of that woman that was too much like me and too much unlike everyone else. 

            According to those I’ve spoken with who have bipolar disorder, most have had some triggering event that has brought on their mood disorder.  That is what bipolar is, a mood disorder.   When I lived in Kansas City, Missouri, I spoke at a hospital that took care of children up to 18 years of age who were dealing with mental illnesses.  The hospital was at maximum capacity and the majority had bipolar disorder.  The woman I dealt with at the hospital informed me that every single child in that hospital had been sexually abused.  I’ve spoken with many others who have bipolar and they have acknowledged some kind of abuse in their past, some kind of stressor that has broken their mind.

            I am not proposing that in order to have bipolar disorder one must meet a prerequisite of abuse or that to truly have been abused one must have bipolar disorder.  I am just suggesting there may be a connection between the two.  As for my personal experience with the bipolar, I think it began in me at a very young age.

            To say that bipolar disorder is caused by genetics is a bit of a misnomer.  Genetics are involved but it is more in the way of an imprint rather than an actual DNA development (Preston, 2006).  I think of this concept in terms of a person of Native American heritage being born with a predisposition to becoming an alcoholic with the consumption of alcohol.  Just because there is a predisposition does not guarantee a result of alcoholism.  I have four other siblings who are all disposed to bipolar disorder based on our genetic heritage.  Yet I am the only one to have developed the disorder.  So even though genetics play a role, they are not the sole reason a person may end up with bipolar disorder. 

            Not only do I have a genetic predisposition to having bipolar disorder, but I also have another defect that contributed greatly to my becoming mentally ill.  I have a central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) that affected me from the time I started school.  CAPD is like dyslexia of the ear rather than the eye.  CAPD occurs when the ears and the brain are not able to fully coordinate with each other (kidshealth.org, 2007). 

            There are five areas that are affected by CAPD.  The first is auditory figure or ground problems.  This is when background noise makes it very difficult for a person to concentrate.  The second is called auditory memory problems.  This is when the person has difficulties remembering lists, directions, and the like.  The next is called auditory discrimination problems.  These problems occur when the person has difficulty distinguishing between like sounds such as cat and mat.  The fourth is called auditory attention problems.  This is when a person may have difficulty maintaining focus long enough for a task to be completed such as a lecture.  The final problem is called auditory cohesion.  This is when comprehension of higher-level listening functions such as riddles and verbal math problems are unattainable for the person (kidshealth.org, 2007). 

            CAPD was not diagnosed when I was a child.  I have dealt with it my whole life, and while I have found ways to cope, it remains one of the bigger challenges I come up against in just about any social situation.  I did not learn about CAPD until I was in my twenties and was tested for it. CAPD is one of the reasons my school career did not start off well and why my teachers decided I was not intelligent.  My mom says she got a call my first day of kindergarten.  It was the school telling her I had been standing in the middle of the room with my hands over my ears screaming at the top of my lungs.  I am smiling as I write this because there are times even now, and all too frequently, when that is what I still would like to do.  I was envisioning myself standing in the middle of an isle at Wal-Mart, hands over my ears, screaming my head off.  How fun would that be, I wonder?

            At my first parent-teacher conference my kindergarten teacher told my mom she felt I would commit suicide by the time I was 15.  This teacher was also the pastor’s wife at my church and that may be why she felt it acceptable to share her inner thoughts about me with my mom.  My mom maintains that when I entered school I became a different child.  Prior to school I was happy and vivacious.  I loved people and they loved me.  My mom was often afraid someone would steal me, and the fact that I tended to draw people with my antics whether it was during church services, at the grocery store, or the library, only increased her fears of losing me to some villain in the crowd.  She often reminds me of the time when I was two I went up to a homeless man who was standing by the door at the grocery story.  I said, “Hey,” pulling on his dirty jacket to get his attention.  He looked down at me smiling a toothless grin.  “Hey,” I said again.  Then, “Jesus loves you!” 

            Mom remembers having freed herself from the checkout line by that point and had reached me in time to hear me launch into a very loud rendition of “Jesus Loves Me.”  After I had finished the little old man asked me to sing it again, so I obliged.  Mom recalls that by the end of the second round most of the checkout area had stopped to hear my concert.  But I only had eyes for the little old man.  When I had finished, my mom grabbed me before I could perform any more numbers, explaining that we had to get home.  She says she will never forget that moment, not because I had performed so brilliantly, but because the little old man had tears rolling down his face when he looked at me and then at her saying, “Thank you.  I had forgotten that.”

            I guess one might say I was a precocious child, full of life, but that all changed with the coming of kindergarten.  For one thing I liked being at home.  My mom ran a pretty tight ship, though she would laugh to hear me say such a thing, for I think she often felt as though she were in the middle of a hurricane.  There were four of us.  Jayme was four years younger than I.  Then there were the twins, Kati and Kelly.  They were brand spanking new when I went off to school, and I wanted to stay home and listen to them make baby noises and smell their baby smell.  I wanted to watch over them.  They were cool.  And there were two of them. 

            The change in our household was dramatic when the twins came along.  For one thing our house got a lot bigger.  My folks didn’t have a lot of money but my dad had land.  Having grown up on a pretty large farm, he and his brothers had each inherited a portion of land.  In Wyoming, and in farming, land is a big deal.  My dad somehow accrued some wood from a building that was torn down and with it he built us, Jayme, Mom, and me a one-room house with an attic.  There was a little bathroom, a kitchen/dining area, and at the back of the room he built a large double sized bunk for Mom and him to sleep on.  Jayme and I slept under it on a mattress.  The bunk was high off the ground, I remember, because I could stand up under it. 

            Before the twins came, the new addition to the house came.  There is a picture of me in one of my dad’s work shirts.  It covers me all the way to my ankles.  My dad is hammering away on the roof of the new addition and I am just below him, standing in a large windowsill, my hand reaching up to touch the top as if I am holding up the building.  My dad built the addition with logs he peeled and cut by hand. I remember thinking that he could do anything.  I suppose I still feel that way.  When I picture my dad I see him hoisting those logs up, the muscles in his big arms bulging with strain, and I forever see him so very near to invincible.

            The new addition brought much needed space and the twins brought hours of entertainment for Jayme and me.  So the addition of school was, to my mind, superfluous.  I remember only sketchy things from the first three years of my school experience.  Kindergarten created a space between the other kids and me.  I was labeled as strange and eventually the teachers passed on the idea that I was not very intelligent from one to another.  I remember having a birthday party, inviting a bunch of kids, and having no one show up.  I remember sitting at the table in the cafeteria with my Snoopy lunch box, eating all by myself because no one wanted to sit with me.  I remember kids throwing rocks at me at recess, and I remember more than one teacher singling me out in front of the class as being unintelligent, or just unable to keep up. 

I remember the day my grandpa came and got me out of school to drive me home

 so that my mom could tell me my cousin Melody who was a missionary had been killed in a car accident.  My young mind had a hard time understanding she was dead, as I had just seen her the weekend before, and she had promised to bring me some wooden clogs back the next time she went to Holland.  

My parents allowed me to view her in the coffin. I think mainly it was because I was having a hard time believing she was dead.  I remember staring at her in the coffin.  She had suffered head trauma when they hit an antelope, so her hair was fake.  She looked like wax to me, and it struck me as funny that they would put a wax doll in a coffin at our church.  I did not know how to deal with what was happening, and the devastation of her death rocked my extended family.  Melody had been well loved by the community and by the college where our family matriculated from in Idaho.  The feeling of shock was palpable within my family and at church.  I didn’t know what to do with that kind of devastation, and besides, I was in a battle at school.  I didn’t have time to try to sort out something of that magnitude when I was already struggling for survival.

 Every day I went to war, and every afternoon I came home for respite.  My biggest form of escape was not television.  Growing up on a farm leaves other options.  My parents did not allow us to watch much TV.  My biggest source of entertainment was my sister Jayme.  I would get off the bus, trek down the long drive to find her waiting for me.  We would sit down across from each other, and I would make faces at her until she laughed so hard she fell over.  Jayme has an amazing laugh, always has had.  Hearing her laugh was the bright spot in my day.  Making faces at her now doesn’t have quite the same effect it did when she was a year old, but she is still most often the source of relief for me when I take respite from my battles, and her laugh still brightens my day.

In the three years I went to the school in my farming community I was accused of vandalism, lying, and swearing.  I was sent to special educational reading and math programs, because the teacher I had felt I was not proficient enough to keep up with their classes.  My mom was astounded.  She knew something was not right but could not get anyone at the school to listen to her.  One of the men who taught at the school and went to our church informed her in not so many words that maybe she needed to accept the fact I was a classroom problem and not all that bright.  But my mom was a teacher herself, and she had worked with me.  She knew my vocabulary was massive.  She also knew I was no vandal or a liar.  I was the type, and still am, to loudly proclaim whatever I was doing with more of an air of defiance than subtlety of sneakiness.  Lying had never seemed profitable to me as a child.  It was like getting tangled up in a ball of string.  With every lie one gets more bound.  My parents did not know what all was happening at my school.  What they did know is that I had lost my sunny disposition and had become joyless and defeated, even as I got up after every hit and trudged on.  My mom knew they must get me out of the school, and so halfway through second grade they put me into a private school.

It is funny the things one remembers.  I remember my book bag was blue jean material with a red apple on it.  My grandma made it.  I remember taking roast beef sandwiches on homemade bread, while the kids at school had Twinkies and fun processed foods I wanted.  I remember kids making fun of my clothes because my grandma made them and they were not as stylish.  I remember making my mom a Mother’s Day present in class and ruining it.  We had to singe the edges of a poem and put it on a plaque.  Mine got singed a bit too far.  When I showed it to the teacher she said, “Lael, you are the only one who seems to have a problem following directions.  So you can just take it home to your mom the way it is.  Maybe you will learn to listen more carefully.”  The other children snickered and I retreated back into my imagination, the only place of shelter in an environment that was a constant bombardment of persecution.  But I was devastated.  My mom deserved something beautiful for Mother’s Day.  I took the plaque, stuffing it into my little blue jean bag with the apple on it. 

After school I walked down the path between our house and Grandma’s house.  I remember tears blurred my vision as I looked down, my bare feet making soft marks in the sand.  I lived in bare feet when I was a little girl.  I hated going to school and having to wear shoes all day.  I have always been very tactile, and I liked the feel of the earth as it moved between my toes, warmed on the surface by the sun and still cold underneath from the coolness of the spring season.  I made it to the crest of the small hill that gave me full view of my dad’s parent’s home.  Even now I can see it as though standing right in that very spot.

Wyoming has every type of terrain imaginable.  It will always be a part of my heart as much as any person could ever be.  I love that my heritage is there, that my family homesteaded there.  I know so much of who I am grew out of the rich heritage I have.  I grew up around the life of the American cowboy.  I love that about my life.  My Grandma Blanche was the center of our family on my dad’s side.  She was the glue that held our rather large family together and she was my entire world growing up.  She understood me and took me to her heart and into her embrace.  She was my best friend and so it did not seem unusual that day that I took my botched Mother’s Day present to her. 

I walked down the hill into the drive that was home to a plethora of vehicles ranging from my grandma’s car under the carport to tractors, loaders, two dump trucks, and a couple of pickups.  I went through the gate of the white picket fence that surrounded the enormous yard, protected by trees and lilac bushes on all sides.  I patted the dog on the head as I went to the side door and up the stairs to the kitchen/dining room.  There I found my grandma awaiting my arrival.  My mom usually called her to let her know I was on my way over, and she would watch out the large picture window for me. 

I raised a tear-streaked face to her, explaining what had happened at school, as I produced the object of such dismay.  I watched her face harden from worry into anger as I relayed my story.  My grandma was a woman of action, a problem-solver.  I inherited that from her among other things.  I had brought her an interesting piece of wood I had picked up on the way over, and I showed it to her.  She looked at it thoughtfully then began to lay out a plan for a new gift for Mother’s Day. 

We sanded the wood, shellacked it, glued little trinkets and rocks I had picked out around a picture of me, and then finished the project by gluing a peacock feather behind the wood.  To this day my mom still has what Grandma and I made.  She also has the botched plaque I had made her.  Apparently, my grandma had given it to her and explained what had happened.  I looked at that plaque the last time I was home.  The picture on it is one that was taken by that teacher outside the school building.  The little girl in that picture looks older than her years.  She does not much resemble the little girl of a few years before who is laughing and smiling in her pictures.  The little girl on the plaque is poised to make a decision, and that decision would have an effect for years to come.  She chose to close herself off to pain and replace all emotion with anger.