I’ve heard people say they’ve reached the bottom.  How did they recognize it as the bottom?  I always wondered what their point of reference was?

Had I reached bottom?  I mean, how would you know if you’ve reached Ground Zero if you are suspended… dangling… reaching… guessing… hoping… What does it feel like? What is that defining feeling?  Do both feet need to hit or does it count with just one?

So many questions.

Although swimming and being submerged in water is far from my happy place, I enjoy knowing when I hold my breath and go under it is temporary, and if I choose to go all the way to the bottom I can push off and propel myself to the top – to the top and then some.  Ahhh!  What a great feeling of satisfaction knowing by my own strength and fortitude I surfaced.  I DID IT!  I trusted my leg strength and primordial breath-holding skills and came out on top.  Seemingly so simple…did it hundreds of times…a baby could do it.  Well, a young person could anyway.

Change the scenario slightly by adding an uncontrolled external force.

Sometimes this metaphor becomes a real life or death situation.  The unseen, dark, amazingly strong force drives me under the water and holds me there.  I no longer trust the touch point because I know I am fighting for that next breath.  The air inside my lungs is diminishing rapidly and panic has set in.  Panic and pressure like I have never felt before.  My chest aches, my teeth clenched.  I can feel my heartbeat in my temples. 

Where does my faith rest now?  Certainly not in my legs.  And the breath I gulped in while encapsulated with fear is minimal…time is short.  Floundering, but in a flash of lucidity I feel my life hinging on the presence of a life guard to remove the force and rescue me from the water.

Seconds later, but what seemed like an eternity, the force is removed and I am splashing and gasping for breath.  Trying to get my bearings to feel the side of the pool.  Floundering like the land creature I am, I slap my palms on the deck of the pool.  Panting puppy-style, I am grateful to be above water and breathing. I rest my chin on the rough edge of the pool. Strength is gone.

What just happened?  How could it happen to me?  I am a good swimmer!  How did I not see it coming and prepare by taking a deeper breath?

What did I do to create that force against me that was trying to keep me under, keep me down below the surface?  What was the transition from calm and controlled to chaos and utter fear?

WHERE WAS THE LIFE GUARD?

My initial “bottom” was reached in only the second year of the relationship.  I left tire tracks on my own lawn trying to escape as this angry person was blocking my driveway.  I turned sharply, mashed the accelerator, and totally tore up my grass.  I made it to the street and left a layer of rubber there before gaining traction and making for the highway.

Only moments before, I had loaded my four children into my SUV as I was wresting to put my keys in the ignition – to close the door to lock him out.  I was pulling on the door to shut it and he was pulling to keep it open, grabbing me and telling me I couldn’t leave.  He was hurting me… again.

I managed to get the door shut and hit the auto-lock and raced out of the garage.  He ran in front of the vehicle and with both hands on the hood screamed at me, “You aren’t going anywhere!”

I put it into reverse, made my sharp turn to the grass, and escaped.

Finally miles down the road I realized the gems in my vehicle were frightened and silent.  I gathered my breath and emotions and began telling them that daddy needed a time out, and we were going to give him that.  I put their favorite sing-a-long in the disc player and before too long we were singing and talking about the movie we were going to see.

I only thought that was the bottom.

I have blocked out the reason for that particular emotional, verbal, and physical eruptions from my then-husband.  It happened so often and with no or very little precipitating incident of consequence. I began to expect and prepare for his irrational outbursts trying desperately to anticipate and thwart them.  My actions were quite inconsequential once his mind was make up that there was a problem.  If there wasn’t something obvious that I did to provoke him, he would create something in his mind. Furthermore, the size of the problem had no real correlation to the size or intensity of the response.

After months of doing laundry in our new home together, and ruining several white blouses and other light colored clothing, I finally purchased a separate basket for my husband’s clothes.  He worked in a shop with grease, oil and overall grime that was typically and logically undefined.

“Can you please put your clothes in this basket so we can wash yours separately?” He looked at me as if I had asked him to rip out each of his eyelashes individually.

“What?” he asked with that all-familiar tone. “Are my clothes not good enough to be in the same basket as yours?”

He then proceeded to dump all the clothes in the laundry room: clean, dirty grease or no.  He started walking all over them.  Walking became stomping as if he were in a barrel of grapes, and he told me, “There, now they are all the same.”  He left the room and we never talked about laundry again.

As the relationship progressed so did the anger and the irrational outbursts.  I had books knocked out of my hands, shoes thrown at me, I was shoved into walls.  We had holes in the walls and doors that I had to cover up with pictures or mirrors.  The night stand was broken off its hinges in a show of dominance.  And the emotional scars were too numerous and too buried to even begin to describe.  It took me years to realize they were even there.

“The bottom” was no longer my fear.  My fear truly was that there was no bottom.  No touch-point. It was a hole – a bottomless, black hole that was eventually going to engulf and neutralize me into a non-existent state.  I had already reached and had verbal confirmation of irrelevance…UN-existence would surely follow.

My feelings were inconsequential.  My show of emotion was completely insignificant to him.  To him, my tears seemingly evaporated the second they hit my cheeks.

I felt alone.

I felt weak.

I felt defeated.

I felt sad.

But mostly I felt hopeless.  Knowing the bottom was elusive and the dangling feeling would only get worse.  My chest was getting tight.

I didn’t have enough air.

WHERE WAS THE LIFE GUARD?

I remember when I was very young, there was a portion of our basement in my home growing up that was unfinished and very scary to a little girl.  My older siblings seemed to negotiate it just fine, but I had no interest in being brave or satisfying my curiosity by venturing down there.  I was content to leave well-enough alone.

I was the youngest of six by a stretch and my older siblings had afternoons of boredom which were often dotted with “how can we taunt and tease the littlest sister?”  This particular day that will be etched in my memory forever; they lured me into the dark chasm of the basement by telling me they had something to show me.  They had a surprise!  At this age I trusted them and trusted that surprises were good.  As I followed my sisters into the basement I heard a noise behind me.  I turned around and there was a horrible growling sound and very scary creature within inches of my face.  Hands extended on either side of the head.

I began to scream and called out to my big brother to help me.  Several times I called his name.  My sisters were laughing as the “creature” took off a mask to reveal my big brother… the very one I had called upon to save me.

The monster was my hero hidden behind a mask.

I was shattered.  I ran to my bed and buried myself in my covers.  Moments later my brother tried to console me, but it was too late.  The damage was done and the scar would remain on my heart and soul forever.

Seeing the manifestation from normal eyes to the empty soul-less eyes of my husband who I vowed to love, trust and offer my heart, took me back to the basement of my childhood home.  I was crushed.  I had been lied to.  I had been cheated out of what I thought was a nice “surprise” in accepting his proposal of marriage.

I was betrayed and deeply hurt, but unlike when I was a child, I was not able to bury myself in my bed.  I also had no one to console me.  No one knew the depth of the pain or fear.  I was left to my own accord and with the questions that would haunt me for the rest of our marriage and still surface, “What did I do to deserve this?” and, “How can I change to make it go away?”

Please Lord, let this be the bottom today.  Please give me the strength in my legs to push up and resurface.  Please Lord let me breathe again.

 Thank you, Kelly Gibbons, for your friendship and love for the world! You are a Hope Giver, and I am so blessed to do this thing called life with you!

Daisy Rain Martin is an author, speaker, advocate, and educator as well as a founding member of The Flying M-Inklings Writing Group. She lives with her husband, Sean-Martin, in the beautiful state of Idaho and teaches English and Literature during the school year to the best 7^th graders the world over. Daisy spends her summers writing, speaking, researching, creating, gardening, and canning.

Hope Givers: Hope is Here, is the sequel, of sorts, to her comedic, spiritual memoir, Juxtaposed: Finding Sanctuary on the Outside, which was Christopher Matthews #1 top selling book in 2012. She has also written a free e-book for anyone who has or is currently being sexually abused called, If It’s Happened to You.

Please follow her weekly blog, SATURDAISIES, which addresses a plethora of current issues including child advocacy, all things hilarious, and matters of the heart. She would love for you to join the Rainy Dais Community by friending her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.