God Does Take Care of You!

The events related herein are not intended to be an indictment of my parents. I am simply relating the facts as I experienced them throughout my childhood. Some facts came to light only as a result of examining medical documentation. Other facts were extracted from written correspondence between my mother and father that came into my possession about 10 years prior to the death of my father.

My mother was 15 and my father was 26 when I was born in January of 1957 at 25 weeks, about 6 months into my mother’s pregnancy. My life seemed at the outset to have not started off very well. Fortunately, God had plans of His own.

The difficulties of my birth were complicated by a congenital heart defect known as a Ventricular Septal Defect (VSD) or hole in the wall between the left and right ventricles of the heart, a malformed pulmonary valve, an Atrial Septal Defect (ASD) or hole between the two upper chambers of the heart, stenosis or narrowing of the Aorta (the main artery leading from the heart to the rest of the body, respiratory irregularities caused by the limited development of the small airways in my lungs and retinopathy of the premature which cost the sight in my right eye and caused severe nearsightedness in my left eye. I thank God every day He didn’t take a notion to scramble some brains while He was at it. 

I came in to the world at 2 lbs, 2oz. and 11 ½ inches long. Due to reactions to the formula they were feeding me, my weight decreased to 1 lb, 3 oz. The doctors told my parents there was nothing they could do to save me. But God had a purpose and He intervened, and I struggled back and after three and a half months I was able to leave the hospital and go home. 

I came to learn, much later in life, that this initial three month period in the hospital would affect my future relationships for many years to come. Psychologists and other mental health professionals now know the effects of long term, early mother – infant separation and the impact it has in the creation of bonds with other human beings. Since I was unable to bond with my mother, this has had a profound effect on my personal relationships with others in my life, to this day.

I was also unfortunate enough to have been born to parents1 that were abusive not only to each other, but to myself and my siblings as well. According to the birth records I have been able to obtain from the hospital where I was born, I also suffered from broken legs, apparently caused by a beating received by my mother at the hands of my father, in order to effect an abortion, six months into her pregnancy with me.

My first 3 years of life were punctuated by several hospitalizations for pneumonia and other respiratory problems, constant doctor visits, countless trips to the heart clinic and the eye doctor, bouts of jaundice, and other sicknesses. I vividly recall taking little brown football-shaped pills that would supposedly make me ‘as strong as Superman’. 

All of this ‘inconvenience’, experienced by my mother, served to fuel the years of physical and mental abuse that was to come. The preconceived notions that my mother had regarding motherhood were shattered forever with the birth of her first child. A child, neither she nor my father really ever wanted because it spoiled their ‘idyllic’ relationship. 

Apparently, my father was trying to create the ‘ultimate wife’ by running away to Michigan and marrying my mother when she was 14 years old, legal age there at the time. This was in reaction to his first failed marriage and the disappointment it caused him. This may have been his first ‘flirtation’ with a minor, but it was certainly not his last. I was to find these facts out later in letters that were written between them prior to my father’s death in 1992.

The physical abuse my father perpetrated upon my mother continued throughout my early childhood and, although he only spanked me on one occasion that I can recall when I was 4 years old, I vividly recall the many instances of abuse I witnessed him deliver to my mother. 

At night I would hear my mother calling for me to come and help her fight my father off from beating on her. When I was about 4 years old my father decided to put a bolt lock on the bedroom doors so I or my brother and sister could not come out and see what was going on. Each night we were locked in our rooms. 

My father worked second shift for a printing company as a paper cutting machine operator and would sleep most of the day and then go to work around 4 PM. When he came home for his lunch at 7:30 or 8 o’clock, we would be put to bed and the bedroom door would be locked. It would not matter if we had to go to the bathroom later in the night. We were instructed that we would have to wait until morning. 

My father would return home around midnight, and my mother’s cries for help and her screaming would awaken me, but I was unable to leave my bedroom. I didn’t know at the time but later on learned that he was trying to force my mother into bizarre sexual practices in which she didn’t want to participate and certainly didn’t understand at that stage in her life. When he was finished with her, he would leave again to go back out to work a second job cleaning coin-op laundry businesses or bowling alleys. He would then come home early in the morning around 6:00 AM and go to bed.

My elementary school years were incredibly difficult for me and by the time I entered the second grade I had already been a subject of psychological counseling for behavioral problems ultimately diagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Unfortunately, this diagnosis did not come until I was 40 years old. 

The psychologist, who was appropriately named Dr. Nutter, told my parents and the school officials that I had an ‘authority complex’ and other behavioral problems evidenced by outbursts in class and the almost daily episodes of wetting or soiling my pants prior to my leaving school for home near the end of the school day throughout the 1st grade. These episodes also resulted in incredibly cruel teasing by the other children in the school. He also told them I had an above average IQ and that I should be placed in some accelerated subjects in order to keep me from being bored. 

A major factor in the cause of my behavioral problems was my fear of returning home each day due to the abuse that was always present there, either directed at me by my mother or by my father directed at my mother. I loved going to school because it had become a haven for me against the abuse I would experience at home. I hated to leave it every day.

Each day I would come home having gone to the bathroom in my pants, my mother would beat me, not merely a spanking, as it was usually administered with an object other than her hand. If she did happen to hit me with her hand, she would invariably switch to using something else, such as her shoe or slipper, because she would break the blood vessels in her hand. She would get even angrier because it caused her pain which she felt I should be feeling instead of her. On more than one occasion she made me eat the fecal matter in my underwear. 

Apparently, her idea of parenting was closely related to that of housebreaking a dog that by today’s standards would also be considered cruelty to animals. Both of my sisters and one of my brothers wet the bed for many years up until they were in their early teens and I am sure this was due, in no small part, to the abuse that was inflicted upon all of us.

The only ‘saving grace’ to my situation was that I was a ‘gifted’ child and learned how to read very quickly and fell in love with books. They ultimately became my ‘escape vehicle’ from the constant abuse. I became a voracious reader and I would hide in my room and read for hours on end. It didn’t matter what the subject was, just as long as I could stay ‘hidden’ in the world that beckoned me from the printed page. It was a world that was safe and couldn’t inflict pain. I was to learn much later in life the falsehood of that assumption.

Due to the physical frailties as a result of my premature birth and the total lack of vision of my right eye and the severe nearsightedness in my left eye, I was restricted by my parents and school officials from participating in any kinds of outdoor or sports activities. This severely limited my ability to learn how to deal with social relationships and situations. For physical education I was told that I could not participate and would have to sit in the gym teacher’s office or on the occasion when I was allowed to join in I was always the last person chosen for the team. 

These situations only served to add fuel to the fire of ridicule from my classmates and deepen the notion that I was somehow flawed and not a worthwhile person. All of this served to drive me further towards the unattainable ‘perfection’ in my schoolwork that I erroneously believed would ensure acceptance from my parents and others. 

Unfortunately, although I was able to consistently be a very good student excelling in many subjects, I was never able to perform well enough to please my mother. 

One aspect of my schoolwork that regularly caused extreme frustration and routinely brought out the anger of my mother, which usually resulted in a beating, was my penmanship. 

In the years when I attended elementary school a student was graded on their penmanship and it always kept me from being on the ‘honor roll’. So I would take home a report card with all A’s or B’s and a C in penmanship and received the obligatory beating for my failure to execute letters properly. 

It never occurred to her that some help from her at home might be useful. In her mind it was the job of the school to teach me how to write. She was the product of a Catholic school and her experience there was acutely unpleasant because she was left-handed. She used to expound upon the virtues of a parochial education and how much I would benefit from it were I to have received the swatting she had endured, delivered dutifully by the Nuns. She was left-handed, but by God she learned to write right-handed and I would too. And since we were not enrolled in Catholic school, it was her place to administer the punishment for failure to learn to write. “You are going to learn to write and get on the honor roll if it kills you.” I heard her say on more than one occasion. 

I never made the honor roll until I was in my freshman year of high school where they didn’t grade you on penmanship. To this day, my penmanship is terrible and most of the time I simply type everything. The only time I actually write anything, I print unless it is my signature and that is impossible to decipher.

These years were incredibly tumultuous and as a result of family issues and the periodic separation of my parents, my 2 brothers, 2 sisters and I were bounced around from city to city and state to state from relative to relative. This constant round-robin between extended family members resulted in an incredible disruption in my education but I did the best I could and sometimes I was successful. I usually spent time with an aunt and uncle in New Hampshire or with my maternal grandparents.

During one of the periods I was home, together with all of the family, my father owned an older car, a 1959 Nash Ambassador. Now when the car was made it didn’t have seat belts and in the mid-60’s it was all the rage that vehicles came from the factory with seat belts. My father, not to be outdone, decided to put seat belts in the Nash. He successfully installed two seat belts for the front seat. 

On the first day of school for in 1965 he decided to take my sister Julie and I to school. My sister and I argued over who was going to wear the seat belt on the passenger side of the front seat and my father said to me “You wouldn’t want your pretty little sister to get hurt if we had an accident, would you? Why don’t you share the seat belt with her?” Well, I decided to be stubborn and not share the seat belt, but to let her have the whole thing. I was not about to share it with her! So I sat in the middle portion of the front seat without the seat belt. 

About 10 minutes later I found myself outstretched on the hood of the Nash, fully conscious, with my front teeth smashed up through my upper jawbone, having impacted the windshield and gone completely through. The only thing that kept me from continuing on to hit the tow truck that my father had rear-ended was my feet becoming entangled with the top of the steering wheel. The hand of God had protected me once again.

I remember everything that happened that day. The ride to the hospital in the police car with me laying on my father’s lap bleeding all over his white shirt and a pink towel that someone had brought over from the Laundromat, in front of which, the accident had occurred. By the time we arrived at the hospital my father’s shirt was blood from his neck to his waist. 

Although my father’s health insurance from his employer would have covered all of the dental reconstruction and other work that would have been necessary to correct what had happened, my father just never got around to doing the paperwork or taking the necessary steps to make things right. Later, before his death, he told me this was one of the things he had regretted most in life.

Months later when my teeth finally came back down they were all broken and jagged. This physical aspect of my appearance would become yet another reason for my mother and my classmates to ridicule me throughout the years. 

For nearly every school picture that was taken after that, I would receive a beating for smiling in the picture. My mother would tell me not to smile for school pictures to hide my broken teeth and the photographer and the teachers would tell me to smile for the picture, and tell me that my teeth didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to them, but it surely mattered to me when I got home with the envelope containing the school pictures a few weeks later.

From the time I was about 6 years old my parents started attending services at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the urging of one of my uncles. It was, I later learned, an attempt to help my parents straighten out their lives by applying ‘God’ to their problems. Both of my parents had been raised Catholic however, neither of them ever practiced Catholicism while I was growing up. During the times when my parents didn’t “get along” we were ‘farmed out’ to two of our uncles who were also involved in Jehovah’s Witnesses. At this point in my life, this was the only indoctrination to ‘religion’ that I had ever received.

As circumstances of life would have it, my mother and father finally divorced when I was 8 years of age and my father told my mother that as long as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was in business we would not starve to death. He had decided it was time to leave the state, and so he moved to Arizona in the spring of 1966, thus ending, in his mind, the responsibility for supporting and raising his children. This turn of events meant we immediately went into the Aid to Dependent Children and Families program administered by the state welfare department.

From the time I was 8 until I was 16 I was subjected to physical, emotional and mental abuse almost daily, some of which would be considered to be absolute torture by today’s standards. There were many instances of school officials contacting my mother and questioning her abilities as a parent regarding bruises or the nearly always present ‘fat lip’ I had received as a result of her parental ministrations. Times being what they were in the 60’s and early 70’s, child abuse was seemingly not investigated or prosecuted as vociferously as it is today. On several occasions school officials sent notes home with my sister, just to make sure that my mother received them as they thought I might not present them to her. As soon as I got home, after my mother had received the notes, I was once again subjected to her wrath for the embarrassment she felt regarding the issues addressed by the communication from school officials.

I was constantly the object of her ire because she had given birth to me when she was 15 years old and she blamed me for destroying her childhood and robbing her of all the ‘normal’ experiences of a teenage girl. She made it clear to me on many occasions that I had ruined her life by being born. Her rationale was that if she had never had gotten pregnant with me she would have not had to marry my father and she would have been saved from the experience of having had 6 children by the time she was 22 years of age. (She ultimately had a total of 9 children by the time she was 30 years old.) Unfortunately, for me, she also had named me after my father, to whom she had attributed all of her misfortunes. My given name was a constant reminder to her of all the pain and anguish he had inflicted upon her. And she made sure I knew it every chance she got.

At the time, due to my being named after my father, all of the anger my mother felt toward him was directed almost entirely at me. This resulted in nearly daily occasions of physical abuse, at least one requiring trips to the hospital emergency room for a broken ear drum (which affects me to this day) from a smack upside the head, as well as constant mental and emotional abuse. 

After a while, my mother decided it would be best to ship me off to live with my father. She told him I was too much of a hassle to handle and she didn’t want to deal with it any more. He wrote in his reply that if she was having a problem with me that the best thing to do would be to place me in an orphanage or a home for wayward boys. I ended up getting shipped off to my grandparents again and after a period of time, when my mother saw that I was not giving my grandparents any ‘trouble’ she would tell them she wanted me there at home with her again and the cycle would start all over again. 

It was during this time that she met my stepfather, the meanest, cruelest man I have ever known or would ever encounter in my entire life. My mother could not hold a candle to him.

Once I was home again and my mother would start inflicting her brand of motherhood upon me, naturally my behavior changed to reflect her actions. My stepfather’s reaction was to inflict even more pain and suffering on me in an attempt to ‘straighten me out’. When a ‘spanking’ would not work (I was used to those by now) he would develop bizarre physical punishments, which could certainly be considered forms of torture, in order to discipline me and my siblings. 

My siblings and I spent countless hours kneeling on hardwood or linoleum floors, sometimes with a broomstick under my knees, or on uncooked rice placed under them with our arms outstretched like a pair of wings. To this day I can still kneel on the floor for long periods of time and ignore the discomfort of the position. If you would like to get an idea of what this was like, try it for five minutes. Then multiply it by several hours a day.

There were times when I was punished for days at a time. Every day after school I would have to come home and immediately assume this kneeling position until it was time for dinner. After dinner was finished I would have to resume the kneeling until bedtime. 

After a while, the kneeling didn’t bother me at all. He then devised other, more ‘impossible’ things for me to do. The one I disliked the most was where I had to stand exactly one foot away facing the inner part of the door jamb and lean forward, without bending at the waist, with my hands clasped behind my back until my nose just touched the frame of the door. If I happened to lean too far and rest my forehead against the door frame or if I lost my balance and fell, another hour was added to my punishment. 

Through all of this physical torture I vowed to hate my stepfather for the rest of my life and when he suffered a heart attack at age 33, I hoped with all my heart that he would die. Unfortunately, for me, he didn’t. Before I turned 16 he and my mother separated and ultimately divorced.

When I turned 12 years old, my stepfather, who was also raised Catholic, decided that it was time that I and my siblings start participating in Catholicism. Since I was never baptized and my parents had never pursued any sort of religious instruction when I was younger, he made special arrangements with the church for me and my brother and sister to attend special classes at one of the convents in town. Every day after school we had to walk to the convent where the nuns would teach us about Catholicism so we could be baptized and make our First Communion. This was the first real inkling that I ever had that there was a higher being who was responsible for our creation.

When I was in the 8th grade I became eligible for a special program for underprivileged students who showed strong scholastic promise in order to qualify for special college scholarships. This program was called “Upward Bound”. It consisted of spending a period of several weeks, during the summer, away from home in an atmosphere of serious academic study in some more advanced level subjects. Upward Bound also provided an introductory experience as to what college life would be like away from home. 

I spent the summer between the 8th grade and my freshman year in high school, and the following summer, involved in the program which was headquartered at Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts. Groton School is one of the leading private college preparatory schools in the United States. Things were at least starting to look promising from an educational standpoint for me. Unfortunately, fate would once again intervene. 

By the time I entered my freshman year of high school I had attended more than 30 schools in at least a dozen different school systems. The local high school where I grew up most of my life was riddled with drugs in the early 70’s and my mother decided that it would not be good for me or my sister to attend school there so we were sent to live, once again, with my maternal grandparents. 

The change in venue turned out to be very difficult for me and my grades plummeted. At the Christmas break my sister decided she didn’t want to stay with my grandparents any longer so my mother said ‘If one of you comes home, you both have to come home’. This change actually made things better for me for the second half of the year and I was able to bring my grades up and move forward into my junior year. 

As a result of my premature birth, I also seemed to always be the smallest child in class, which led to constant ridicule and abuse at the hands of my classmates. I was unable to defend myself against these attacks and the negative impact on my self-esteem was only deepened by these events. All of these circumstances would have drastic impact on my adult life. 

The only negatively impacting occurrences that stand out in my mind, apart from the physical and mental abuse at home to which I had by now become accustomed, were the continued events of ridicule and taunting by my classmates. I endured daily beatings by one classmate in particular which ultimately earned him a rather lengthy period of probation, thanks to the Lowell District Court of Middlesex County.

In my junior year of high school I was subjected to one of these incidents of ridicule and in a very explosive and wholly unexpected burst of self-preservation, I struck back and punched my antagonist in the mouth at the end of a U. S. History class one morning just prior to lunch. It just so happened that the person who was taunting me by poking me in the back of the neck with a very sharp pencil was a girl (I am unsure to this day as to what her actual motives were). Due to the fact that I had a ring of keys in my hand, in preparation to visit my locker and deposit my books prior to going to lunch, the girl lost six teeth. As a result of my actions and the effects of my retaliation, I was expelled from school for 10 days just prior to my 16th birthday. 

This expulsion turned out to be the ‘last straw’ for my mother, who along with my stepfather had developed an alcohol abuse problem, and she decided the best thing to do in her situation would be to kill me. 

Since it was the winter in Massachusetts, she deemed it appropriate that she crash the car with me in the passenger side into a utility pole in an effort to kill me. Her question to me at the time just prior to the crash was “Are you afraid to die?”

The next thing I knew, I was jolted by the impact of the car and I could hear my mother crying (she was drunk of course). Fortunately, I was wearing my seat belt this time and my mother was not. She was bruised up pretty good from the steering wheel but since most of the impact had been directed at my side of the car most of the damage was to the passenger side of the vehicle. Once again, God had protected me.

This event turned out to be pivotal in my life. It was at that moment that I knew I had to get away from her and the rest of the family otherwise my days would be numbered. I truly believed I would not live to see 21. I subsequently made arrangements to go and live with my aunt and uncle in New Hampshire again and work for them in their bakery since I had quit school a few days after I turned 16. 

I thank God every day for my Uncle Al and Aunt Pauline. They always took the time to make sure I knew what was right and wrong and Uncle Al always told me that if I was going to do something for someone, especially for work, that I had to be sure to do it to the best of my ability because the person was paying me for my best work. But most importantly, they both took the time, whenever I was living with them, throughout the many times in my life, to just love me the way I was, just as they did with their own children. Even after I set the seat of the neighbor’s tractor on fire while playing with some matches with my cousins.

During the time I spent working for my aunt and uncle, my mother tried to commit suicide. It was the first of many attempts and it was a miserable failure, which only served to cripple the use of her thumbs due to the tendons she severed in the attempt. When one of my sisters called me to let me know what had happened the only thing I could do was laugh. I laughed so hard I had an asthma attack and I was not sorry in the least.

I spent several months working with my uncle and then my father returned from Arizona because his mother was dying. At that point I decided it would be better to go and live with him. So for the next year I lived with my father in a small 17 x 8 foot travel trailer in the middle of the desert about 40 miles outside of Phoenix in a small town known as Circle City. When the next school year started, I enrolled to finish high school in Wickenburg, about 15 miles away. Unfortunately, this was not in the cards. 

Unbeknownst to me, my father suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The stresses of my being there in Arizona with him pushed him deep into depression and then into some very extreme mania. At 17 years old, I was not able to understand what was happening to him, nor was I legally able to get him the help that he desperately needed. 

During the time I stayed with my father, he ‘preached’ his religion to me. This ‘religion’ was a mixture of Catholicism and Jehovah’s Witness theology and in his mind was the salvation of everyone that ever heard it. Of course all of the texts he used were published by The Watchtower Society. He nearly drove me crazy with it.

Some people in the trailer park where we lived saw my plight, as well as the very bizarre and dangerous behavior my father was exhibiting and they decided the best thing for me was to go back to Massachusetts to relatives. So, back to New England I went.

I was about a month and a half away from my 18th birthday when I got back to Massachusetts. I immediately enrolled in the high school to continue my school year. While I was attending school, I was staying, once again, with my mother. During this time, I was to learn, quite by accident, that my youngest brother, who was 10 years old at the time, was being molested by a man who was supposedly the little league baseball coach.

When I found out about what was going on with my brother, I immediately told my mother about the sexual abuse to which my little brother was being subjected, in some instances right in my brother’s own bedroom, when this degenerate would come to visit. 

My mother’s reaction to these accusations was one of complete denial. It was her belief that something like that could never go on under her roof with my little brother. Even after he told her what had been going on she would not believe that it happened. After all, she had met the guy several times and she knew he was a nice guy. Since she had decided that it simply had not happened, she didn’t do anything about the situation. 

Ultimately, I ended up taking my little brother down to the courthouse and after recounting his story to the clerk, filed a complaint against the guy for child molestation. He was arrested and subsequently, during the investigation, we learned that he was molesting at least a dozen little boys, all of them between the ages of 6 and 10 years old. We also found out that he was wanted in California for rape. There were more than 20 charges filed against him for sodomy and other lascivious acts against minors. He was released on bail and promptly disappeared from the area and was never apprehended. My little brother continues to suffer from the emotional trauma caused by this incident.

As you can imagine, the situation was not without friction between my mother and I. We had many arguments about her inaction and her lack of ability as a parent. Several of these arguments escalated in to physical ‘altercations’ that she won by brute force, but there was one time that I finally stood up for myself and hit her back. This action was a big mistake. She grabbed me by the throat and picked me up off of my feet and held me up against the bathroom door (my mother was about 5’8” and about 180 lbs, I was 5 feet and about 100 lbs.) and strangled me until I passed out. I never raised my hand to defend myself against her again.

A couple of weeks later, I turned 18. On my 18th birthday she told me it was time to move out. I happened to be sick with the flu at the time and asked if I could stay a couple of more days until I felt a little better and was able to find a place to stay. Thankfully, she granted that particular request.

A couple of days later, I moved into an apartment that some acquaintances of mine were renting for about 3 weeks. I went down to the local unemployment office and was told that what I should do was to stay in school and finish my education. They suggested that I go to the State Welfare office and see if there was any way I could get assistance to stay in school. The one thing I knew was that I had to stay away from the influences that other teens were facing at that time. Drugs were rampant in the neighborhood and the peer pressure was tremendous. But once again, God was protecting me.

I went to the Welfare office and they were able to put me on a program that would allow me to stay in school. They paid me $55.00 every two weeks and I had to stay in school. The only problem was I could not live with my friends in their apartment. I had to find my own place to stay. So, armed with this pittance, I was able to secure a room in a huge rooming house where mostly old drunks and derelicts lived. I was petrified that one of these guys would fall asleep with a cigarette and burn the whole place down. But, it kept me going to school and that was the key objective.

About this time I was feeling pretty badly about myself and my life up to this point. Here I was, 18 years old and living in this decrepit rooming house with a bunch of strangers and virtually no friends in the world. It was, to say the least, a pretty miserable existence.

The rooming house was nothing more than a bunch of small rooms about 15 x 12 with a bed, a small sink and a bare light bulb in a socket attached to the ceiling. There was also a rather large closet, large considering the size of the room about 6 x 8. Everyone on the floor shared a bathroom down the hallway with a shower.

The rent for the room was $44.00 for every two weeks. This left me $11.00 to eat between each check I received from the state. I decided that if I spent a dollar a day that I could eat throughout this period of time and that if I bought something to eat that I could somehow separate into portions I could eat a couple of times a day. 

Since the rooming house had no cooking facilities and didn’t allow the use of a hotplate in the rooms, I had to be sure to purchase something that I didn’t have to cook and that also would not spoil. 

At that time of my life I didn’t have any real skills with regard to home economics apart from doing dishes, making my bed and taking out the trash, the most logical solution for me at the time, after weighing all of my options, was to buy a coffee cake that came in a small cardboard box and was made in the shape of a ring. 

I reasoned that if I cut the ring into quarters I could have something to eat for breakfast, eat lunch at school and then have something for dinner later on. The fourth piece would be used on the following day since there was a period of 4 days in the two week period between checks from the state where I would not be able to spend any money to get something to eat. I had to make sure I could stretch things out. There were a few times when my lack of willpower got the better of me and I ate the whole thing in one day which resulted in my learning about being hungry the next day. It was a lesson that stuck with me.

After living like this for a little more than a month or so you can imagine that I was pretty demoralized. One of these dreary, cold and drizzly late winter days in New England I set out to walk to the store where I purchased my daily coffee cake. I didn’t realize, until my arrival at the store, that I had forgotten it was closed that day each week. The discovery that I had walked several blocks in the rain for nothing did nothing but darken my mood even more than the rain had done. I made the decision at that point to end my misery. 

I walked down the street towards the bridge that spanned the river that ran through the center of town. Since I never learned how to swim I figured the best thing to do would be to jump off the bridge into the river below and drown.

When I arrived at the bridge, I walked to about the middle of the span. There were actually two parallel sections of the river at that point in the stream. The structures of the bridge were on top of a dam that split the river into two different configurations. On one side, the flow of the river was diverted by the dam to feed the network of canals that ran through the downtown area used to generate power for the mill buildings that were built there. The other side was where the dam controlled the flow of the river continuing downstream and was substantially shallower than the canal side. I had a decision to make, do I jump off the bridge and land on the rocks 50 feet below or do I jump off the bridge where the canal was 30 feet deep and let the water flood my lungs.

As I was contemplating this decision, I swung my legs over the top railing of the bridge and looked down into the river below. I was afraid of dying and the thought of drowning was incredibly fearful, especially since I had a great fear of water from a ‘swimming lesson’ when my father had tried to teach me to swim at the age of 4 or 5. I stared at the river and happened to see a fish swimming in the shallow portion of the river. The fish was trying to get to the fish ladder to get to the other side of the dam. 

As I was sitting there on the bridge railing several cars stopped on the bridge and people had gotten out of them and started trying to talk with me telling me to not jump off. I could barely hear them in the background as I contemplated suicide. “What would it matter to the world if I were dead?” I asked myself. I didn’t have any friends. I wasn’t allowed to see my brothers and sisters following my exile from the family. Who would care? Once again the fish caught my eye.

“Look at this fish” I thought to myself, “He doesn’t have a care in the world. All he has to do all day is swim around and eat. God takes care of him, why doesn’t God take care of me?” I just sat and stared at the fish. 

At this point the bridge was now pretty well jammed up with traffic due to the cars that had stopped. I started hearing horns honking and more people where there trying to talk me out of jumping off. Since I was sitting on the top railing of the bridge with both legs hanging off on the side overlooking death, nobody dared approach me for fear of what my reaction might be. I was transfixed by the fish. I could not see anything else. The thoughts of death, the fear of the water, everything around me paled as I focused on the fish swimming in the river. “God, please help me too?” I thought to myself.

As soon as I had finished asking God for help, I realized what was going on around me. I turned to look at all of the traffic on the bridge and the people that were trying to talk to me. I waved them off and swung my legs back over the railing of the bridge and started walking home again. The people crowded around me, demanding to know what was wrong. I just pushed through them roughly and headed back up the hill toward the rooming house. I would give God one more chance to prove that he cared about me as much as he cared about the fish in the river.

As I approached the rooming house about 15 minutes later, walking in the rain, I noticed a car parked in front of the doorway with a flat tire. As I got closer I noticed two men in the doorway huddled against the rain. It turned out that the men had borrowed the car from someone and they only had the key to the ignition and could not access the spare tire in the trunk of the car. 

I walked up to the door to go inside and one of the men spoke to me. I looked up and recognized him as someone that I had met during a visit I had made to the unemployment office a few days prior where we had spent some time shooting dice on the desk while waiting to get through the bureaucracy to speak with someone about a part time job. 

“Hey!” he said. “I want you to meet someone.” I looked at the other man who immediately presented his hand for me to shake. I shook his hand and before he even gave me his name he said to me, “If you died today, do you know where you would spend eternity?” I said “No”. He said “Would you like to know?” I said “Anyone would like to know that wouldn’t they?” He said “Can I show you something in the Bible that will tell you?”

Immediately my mind went back to all of the preaching my father had done to me the previous year spent in Arizona with him. I wanted to just say no to this stranger, who still had not given me his name, but for some strange reason I felt it was important to hear him through so I said “Yes”. 

He then told me his name and he turned out to be a pastor of a new church that had just been started in town. About that time a small van had pulled up across the street and he said, “Let’s go inside the van and we can get out of the rain.” There was a pretty, dark-haired woman who turned out to be the pastor’s wife. She had brought the key to the trunk so they could change the tire.

The pastor and I went into the van and he proceeded to show me verses in the Bible that explained the process of salvation and what I must do to be ensured of a place in heaven after my death. We talked about them for about 45 minutes or so and then I prayed and accepted the Lord into my life and became a ‘born again’ Christian. This turned out to be a pivotal moment in my life that has since carried me through many hardships. It was then that I came to realize the God had been protecting me through all of the hardships I had experienced throughout my life and He protects me still today.

I don’t know what purpose God has for me in this life, I only pray that in some small way I will have made a difference in the life of someone else by my witness and my testimony of God’s love for me.

It has been more than a decade since I’ve spoken with my mother… by her choice. I’ve long since forgiven her for the abuse I experienced at her hands. I continue to pray for my mother and my six brothers and sisters that they might come to have a saving knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I have had many more hardships since the day I became a Christian. Through many of them, God has shown me great evidence of his love and protection. He has also used them to instruct and guide me in His will. God has been faithful to me, even more so when my own faith has wavered. I know that I am saved by His grace, nurtured by His love and have been protected by His wisdom for many years. I give Jesus Christ all of the glory for my life, because without his love I would have never been.

Yours, in Christ,

Ben E. Brady