Are you gonna be Our Mom?

I wanted nothing more in life than to be a mother and have a family. After one failed marriage under my belt (8 years together) and the realization that I would never have children of my own found me in great despair in May 2002. I wound up in the psych ward after learning my first husband was having a baby with another woman and we had only been legally divorced for a month. I was so distraught and jealous and monumentally wounded that the love of my life at that point was having a child with someone else. I had always hoped it was not only just me that couldn’t but maybe, just maybe he couldn’t either and that was ok with him and me, but his mother felt emphatically the opposite.

This hospital stay, I met Luis. Luis was a veteran who was just returned from fighting in Bosnia but was hospitalized because his wife of 9 years, left he and their two young children for good. Giovanni was 5 and Nina was 3. She had not really been apart of their lives much in the role of mother their entire lives, but made it official, she was OUT in May 2002. Same month as my realization that I wouldn’t be a mother. He was a dad left with two children and no mother… PERFECT, RIGHT???!!!! It seemed pretty perfect. It ended up being a challenge, raising someone else’s children, them depending on you for everything, calling me mom, but I loved every moment of it. I can remember Giovanni and his little sweet 5 year old voice asking me on the phone when he was in Texas with Luis’ parents (where they spent 90% of their lives at that point because their mother always shipped them to his parents and Luis was always deployed overseas) if I was going to marry his dad, if I was going to be he and Nina’s step-mom, if he could call me Mom? I asked him; do you want me to? His reply was yes! And from that point on I was Mom, for the next 11 years. I’ve been gone from them since August 2013. My heart aches for the way our lives used to be. The holidays, the birthdays, the milestones, girlscouts, baseball, basketball, drama, hockey, the flu, home sick, home schooling, brushing teeth, getting ready for bed, school, homework, first period, the hug, the kisses, the I love u's, braces, boobs, mustaches, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, being snowed in, first girl friends, sleep overs, snow days, vacations, adventures, our animals, Vinnie, Lola, Lucy and Chloe, HOME. I miss it all soooo terribly. I cannot describe to you the level of loss. It’s immeasurable. But home is a state of mind, right? That’s what I’ve heard. I’ve also heard it’s where the heart is. I believe both to be true. Like Luther Vandross’ A House is Not a Home. JUST EMPTY!

These are some of the casualties of war.

Luis now sits in a 600k dollar home with a $3,000 mortgage, on Workers Compensation alone in the ruins of what was once our refuge. Everything personal is gone, everything sold, all the pictures put away, the wall collages of our life in boxes. He is alone in his world and I alone in mine. I have No relationship with any family or friends from that time in my life. NONE! NOT ONE FUCKING PERSON! I am on Social Security Disability living 2500 miles from “home” where I KNOW NO ONE AND HAVE NO FUCKING SUPPORT OR HELP, I have no one to care for anymore, no one to look after, not even an animal. Trying to stay alive physically and mentally. Trying to get to this place where I can breathe without the disparaging feeling in my chest and throat, where I can’t swallow and I cry sooo hard I feel things pop in my head, like flashes of lightning. Where my crying makes me puke or dry heave depending on weather I have eaten, which hasn’t been that often the last few weeks. Just franticly trying to find the fucking answers. I thought the answer was to disconnect from people. People only hurt, that is what I have convinced myself of, it is my armor; it is my defense and offense. I am better off alone, for the majority of my time, but this isolation from human beings, basic human contact, a hug a kiss a smile being able to look at someone, anyone in the eye and feel loved… haven’t had that in what feels like an eternity. I really don’t trust anyone wholly and completely. I have my reservations about everyone and everything. I am skeptical and doubtful of anyone and their “word”. I have been abandoned and hurt by all I have loved and my soul annihilated, like the target of a 107 rocket. OBLITERATED! Now to OBLITERATE all these feelings and HEAL!

Face to Face with a Suicide Bomber

FACE TO FACE WITH THE SUICIDE BOMBER

I have been trying to write something of substance now for far too long. Focusing on the shit that doesn’t fucking matter, like punctuation, spelling, grammar. I’m aiming to get rid of this shit in my head and off my heart. Right here! Right the fuck NOW!

I am fully aware of the therapeutic process in writing and letting it out and letting it go. I did that with a few chapters of my life, My Dad, My Grammy, My abortion, but now it’s time to make the monumental last 13 years just another chapter, not the ending.

This is where I will utilize the powers within all the dark nights of my soul. Time to channel this overwhelming fucked up energy into something for my soul’s existence and survival instead of its death and burial. I have felt that my soul died, that there was absolutely no way I could continue on with the sheer level of loss I have experienced. I genuinely believed I would die this time, from the sorrow and misery. These last 4 years have been the apex of my existence; the dark nights of my soul have consumed my life so much, that I no longer enjoy things I love. I don’t even do anything I once loved. Photography, Decorating, Thrift Shopping, ReSale, NOTHING! The once happy homemaker, mom simply ceased to exist.

I hold so much fucking resentment and the only person in my cross hairs that I have blamed is Luis, when in fact it is WAR and his AGENCY that I blame. I feel incredibly guilty blaming him, because he is MY HERO who selflessly went to active combat war for no other reason than to serve and protect our country, he wasn’t active duty anymore, he had been a contractor for a decade and now was a government employee for an intelligence agency within the Department of Defense. He DIDN'T HAVE TO GO!

Luigi left a man who was incredibly witty, happy, and funny. A man who could exchange banter so cleverly I often felt in awe at his ability to be so quick, especially because he speaks so many languages; Spanish, English, Italian and German fluently and a few other languages just conversationally from his deployments around the world. But his ability to be so funny and quick was always fun! He used to entertain me so well, I miss Luigi.

The man who came home from FOB Salerno (a.k.a. Rocket City) in Khost Providence Afghanistan was NOT THE MAN WHO LEFT! The man who came home was angry, confused, hyper sensitive to sound (not good when your wife has one of the loudest speaking voices in the world), easily agitated, unable to focus, unable to follow a conversation, unable to remember watching a movie the day before, unable to sleep and when he did, was filled with night terrors. I was no longer secure with the man I married, the man who gave me the opportunity to be a mother, the man who let me take care of he and his children, the man who gave me a home to make. I was in fact afraid of him and miserable in his presence.

I was never told when he came home that he had been involved in two significant blasts while he was deployed at Salerno, He came back in one piece and I thought all was to be thankful for! It only took 3 days before it was PAINFULLY OBVIOUS that HE WAS NOT Luigi anymore. Three days after he got home and on our family “Welcome Home Daddy/Luigi” vacation in Myrtle Beach, SC he learned of his dorm mate getting blown up in the dorm he had just left days before, I think that sealed the deal. Goodbye, Luis Fernando Rivera. Even my ignorant mother-in-law KNEW what was up, her words.. “Oh God! He’s just like his father in Vietnam”!!!! Great, thanks for that insight and guidance MAMI! That was the extent of that woman’s support or acknowledgement about what was going on with her oldest child, my husband. SO FUCK HER! I won’t even waste anymore of my words talking about the BLINDFOLDED RIVERA FAMILY! Not worth my energy.

Luis even looked like someone else. You know how someone who becomes a brain damaged vegetable and you look at a before picture and they look like everyone else, but then you see them after and maybe they drool and their facial structure changes and they may have glassy shark eyes, they just end up looking deformed and visibly disabled. Well, that wasn’t what this was, he looked fine to the unknowing eye, but in my watchful eye I could see he did look different in the eyes. He would froe his brow when I would talk as if I were speaking another language. He would shrug his shoulders as if something loud had gone off in his ear when I was loud or I turned music up. He would flip the fuck out over the smallest things and I MEAN FLIP THE FUCK OUT! The silverware had to be put in the fucking dishwasher a certain way or he would FLIP, Yell, Curse… NOT MY LUIGI, not him at all!

I recognized all of this within the first 2 months. All the work I did on preparing for him to come home and the “Re-integration process” was OUT THE FUCKING WINDOW Because no one and I mean NO MUTHER FUCKING ONE in his Agency once said; Jenna, he was blown up a couple times, but because he was pretty much in one piece he went right the fuck to work and handled business. NO ONE EVER SAID THAT.

The reality is he has a floater in his right eye, he said it sounds like he’s under water in his right ear and his elbow hurts. But the reality is, IT RATTLED THE FUCK OUT OF HIS BRAIN!!!! The Agency NEVER HAD HIM EVALUATED and they knew of his involvement in the blasts when they OCCURRED!

Needless to say it took almost 2 years to get an MRI of his brain which reads; “Significant scarring on the right frontal lobe”. He suffered Traumatic Brain Injury and suffers from survivor’s guilt and Combat Fatigue PTSD. It has taken everything and everyone I loved away and I am just trying to survive almost 4 years later.

I love you Luigi and I am sorry I blamed you.

 

I became the enemy to Luigi. I was ignored by his Agency and I KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG. He used to say to me; “You want me to have PTSD, don’t you”… “You’re the problem”, “You’re out of shape and need to loose weight”, “You CLAIM to be a BUDDHIST but it’s all bullshit”… He attacked me every chance he could in his compassionate combatant way. And I reacted in my HOSTILE, UNDER ENEMY FIRE DEFENSIVE WAY! It just became an UGLY DECAYING MARRIAGE and FAMILY. The kids were suffering, we all were suffering and I couldn’t do ANYTHING ABOUT IT! I was helpless and hopeless and alone. It is the Stuff of Nightmares, it is the slow suffocation of self and soul. Everything fell apart. I wish I could have time lapse photographed my life since November 2010. It is the epitome of the ruins of war. The destroyed buildings (my home), the dead (my family), the wounded and mangled (Luis, Giovanni, Nina and myself)… Just a HORRIFIC SCENE!

It’s what is left when you come face to face with a suicide bomber.