Trapped In Between. Marilyn Elaine Lundberg Lundberg
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perfect in all areas of my life. I had low self-esteem and felt guilty and shame for some odd reason. I lacked joy, except in sports, and had a need to please people. On top of all those problems, I lacked most of my early memories, and a big black bear prowled around in my dreams every night, successfully killing me. Did the other kids feel like me? I doubted it.
On a Saturday morning, during summer break from sixth grade, I woke up with a start and felt very uncomfortable and sick to my stomach, for some reason.
I looked out my bedroom window towards the garage and saw my dad working out there. Both garage doors were wide open. I had a very ugly feeling in the pit of my stomach. I got dressed and went outside. I peeked in the garage and behind the service door was where I kept Tiger’s litter box. It was gone! Her toys were gone! She was gone!
I said, “Where’s Tiger?” He said, “I got rid of her because I was tired of dealing with the mess of the litter box.” That was a very strange thing for him to say, because he had used the dirt in her kitty box to throw in his garden, and he had the biggest most beautiful flowers you ever saw. In fact, he used to brag to people that cat poop is the best flower fertilizer in the world.
I ran in the house and cried and cried and cried. He had no idea how much that kitty meant to me. She was my rock! She never hurt me, and she was always there for me. Now she was gone. Did he just dump her somewhere? Did he take her to a shelter that kills cats? What did he do to her? I was so angry at Dad. The cat was never mentioned again in our family. I no longer had a little kitty sister.
Chapter Three – THE DARKNESS SETTLES IN
Summertime, after the sixth grade was difficult for me, because I was grief-stricken from the loss of my kitty. She had filled a huge void in my life and I felt hollow without her. There was something so special about that little kitty that had wandered into my yard. She seemed to love me unconditionally; I didn’t have to do anything for her love. She was never in a bad mood or too tired to play. Even though garage doors were intentionally left open, she never ran away from me. On my bad days, she was the one who comforted me. If the other kids teased me, she lifted my spirits. She gave me joy and now she was discarded.
I never let my dad know how much he hurt me. He never saw one of my tears, I kept them all inside, hidden away from his eyes.
I also had a little baby squirrel that I had nursed back to health during the time I had Tiger. He had fallen out of his nest and I scooped him up and protected him from other critters in his little shoebox home. He would eat tiny peanut butter sandwiches from my hand.
As he grew up he would look for me to sit on the yellow metal lawn chair in the backyard. He would come a running and jump into my lap. He was sweet and fun, but he wasn’t my soul mate, like Tiger kitty.
The rest of the summer my poor belly was crammed full of fluttering butterflies. With fall approaching, those butterflies changed into pain with nausea, and my poor mind was spinning with worrisome thoughts about school being right around the corner again. I wanted the calendar to stop. I couldn’t bear to think of another year trapped in a brick building.
My new school, Jordan Junior High was a one mile walk from my home, compared to my elementary school which had been a hop skip and a jump across the street. Instead of having one teacher, I would now have six teachers, one for every subject. I tormented myself with worrying about the what if’s. What if the teachers are like my fifth grade teacher? What if they want me to give speeches? What if I can’t make new friends and the kids don’t like me, and continue to tease me about my teeth and blushing. My mind was worried about all facets of school.
Something very strange happened that summer, I began to see less and less of my best friend, my sidekick who had always played with me in the schoolyard. She and her sister sort of slowly disappeared from my life, she had so many friends, and I just had her. She not only didn’t come knocking at my door, but if she saw me she turned the other way. I was devastated in the loss of my buddy and fearful of having to walk to my new school alone. This was such a big deal for me, and I never dared to ask my best friend what had happened.
This became a new worry that consumed me. I began to daily obsess about this loss of my friend, and what I had done to her. How was I going to solve this dilemma? I remember sitting in the living room and looking out the window to the schoolyard, that had once brought me all my contentment. That’s what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket, and you only have one friend. When she was gone there was no backup. Going to a new school, walking twelve blocks without a friend by my side was just too much to deal with. This uncertainty controlled me that summer, I felt so alone. No kitty and now the loss of my ally.
This was the summer that my nervousness, sadness and anxiety went to a much deeper level. I believe depression began in the fifth grade with the oral book reports, but took a nose dive when my mind began to calculate all the unknown fears in going to the new junior high school, alone.
The dread escalated each passing day. My mind was constantly trying to calculate a way that I didn’t have to go to school, but I was trapped, there was no way out of it, and each day that passed was a day closer to the first day of school.
Those commercials would come on the television about buying school supplies, and I wanted to vomit. I never told anyone about my thoughts or the terror that I felt. It wouldn’t have helped to tell my parents, they both worked and there wasn’t any such thing as homeschooling in those days.
If only I would have had some control; if I could have picked my teachers, or said no to speeches, it would have helped, but once again, I had no dominion in those areas. My mind was always on overdrive trying to figure out how to stop the madness. I needed to be able to grab onto something, or someone that could help me, but I had no one.
I no longer had my little soft fur ball to talk to, and comfort me, I was totally alone. All I knew was that I couldn’t walk those twelve blocks by myself.
The darkness was now so close to me I could almost touch it. I had felt it slowly creeping towards me since the beginning of fifth grade, but now it was here and rubbing against me on all sides.
I am now going to write about my thoughts of suicide. I was unsure for quite awhile if I wanted to reveal this portion of my life. Suicide is so wrong, and I would never want to encourage someone else to think the way I was thinking, but I am going to tell it like it happened, and not sugar coat it. If you are having thoughts of suicide, please seek help, it is never an option for you.
One day the lightlessness totally engulfed me, and whispered into my ear, “Just give up, forget about life, it’s not worth it, go ahead and commit suicide.” I was shocked when I heard this voice in my ear; that thought had never ever entered my mind before. It was an idea that made me sick to my stomach, but on the other hand it did seem to be a possible way out of my dilemma. It was extremely drastic, but a viable solution. There was almost a peace that came over me when I thought about the suicide event. No more jokes about my teeth, no more blushing, no more summersaults, no more oral book reports, no more wondering who I would walk to school with, no more listening to Mom talk to her imaginary friends, and no more Dad showing me his private parts.
In Sunday school they talked about heaven, and how wonderful it was, and now I could make that happen, if I chose to. Finally, I have control over something in my life.
Perhaps if I had lived with animals, for instance cats, dogs and horses, in the middle of nowhere, I may not have thought about suicide, but it was the fact that I had to be around humanity, and had no control over their directives, that is what made life torture for me. I needed to find a safe place where I wasn’t so afraid, and I thought heaven might be the place for me.
In the animal kingdom, the weak don’t often survive because the strong bully them and destroy them. I regularly felt that was happening to me by the passing rude comments that came my way from other kids. Mean words by the strong would slice me, but no one ever saw the damage except for me.
My intention to commit suicide was not to say, “I’ll show you," I was simply saying I can’t take the agony anymore, it hurts too badly, I want to live in a place where I will be free of chaos, and