Trapped In Between. Marilyn Elaine Lundberg Lundberg
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me and he made me feel special. I wasn’t feeling so much like a square peg in a round hole anymore. There were moments of almost feeling normal, then the darkness would come back and wrap its arms around me. I never felt like I invited the darkness in, but it was always secretly hiding around the corner, ready to engulf me.
At the beginning of my senior year my dad bought me a car, a 1963 Ford Falcon with a stick. She was aqua, and quite a beauty. This car had been the loaner vehicle at the garage where Dad worked so it was in good mechanical condition. I was hoping for a VW bug, but Dad said that no daughter of his was going to have a foreign made car, so that was the end of that discussion.
I signed up for the work program the beginning of my senior year and was accepted. In this program I only had to be in school for three classes each day, and then I would go to work, or go home on days that I was off. This program was awesome for me; I was able to get away from the four walls of the classroom that had always made me feel confined. I told the program director that I wanted to be a social worker when I grew up, so I asked for a job that would complement that position. I thought that if I was a therapist, I could perhaps figure out what was truly wrong with me and fix myself. The closest job that they had for me was nursing, so as a senior I started to work at Swedish Hospital as a nurses’ aide.
One of the three classes that I had in my senior year was a health class. We studied all of the different mental illnesses and I found that very intriguing. When we came to the definition of paranoid schizophrenia, I knew that was what my mother suffered from. The definition described her exactly. I thought, “I have to get Mom to a doctor so he can prescribe the medicine that she needs, maybe she could get better.” I had great hopes of helping her. I was never able to learn about my own particular problems in class, but I was confident that the day would come when I would discover all the answers to my own questions.
In the middle of the twelfth grade I got the idea to take a year of my life and volunteer for the Peace Corps. Maybe, I thought, if I get far enough away, I could leave my problems behind me. Perhaps all that was plaguing me could be healed if I helped other people with their problems. On the days that I worked as an aid at Swedish Hospital, I felt great. There was something special about caring for the sick that uplifted my spirit, and made me feel useful and appreciated.
This Peace Corps idea stirred around in my mind until close to graduation, I even filled out the application and all necessary paperwork. One day I shared this idea with my boyfriend and he took the papers from my hand, read them and tore them up. I was saddened by his reaction, but at the same time I thought he was showing me how much he loved me, and didn’t want me to leave.
At the close of twelfth grade my teachers asked me frequently where I was going to go to college, and what my plans were for the future. My grades were very good and my teachers had voted me into the National Honors Society, but even though I wanted to be a social worker, I just could not get myself to apply for a college, and sit trapped in another classroom situation for four more years. That seemed like an eternity to me. I wanted desperately to move on to college and get a good education, like so many of the others, but with my backpack of problems, I just didn’t know how to go about all that. My parents had set money aside for my education, it was all available for me, but I was too nervous to follow that path. I was very disappointed in myself and felt like a failure. I decided my future would be to get married, have kids and stay at home where I could be a great mom and feel sheltered from my problems, and the world.
I found a tiny apartment about two weeks before graduation, and moved out of my parents’ house on Oliver into my own place. I couldn’t deal with Mom’s mental illness any longer, and she didn’t seem to want help. I needed peace in my life, and it felt good to not be at home anymore around the craziness that I had endured for so long. My parents were sad that I moved out, but they understood, and passed on some hand-me-down furniture for my apartment, which I was grateful for.
Graduating from high school was an important turning point for me. I was elated that I wasn’t locked up in a classroom anymore. Tremendous pressure was removed from me when school was forever over. Working at the hospital was easier than school, and I found it rewarding. I loved to listen to the patients, and help them in any way that I could.
At first I was assigned to the surgery floor and most people came in, received surgery, recuperated, and left the hospital healed. I had a fantastic head nurse who sort of put me under her wing, and gave me wonderful feedback regarding how I was doing at the hospital. One day she took me aside and told me that she was very impressed with my work ethics. She said that she was happy that I spent quality time with all the patients, unlike most of the other staff who goofed around talking to each other at the nurses’ desk. She told me that I would make a great RN, if I chose that direction in my life. I felt so good hearing the compliments and thanked her. She was a great mentor to me.
I still had the laundry list of problems, but at the hospital I was on my feet all day, working hard, getting exercise, and there were fewer moments where I experienced the trapped feelings compared to school.
I continued working at Swedish hospital for a couple of years, but things were not going as well toward the end. I was moved from the surgery floor to the cancer floor where all the patients came to die. Every day I watched the young and the old get sicker and sicker until they passed away. You couldn’t help but love them, even though we were told to not become attached.
One day I looked up and down the long hallway where I worked, and could remember the name of a friend or patient in each of the rooms that I had cared for, and later died. I couldn’t do it anymore. Asking an eighteen-year-old to care for hospice patients is demanding and became too much for me. I was required to clean up the deceased bodies before they were sent to the morgue. They were dying every day, and I couldn’t do it anymore.
I searched the paper for something different, and found a job with a company that hired people for temporary positions. I applied as a secretary and began to make money in that way. I was able to set my own schedule, and accept or reject work when it came my way. I finally felt that I had control in the work place.
An interesting phenomenon began to happen around this time. I had also experienced it a few times in high school. It sounds strange, but I was sometimes able to sense peoples’ pain. I was a people watcher, guess I have to attribute that to always watching my mom’s scary expressions, but I could sometimes see the pain in peoples’ eyes. They might be smiling, but that was not what their eyes were telling me. I would sometimes say, “Are you okay, you look a little sad” and they would spill their problems to me. I guess I felt safe, or they thought I understood. Sometimes I would know ahead of time what the problems were, so it was a confirmation when I heard the words from their own lips.
I always wanted to be available to people that were suffering. I wanted to help myself, but I also had a desire to help others at the same time. I wanted to be a compassionate person, maybe there would be something I could do or say to help them. I found out that most of the time I just listened, because that is what they needed most. Helping people, in return, helped me to feel better.
After I moved out of my parent’s home, I never went to church again. I had been in church my whole life, but now that I was in control of the decisions, I decided to no longer go. I knew about God from Sunday school and sermons at church, but He was a character in the Bible, He was not real to me. I was also upset with Him for allowing me to struggle all these years. I will take that a step further, I was furious at God for ignoring me and allowing me to suffer. I thought, a real God would have helped me, cured me and rescued me from all the pain that I had been drowning in.
A living God would have given me a beautiful childhood like peers of mine who didn’t seem to have a care in the world. If there even was a God, I felt that He had betrayed me, and turned His back on me. I remember a picture that I had seen of Jesus going after the one lost sheep, and leaving all the others behind. Why hadn’t Jesus come for me? Why had I struggled so much and why was I so sick?
I was convinced that I was on my own in this world and any healing that was going to happen to me would be of my own making. I needed to read the right books, eat the right food, and someday I would figure out the reason I was peculiar.
The problems