Guest Post: Five Miles And A Miracle

(Hubby wrote this, and asked to post it here, so here goes... TB)

I want to wander into the emotional and metaphysical forest here, so bear with me.

Five, Miles, and Miracle are words.

Words are a code. This code lets you know many things, depending on the placement of words in another code called a sentence.

So far, so good?

Five is a number, another code which defines everything, as math (quantum physics) is the basis for the universe.

Mile is a unit of length, and here's where we start our path into the woods.

Yesterday I increased my daily riding length to five miles, thanks to an incredible find by TechnoBabe: a nature trail built around the high school's track. I say "the" high school because we only have one here, you know.

I'd been riding a little over four miles by going around the outer streets of town and adding a spectacular one-mile stretch northeast of town. It's a straight, flat (wait, that's redundant, it's all flat here) ride through farm country.

With the new route I can do three laps to the mile on a concrete path through a beautifully serene woodland, and I can ride flat out; no people, no traffic, no intersections, just me and the bike and nature. So I am doing six laps and then riding a half mile to the "long road," as I call it. Five miles.

So, you can understand my code (sentences) because I am using smaller codes (words) in a way that creates a common understanding between us.

Miracle.

Now we're really into it. This word is LOADED with meaning. Five and Miles not so much. Miracle is defined as:

• A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.

• a highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment that brings very welcome consequences.

• an amazing product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something.

I will use all of these definitions going forward. Here is how the miracles happened to us.

When I met TechnoBabe for our marathon first meal and chat, she told me many mind-blowing things which happened to her, and as the afternoon wore on I could not believe she wasn't a raving crack addict serial killer. I was amazed at how she handled these catastrophic events and went on to raise a family essentially on her own. I could see an awesome human being hiding back there in the foliage putting out crumbs for me to follow into her soul. She did not know this. Her inner self knew who I was, and had decided to reveal herself.

Now I can see that her ability to transcend this horrible damage was a miracle, not explicable by natural or scientific laws, and thereby caused by a higher power's interaction with her soul.

After six months of dating, we moved in together.

Then the real work began. And I encountered her Protector. This was a psychic response to a dangerously abusive situation. She created this entity before she had words to describe what was happening to her, and it became fully developed after she had to fend for herself after her mother refused to stop her abuse. She learned to dissociate. Then she was sexually assaulted and almost murdered when she was twelve.

Hence, a highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment that brings very welcome consequences. This extraordinary skill borne of horror allowed her to deal with the pressures of married life with increasingly dysfunctional men, and the raising of three children. As time went by, her Protector kept her from harm by dropping the gauze of slippery personality change over her, but eventually the consequences became unwelcome.

Her Protector took over whenever the slightest threat was perceived. This part of her did NOT trust me, and became increasingly agitated when I did not abandon her or cheat on her.

After a while I realized I wasn't living with a single personality, but I was too busy falling into my own damage to make sense of it. All I knew was that from time to time, she would fall into a scripted, repetitive response to disagreement which sounded like someone I did not know, complete with warped facial features and violent responses.

In August of 2008, some of you know that I had a manic episode caused by thyroid dysfunction. TechnoBabe moved out. When I left the hospital ten days later, we began to pick up the pieces and she eventually moved back in. The miracle here was that she met and learned to trust a therapist who realized and reinforced the same thing I did: she dissociated into another personality. The therapist said she'd never seen anyone flip so fast and so seamlessly. Tell me about it.

Her Protector was rude, dismissive, taunting, mocking, verbally assaultive, and totally blamed me for her feelings and behavior. We learned a Kabuki theatre of arguing, going from a sweet loving couple to horribly damaging spats that seemed to have no beginning, and no end.

Even through all of this, she respected my commitment to my music and in early 2010 played a monumental support role in the creation of Bipolar Shaman, my first CD.

Then the last, or most recent, miracle happened.

Her primary personality took over. She realized that the Protector was keeping her from taking responsibility for her behavior, and that it was killing us. I could fight the Protector to a draw, but as time went by I realized that my part had to change as well. So TechnoBabe became her true self, and I became a new part of our new life.

The Miracle part has been ongoing since December, and it's consistent. If you think about it, two people with catastrophically damaged lives working through the worst shit you could imagine and coming out the other side nearly whole and loving each other more all the time...

We are an amazing product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something.


Something called Love.


(Note: She read this prior to me posting it and didn't blink. This is another miracle of her growth, believe me.)