Be The Twist In The Story

Run Like a Girl Intention #2: Turn negative stereotypes around: To acknowledge that nothing is impossible, the process of redemption is the twist in the story that no one expects. Be that twist.

When I was a girl, I didn’t run. I had a profound, gait issue that would cause me to trip. I became the proud owner of corrective shoes that looked like small leather prisons on my feet. I was a hostage in more ways than one. It is interesting to me that my life has taken me this place where I encourage, support and advocate for women to run like a girl. It’s God’s twist in my story, and I so love good endings.

The story of the month is about the twist in Karen’s Sjoblom’s story. Karen is a great writer, trusted friend and an all around wonderful woman. I hope you read it and leave a comment for her. I want you to take this story into your hearts and remember that you have a twist in your story too.~Kathy Vick

In the interest of disclosure, I need to say that Kathy is a dear friend and we both have the requisite bias required for long-term relationships. She has said that I am her hero. And I believe I’ve gotten far more out of the friendship than she has.

Regardless, in asking me to write about Intention #2, Kathy’s saying, essentially, that she sees things in me that I cannot, which is what we do, all of us, in and around each other. And part of turning negative stereotypes around, besides surrounding yourself with good and honorable friends, is acknowledging and accepting that, in both good and bad ways, we can be blind to ourselves. There most likely is redemption if we peer into our souls, if we can get out of our own way to do so. And if we’re willing to go into that dark place and flash some light around, we may find ourselves pleasantly surprised.

I am not by nature an optimist. I categorize myself as a fatalist with a good sense of humor. So much of this is environmental: I was raised by grim-faced Midwesterners who believed in hard work and self-denial. And lots to drink. We had lots of alcoholics in my family. Rumor has it that the beginning of the (long) end of my parents’ marriage arrived concurrent with my birth. I now know that it would have been tough to grow up there under most circumstances, but factor in a freakishly oversensitive child who observed everything and everyone, who can remember the slightest details, and it’s a recipe for disaster. I grew up feeling too much, and what with everyone else’s problems and issues, I found myself all too happy to carry the burdens. If you drank too much, it was my fault. If you weren’t happy or fulfilled, it must be me. And if you needed to let loose on your bitter disappointment with life, I was your girl. I soaked it up at the cellular level: I was a problem, an irritation, a disappointment who’d never amount to anything. Even God didn’t like me.

It would have been handy if I, too, drank, but I chose other methods of coping: food, perfectionism and control. I tried to numb out so I didn’t have to feel so much, and I tried to control so that fewer things were left to chance. I turned my back on God at age 14, because He seemingly wasn’t powerful enough to solve my many family problems. By that point, I’d had years of abuse despite my best efforts: If I was going to be saved, I would have to do it myself.
So I became a striving young woman, judgmental and perfectionistic. I worked harder than you. I suffered more than you. I made fewer mistakes than you. And this somehow made me better than you, if only for a moment, until the bad voices in my head would start chewing on me again: Loser loser loser. Author Anne Lamott cleverly categorized this thinking and behavior as a classic egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I was both/and: grandiosely above reproach while feeling like something on the bottom of someone’s shoe…worthless.

I got married at 30, so incredibly happy that he didn’t drink. But I found he had other addictions, and a secret life, and I couldn’t trust him or get him to mind. And so we did what any couple in our situation would do: We had a baby, thinking that would fix things. And it got worse and worse until I threw out an ultimatum: We were going to counseling, or 12-Step, or whatever else, and we were going to get free of these addictions, or we weren’t going any further.

I came back to God on my knees, totally busted. I admitted my own wiliness was shot and I was fresh out of clever. I was willing to do whatever: stay or go. I didn’t know how to do either, frankly, but I was willing. And so we started, He and I, to look under some icky rocks together. We looked at my lack of trust. We looked at my being molested. We looked at alcoholism, and self-loathing, and control. And we looked at whether I was a loser in His eyes, or just mine.

And we looked at my then-two-year-old daughter, sitting precariously on the brink of repeating that life.

After a great deal of counseling and prayer and trying and hoping, I gathered that He had some work for me to do that perhaps I would not get accomplished under the current circumstances. With no forward movement on the addiction front, I ended up filing for divorce. It took 19 months to get out, but my daughter and I landed in a little place of our own, one without secrets. It’s not fancy, but it’s ours: There is peace here.

I cannot say it’s been easy, because it hasn’t. But as I’ve walked through this process and continued working on my faith, I’m learning something amazing: God likes twists. He’s not the cut-and-dried kind of guy I thought. In the middle of all my angst and worry and fretting, of feeling like I blew it too badly to be able to come back into the fold, I found I was not only welcomed back but given a ridiculous assignment to boot.

Before and during my marriage, I confess to having some disdain for single mothers, thinking they should have thought about birth control if they’re now complaining about how hard it is to be a single parent. I mean, please. And then, I found myself as a single parent, thinking, “Crap. This is really really hard.” And through a long and involved process, I got the feeling that God wanted me to talk and walk with other single moms, so we could (All together now!) say, “Crap. This is hard. But thankfully we have each other and The Big Guy.”

So God introduced me to Cathy Brewer, another single mom and my business partner, and we started hatching Eve’s Daughters—a place where we long to live out the wild love of Christ by walking alongside single moms in crisis. Our personal motto is that, even with over a dozen years of single parenthood between us, we’re still in crisis most days: Only the topics have changed. But I see that even someone as hardheaded and driven and introverted as myself could be changed and loved on enough to admit my needs, my loneliness, my failures and turn me into a woman whose heart breaks for other single moms. There’s some righteous indignation and there are tears and there are black-humored laughs…but there’s no more judgment.

We have so much work to do in starting a non-profit. But I’ve come to believe if you’re not anxiously breathing into a brown bag, maybe the dream didn’t come from God. He seems to have so much more belief in us than we do in ourselves. So if it’s too big and too overwhelming and too much all the way around, I’m guessing I’m on the right track. And that’s the twisty part of the redemption: getting lost, getting found, getting saved, getting busy. And that He can use me for any of it comes as the most beautiful twist of all.

Karen Sjoblom is a freelance writer/editor and non-profit birther living outside of Portland, Oregon. She’s the single mom of a fabulous 10-year-old princess wannabe, a colorful daughter of an astounding Father and an avid coffee drinker. Hobbies include music, reading and thinking too much. She blogs at http://searosecreative.blogspot.com/ and http://evesdaughtersoforegon.blogspot.com/ and is trying desperately to finish a more functional website at www.evesdaughters.org.

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