A Journey Through the Furnace
It had been a hard week. It was Friday and my time babysitting the son and daughter of friends was up. These were not bad kids, but they had a lot of emotional challenges and I had agreed to watch them without being told all of the important details. I was relieved that I had only agreed to watch them for one week. The afternoon rolled around and the boy mentioned that he would be seeing me the next week. I was puzzled, and immediately suspicious. I asked him what he meant. He told me that his Dad had said I would be watching them that week too. What could I say? This was a young boy. It wasn’t his fault that his Dad was taking advantage of me and our friendship.
When his Dad and step mom arrived, the kids were playing and not in hearing range. I let them know right away that their son had spilled the beans about the next week. I was very upset because they assumed and never even asked. They talked about it in front of the kids and told their kids something that I hadn’t agreed to. Caught between a rock and a hard place I agreed to watch them the next week, but made it clear that was it. I would not be available after that. They would need to make other arrangements. That was pretty much the end of that friendship. It had been killed off by friendship abuse.
After the family left I started feeling horrible. I was dizzy and felt like I was going to fall over. It got worse over the evening until finally my husband loaded me and our son up in the car and took me to the emergency room. It took about three hours for me to be seen. I had calmed down somewhat by then. When I had first started experiencing the dizziness I started feeling a high level of anxiety. I now know that the anxiety made my dizziness worse, but at the time, I had no clue. When I was seen by the E.R. doctor, he did some basic manual diagnostic tests. Things like touching the end of my nose with my fingertips and my feet tightly together. This checked my balance and hand/eye coordination. He had me bend over and then come up to see if I would fall over or be steady as I stood back up. Again, this checked balance. These were to determine if there was pressure on my brain from some unknown problem. I passed all of the tests, the dizziness had subsided, and I felt better. The doctor chalked it up to stress and sent me home.
The rest of the weekend was uneventful. I ranted a lot about the situation with the former friends and their taking advantage of me, but I wasn’t dizzy anymore. I watched the kids the next week, and I noticed as the week wore on that I became angrier and angrier. The angrier I got, the more stressed I felt, the more the dizziness came back. By that following Friday, my nerves were toast, I was a wreck, my dizziness was back and I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know it yet, but my journey through the furnace had started me down a very fiery path.
Everyone handles adversity differently. Some people hit it head on and refuse to give in, others fall down and battle with it in the pit before rising up and moving on, others park at their adversity for a while and figure out how to overcome it, and still others let their adversity trap them and never really get out from under it. I did not start out as an overcomer, but I refused to live under my adversity and let it win either. I fell somewhere in the middle. I believe the measure of a life is defined by how we live the moments day by day and deal with its battles for each and every encounter.
Without realizing it, my journey through the furnace had started years before. I was blind to the moment I stepped through the furnace door. I was young, so its easier to understand how I missed it. I would have to say that defining moment happened the day my Dad woke me up to tell me that my Mom had passed away in the night. She was thirty-five years old. I was eighteen. I had a younger brother and sister. Our world fell apart that day and started me on my very painful journey.
To Be Continued: Excerpt from Unpublished Book
