You Can’t Run Without Kneecaps, Bre

I’m angry

The more I heal, the more rage I feel.

I have cried at least once per day for the past fourteen days. Being made to feel worthless, irrelevant, and unintelligent has led me into a mental downward spiral.

What is that spiral?

The only way I will write this is with true transparency, and if you take offence to it, you take offence. Deal with it.

Well, it begins with being 32 years old and having nothing to my name besides five children.

Count with me: 1….2….3….4….5.

And before you attack me for what I am about to disclose, I love my children. But what I wouldn’t give to have, at minimum, 24 hours without hearing, “MOM!”

The last vacation break I went on was in 2013. My oldest, 12, was 14 months old, and I had come home pregnant from that break. I remember marking on my Blackberry calendar, ‘Period Started’ on June 29th, 2013. Oskar was born on March 26, 2014. I carried and gave birth to three more babies in the 5 years that followed. Brielle - in 2015, Kate - in 2017, and Alessi - in 2019. Five children in seven years. Five in seven. Insanity. As many say, “ Your poor body.” I haven’t had time to process. Whatever.

If you’re new here and thinking, “ What the fuck, does this woman not know about birth control?!” You are not the first to think it and you sadly won’t be the last. In the cult, birth control was forbidden. Women had begun to sneak IUD’s but before long, someone snitched, and the cult leader found out. As you can expect, the women, as a whole, were reprimanded. “If you’re not getting married to bring forth the children of God, don’t get married.” So what? Stay single and miss the window of opportunity to find your spouse, and be labelled an “Old Spinster,” never fulfilling my God-given purpose in life? I think not. Pregnancy it was.

A day in my life as a Dayhome provider

I was a married, single mom, and I was to blame for not working hard enough (I ran a full-time day home, taking care of six children whilst taking care of my children), the messy house, the lack of finances, the laundry not being done, the mowing of the lawn, the loud children, the dirty vehicle and not fucking enough which in turn put the ex in an angry mood. It was all my fault. *It is obvious, I was the reason my then husband (a now convicted abuser) abused me.

I have never been enough for anyone, not for my parents, not for the cult and most definitely not for my ex-husband.

My 97% on a test was not good enough for my parents. “Breezy, you can pull a 100% easily. What happened?” A handwritten note to my grade one teacher had my dad asking what I needed to do more to keep my grades above 95% due to his and my mother’s notice of my grades slipping. 97% was a slip, while my sister was cheered for and loved for pulling 65-70%.

My “slipping” grade one report card. Note - I had to sign it too.

I carried a good attitude and urgent motivation. I was unproblematic; not once did I cause a scene. I was the teacher’s pet, the helper, the doer, the good example, the daughter who was told, “If we don’t do this for Jay, she won’t come to church, so, please, Bre, understand how we promised you this, but we need the money to buy this for Jay so she will show up. I have cried in silence more than a few times as I watched my sister get everything she wanted in a store while I dreamed of what I would look like in new pieces from afar. I received the hand-me-downs and was sure to be grateful for them when the time came. I kept the peace and walked on eggshells. I completed Jay’s homework so the yelling matches wouldn’t start, or if they had, my doing of her homework would bring them to an end. I was always ten steps ahead to keep myself out of the way. I was the daughter who was driven to a bank, taking on a credit card for my parents to use to eliminate their debt. As my Dad would tell me, “Head down, sit down and shut up.” I faded into the background, yearning for a crumb of acknowledgement.

The moment I left ‘Brown’ and stepped foot into the home of the Assistant Pastor, I was good enough to be their guinea pig to browbeat into the poster child of a godly Christian girl. For 395 days, from 18-19, I surrendered all agency and endured 395 nightly ‘lessons.’ Something was always wrong with me, from my sleeve length to keeping laundry in a basket to how I rolled off the bed in the morning. A steady stream of cult members took issue or concern with me, and in living with the Assistant Pastor, these cult members weaponized their mouths and ran continually to take problems with me, which, in turn, had me succumb to relentless exploitation. As they killed me, the standards of which they set out for me, I reached. After telling me that he was harder on me than any of their biological children, the Assistant Pastor gripped my hand and walked me down the wedding aisle, whispering how proud he was of me.

Summer of separation - 2021

Divorce Certificate

Three years ago, I chose to report my abusive ex-husband to the police. I went through the divorce process, spending hours at our local government building and staying up hours of the night writing and rewriting paperwork. Unable to afford a lawyer, I have appeared in court countless times fighting for myself, only to be met with, “ The court won’t hear that,” whilst giving the ex-husband a chance after chance. Listen, if you’re a white male with a sob story, the court is in your favour. It wasn’t until this year that the court finally did something by placing his sorry ass into contempt after I laid out the emotional and physical distress I continued to suffer. What does that mean for me? Absolutely nothing. The child support and contempt he owes increases with every passing day, but he refuses to pay, and the financial burden of raising my family has lodged itself with me.

Today, I am 32, and I am angry.

The Crew

It is not a dream of mine to have a large family one day, but I have a large family. My children are not dolls to be tossed to a thrift store once I have outgrown them; they are here to stay. I do not have a co-parent to whom I reach out and share parenting time and financial responsibility. I am ‘on’ 24/7. Funny. Being a single mom, everybody has an opinion on how I could and should do better. Be my guest and take my place; you wouldn’t last a day, let alone a morning.

I don’t have sorority sisters or childhood school friends. I did not celebrate my 18th birthday. People my age can’t relate to me, and I do not relate to them. While they reminisce about the ‘Good Ole Days,’ all I can offer up is, ‘How to Properly Cross your Legs as a Young Woman, Insights of The Book of Revelation and Do You Know What a Mucus Plug Is? Many people my age or around my age own homes, have made their way through secondary education, have their pods of friends, are saving, travelling and are beginning or are a few years deep into their careers. They can ‘up and go’ when they please and stay out as long as they desire. They can book a flight on a whim and not have to worry about the finances it will take to hire a nanny. They are dating or newly married, may be pregnant or are waiting. They have themselves to worry over; I am the last on my list. My therapist told me today that she doesn’t believe that I have processed the trauma I endured in September and October of this year. Ooof. I move along into the next quickly because I do not have the time to sit, ponder and process. The train is moving fucking fast folks! I drive or this train is going off of the tracks. Yet again, I do not have a choice.

I have been married for ten and a half years and am divorced.

I have a twelve-year-old son… along with four more offspring.

I am 32, living a life that I did not choose. I am living a life that was chosen for me. I am living a life that is the sum of the equation written by others. It is a mind fuck that is challenging to pull out of. It is a reality I can not change. While I am stopping generational trauma for my kids, my life remains full of the generational trauma from a life that my parents selected for me.

Today, I had therapy and broke down crying.

“How do I not compare my life to others my age?” I asked.

“Instead of comparing yourself to others, compare you to you.” Compare you to you. I’m taking that one to the bank! “Look at Bre from ten years ago. Where was she, and what would she think of where you are now?”

2015. Three - 3 and Under

2015. Cult Sunday Best

Ten years ago (and a few months), I was twenty-three and had given birth to my third baby. I had three babies, ages three and under. I was a month away from having Irish Twins. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment with the kids sleeping in playpens and a baby swing. We could not afford beds. Our fridge and pantry remained bare, and I watched as the pile of ‘ Final Notices’ rose higher and higher each month. I had postpartum depression but could not receive a diagnosis for it; hormones don’t exist in the cult. “Women’s bodies are built for this (pregnancy)).” We were months behind paying tithe and offering, but I needed a break. We saved a couple hundred dollars and booked a two-night stay in Calgary. Asking the in-laws to babysit the children, they agreed, but then, as they always did, they ran their mouths to their designated cult elder about our plans. Hauled into a meeting after the Wednesday cult service before we were set to head out of town, we were given an ultimatum: use the money we had set aside for the weekend break that I desperately required to pay back the Tithe and Offering we owed or never return to the cult again. We returned, and I never got that break. A year later, and you’ll never guess, I was again pregnant.

Pregnancy #4

Therapist: “We all begin on the same start line, but when your start whistle blew, you went backwards instead of forward with the others. Remember that some people have privileges, such as stable homes, financial means, nepotism, education, travel, etc. Think of it like this: you are standing on the bank of a river with others your age. When you jump in to make your way to the other side, you are neck-deep in water, filled with rocks, weeds and mud. The others don’t jump in; they can walk to the other side on a bridge. You can not compare yourself to someone who has walked on a bridge to get to the other side. You will get to the other side, but it’s hard, very, very hard.

Or, let us think of it as the stages of babies. At first, babies roll because they do not have kneecaps. Then they crawl, stand, walk, and then they run. You are at the rolling stage. You can not run yet; you don’t have kneecaps! Others are running, and you can be happy for them—you really can be—and know that one day you will run too, but right now, you need to master rolling.

“Would you be ready to walk into a room full of executives and use your voice?”

“Do you still apologize to keep the peace and take the fall to people please?”

Master the rolling. I need to master the rolling.

Every once in a while, I look over and see the bridge, and I rage as I untangle my legs from another weed and exhaust myself as I work my feet out of the mud to take another step forward.

As my stepdad has told me from day one,

“Timing is everything, kiddo.”

You can not run without kneecaps, Bre. You will run but, you’re not ready yet, and it is hard—very, very hard.

* sarcasm