The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

  Both my ex-husband and I suffered trauma in our childhood. Mine is discussed elsewhere in this blog. Look for it. My ex-husband’s parents never married and were unprepared to be parents when he was born. Growing up, he was shuffled between different family members’ homes. Some family members were loving and supportive. Some were stressed by their lives. They tried to give him a good life but also failed to give him all the love and support he needed. Perhaps due to his insecure childhood, my ex-husband was the most jealous man I had ever dated. In addition, I was eight years older than him and had worked about four years as an observer on foreign fishing vessels in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska. The job came with lots of male friends and significant growth in my self-confidence.  Before we married, my husband and I went to couples’ counseling to work on our struggles. The therapist told my soon-to-be husband to be less jealous and gave us a book by Harville Hendr...

Social Scientists noticed that people feel good when they hear their religious and political views praised and distressed or even angry when they hear facts that disprove their beliefs. We humans are like this because when our ancestors walked the earth as hunter/gatherers, they needed the protection of a tribe for survival on a wild planet populated with mountain lions and wolves and African lions and hyenas or elephants and tigers. Unfortunately, in the modern world, tribal thinking causes racial discrimination, wars, ethnic tensions, and conflict in divorced families. My children’s father and I co-parented well when we first divorced. Then he married a very controlling woman who divided our family into tribes. In my tribe, we called my daughter’s father every night because when my parents divorced, I lived with my mother, but my relationship with my father was important to me. In my tribe, I wrote letters to the teachers to make sure they gave all school information to my dau...

Please note that I wrote this blog when I still attended a Catholic Church—something I have not done for ten years. Growing up in America, I learned prejudices against Muslims -- that they restrict the rights of women and are religious fanatics willing to blow up people to achieve their religious and political aims -- or so I thought until I got to know some actual Muslims quite well.  I met a few Muslims during college but never became close friends. I became close friends with some Muslims in the latter half of the 1980s, when I worked as a fisheries observer on Soviet fishing vessels in a joint venture with American catcher boats in Alaskan waters.  The Muslims I became friends with were fishermen from Muslim Republics of the Soviet Union. While working on the fishing vessels, I learned that the old saying that sailors have a girl in every port isn’t untrue, although not every sailor is equally unfaithful to the woman or women in their lives.  Infidelity on all sides i...