Illusions
It was just a few weeks after my twenty-first birthday when we said our vows in a beautiful church wedding on December 7. (Yes, we married on Pearl Harbor Day—a prediction for what our marriage would turn out to be.) It was a very happy day and we danced the night away, glowing in the romance of it all.
My husband didn’t understand what I was, and as time continued his tolerance of my sensitivity made him angrier and angrier. If he looked at me the wrong way, I’d sob. Instead of reassuring me, he’d let his anger boil and I’d sulk in the fairy tale that I so badly wanted and had possibly written in my head. High school sweethearts. Captain of the football team with the captain of the cheerleading squad. Sickening sweet, but with a hidden, darker side.
I lay in a bed in the emergency room when a pastor, doctor, and social worker came in. I was having horrible abdominal pain and had just been put through the wringer of numerous medical tests.
“Is your husband beating you, Kristy?” the minister asked.
“What? No!”
“Explain the three fractured ribs then,” the doctor said, holding up the X-ray.
I burst into laughter. I had completely forgotten about that morning at Aikido class when my husband playfully football-tackled me. They didn’t believe me, but they released me to him anyhow. A few days later I became violently ill, only to receive a call from the hospital that I was pregnant. The morning sickness became all-day sickness and incapacitated me most of my pregnancy. My husband wasn’t thrilled with the pregnancy coming so soon after our marriage, but there was no way that I was going to get rid of the baby. The constant illness didn’t help our relationship. I developed preeclampsia in the second trimester of my pregnancy, which resulted in either making the trip down to the hospital in Detroit to be monitored or bed rest at home—all while trying to stay employed.
I was five months pregnant with my firstborn when my grandmother, who was hospitalized and dying, called and left me a voice mail. She was sobbing and asking for my forgiveness. She asked that I call her so we could reconcile. I felt perhaps it was her way of looking for the golden ticket to the Other Side, so I decided to hold off on a reply. She passed away that same night. She was buried with many secrets—except for one. On her deathbed, she informed my dad that she had not been raped at all, and offered my dad his father’s name.
There are many days that I regret not getting back to her, giving her one last chance to explain herself, to explain why she treated me with such discord, but too much hurt had built up. I believe I grew resentful and bitter for not having a typical warm and loving grandmother. At the wedding to my children’s father, she bad-mouthed me to my boss and anybody else who would listen, claiming that I was the most spoiled person she had ever met. Maybe I was, but I just wanted to be loved, and maybe she did, too.
It was August 10 and I was eight months pregnant when I developed a terrible headache—every time my head pounded I saw different colored lights, as if angels of all different colors were singing a message to me. I called the doctor’s office and left a message with the answering service. After an hour and no return call, I decided to take a shower and sleep it off. The next morning was my check-up and since I was still feeling lousy, my husband came along. My blood pressure was slightly elevated, but that wasn’t unusual—I had gained almost one hundred pounds during the pregnancy, and it was an excruciatingly hot and humid summer. Although Micaela wasn’t due until the second week of September, the obstetrician said that if she didn’t come before August 23, he would induce on that date. The problem was she was breach and facing backward. I’d had enough of being pregnant and was near tears as I climbed down from the table. “Oh, by the way, why did you call yesterday?” the doctor inquired. He said he tried calling back, but nobody answered. When I told him about the headache, the blood in his face drained and he asked me to take another urine test. In the thirty minutes since I’d come into the office, my protein had doubled. He immediately sent us to the hospital, where I was given a drug that made me feel like water from hell was boiling inside of me and then had an emergency C-section.
On August 11, 1994, we welcomed a baby girl named Micaela. The pregnancy had been awful, as was the delivery. I can now joke that she was truly trying to kill me.
I didn’t get the normal bonding time with my baby girl, as I was taken from recovery into the intensive care unit and heavily medicated with what the nurses referred to as hell water, an anticonvulsant medication, magnesium sulfate. I awoke the next day to my husband bringing friends in and making fun of me for talking nonsense, only to fall asleep and wake an hour later to immediately rejoin the conversation as if nothing had happened. My husband thought it was hysterical and kept inviting his friends to the hospital. I became a sideshow as I fell in and out of a medical-induced stupor. I didn’t think it was funny and instead it made me sad and hurt.
The second night in intensive care, the heart monitors started to go off. Doctors rushed in to give me an EKG and I passed out. I heard a priest praying over me when I woke up. I surprised him when I asked who he was and informed him that I was Lutheran. When my doctor came to check on me, I asked him what had happened. He told me I didn’t need to know, and that I should just rest. I joked that I was probably receiving my last rites. My doctor didn’t laugh.
Recovery was slow, but coming home with that baby girl in my arms made everything worth it.
Nine months later I was pregnant again and I had a sinking feeling as I told my husband, who was still adjusting to having Micaela. Intuitively, I was right on the mark. Instead of being excited and passing out cigars, he told me to get rid of the baby or else he was leaving. Now, the signs were right there, but in my head he was still my high school sweetheart, and I wanted the happy family with the two-point-five kids and the picket fence. The problem was that we were young and I was smothering him. Each time I had a feeling he was thinking of straying, I’d panic, which just pushed him away even more. A few days after sharing the news with him (but not the rest of the family), I was at work when I developed awful cramps. I called my doctor’s office and was told to get to the hospital quickly because they feared it was an ectopic pregnancy—a case where the embryo develops outside of the uterine cavity. The doctor’s staff also told me to call our parents, who only scolded me for not telling them. It wouldn’t have made any difference. I lost the babies—twins. I woke up from the anesthesia to see my husband flirting with the recovery room nurse and laughing at me. I was torn up inside, emotionally and physically.
And once again, that should have been a strong sign to leave, but instead I wanted to add to the family with hopes that if our family was complete, we could move on with our lives and rediscover the love. Naïve or a hopeless romantic? Probably more naïvety. I did indeed get pregnant, but just a few weeks after the positive pregnancy test I again developed cramps. This time my doctor sent me for an ultrasound. The look on the technician’s face spoke volumes as she excused herself to get a doctor. The doctor patted my hand and told me that I was losing the baby, and I would probably have the miscarriage that night. I did. I shed gallons of tears of frustration because something that was supposed to be natural was so difficult for my body. But for the following three weeks, I continued to have morning sickness and nausea and then had a visit from my grandfather.
We stood in an all-white room. In his arms was a baby wrapped in a blue blanket, and he stretched his arms out for me to take him. I looked into my grandfather’s eyes and he telepathically reassured me that everything would unfold the way it was supposed to and that the baby was a gift from him. The next morning I called the doctor.
“I really think I’m still pregnant,” I blurted out as soon he came on the phone, without mentioning the visit from my grandpa.
“Kristy, we drew your blood and the levels went down, indicating the loss.” His compassion came through in his voice. He had been my OB/GYN since before Micaela and had witnessed the miscarriages, seen the marital issues, and knew that I had a lot of stress in my life.
“Did it go to zero, though?” I inquired. His silence was telling. “Well, did it?”
“No,” he sighed. “Tell you what. You get another ultrasound, and if you aren’t pregnant, you’ll make a deal with me to get some therapy.”
“Deal,” I said, smiling, certain that I wouldn’t have to be sitting on a therapist’s couch—at least not for that.
The next day I was back in the same examining room, with the same doctor and technician who had told me I was going to lose the baby. I held my breath and asked my guides, grandparents, and angels to help with the miracle.
“This can’t be,” the doctor exclaimed. “There’s a baby. Not only that, the baby is the same gestational age as the one you lost.”
“A twin?” the technician asked.
“We may never know, but there is for sure what looks like a healthy developing baby.”
The pregnancy, although it started out rocky, was pretty much normal. The news that it was a boy was also exciting, and I thought perhaps I could win over my husband by giving him a son. It wasn’t until I was being wheeled into the operating room for a C-section that we decided on his name: Connor Drake.
I had a premonition awaiting the prep for the C-section and was told by my guides to ask for another. They didn’t expand, and I hadn’t a clue what “another” was. It wasn’t until I was already in the surgery room that I knew exactly what they meant. I was having contractions and was bent over the table as the anesthetist began to insert the needle above my spinal cord, but he missed and tried again, only to miss the second time. The operating room erupted in angry confrontations as I tried to stay still while having contractions and feeling only partially numb. My mind wandered to the fear of feeling the surgery. Finally, the third attempt was a charm.
As I lay in the recovery room, my husband and nurse came to give me the news. Connor was healthy, but he had a cleft palate in the soft palate and was born without a uvula. The hospital wasn’t sure what to do with him, and I hadn’t a clue what a cleft palate or a uvula even was. Holding my baby boy, he looked as perfect as could be, but once I started to feed him, I realized that he wasn’t getting any milk out of the bottle and his frustration was making me teary, which was only compounded by a resident who came in with my chart a couple hours after giving birth.
“Kristy? Can you tell me what you did to make your son this way?”
“Excuse me?”
“Drugs, alcohol … you caused this cleft,” the doctor stated with a smirk on his face.
I caused the cleft? Thinking that I did anything that would’ve hurt my baby made me want to vomit. Had I really caused the cleft? Immediately I fell into a depression, contemplating each and every thing I had put into my system. Was it the ibuprofen after I miscarried? Or the cough medicine I was told would be safe when I had a cold? I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life. I never did any drugs and I hated alcohol. I had even quit all caffeine during the pregnancy, but somehow I caused the cleft?
After being stunned at the accusation, appalled, I ordered the doctor out of the room. The next doctor who came in informed me that Connor would have to be transferred to a children’s hospital. My response was “over my dead body,” so they brought the team from the children’s hospital to us.
Because of the botched spinal anesthesia, the following morning when I got up to take a shower, I noticed that I couldn’t feel my right leg and mentioned it to my nurse and the doctor who came to check up on me, but everybody was so concerned with Connor, and rightfully so, that my concerns went unnoticed. So, I did exactly what I needed to do—I put all of my attention on Connor.
I was now twenty-five years old with two kids under the age of two, and living with a husband who resented me, not only because we now had two children, but because I had also put on a lot of weight. He had threatened previously that if I gained weight, he would divorce me. It was said in fun, but there was an undertone of seriousness. At that point, even though I wasn’t happy within myself, I didn’t care. All I cared about were the words of that resident, which reverberated through every step of my morning, afternoon, and night: “You caused the cleft.” It didn’t help when my husband repeatedly told me that the baby must’ve gotten the problems from my side of the family because, after all, his was perfect. There was no compassion, only criticism. I became so depressed that I lost my dreams in both daytime and night, unless they had something to do with the kids. I was angry with the world for giving me such a rotten life. Why me? It was a constant question I asked because it was a constant statement I heard growing up with my family. If it wasn’t “Why me?” it was “What’s next?” I anticipated something bad was about to happen because that was all I was taught to expect.
The next year flew by, filled with surgeries for Connor to repair not only the cleft but also hearing loss that resulted from it. Then there were doctor appointments and physical therapy for my back and leg, as it turned out that the numerous spinal anesthesia procedures caused severe nerve damage. I began researching anything and everything to do with cleft palates and came upon several foundations. I had been reassured by the team at University of Michigan that I had not caused the cleft, and since the genetic testing came back clear, we would probably never know for certain why it had happened. Speculation was that when I lost the other baby, it affected the blood flow to Connor, causing the mouth to not properly grow. In layman’s terms, it was a fluke. Connor’s surgeries were all successful, even though the emotional ordeal of handing my son over, time and again, and having to trust a medical team to hand him back to me healthy was trying. The demon named “Why Me?” began to fade, and I decided to reopen my intuition and use the lessons I had learned in helping others.
My marriage continued to deteriorate, with my husband’s temper becoming even more volatile as his unhappiness escalated. My depression didn’t help create a good foundation, but his insensitivity also wasn’t healing the relationship. I begged him to go to couples counseling, but his therapy was punching the walls anytime he was upset with me or aggravated at my accusations.
As a child, I always had a pen and notebook in hand, writing either poetry or short stories. As I grew older, I continued my writing and sold several stories to magazines and research papers and educational publications. It was my escape from the world.
At the end of 1997, I came upon the Professional Association of Santa’s Elves (PASE) and began Sent by Santa, writing personalized Santa letters. Soon afterward, I was elected to the Board of Elves. My letters were different because each letter was written using my intuition and psychic gift. Obviously, those who were ordering the letters didn’t have a clue. I based my letters on information that the parent or grandparent gave me, but I always included extra information. I wrote every letter in a positive tone without blackmailing children to eat all their peas in exchange for a visit from Santa. Instead, it was a pat on the back, reassuring them that they were loved and watched over. My business grew from just a few to thousands a season. I didn’t start the project as a “get rich quick” scheme; it was merely my way of sharing my gift and helping out some of the cleft charities.
The writing business helped to reclaim my independence while reopening my intuition, which had felt so evil and wrong before. Although I had always worked outside of the home and had a college education, I knew in the back of my head that one day I would be on my own with the kids, and I had to be prepared. It was just a matter of the timing. The knuckle marks in the drywall were beginning to happen all too frequently.