Chapter 1: Foundations
I’m a gay, Coptic-American, born-again Christian. A son, brother, divorcee, father and anesthesiologist. I didn’t plan it that way; life just happened. But if you think you can’t relate to any of those things just know that this is a true story about love in all its forms. It’s a story on learning to give and receive love from wives, husbands, friends, parents, and children. It’s a story of how God creates beauty out of broken things, broken people and impossible situations. They say there’s a thousand ways to bake a cake, but the basic ingredients are the same. Well, the basic ingredients in love are hope, truth and strength. My story just has a few extra spices thrown in.
I think to really understand a person you need to understand their family. If we are a bloom, then Family is seed and soil. God, on the other hand, provides sun and water. Family provides the raw material and the nurturing. God provides opportunity.
My parents are Egyptian Orthodox Christians- commonly called Copts- who immigrated to the United States in 1969. My father is a man of strong convictions and iron will; an underdog, a fighter. He’s not a physically large man, but never backed down from a fight as a kid. Even if he got his ass kicked, he said the other kids would respect him for sticking up for himself.
He never really knew his father, who died very early in his childhood . My grandfather was a physician who contracted typhus in the line of duty serving the rural poor. He was considered a local hero. Shortly thereafter, one of my father’s younger brothers died of a tetanus infection. Suffering the loss of her husband and child hardened his mother. Life pushed and she pushed back to provide for herself and her four remaining children. I knew her as stern, unyielding, ambitious and resourceful. My father admitted to never feeling loved by her.
My father was quite religious in his younger years, devoting much of his time to pursuits of the church. I suppose the church offered comfort in its structure, tradition and male mentors. In fact, he wanted to enter the clergy as a young man. To that end, he made a pilgrimage to a famous monastery in the Sinai Peninsula in order to seek God’s will for his life. He tells me that his earnest pleadings to the Divine were met with only celestial silence. Hearing no answer from God was like losing a father for a second time. Returning to Cairo, he pursued medicine and never looked back. He grew to hate God for taking his father’s life and abandoning him. For most of my life I knew him as an angry agnostic who resented the stifling ways of the Church.
Despite cutting ties to the Church, he adhered strongly to his own sense of ethics and justice. Egyptian culture revers professors and teachers with almost God-like status. Their authority is never to be questioned. My uncles tell me that as a medical student my father risked expulsion by publicly confronting a professor guilty of mocking an indigent and illiterate patient. This was a particularly radical act as a minority Christian student taking on the Islamic Establishment. He says he couldn’t stand by to such injustice. He wanted to be honorable like his father. Eventually the administration supported him and he avoided expulsion. His mother berated him for risking his future over defending a “peasant”.
After finishing medical school and residency as an orthopedic surgeon, he was relegated to work in small rural villages by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist regime. He was to serve as a general doctor and not as an orthopedic surgeon. Although Nasser is heralded for his movements toward anti-imperialism, social-justice and modernization, my father felt imprisoned by his authoritarian policies which deployed thousands of physicians, against their will, to underserved areas. Loving his country but resenting its government, his singular goal became escaping to the West in search of opportunity.
He was assigned a tiny room in a government boarding house which he refused to furnish with any personal effects, not even a blanket. In desperation to leave Egypt, and fearing complacency, he refused anything that might threaten that goal by making him feel comfortable. He swore to my mother he would never want children if they stayed in Egypt. He would only father children if he could provide them better opportunity in a foreign land.
My mother, on the other hand, found love in only one person growing up- her father. He was quite a famous artist, a romantic life-lover and a very kind man. No one else made her feel valued. I too loved him very much.
Nasser had overthrown the monarchy and his regime compelled radical shifts toward modernization and social justice. This coincided with a cultural boom; an Arab renaissance of art and thought. Cairo was alight with creative energy and my grandfather was at the heart of it all.
She joyfully recounts rushing after school to find him painting in his studio or at the cafe forging ideas with other artists over beers and ouzo. Musicians, painters, playwrights, philosophers, sculptors and writers (including Naguib Mahfouz who would later go on to win a Nobel prize in literature) would assemble at a particular cafe in the old city behind the old opera house. As is common with elders, she would warmly greet them with an “Uncle” or “Tante” and they would call her “Daughter”. She’d huddle at a corner table with her dad, feigning to do homework all the while savoring the palpable excitement.
Her mother was a strict school principal who financially supported the family during an era and in a culture where that was quite abnormal. She ran the home with an iron fist and was often distressed by a teenage daughter consorting with “art folk” and a husband who would occasionally spend the night in his studio after a few too many ouzos.
Although my mother is very beautiful she never realized it. My grandmother favored her niece and would tell my mother she was fat and ugly and so had better do well in school. I even remember her sending clothes to my mother for Christmas that were six sizes too large and then explaining she couldn’t remember what size my mother was and so just bought things she thought would fit. My mother studied architecture and interior design at Cairo University and was one of the only females in her class. She was valedictorian. She is perpetually the humble, innocent-hearted, young lady who fell in love with my dad when she was sixteen.
Following the trail of my father’s ambition, they left the country soon after marrying. After paying fees at the airport, they only had sixteen dollars left in hand. Think about that. That’s amazing and terrifying. There are fables of warriors landing in a new land and burning their ships so the troops would know there was no retreat. There was no room for failure; there was no going back. It was the same for my parents and for most immigrants of that period; hard work was the ticket to turn a warrior into a conqueror. Even though America was the Promised Land the act of crossing the Jordan with no hope of return, required great courage.
My father found work as a night security guard at a factory. He went mostly undisturbed at a desk and could study for the American Medical Board Exams at every chance. He’d finish his shift, rush home, devour what little cheese-in-pita they had and settle into his rickety desk to study more. He perpetually subsisted on little sleep and cheese-in-pita. It’s funny, now as an old man, if no one is there to help prepare a meal he only eats cheese-in- pita. For him it was a no-looking-back-life-is-full-of-opportunities time. Those difficult times feel strangely nostalgic to him . To this day, that paltry meal reminds him of his Herculean journey through life.
My mother, whose English wasn’t very good but whose qualifications as an architect were impressive, worked as a draftsman at an architecture firm. There were few American women architects at that time. Interestingly, it was an Arab Jewish man who gave her the job and years later when my parents’ fortunes turned she was always faithful to keep in touch and send her gratitude. They had a little help from some acquaintances and family friends who’d made the move a year prior. She still cringes when remembering their cold, tiny, stained, rat-riddled apartment. They rented a mattress, some linens, a desk and a lamp for a few dollars a month. Their apartment had a hot water radiator, but no heater. Through trial and error, she eventually learned how to cuddle close enough to it with a blanket on the floor without burning herself. She describes that dank room forever colored by gray, overly-reflected light during the day and by my father’s never extinguished, sallow study lamp by night.
She tells me how cold and foreign it was and how coming from Egypt she didn’t have any clothes remotely adequate to protect her from the harsh New England winter. In dry countries many cobblers glue leather shoes together; it’s cheaper that way. She told me how all of her shoes fell apart in the moisture of snow and rain and how she cleverly used string and ribbon to hold them together while still looking fashionable. I don’t think she’s ever visited New York City since. She has little nostalgia for that time.
As my father became certified he gained an initial residency position in Columbus, Ohio where my oldest brother was born. To finish his training, they went on to Birmingham, Alabama where my other brother was born. By 1977, my dad was chair of his department at a prestigious private practice in St. Louis and I was born. By the time I was five we lived in the most exclusive part of the city, attending the best schools available. Our house was an antebellum mansion with an elevator in it. My parents are the quintessential American success story.
Nevertheless, you have to understand something about immigrant families, their prosperity isn’t about money as much as it as about providing a better and fuller life for their children. It doesn’t matter what ethnicity they are, when a young couple leaves their family and comes to the America they can never look back. They can only look forward to the opportunities for their children. You will often find that the children of first generation immigrants tend to be highly educated, more financially successful and more conservative than their counterparts in the motherland. My father defined success not by how much money he made but by the “quality” of his sons. Every time we got in trouble growing up he would remind us “We came here for you. If you’re a failure then I’m a failure. If you’re a liar and a cheat then I’m a liar and a cheat and I refuse to be any of those things.” That same fighting spirit he had as a child now raised its head on behalf of his children. I very much respect that view and now as a father myself I see how that view gave my life a sense of purpose; a sense of interconnectedness.
Immigrant families stick together. There isn’t one part that can be left behind or cut off. They can’t afford to have a black sheep. I was raised to know that that one day I too would be a father and a husband and people would depend on me; my life would count for something. In everything my parents would remind me I’d been given precious and rare opportunities and that my full time job was to seize those opportunities through hard work.
In the best sense these families are supportive and nurturing. In the worst sense they exert incredible pressure to maintain the clan’s culture and norms. This is almost always a source of immense conflict as the second generation begins to adopt viewpoints of the new land, but more on that later. Suffice it to say, I was the only one in my family allowed to go to college in a different city. Even then, I spoke with my parents on the phone twice a day, every day, all through college and medical school.
Well, that being said I basically grew up as a rich kid in St. Louis. We lived on the single most exclusive and historic boulevard in the city. Our massive home was a work of art. Built at the turn of the century it looked like something from Gone with the Wind. The cascading stairwells, marble floors, stone walls, servant’s quarters, expansive grounds, carriage house and Olympic-sized pool all exhibited classic, detailed craftwork which isn’t seen in today’s architecture. In retrospect, it feels like I had a chance to grow up in the Disney World palace.
Each son had his own massive room with adjoining bathroom. Since I was only five, they put my room in between my brother’s. One whole wall was lined with windows. On windy nights the tall tree branches would thunder against the glass, sending menacing shadows lashing about the room. Hiding under the covers of my queen bed, I would shake in fright. That large bed offered no comforting boundaries to a skinny little kid. I was a terrified five year old in an expansive room surrounded by howling wind and banging noises. It’s no wonder I was a late bed wetter. I’m not sure if it was courage or just mounting fear, but eventually I’d spur to action, throwing off the blankets and running as fast as I could down the hall to jump into my oldest brother’s bed for safety. Trembling under the covers I’d cuddle as close as possible. He’d tell me it was okay until I calmed down, then he’d demand that I scratch his back until he fell asleep. Undoubtedly I’d pass out mid-scratch and be met with a swift elbow to my belly telling me to keep scratching. I’d sigh and comply. Hard labor seemed better than angry tree-shadow-monsters.
I spent most of my time playing alone in that big house and torturing our family cat. The torture was inadvertent, of course. I was fascinated that cats always seem to land on their feet. In true Southern style, the foyer of this estate featured a round, wide and elegant space graced by an expanding, cascading marble staircase that gently curved down as it led from the second-floor landing. It even had the red velvet runner held in place by brass crossbars like the sort you see in magnificent theaters. I often threw MishMish over that second-floor landing; a solid forty feet above the ground and watch her flip and twist in the air. That was her name; MishMish. It means “apricot” in Arabic. It’s a common cat name in Egypt. I suppose apricots are cute. No matter her trajectory, she always landed on her feet. It amazed me. She was a twisting diver, a powerful gymnast, a tumbling Titan thrown down from Mount Olympus. I’d try and count the rotations, getting lost in the whirlwind of grey fur in mid-flight. I liked the concept of someone surviving a tumult, ready to soar again.
One day, while my mother was loading up the washing machine, she received a phone call and stepped away, leaving the machine with the top loading door still open. The cat showed up looking a bit disheveled. I, being the only five year old who could keep a white shirt stain-free, naturally threw the cat into the washer. My mother came back, head cocked to the side, with that phone with the extra long curly cord perpetually pinned between her ear and right shoulder. Talking in Arabic except for a smattering of English words like “shopping” and “okay” and “Bible study” she finished loading up the washer. She sprinkled in detergent and started the cycle. Later on, she described hearing this moaning sound coming from the machine and wondering if something had broken. Eventually she opened the door to examine and found our ragged cat, bubbles emanating from her mouth, groaning in that long, tortured manner that only cats can do. Don’t’ worry, she was alive. However, a few minutes more and the spin cycle would have started. Who knows what would have happened? MishMish really did have at least nine lives. It wasn’t long before that cat would catch my scent, hiss like the Devil and bolt the other way. It’s hard to catch a cat that doesn’t want to be caught and so I moved on to other forms of entertainment.
The basement of this great estate housed the laundry facilities. Each upstairs room had a dumbwaiter and a laundry chute that collected in the basement. Some days I’d throw my teddy bear down the laundry chute and run as fast as I could down the four separate staircases to see if I could beat it. Always, BoBo the bear would be sitting atop the clothing pile, waiting for me. To this day, he is my faithful friend. I’ve had that teddy bear since I was three years old. Now, he belongs to my son.
My mother doing laundry, scrubbing the house and cooking are all familiar and warm memories. She filled that big stone home with life. It was part of her way and charm. A simple girl living a large life. One day, she summoned my brothers and I to the kitchen and lined up side by side by age. Next to my mother stood the single most formidable Black woman I’ve ever seen. I was tiny; this woman blocked out the sky. My mother introduced Ms. Clementine, our new housekeeper. My mother presented us, “Tarek, Ahab and Jimmy.” Ms. Clementine repeated “Tay-rack, Ay-ham, and Jimmy.” That was as good as it was going to get but at least I wasn’t getting screwed over for once. I distinctly remember my mother telling Ms. Clementine to treat her boys like her own and that she had “full spanking rights”. Glancing, I noticed the size of her hands. Their magnitude made me tremble. I noticed nervous sweat on my trouble-making middle brother’s brow which I found to be very gratifying.
My mother never treated Ms. Clementine as “the help”. She was indeed part of our family. Together, she and my mother scrubbed that house, cooked meals and kept things moving. Every day, they would pray and do Bible study together. When my father was at work I’d hear loud “Hallelujas!” and “Praise you Jesus-es!” amidst burst of Tongues as she and my mother prayed over every room they cleaned. On a strictly policed budget my father imposed, she would save and sneak money, food and clothes to Ms. Clementine. Finally, all those over-sized clothes from my grandmother actually did some good. We occasionally went to her black Pentecostal church together. It was in a run-down building. We would sit near the back. The congregation would be dressed to the nines. People would suddenly feel led by the Holy Spirit to stand up, holler and dance and sometimes be overcome by the spirit and be “slain” in the aisles. It was very Medea and the theatrical nature of it all mesmerized me. Anyway, the point is, my mother is truly a humble and faithful woman. She keeps in touch with Ms. Clementine to this day. In fact over twenty years later, long after we’d moved away, my mother had Ms. Clementine come to all our weddings.
By this time, my father was chair of his department. My mother says that it’s wise to have your work colleagues over once a year into your home so that they can see how you live and know that you’re an honest person. She also says that it’s important to serve them and be a gracious host. I remember her getting ready for his annual department Christmas party. It was a black tie, ultra elegant affair. She would start weeks in advance with the cooking. My aunts and some of the Egyptian women would gather in our restaurant-sized kitchen and set to task with lamb, veal, moussaka, vegetables, pastas, kofta, baklava, delicate tea cookies, tiramisu and a never-ending list of goodies. It was a Mediterranean extravaganza. They’d prepared the food, label it, and store it away in any one of our many freezers. My mother, an excellent organizer and home-maker, ran that operation with military precision softened by abounding laughter. Those are happy times for me filled with excitement in many voices. I’d ask for any menial chore just so I could be a part of the action.
The day of the party is one of my most favorite childhood memories. The house was ablaze with kinetic activity and utter excitement. First, landscapers arrived to clean the grounds and sculpt the trees into moving animals of exotic sorts. Next came the wait staff, scurrying in, struggling with cumber-buns and cufflinks. Not personally knowing them, my mother would nevertheless greet them with a hug and a warm thanks and tell them not to get fully dressed until right before the party. She’d say it was important to be comfortable because they all had lots of work to do now. Her consistent My Fair Lady/ Pretty Woman charm made her so endearing. They were troops and she their leader. Rolling up sleeves they attacked freezers under the hailing of Joan-of-Arc of the kitchen. Then came the delicate decorative touches throughout the house. The scent of flowers bathed every room. Young hands lit what seemed like a million votive candles and ever so delicately set them free on the glass surface of the pool. With pursed lips that looked like kisses, they would send the tiny flickering wishes on their beautiful aquatic journey. Those days, our home looked like that Disney World palace adorned in lace. Next would arrive musicians; two string quartets- one for inside, one for outside. As the sun began to set my mother would swiftly but calmly glide up that staircase and make sure we’d showered and dressed. She’d laid out our little suits days prior. Guests would arrive past our bedtime but she would allow us to stay upstairs with a babysitter and peer over the balcony at the ball below, as long as we dressed appropriately. She would escape into her room and with mounting excitement I’d wait for my favorite part of the night. Soon would emerge the most elegant dove adorned in the most intricate gown you could imagine. Emerald and ruby stars embraced her. Her raven hair, a crown of woven silk. She glided; Isis on the Nile. The irony is, she never saw herself as stunning as she was. Hurrying past us, she’d kiss us all on the head, say a quick prayer, and rush downstairs to make sure that all the food had been set properly. I just wanted someone to stop her for a moment to tell her how perfect she looked. No one did. It’s strange to me that of all these vibrant ruminations, in so few of them reside my father. It was because, and for, him that these great events breathed yet only in shadows is he impressed upon my mind.
The guests arrived; men in their tuxedos and ladies in gowns flowing like light reflecting off rushing water into a thousand bright colors. A butler would open the heavy wood door to greet them while directing them to the foyer and salon. Waiters whisked around silver platters like moon shaped discs laden with champagne and hand made delicacies. Showing her humility, my mother honored my father by hand making all the food. I learned a lesson by watching her example; great love requires willing service.
While my brothers played board games with the sitter I would stand there, hidden from sight but devouring the lavish sight below. I was so proud to be my parent’s child those nights.
Those were my favorite days but it seemed that for all the others, my parents had a tough marriage. My father worked all the time, and on free weekends he’d pick up extra shifts and work some more. He said he panicked about dropping dead like his father did and leaving behind three young boys with a “naïve” mother. He said he’d work hard now, amass some wealth, and reward himself by retiring early. During this time, my mother’s faith grew and with it, so did her involvement in the Coptic American community. As a strange counterpart, she also developed strong ties to the Pentecostal church. I think the Pentecostal church provided a lot of emotional support she needed: prayer partners, bible study groups, comforting church elders. So, culturally we were traditional Coptic Orthodox, but our daily lives in my father’s absence was all spirit-filled, Pentecostal intensity. I’m pretty sure my mother invented the concept of praying in Tongues throughout the Liturgy. Strange paradoxes color so much of my childhood.
To her credit, she delicately balanced looking like a socialite but investing herself in people’s lives like a missionary. On the surface she seemed like this beautiful rich woman who had it all, but when people spoke with her they would find an authentic and humble person in an volatile marriage. She has boundless heart and finesse, with genuine interest in people’s lives and wellbeing. When people called about feeling weary or discouraged she would tirelessly listen and pray for them, cook meals and save what money she could for them.
Soon there amassed a troupe of Egyptian women who commiserated about everything and prayed in Tongues about even what to prepare for dinner. I don’t say this to be irreverent. I understand and believe in the theology that God cares about the little details of our lives and that wisdom applies in every decision throughout the day. But this faith bond between sisters gave purpose to routine happenings and provided a means for all these women to intricately tie their lives together, much under the spiritual direction of my mother. It provided a support group and a news reel all in one; a means for everyone to keep updated on one another’s lives. They’d ask for prayer for yonder child dealing with such-and-such or so-and-so’s husband who did this-and-that with the secretary. You get the picture.
With all that together, you can imagine how our phone was always ringing. That phone was hermetically sealed between her right shoulder and ear. She would spend hours praying on the phone with confidants and with people she barely knew, alike. What impressed me is that she did all this in secret so as not to upset my father who viewed, without impunity, the church as an institution designed to influence and control the weak. He believed women to be inherently intellectually weak, but masters at manipulation. To him, church women were the worst of the species, exercising serpentine control over their husbands and families in the name of God and for the financial gain of the church. He was a fiercely private and independent man who was always suspicious of the controlling ways of the church and who hated the gossipy ways of women. And so, her ability to double speak in code and skillfully coordinate schedules around my father’s, became highly refined. In another life, she would have made an excellent spy. A phone conversation with a friend about the inability to remove a laundry stain would actually be an update on some family problem they had discussed earlier. “Oh. It’s still there. Just as dark or is it getting better? Ok. Let’s keep soaking it and try again tomorrow.” Meaning “Okay, let’s keep praying together and give it another few days.”. And so, there was always some secret project going on; some secret meal she was preparing for someone or some clothes she was donating or some prayer request she was honoring. I think every now and then, my Dad would catch on and that sense of deception would lead to a big fight.
My childhood consisted of a lot of alone play time, trying to get along with my older brothers and comforting my mother after her and dad had a fight. It seemed he would show up once a month and the house would explode. I never really knew what they fought about. My impression is that it usually to do with church or money or both. My brothers never seemed to be around when it happened. Being four and five years older than me respectively, they were always out and about and perhaps their absence allowed the space for my parents to feud. My father would show up, the house would crumble, and I’d be left as a five- year-old holding and comforting a sobbing and often battered mother. Even one moment as a child, sitting on the bathroom floor, holding your mother’s head in your lap, soaked by her tears and blood, is enough. It doesn’t take many of those moments to shape a childhood, to crack an emotional foundation or to scar a psyche. Those moments are potent and fierce and tend to burn up the kinder ones in their furious heat. Security was fragile and I was alone. I learned to be self-reliant early on.
Even then, among those burning moments, one overshadows the others: the moment I broke as a child. Hearing my mother’s screams, I ran downstairs only to halt mid-way, stunned by the sight in front of me. She was in her night gown and slippers, my father in slacks and a partially unbuttoned dress shirt, sleeves rolled up as though he’d just arrived from a long day at work. She was terrified; I could hear it in the high pitch and guttural strain of her shrieks.
This was different. Like a panicked and wild animal surrounded by brushfire, she frantically sought safety. The fire she fled seared in my father’s eyes. There they contended, in the vestibule of the great front entrance. It occurred to me that even in her negligee, she was trying to run out into the night for safety. I sensed he had already struck her a few times. The same door that had graciously welcomed elegant guests now stood as a heavy barrier barring her escape. All in one instant, which forever replays in my mind, he grabbed her by the hair as she strained to break free, yanking her and slamming the back of her head into the wall as she screeched in pain, begging for mercy. Her head ricocheted off the stone wall, and as her neck snapped forward, she caught sight of me, in desperation pleading “Jimmy, help!” as his fist met her face again. Her head hit the wall again. There was no more noise other than air and consciousness forcefully expelling from her body as she collapsed, slumping into a heap on the ground with a hollow thud.
I also collapsed against those stairs, shattering under the weight of her cry for help and my inability to rescue her. I went silent, other than heaving breaths of terror. And then he slowly turned and stared right at me. In a long, low, slow and strained tone, like a caged bull about to erupt, he groaned out my name. “Jimmmmmmy!” With a wail that awakened my paralyzed legs, I scurried up the stairs on my hands and feet and fled for any place to hide. I found a small, dark closet in the guest quarters and threw myself against the back corner, curling up, holding my knees and pushing my face into the carpeted floor to muffle my breath so he wouldn’t hear me. He never came. I lay there trembling too terrified to even cry, convinced my mother died because I couldn’t save her.
She didn’t die. I don’t remember anything more about that night. I don’t know how she recovered; whether he picked her up or she regained consciousness or if they kept fighting. I don’t know where my brothers were or what they witnessed. I don’t remember ever discussing that particular night until many years later. What I do remember is blinding in vision, piercing in texture and deafening in sound but everything else surrounding it has gone from my mind. Her bruises mended, she recovered and we all went on. This was the pattern of our lives. It was a precarious tight rope walk, a delicate balance of perfect and peril, and every now and then, a painful tumble.
And as that pattern went on it became easy to become crippled with self-pity, unforgiveness and hatred. For a long time I stayed emotionally stuck on that staircase, paralyzed by fear and anger and self-hatred. Fear of power and strength and authority because my father abused his, anger toward God and my parents for violating the security every child needs and self-hatred at my inability to change those events. For all of life’s beauty and wonder it is often the ugly, broken, dark, and desperate moments that have the most impact. These violent moments are the anvils and hammers that forcibly shape and threaten to break us.
It’s tempting as a writer to nicely and neatly wrap this up. It’s tempting to say that I learned to forgive, to take the good and leave the bad and to be stronger. But that’s not true. There are no bows wrapping up life’s messy situations. In order for wounds to heal, they must be examined, cleaned and continually tended and even when they heal, wounds leave scars. It took me a long time to learn that lesson. Instead, I handled those wounds in the only way I knew how as a child. I slapped on an emotional Band-Aid and ignored the terror, anger and loneliness. I learned to hide behind performance. Doing well and avoiding trouble shielded me from conflict but allowed my shame and resentment to fester in private. As my homosexual feeling emerged, the sense of dread and shame and isolation only intensified. I emerged from adolescence two men in one. The outer, extroverted, high-performing “ideal” son and the inner, terrified, self-loathing, lonely child that just wanted to leave home and never come back. And yet, even though there are no quick and tidy fixes, there is still Hope. Over time, God faithfully showed his warmth by using these stories I will share and the people in them to bring grace and healing. This is why I share them. Life has its way of happening in this broken world filled with us broken people. Sometimes we are the victims and sometimes we are the villains. Sometimes we do and sometimes things are done to us. And in all of this we have a choice: the choice to move, the choice to peel ourselves off the staircases in our lives, the choice to stand and the choice to take the heat of those burning moments and make fuel to move us forward.