Serious Business - What Patriarchy Can Do

I was going through some photos this evening, and...it was kinda frightening. Things in my world have been so turbulent and highspeed over the past three years that, although having lived it, although being aware of how physically sick and depleted I became, and although obviously having seen the photos before, I haven't really stopped to ponder it in its entirety.


Do you want to see why this is all such serious business to me? Do you want to see what loving a daughter of patriarchy, and fighting for her freedom like a rabid grizzly, did to me? Lets take a journey...


This was taken just a couple of months before my engagement. For a frame of reference, the guy on my right is 6'7 280, and the guy on my left 6'5 330. I was rockin' along at a solid, very healthy 6'0 215-220...

About a year later, and about a month/2 months after my ex had disappeared, the effects were already evident and I was down about 30 pounds or so from the previous photo...

A few months later, December 2008, there's this, and it's disturbing...

And this, equally as disturbing...

Thanks a bunch, "biblical" patriarchy.


I hadn't even bottomed out yet in those photos. That would come about 6 weeks later, when I was essentially bedridden, painful lesions breaking out on my body, issues with my heart, having lost about 1/3 of my body weight and my doctor fearing my organs would be damaged from malnutrition if I didn't begin to keep food down. I hadn't been able to eat properly in months (as well as sleeping sporadically). After months of everything that goes down coming back up, the stronger memory is that of what comes back up, and food loses its luster. My family and friends don't like to think about this period. One described me as looking like a refugee who was strung out on crack. I don't have photos of "rock bottom", nor would I want to see them. To understand some of the ancillary stresses of the preceeding months, you can read this post. It was during this period that the "godly" patriarchals I was dealing with had police calling me and sent police to my home, on the other side of the continent from them, just to make sure I was no threat to go and take her away from them. Paranoid fools, and judge me for feeling this way if you want, but I don't begin to consider them my brothers and sisters in Christ. I pity them as the sanctimonious, reckless, destructive, and selfish fools they are. I hope they'll wake up at some point in their lives.


Patriarchal types may be reading this saying, "but OUR family wouldn't do such things!" I promise you - I PROMISE YOU - you would, and you'd do so with callous disregard for anything but the selfish preservation of the patriarchal fiefdoms you reign over. When and if the wind ever blows on your structure, you remember my words. You've tied all of your being into your patriarchal belief. Just wait until the wind blows on you a bit, and you'll see exactly what you're made of. You won't care who lives or dies, who thrives and who languishes, who hurts and who heals, as long as you get what you want. These beliefs make people do selfishly evil things - because they require you to sell your entire soul to them.




Thankfully, this is me now, at a healthier weight (rockin' it around 230 - wouldn't even mind shedding a few pounds)...

Still ugly, still ornery, still scrapping, and still kicking.




I guess I had it coming in dealing with fundamentalist fools. Maybe I'm the bigger fool. But, when you love someone, and you know what's right, you'll pay any price. It didn't work out the way it should have, but I'd do it all again if there were any hope at all of getting her out of that spiritual, mental, intellectual, and emotional poison. I'd take on an entire army of wolverines.


I loved her, and would've given my life for her. They loved her, and would've given MY life for her.






Edited here to add the following backstory for clarity purposes...

For those who don't know the backstory, and who may be saying "It's dumb for someone to let this happen to themselves over a girl"...That's more than a bit of oversimplification.

Regular readers have read where I've written in the past, "The dynamic is much more like the woman I loved suddenly died (yet still walks the earth - unreachable) than simply a relationship ending and a man and woman parting ways." She was, and then she wasn't, yet she still was - somewhere.

On the day she was to fly here (for our soon upcoming ceremony), her last words to me were "Love you. See you soon." Two hours later, her grandfather called me and said, "She's not coming, and doing so on MY strong advice." He proceeded to say several extremely hurtful, intrusive, meddlesome, and ignorant things, telling me the various ways I was responsible for the situation. It was a good old fashioned Christian "eff U" coming from a good old fashioned Christian a-hole. He made it clear that if I made the venture across the continent to get her, "You'll be met with unfriendly faces if you do it!" Unless they'd hired some serious muscle, I wasn't worried about facing the whole lot of those fools. The reason I didn't go was that I knew it'd be pointless. They'd have her hidden somewhere. And, sure enough, a week later, I was able to locate her (and I won't disclose how). She was in another state, holed up with another group of patriarchal imbiblers and religious fools, being reindoctrinated but convinced, by them, that she was "waiting to hear from God about the situation." It would've been pointless to go there to get her, and for several reasons. First of all, the legal ramifications. Second, they would've had over a week of working intensive thought reform on her by the time I could get there, and I would've discovered a confused woman who may or may not have been receptive to me. Don't forget, I heard the voicemails these people had left for her on the day she didn't come here, so I know exactly the depths of their fruitcakiness.

The reality is, I knew, from the moment of her snake of a grandfather's phone call, that I'd likely never see her again. Once I found out where she was in hiding, I was almost certain of it. And, I was right. I haven't seen her. I've only had extremely limited contact with her via telephone, and that only with a "monitor" on the line with her, usually her idiot father, telling her which questions she could answer and which she couldn't, cutting the conversation off if he felt I was "reaching" her in any way. She was a shell of the strong, vibrant woman she'd been becoming with me, now spouting all of the buzzwords and giving me blatantly obviously scripted and rehearsed answers. This is a woman in her mid 20s that we're talking about.

Despite the lack of any real hope of getting her out, I fought. I fought with everything I had. You don't come by the information I came by in the months that followed by sitting around and pining. I squeezed every possible resource and pursued every possible avenue. I called in every possible favor. Over the six months or so that followed her disappearance, I expended most of whatever professional capital I had within the music industry begging movers and shakers to not punish her and her sisters (and their potential future in music) over her father's bizarre behaviors.  He had begun writing letters to influential people in the business while she and I were together trying to undermine me, as well as starting and promoting bizarre rumors about me in the circles I ran in, and continued to do so as long as he thought my pursuit of her freedom was continuing. Make no mistake, they thought he was a total kook...but it still made for professional troubles for me (gospel music business people don't have a lot of salt or backbone)...and they still wrote off her whole family. Maybe deservedly so, but a shame nonetheless.

And then, the bottom...and so much more which I may or may not write about in the future.

Like I said earlier in this post, some of the other issues I was dealing with at this time can be found here. 

Maybe this is a morbid way to look at it, but it all would've been so much easier for me if she had actually died, been lowered into the earth, and sprinkled with dirt. There would've been closure, and my goodbye, painful and lonely as it would've been, would've been significant for my healing and my future. As it is now, she essentially died, but still walks the earth as an unrecognizable soul, carrying the answers to questions I'm not allowed to ask, carrying the closure that my healing needs - with it locked away in the vault of an unstable, sociopathic father who uses it to torment an already defeated enemy. I sit here alone, trying to figure out how to grieve a dead, yet still living, promised and beloved bride - a bride who is now married to a man she doesn't love.

If you want to see this as an overreaction to an all things equal, boy meets girl/boy and girl break up situation, that'd be pretty stupid of you, but it's a free country.