I Want To Tell You My Story

By

Elle Patterson

Chapter 1  I Would Like To Tell You My Story 

My first life came to an end one day in July, 2005. That day I opened an envelope containing divorce papers. I thought I knew why, but my understanding didn’t sit well with me. It wasn’t until January of 2012 that I took the final hit to the mid-section of my good ship H.M.S. WhoAmI. It was my fifteenth or twentieth psychiatrist, I don’t know how many,  I lost track a long time ago  and again right now.  Where was I? Oh yes, my psychiatrist had just burst open a nightmare I had bubble-wrapped so well, not even I knew what it contained. 

I had been raped between 8th and 9th grade.   My psychiatrist was having trouble figuring out how a young man, the life of 8th grade kissing parties, thanks to Coralee, could go through high school with only a few dates, one as a freshman arranged by his Dad with a girl from a Sunday School class, one as a sophomore when a beautiful Junior asked him to Junior Cotillion, and a couple dates with a freshman at Columbia College, arranged by his brothers when he was Junior. How could anyone doing so well socially have bottomed out so bad. Rape. But that wasn’t  the first blow to the good ship H.M.S. WhoAmI. 

The first blows were filled with so much trauma that just a few years earlier a psychologist, following up on yet another psychiatrist’s diagnoses of severe chronic PTSD, was able to help me piece together how my body had been unable to learn how to react to stress because it was subjected to situations that a child’s mind couldn’t process. So, the body did.  That’s what PTSD is, the body usurping the mind’s response in stressful situations.  They started in 1956, after a horrible accident that left my Grandfather dead, my Dad with a broken neck, and my Mom with more than a dozen broken bones. Needles to say, they didn’t come home for several weeks, and when they did, two hospital beds came with them and held them for months afterwards. My Grandmother would tell me stories about what happened to me after that. And it never stopped. “Why they let those two boys treat you that way I will never understand,” she would tell me much later. 

Did you know that having your finger stuck into a small snapping turtles mouth doesn’t hurt much, unless it catches your cuticle? The same for parakeets. Now a cockatoo will draw blood from a child’s finger. But that’s nothing like a prairie dog, off to the docs for some stitches. Not much a child of three to five can do to fight off the grip of an seven to nine year old.  Do you know what poo-poo stick is? First you dip a stick in to fresh dog dooty, then you chase someone with it. Again, not much of a running contest between a kindergartner and a third grader. You get poop on your clothes, in your hair, and even in your mouth. Our basement was unfinished on one side and only the walls finished on part of the other. The basement windows were covered so it was pitch black. We had the regular creepy crawlers, spiders, centipedes, and mice.  So, I was dragged down there kicking and screaming, shoved under the staircase, furniture moved to block my exit, then the boys would run upstairs, close and lock the door with the lights turned off. I don’t know how long it took for me to quit reacting. Maybe as long as it took me to quit laughing when they sat on me and tickled me. Or maybe as long as it took until I just ate and swallowed hamster food, cat and dog food, or even monkey food that was forced into my mouth. That’s probably enough examples  For now to demonstrate how my body learned how to react while my mind just screamed out in fear and panic. 

I didn’t remember any of this when I saw my first shrink when I was sixteen. Some of you recall that I dropped out of Hickman and started at MU at that young age. Guess what? Doctors were free for students and they didn’t need to tell my parents, since I was a university student.  Recall that I didn’t remember about my early struggles at home, I didn’t recall being raped, but I did recall my, mostly, lousy days socially in high school. Life would have been better if I had been born a girl. 

Chapter 2  I Would Like To Tell You My Story

(Note to readers: please consider reading the comments of others, as many of you are part of My Story, and I often include clarifying comments or add some detail not in the primary text. See Chapter 1 and the comments on my timeline.)

Wait! What? My life would be better as a girl? Well, my older sister originally thought so. She really wanted Mom’s next child to be a girl. I wasn't, but that didn’t stop her from dressing me up in her clothes and having me act like I was her sister. I must say, compared to the torture I was enduring from my brothers, add in snotchos and Indian burns to the others previously noted, playing dress-up, having tea with dolls, and the like was always a welcome respite.  And she wasn’t alone wanting me to come out the womb female. I don’t know when I overheard it originally, but I did confirm with others that my Mom wanted two boys and two girls. Oops!

My many therapists believed that the most tragic event of my childhood was the death of my Mom when I was nine, during the last month of Fourth Grade. Perhaps. But more tragic, or sad really, is the fact that I don’t remember anything about her. I don’t know what she looked like aside from pictures. I don’t remember one word she every spoke to me. I don’t remember one smile or laugh. I don’t remember the sound of her voice. Nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada. 

Now don’t get me wrong. I do know who she is. Photographs and stories. My Dad was an avid photographer and we had thousands of pictures on 35mm slides. I’ve seen her. At the cabin, at parties, and on holidays and family events, all captured on film. And it seemed everyone in the fifties and early sixties knew Muggsie Dalton, as they often referred to her in their stories. Her aunts and uncles were famous, too. Governor, Supreme Court justice,  research doctor,  chief counsel of a very large railroad company, and on and on. Yes, everyone knew Mom, except me. I remember a few events involving her, but not her. 

The earliest is my first memory. Duh. I deduced it was Christmas evening of 1953. I was almost three months old. I was in a carrying cradle that was placed by the front door as family came and went in a bustle of activity. And then there was silence. No sound of anything, no breathing from someone nearby or of the movement of things in another room. Silence. I felt at peace. But all good things seem to come to an end. Again, I deduced, turns out I’m very good at deducing, that in all the excitement to get to Papa’s house for Christmas Eve, somebody forgot it was their job to grab me after the car was loaded. Miles away, someone remembered, and they all came back for me. 

My next memory was around three or four. Mom, as she apparently did often, arranged a Patterson Production at Grant School. She had her two sons and two daughters singing and dancing When The Saints Come Marching In. That’s right, two daughters. Even my own mother had me dressed up as a little girl. And when the performance was over, we lined up, we bowed, and I took my wig off. Everybody cheered and laughed. Oh, the confusion we plant in little minds. 

Sometimes, we plant very bad thoughts in our own brains. One of my worst memories occurred on the curb of Garth, the street just outside Grant School’s gym. I had a beautiful Irish Setter. The kind portrayed in the ‘62 release called Big Red. I loved, loved, loved my dog. (Sorry, tears are preventing me from writing for a moment.) Anyway, Columbia had recently passed a leash law prohibiting dogs from running free. And Sandy ran free. Because we lived only four houses away from school, she would greet all the students every recess. She loved every one of them. Anyway, that dreadful day, Mom ordered Sandy to ‘GO HOME!’ Sandy just looked at her, then looked at me as she crossed Garth. BAM! A car hit her and knocked her on to a broken pop bottle. Others ran out to her, my Dad was called from work, he took her to the vet, but too much blood had been lost. I remember being so mad that I wished I was dead. And then I told my Mom, I wished she was dead instead. A couple of months later, she fulfilled my wish. She died of breast cancer that claimed both her breasts and then her. And it was all my fault. 

My last memory, or lack of one, was Saturday morning, May 18th. Sister Deborah and I were in the kitchen fixing breakfast for the two of us when Dad walked through the door wearing sunglasses with tears running out below them. Mom was dead. Why did I not get to go in and see her Thursday night when Dalton, Donald, and Deborah were given farewell instructions and a chance to say goodbye. Why was I treated like a kid when I felt smarter than the bunch of them combined. “Why?”, would haunt me until December of 2020. 

That day I awoke remembering my first thing about Mom. She was holding my hand. All I remember from the dream was that her hand was bigger than mine and softer than Dad’s. And that she wanted to hold my hand. Oh, the tears flowed as once more my deductive powers came to my rescue. I woke Rebecca Lynne, who actually seems to never really be asleep, but just waiting for me to tell her something God said or showed me, bless her heart. I said I know why Mom didn’t see me Thursday night. She loved me too much.  She was afraid she would die on the spot from a broken heart. No Mom desires to do that to their beloved child. It was no secret that her Dad loved me the best. It was no secret that I had beautiful curls, just like her. It was no secret that she loved me very, very much. Except to me, until right now.

Chapter 3  I would Like To Tell You My Story

Note 1: Please don’t call or text my siblings to see how I’m doing. I’m doing very well, thank you very much. I’m just following directions one step at a time and they don’t need to be freaked out or worried. 

Note 2: For those who come from large families,  I believe abuse from siblings is, sadly, common. However, that abuse is normally checked when it’s gone on long enough or is inappropriate. My little sister says I did the same to her. She doesn’t realize the abuse to me was unchecked and inappropriate. Nor does she realize that I quickly learned that mimicking the boys even in the most rudimentary way was revolting to the crew of the H.M.S. WhoAmI, so I stopped. 

Crew? This chapter may be one of the most difficult chapters to share based on the many reactions I’ve witnessed over the last twenty, nay, fifty years. Please consider that all things might turn out noble.  Two diagnosis, one in 2000, that freaked me out, and the other just is. Disassociative Identity Disorder and Dissociative Amnesia. See https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dissociative-disorders/symptoms-causes/syc-20355215 for a brief definition with most of what you need to know. 

Turns out the H.M.S. WhoAmI has a crew of two. If you had to escape into another reality, but the only person who changed was you, can you guess what gender I would be? Yep, female. As close as I can understand it, I would just flip. I started flipping after the rape happened (The one I don’t remember).  I wouldn’t flip randomly and not when participating or responsible for others. Never! But when left by myself on a Friday or Saturday night, all alone, spirally down in search of “What’s wrong with me?”, I would just flip. I wondered why I never got to wear MY clothes. In fact , I didn’t have any clothes appropriate for me, so off to a closet to get myself dressed properly. Something comfortable to watch a movie in or go to a fast food drive up window. Often, I realized I looked like I hadn’t shaved my legs or underarms for weeks, so off to the showers with my lazy bum. I would relax, become at ease and just chill, a word not used this way in that year, but you get the point, I was okay. And then, I would remember that my parents would be coming home soon and I needed to make sure I did all the chores they asked me to do if I was going to stay home, and then, and then, and then I would see myself in the mirror and freak. Oh, the  anger I felt that I had to go back to being one of the boys so I wouldn’t upset anyone walking through the door. Eventually, I would flip back to my poor miserable self, until the next girl night out came. 

The doctors call it dissociative identity disorder. But get this, I was thirteen when my first episode happened and forty-six when someone finally diagnosed it. Over thirty years of therapy and not one saw it. My problems were buried deep. Very deep.  But when they did diagnose it, I didn’t get checked into the St. David’s Mental Hospital for acting female. No, you’ve really got to dissociate so badly that you regain consciousness hanging from the banister by your neckties, call your care pastor, meet with him, leave your car at his office, go with him to a hospital in downtown Austin, watch him tell a surreal story, apparently about you, realize it’s serious, that they want you to commit yourself without hope of leaving unless they say it’s alright, then step through a security door, and get asked to remove your belt and shoelaces. Whatever the hell for? It’s not like I’m going to hang myself. 

I went in on Friday and came out Sunday night with the promise by me and my wife that I would be there bright and early tomorrow for four hours of intensive outpatient therapy and continue every day until they said stop. The main part of the therapy is based on Cognitive Behavior Theory (CBT). It is really cool and everyone should be educated on it as it deals with around a dozen distorted thought patterns that we all use to some degree. Turns out that these distorted thoughts arise from core beliefs that are faulty. (Aside: sounds like the citizens of the U.S. could use this right now with the 2021 inauguration happening in two days.) Intensive CBT therapy is effective for about 95% of the patients in about ten to fifteen days. By that time old and new patients were asking me to teach the forty-five minute section daily on CBT. I was good, but I was also in my third week with no improvement. 

Clearly I understood the theory and was implementing it properly So what’s up? I had gotten the attention of the head of psychiatry at St. David. She explained to me that for five percent CBT is not effective. They either had severe childhood trauma or had been raped. Nope on both accords. (If you read Chapters 1 and 2, you know no one knew for another decade that I had suffered from both of these.) She met with me for an hour everyday after my four hours of intensive outpatient therapy. And one day, combing through things that haven’t happened for ten years, I mentioned wanting to be female at one time. Well the sh*t hit the fan then. I had a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a social worker, and a gender dysphoria group assigned to me. All CBT therapy stopped. Wait. What is Gender Dysphoria? Look it up like I had to. But it was a big deal and they believed it must explain everything. Gender Dysphoria. Go figure.

Chapter 4  I would Like To Tell You My Story

WHAT? THEY WERE WRONG! I DO NOT SUFFER FROM GENDER DYSPHORIA. How could this happen? Where were we? Oh? Yes. Fast tracked at St. David’s for gender dysphoria.  Turns out they only had two years to do their work. I retired from my high paying job and took a ninety percent cut in pay to teach high school math the fall of 2000, as a male, I might add. A year and a half later, my wife’s company closed up shop and offered her a job in Pennsylvania. We didn’t really have much of a financial choice, so we packed up house and moved to the last place I would ever wanted to live. But I was surprised. Southeast P A, as the locals affectionately call that region, is beautiful. And it is the home of Dr. Maureen Osborne, one of the nation’s leading authorities on gender dysphoria. (An example of her work in 2015: https://www.slideshare.net/MaureenOsborne/transgender-summit-plenary  ) So I started seeing her. One year later, she called my wife and I into a consultation that changed my life. She told us explicitly that if I didn’t have gender reassignment surgery that I would be dead in a year. Because I had disassociated before and almost killed myself, she was certain I would try again and this time be successful. This freaked me out because you don’t know your disassociating until after the event, in this case, dying. To quote Eddie Izzard, “Cake or death?” I choose the cake, but not until after we left Pennsylvania and returned to Missouri. I just started getting too scared of disassociating, so I faced surgery. 

Per the Standards of Care in the DSM IV for gender dysphoria, I found a therapist familiar with the topic to take over therapy. I had only seen her for a year when I received the divorce papers in the mail, July 2005. Couldn’t really blame my wife. I was a lot to handle. She said I could stay with her, but not married. The loss was too great for me, so I moved out. As therapy progressed, my new therapist was convinced I was in denial, that I really was “a woman trapped in a man’s body.” We worked for four years, two, sometimes three times a week. We knew each other well. Then one day in the Spring of 2008, she saw something else, something bigger and deeper. I was so relieved, as I was not making any progress in accepting my transformed body. But she said to dig that deep would require intense daily therapy. Where had I heard that before? But this time the cost would be out of pocket, estimated to the tune of $40,000 to $60,000. Ouch. No, I’ll pass. I quit seeing her. I quit my female hormones. I approached my ex-wife with the news. 

She invited me back in, May 2009. In January, 2010, I tore a ligament on one side of my left knee and fractured a bone on the other side of the same knee. I was just catching my breath on top of a mogul, slid back a foot, fell over, and snap crack. This may seem out of place, but hang in there. June of 2011, I was water skiing and cut back across the wake, catching at most six inches of air. When I landed shock waves ran the length of my body. I just let go, settled into the water, and prayed I could feel my toes. I had fractured spinal discs L1, L2, and L4. What was happening to my bones? No hormones, that’s what. I was borderline osteoporosis. I was dressed like a male, wanted to be a male, so they injected me with testosterone and put me on a regimen. And then the anger, frustration, and stress began anew with a vengeance. I found a new therapist that was covered by insurance and we went back to work. Even she was surprised how quickly she was able to uncover a glimpse of an edge of one memory which revealed enough for her to proclaim, “We can stop digging. You’ve been raped.” In doing her due diligence, she also uncovered my childhood abuse. We ran over my history since then and all my discussions with different psychologists and psychiatrists to reach the conclusion that I suffered from not only disassociative disorders, but more disconcerting, I suffer from severe chronic PTSD. I DO NOT SUFFER FROM GENDER DYSPHORIA. The testosterone regimen was changing my blood chemistry and triggering PTSD episodes. I must find a way off of testosterone. 

She told me in January 2012, that I needed intensive rest with much love while getting help with the PTSD to have a chance at living much longer. On February 14th, I invited my wife to a marriage renewal seminar at church. I would get the love I needed. I wrote my renewal vow, but she couldn’t, in good conscience, write hers. I was doomed. My therapist contacted psychological retreat courses on recovery, but they ran four to six weeks at $10,000 per week and not covered by insurance. Doomed again. We talked about alternatives and decided staying with my oldest sister in Wine Country would be best. And then I did something I will always regret. I went to my son’s house to say I was leaving. When he asked if I was going to Rebecca‘s and if I would be marrying her, I lied and said yes. It sounded better than the truth, that I was going to my sister’s, but would probably die on the way. For a forty-five minute ride down a steep hill on a Wyoming cross-cut to Idaho, towing my car behind a U-Haul truck, I fought Satan for control of the wheel. I didn’t want to die. I rolled into a friends house in Idaho, and fell apart. God help me.

Chapter 5  I would Like To Tell You My Story

I had forgotten the feeling of utter despair, of complete and pure hopelessness, until the Spring of 2013. But let’s start with the first time. We have to go back and build up the success of the World in my shattered psyche. School was about to end that first week of my senior year. I was sixteen years old. I headed down to the revered and very intelligent Mr. Battle, school counselor, to inform him that I was dropping out of school and wouldn’t be back. We had a polite argument with which he ended taking the stand that the Patterson’s were a prominent family in Columbia and if one of those children dropped out, it could set a precedence for others to follow. “Think of the others that aren’t as smart as you. What will happen to them?” I didn’t care. I didn’t believe in Santa Claus and I didn’t believe in God. 

I walked to the Dean of Admissions at the University of Missouri’s admission office and asked if I could go to school there. He or she inquired about my schooling and high school graduation and when they saw my determined stance, regardless of being a high school drop out (of only about thirty minutes, I might add), they said I would have to do well on the College Entrance Board that were being held tomorrow in the Physics Building‘s auditorium. “Show up tomorrow at eight and be prepared to spend the whole day testing, then show up Monday at registration and they will let you know if you’ve been enrolled. You will have to pay the $128 fees per semester then.” When I finally got up to the person checking CEB results on Monday, she had to call the testing center. I heard her say over the phone, “What? This kid standing in front of me got a perfect score on the math. Ok, I’ll enroll him.” It wasn’t the last time I scored that high. I repeated it eight years later on my GRE, the entrance test for graduate school. You understand what I’m saying don’t you? I am frigging smart. 

When I was a sophomore in college, I decided after trying my first year, dually enrolled for majors in Physics and Chemistry, that they didn’t make a lot of money, remember this is 1971. So I switched majors to Corporate Finance in BPA. It would help me fit in with the other pledges of Phi Gamma Delta, the Fiji’s. But after three semesters of that, I met with Dean Edwards, a friend of the family, and said business school was too easy, that there was no real challenge. He somberly took the put down of the school he was dean of and set me up with Testing Services to find a school that would be a challenge. The head of testing sat down with me with the results and said he had never seen anything like it. He told me that I tested over 95% aptitude in over fifty fields offered at Mizzou. I could do whatever I wanted. What I wanted was for him to tell me what to do. The military automatically got the results, too, and every branch, including some I didn’t know, interviewed me for some upper ranking position in the near future. I ended up asking the counseling service what the hardest school was at MU. They said based on dropouts, that would be Electrical Engineering. What the heck do they do? But I didn’t care, I switched to them. 

There are several areas of life that the World says that if you succeed in one them, then you will be considered a success. Well I succeeded at being intelligent. What was next, money? I worked for my Dad several summers in steel construction. I believe minimum wage was $2.50 an hour, so I made $100 per week. That would easily cover college and frat house room & board. One summer day, at the end of a week, I asked my Dad if I could borrow the boom truck on Saturday. I drove down to southeast Missouri, picked up some 300 lbs to 800 lbs boulders off farmer’s hills for free and then sold them to a landscaper in Columbia for $1,000. I made in six hours what my Dad paid me for ten weeks of work. He was impressed. But not nearly as impressed when one June, a fraternity brother and I decided to open a bar. We opened Déjà Vu at the end of August. I invested $9,000 and sold it April 1st of the next year for $175,000. I decided I ought to finish my junior year in Electrical Engineering and I graduated in 1977. In 1978, a regional shopping mall was going to open in Columbia. I teamed up with one of my brothers and May Development and fought against General Growth for developing rights. We came very, very close to pulling it off. I believe my share would have been worth $16,000,000. Yes, I could make money. I went back to grad school and got my Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering in one year. After a stent at Texas Instruments, I ended up in Silicon Valley designing computer games in 1981. I was very successful mentally and financially, but it was empty. 

I had a wife, a beautiful smart son, a home, a promising and glamorous job, and it didn’t make my boat float. I just couldn’t shake this feeling I was worthless. I started  seeing a psychiatrist because life had no meaning.  He said it was this, he said it was that, he said it wasn’t that I wanted to be a female. That just wasn’t done. But I had to escape from myself and no one knew why, especially me.  One Spring day in 1982, I was driving our gold Mercedes Benz 450SL across the Golden Gate Bridge, heading into Sausalito. I pulled the car over in the middle of the bridge and started to get out to jump. My 3-year old son said, “Dad? Why are you stopping the car?” I swung my tunnel vision, caused by one of my meds, over to look at him. I saw me at three sitting there. Suddenly, I was having a vision of me falling between two  opposing cliff faces. I could see a line of open space near where they were converging and if I could just make it into that space I would be free. As the two faces came closer and closer together,  I thought I might just squeeze through. My legs were free, but my hips caught and my arms were jammed above my head. I was stuck fast, just dangling. There was no hope of getting out. Engineers couldn’t help, doctors couldn’t help, family couldn’t help. I was beyond help, beyond hope, beyond any desire to live another moment. But I couldn’t die. One cliff face was my young son with all his life before him. The other cliff face was my Mom having died when I was nine. I couldn’t take my son’s father’s life because I knew what it was like to never see a parent again. I couldn’t voluntarily do what my Mom involuntarily did. I was completely and purely hopeless. No reason to live. No way to die. It was then that I looked up past my outstretched arms and said, “If there is a God, please help me.” I put the car in gear and drove on across the bridge, feeling empty, because I knew my only hope didn’t exist.

Chapter 6   I Would Like To Tell You My Story

“Draw near to Me, and I will draw near to you.”  I’m headed west on 280 about five minutes before catching 85 north to Sunnyvale. I’m thinking about my new job at Hamilton/Avnet as a technical specialist. How far had I sunk? A month ago I was the engineering manager of a game designing startup for Nolan Bushnell, think Atari, and now all I do is explain new microtechnology to companies scattered throughout Silicon Valley. I should have jumped off the bridge. Instead, my meds are making me talk monotone, I can barely think straight, I just regurgitate data to engineers who are ... . I notice I’m going 85 mph. Up ahead is a road crossing over the freeway. It’s massive support standing like a life ending sanctuary between westbound and eastbound lanes.  If I hit it at this speed, ... . Suddenly, I’m falling between two cliff faces, one my son, the other my Mom. I slow down to the speed limit remembering what I said that day on the bridge, “If there is a God, please help me.” 

Every day is the same, maybe a different road, maybe a different overpass, but the same thoughts, the same memories. I can’t take it. I had quit listening to Rock’n’Roll since I sold the Vu seven years ago, but I needed to get out of my head. So I would crank up the tunes, BTO, Eagles, Beatles, Foghat, and the like. I would remember that awesome football game that Mizzou won in the Fall of ‘75. I ran from the stadium to open  Déjà Vu before the anticipated celebration overwhelmed the place with 2,000 people. “Man, I’ve got to find a way to keep people waiting outside. You can’t even serve drinks when it’s that packed.” The fans started showing up, I jumped into the DJ booth, cranked up the tunes and had everyone dancing from five o’clock to closing. I loved matching the music to the mood swings in the crowd. I played it masterfully. My personal mood swings weren’t going as well. I would recall finishing UMC with a BSEE and an MSEE. Not bad for a high school drop out, but episodes of wanting to escape into another body, hitting the drug scene in the super-rock-star-crazy game industry, and then ending up just a tech. The car sped up, a concrete post appeared in the distance, I changed channels just in time to stay away from the cliffs. Day after day. Changing channels came faster and faster as I could slide through the memories like a car on black ice. I was losing it. My favorite station became S C A N. That’s right, the scan button wouldn’t play the song long enough to go cliff diving. But I got better and faster at spirally down, down, down, hit AM, hit AM, hit AM. So, I jammed the AM button, and darn if there weren’t golden oldies station mixed in with Hispanic stations, news stations, and what? What channel had S C A N found? Some guy mumbling something I couldn’t make out through my drug impaired hearing, but I knew one thing and it was good enough for me. When this guy was talking, I didn’t speed up, I didn’t recall the Golden Gate stop. I could drive to work peacefully. Now, all I had to do was find out when he was on and go to work at that time. It worked. Hallelujah. Wait. What?

Many days, I would get to work and turn right around and get into one of the salespersons’ car to go call on one of their accounts. I hated that, being in the car, left in my mind by myself, while they drove to the account. Occasionally, I had to ride with this one sales guy, C.H., who others found a bit odd, but I liked him. He would take me to some of the most exciting places. The first time I had to ride with him, he noticed I was depressed and said I needed Jesus. I told him if he ever pushed that crap on me again I would go to management. He stopped. I climbed back inside my mind seeking for a way out. Several months later, he called and said his car was in the shop and could I drive. He said to pick him up early for our first appointment. When he got in the car, I told him not to talk. At the precise time I clicked on my AM station and listened as I drove to his account. When we pulled into the parking lot and parked, I started to get out of the car and he asked me to sit back down. “Dan, do you know what the radio show was about?” I said, “Yeah, remember when I told you about that day on the Golden Gate Bridge and how I was stuck hopelessly between two inward facing cliffs? I’ve been talking with a man as he has been slowly pulling me up. The guy on the radio is describing the man helping me.” His jaw dropped down and he just sat there with the most bewildered face. Finally, he said, “He was talking about Jesus.” “Oh,” I said, “so that’s his name.” I put my arms up like they would be in my vision and said, “Hi, Jesus. Thanks for pulling me up.” C.H. looked baffled the entire day. Some days C.H. seemed a little bit odd even to me. 

During the next few times I had to ride with C.H., he would rant about how people don’t come to knowing Jesus by being pulled up between two cliff faces. I wasn’t doing it right. No, I mean I’m not writing this chapter right. I put down my iPad, looked at Rebecca and said, “I can’t do it anymore. What’s the point? Where is God going with this?” She just looked at me sadly. She has been trolling Facebook and the news of January 23, 2021, and read a few of the opening paragraphs out loud. I fell asleep listening to a video about crystal batteries changing the World. Off to bed. 

“How did you sleep?”, Rebecca asked in the morning. “Fine, I guess. But what’s the point in continuing My Story. I would have to confess that I was a lousy person back then, that I lost my two best friends from college. One, that hated me after I took off for a three week honeymoon the first December of Déjà Vu’s young existence, and the second hated me after I persuaded him to come out to Silicon Valley and join me in designing games, only to end up leaving to become a tech because my life was crumbling.” Rebecca Lynne laid there, silently beside me. And then I said, “The story gets gets worse. For you. I can’t tell the story without talking about my love for Deborah.” And I laid there, silently beside her. Then she spoke. “I don’t really know how to say this, but I will give it a try. Your love for Debbie Sue back then was awe inspiring. No matter how much you hurt each other, you loved her with all your heart. I could never expect you to love me like that and I expected you to leave me. I was ok with that. I would always be second. I just needed to be near you. You were real. You brought color into my black and white life and proved to me daily that God was alive and vibrant. Just watching what you did and listening to what you said, you were real. And God was real to you.  I was more than willing to simply live with you and Debbie Sue and help in any way I could. My life had meaning when I was near you. I felt seen for the very first time in my life. I didn’t want to lose even a piece of that, a piece of becoming real.” Perhaps, Lord. Perhaps my becoming real in others’ hearts in this time of division, rampant manipulations in the news, even fake news, will open their hearts enough to be heard, to be seen, to become real. It was always Your story, Your realness. Let the pain and suffering of my last forty years begin. But this time with You in it. 

[Special thanks to Rebecca Lynne Pattrrson for writing down her words this morning to be included in Chapter 6.]

Chapter 7   I Would Like To Tell You My Story

Rebecca Lynne told me to keep being real, keep writing. C.H. said I was doing it wrong. And, I had just learned the name of the man pulling me up from between two cliff faces, two cliff faces that seemed to recede like that door at the end of a hall in a horror movie, the faster you ran, the faster it receded.

His name was Jesus. And I knew where to find Jesus. Apparently, I had read the Bible before now. Not surprising, considering the National Geographic,Time-Life’s Nature and other series, and of course the Encyclopedia Britannica, that our parents would buy so we would learn about the world around us, were sitting on the same shelves. Well, I read them all, well almost all.  I just couldn't make it through Britanica. But I had read the Bible through and I put it to good use in college. I would ridicule fraternity brothers that believed in god by tying them up in scripture inconsistencies, fallacies, and example upon example of the lack of love their god had. I even got the best grade in Philosophy class based on a scathing paper on how god could not be all loving and all powerful at the same time. After all, god took away my Mom when I needed her the most. And to top it all off, when I had only been married a month or so, I told my new wife that we weren’t going to raise our kids believing in any Jesus crap. And here I was being pulled up by Lord Jesus himself. How was I going to react when I learned that He had allowed the abuse and rape that I didn’t even know had happened? I would learn that later, but not now. Now, I needed to learn why He was pulling me up. 

I didn’t own a Bible anymore so I went to a Christian bookstore to get what I would really need to learn about God and Jesus. I came out with a Thomas Nelson New King James Bible that included a topical index, dictionary, small concordance, and abbreviated Strong’s cross reference. And because I was taking this seriously, I purchased the matching full concordance and a complete Strong’s Index Reference book. I got up early every morning, think five-ish, and read for more than an hour and would find time during the evening to read some more. One day, my four year old son wanted to read it, too, so he climbed up in my lap in the morning and I would read it out loud. Later that year, my son would ask to go to a men’s bible study on Proverbs. We grabbed some donuts to share and headed off to a 6:30 AM hour long study. He never fidgeted or wanted to leave early. I loved that time together. 

C.H. took me to his church and introduced me to his pastor, Paul Steele. Paul asked if I would please give my testimony next Sunday with a scripture. The next Sunday, after telling a very short story, I quoted Paul from Romans 7, “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” After the service, a woman asked me if I could help her son. He was depressed and hitting his head with a hammer. Ouch! For both of them. I was polite and took her phone number. Like I could help. My father-in-law, Marion Small, was visiting a few weeks later. I loved Marion more than any man I knew. He was quiet, but strong, physically and, more so, in character. And he was the best pool player I would ever know. Apparently, he would go out to taverns that had pool tables and would often call home for a ride because he was too drunk. But he didn’t drink and didn’t smoke when I met him. The story goes that he said one day out loud to himself, “That’s enough.” And apparently it was. No more alcohol or tobacco. Anyway, I told him about that woman’s son and asked if he would like to take him with us to shoot pool. We took him twice that week, and the following Sunday, the woman told us that her son decided to go back on his meds and continue counseling. I didn’t know what to make of that. 

C.H. continued to think of ‘God-things’ we could do together. He recognized that  David Hocking was the man I was listening to on the AM radio, so he arranged for us to see him talk live at a local church. Of course, we sat right up front and shook hands with him afterwards. Reminded me of the time when I was much younger that my Dad took me to hear Billy Graham. We shook hands with him, too. Seems like that is what you do after someone talks to you for an hour or so, thank them and shake hands. Our company decided that a joint luncheon between Intel’s and Hamilton/Avnet’s Bay Area sales force would be a good idea. A lunchroom at Intel held the several hundred and lunches were served quickly. I stood up, pinged my water goblet for attention, said a prayer of thanksgiving for the food and record sales, and sat back down. The silence was as deafening as the talk was moments after. Apparently, I had broken a Silicon Valley taboo, something that certain individuals would remember for a long time and another wouldn’t let the day pass before attacking. Back at Hamilton/Avnet’s bullpen, an area of at least fifty desks for inside sales, Steve J., a salesperson, hollered at me from five feet away, “What the hell did you think you were doing? You arrogant self-righteous bastard. Bringing your belief into our house. Just shut up and do what we tell you to do when we tell you to do it.” I would hear that two more times in two other companies. Technical specialists were like slaves to salespeople, even though it was their knowledge that made purchases happen. And this slave just took their first public beating. 

You can understand why I was hesitant to participate in another lunch idea the company had months later. The request to take a fellow tech from Intel to lunch this week still didn’t sit well with me, so I waited until almost one o’clock on Friday to show up at Intel. Surely everyone would be gone, everyone was, but John. The John who had made it publicly clear that he didn’t like me, and for that reason, I didn’t like him. But I was a good slave, so I invited him to lunch. We went to a small restaurant, ordered, and I started to eat after we were served. I was three bites in when I noticed he was just staring at his food. He said, “I’m not hungry. What’s the point of living? I heard you wanted to jump one day.” Wow! Is nothing private anymore? But I told him my story as I knew it in 1983 and about Jesus pulling me up. We paid our bill, left our entire meals just sitting there, and went to his apartment. I told him I had no idea how to help him, so I told him what C.H. said to do. I did, he did, I left, told C.H. what had happened, and said, “John’s all yours. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

I had some more public embarrassments, one being told by God to speak out at a hearing to open a liquor store across from the high school. I stood up to speak at the appropriate time, I wasn’t on the speakers’ list, they told me to sit down, I started to, God said to tell them He didn’t want this, I told them, I started to sit down, “Stand”, they told me sit down, I started to, “Stand”, they said they would have me removed, I started to sit down, “Stand”, a man came over to remove me, “Sit”. “Oh God, can I please leave now?”, “Not yet.”  That was the most embarrassing thing I had ever done as a grownup.

I didn’t see the other one coming at all. To understand how it came about, you would have to know Deborah’s and my love for our parents. We often talked about how selfish we were to keep both sets of grandparents from their only grandchild. We even made a list of why to move back to Columbia. It only had two words on it. Grandparents. Thunderstorms. You see, the Bay Area just doesn’t have a lot of thunderstorms. In fact, for the four years we lived there, I only remember two claps of thunder. Not rumbling beauties, mind you, just two solitary claps. We really missed them, especially in the summers. Anyway, we were having serious struggles about keeping our son separated from the grandparents one night when I realized that maybe God would help us. I remember I prayed and told Him how much it hurt to not know what we should do. And I asked Him to show some mercy and make it clear. I had read that He once wrote a message on a wall, so I asked Him to show mercy and to write His answer on our wall. After a few hours of sleep, Deborah nudged me and asked me if I heard that. Heard what? She said open the doors to the patio and listen. It started as distant rumblings, but when a bolt of lightning hit nearby, I realized we were at the onset of a thunderstorm. After about fifteen minutes, she said it reminded her of the thunderstorms in Columbia growing up. I thought about that. No way, Lord. You don’t write Your answer on the sky. The storm went on for an hour, if not two, and I argued with Him about how this couldn’t be a response to my prayer and He said, “How many times have I had you read Job?” Job was becoming my favorite book. In it, God responded to Job with questions he couldn’t answer. God declared that He would do what, where, when, and with whom He wanted. I surrendered and begged Him to stop the storm so I could get a little sleep. I wasn’t the least bit surprised that everything went silent. In the morning, I couldn’t wait to tell Deborah about my freaky dream. But she cut me off after I started and said it was no dream. Nooooo. God, You don’t do that. I had studied enough to know that when you thought God did something that you better find some proof in the Bible. His Words are a reference point for our thinking. I couldn’t find thunderstorms in the index, so I searched for storms in the topical index, and found thunder, wind, and lightning in, surprise, the Book of Job. I had learned to back up several verses to understand the context of a specific verse, and sure enough, He was talking about weather. And then I read my verse, “He causes it to come, Whether for correction, Or for His land, Or for mercy.” It began raining inside as I reread those last two words, “for mercy”. The afternoon edition of the San Jose Mercury had a big bold headline, like it would use to say war was declared, but it read, “Midwest Thunderstorm Comes To Bay Area.” We put up our house for sale the next day. The realtor said we should list it for $175,000. I told her to put it on for $195,000. It sold in two days. Everyone one at work and church said I was nuts. Did I really think God would do that? Even my close friends questioned it and I could tell that Deborah was also waffling. We canceled the contract, but a few months later I was feeling shameful and found myself asking God to let me know in my review whether He had wanted us to go to Columbia. I was expecting a 10% raise. Instead, I was told the whole company was suffering from the recession and we were cutting back everyone’s pay so no one would get laid off. We sold the house in a week, moved to Columbia. Went looking for a job, found the ideal job teaching electronics at a junior college. Only problem was, I was two months too late. It had already been filled. And the time of agony, pain, and suffering was about to begin. 

Chapter 8  I Would Like To Tell You My Story

Here I am back in Columbia with a wife, a four year old son, and no home. We have to unload our U-Haul, but where? I was working with a realtor and she said she talked to the owner of one of her listings who said I could unload into the garage. Two weeks later the owner said he would rent to us. The yard was in terrible condition so I dethatched it, fertilized it, reseeded, and watered it. It started coming back. The owner saw our love for the property and made it possible for us to buy it. We were in the Grant School district, so my son enrolled in kindergarten. A week had barely gone by when he came home and called his Mom a motherf$&#*r. He had picked it up from fellow students. Kindergarteners! What had happened to Grant School? We enrolled him in a Christian school that was part of the First Assembly of God in south Providence, the church we decided to join after visiting five others. I had many meetings with Pastor Denbow, trying to figure my calling, my purpose in life. I was obviously struggling, but neither of us knew the baggage that I was carrying. 

I did eventually find a job, but I continued to drop lower. I was now a service tech for a pc reseller. I supplemented my meager income by learning a multipurpose program called Framework and used that knowledge to computerize the management of a 400-unit apartment complex in south Columbia, an asphalt plant in Hannibal, and a construction company. I still believe I wasn’t happy in my work, because I wasn’t doing the right kind of work, God’s work. I had purchased an Atari ST, in 1984, as a personal computer. It had the ability to run Apple Macintosh software, and I was investigating its utility when I decided to ask God whether he wanted me to open a retail store to sell them. I wasn’t sure He was there anymore for me. I had quit reading the Bible, four times through seemed enough, and His punishment, as I saw it as such then of not getting the dream job teaching because I didn’t trust His thunderstorm response, seemed cruel. But I was trying so hard to find His direction on my life, so I flipped a coin. It came up heads, so I took the remaining money we had after moving and buying a house, and started Computer Research Labs on south 9th Street selling Mac clones. Many university and college students loved it. I met wonderful people and had wonderful employees. It was a police officer from Jefferson City that caught my heart. Steve C. would come in often just to talk about God. His two sons had found his service revolver and were playing cops and robbers. But when the oldest pulled the gun on the youngest and shot, the gun went off. His brother died. How does one explain God’s love in that situation? One doesn’t without God. I told him to feel free dropping his older son off at the store, while he went to class, and I would let him play whatever he wanted. Steve wrote his dissertation on the Lab’s Atari’s and printed it out on our new laser printer. I learned after we moved away that he had started a ministry for police officer’s suffering. 

Suffering seems to be everywhere. What’s the point of suffering? Deborah got a call late one night from her Mom. She needed to come to the hospital right away. I stayed home with our son and fell to my knees in the living room. Her Dad had suffered a mild stroke a few months earlier. Marion was a father to me. He helped me rebuild the cabin on the Gasconade after a flood did a lot of damage. He helped me down at the store whenever I needed him. He painted the outside of our home. And all this after flying across the country and packing our belongings with my Dad’s help, and driving the truck back to Columbia, when I’d only been married six months and was collapsing into gender dysphoria. He loved me unconditionally and he was dying. I prayed for a miracle. I offered God my life instead of his. I confessed everything I knew I had ever done wrong. I begged until I was overwhelmed with tears and shaking. And then He said, “Shhh. Be at peace. He is with Me.” I was instantly at peace. Even a smile broke on my face. I didn’t know how this could be. He never confessed to me. He never asked any questions about God. He didn’t attend church unless someone asked him. It wasn’t until after the funeral that his sister, I believe, said Marion would always mention that God wouldn’t like this or that. He definitely believed in God. 

I still had a couple of more struggles with my walk with God in Columbia. The Christmas Season following Marion’s death was coming. Computer Research Labs had its first month in the black in October, so I went all out, bought fifty Atari ST’s, and dreamed big. Unknown to me, the University Bookstore, three blocks south, had also purchased hundreds of Macintoshes and had permission to sell them at half-price to students. We sold two computers and owed more money than we had. Deborah was starting her last semester of her finance degree, so I lied and said everything was fine. I negotiated with the bank to wait until May, after I sold the house to pay back loans. I negotiated with SBA to repay their loan in full, if they would withhold interest. I received a check from the IRS, and when I inquired why with my accountant, he finally came out and said, “Your income was below the poverty level.” After Deborah’s graduation, we auctioned off most household goods, even my son sold some of his toy collections to help. A classmate, Jenny C., dropped by during the auction. She came over to say hi after a while and asked me, “How can you be so happy and smiling? You’ve lost everything!” It was easy to explain. I HAD lost a lot, but not everything. I had no choice, but to sell all. I was on God’s path. I realized then that the easiest times to walk with God were those times where He gave you no choice. My Dad showed up just as I finished cleaning up the front yard from the auction. He stood about two feet away directly in front of me. He said, “I haven’t been doing it right, have I?  I’ve watched how you show your love for your son. I haven’t been doing it right.” “No Dad, you haven’t.”  I hugged my Dad for the first time I remember since that Saturday morning in the kitchen, when he told me Mom was dead. I would only see him once more this life. (It’s raining inside again.). He called several times to talk about scripture. He said I helped him draw much closer to God. He was like a little boy who never had a father that loved him, but did now.  He hadn’t. His father left his family when he was two. But he finally found his way back home. And the Angels rejoiced. 

Chapter 9  I Would Like To Tell You My Story

We were packing up to leave Columbia. I had no choice but to return to Silicon Valley where my skills were valued. I called the Hamilton/Avnet office in Sunnyvale, California and asked for Bill C., the Area Manager. The receptionist said he was no longer the AM, and the new AM was unavailable. She said she would take a message for him. I left my name, said I wanted to know if he was hiring, and for him to talk to anyone that was there three years ago, in 1985, for a reference. He called back an hour later with an offer of $95,000. That was nice, I would be able to pay off our debt. 

They say hindsight is 20/20. That is simply not true. You have to have memory of all that has transpired and knowledge on how to use that memory. I had neither. It is clear to me this last day of January, 2021, that God had my debt covered in 1988, and had provided financially for my future. But I wasn’t aware of any effect that leaving Deborah’s Mom all alone in Columbia would have on her future thoughts towards me. I just realized that now, this instant, that this aloneness would fester in her mind and contribute greatly to the separation that my son and I would experience. 

When we arrived in California, it didn’t take long to realize that the value of our old house had almost doubled. Our little trip to Columbia had cost us nearly $200,000 in increased property value, the loss of all our other assets, and gave us a $29,000 SBA debt to pay off. I was making enough money to buy a new home, but I questioned my mental health, as I would still flip. And I didn’t feel right with God, as I blamed Him for the continued flipping and for the loss of money going back to Columbia. On the other hand, seeing Marion for almost two more years was irreplaceable. “Oh wretched man that I am.” I threw myself in to compensating my son for jerking him away from his friends three years ago. I found a cool neighborhood, helped another dad build a basketball court for the boys in the closed neighborhood to play, and invited the older boys over to the house to play board games. I had quite a few games and the boys took to the kooky man who loved playing games with kids. I hoped my son was having fun. A year later, I had the opportunity to become a salesman. I would no longer be the techie slave. But the economy turned again. My sales hadn’t developed well enough to justify keeping me during the layoffs. I was thankful we hadn’t bought a house. Turns out there was another Christian at the Intel meeting when I said my prayer, because Scott M. called me shortly after the layoffs. He said he wished he had the spiritual strength to do what I did. He had fallen in love with my love for God and wanted to let me know about a job opportunity working with him. I wasn’t going to argue with him about my alleged love for God, so I interviewed and got the job. I was a techie again, the product was much more technical than Avnet’s, in fact in many aspects, it was awesome. I was working with something on the bleeding edge and still had time to play games with kids. It was the best I could hope for to minimize flipping. 

One day the technical manager came into the back office where everyone had their desks when not in the field. He stated that our company had just lost the salesperson and technical specialist in their third largest market and that the impact of the loss would cripple the company. He said he had talked to management and that there was only one person that could quickly save that market, then he looked at me. I knew a lot of people in the company. I had visited headquarters in Longmont, Colorado. I had met their kids, eaten dinner in their homes, and learned of their love for the company. I felt trapped. I did the stupid thing. I went home, explained what happened, and was on a plane to Phoenix on Monday. I would return once in the next two months and after that to move my family to Chandler, Arizona. It was stupid because I did not consider the impact this would have on my son’s life. The family had visited private schools and picked one out that had awesome art classes. We were all excited for him. “Oh wretched man that I am.” (That is the first thing I would change in my past if I could. It’s raining again.) I thought I could make up for it by building an awesome backyard. I built a half court basketball court. I built a regulation badminton court and croquet green. I built a beautiful oasis swimming pool surrounded by 95 tons of Sedona Redrock with twenty waterfalls that everybody said was on par with the most expensive pools at resorts. And he only wanted to go away with his friends. He started 9th grade at a private Christian school, was the 10th grade class president, and announced he didn’t believe in God anymore. I had lost my son and it was completely my fault. Work was wonderful, but I had lost my heart. Even though I closed an impossible sale to U-Haul Headquarters for $650,000, garnering a $45,000 check that month. It was empty. And then the Sunday morning I was to teach the high school Sunday school class that my son wouldn’t be attending, my wife said I had a call from my sister. “Tell her I am in the shower right now.” “She insists.” I take the phone and ask what. “Dad’s dead.” 

Some say that bad things travel in threes.  I don’t believe it, but it did happen the weekend of January 16, 1994. The day before, I was in a rear-end car accident that tore little muscles and tendons that attach my shoulder to my neck. But those would go undetected for a week because of the painkillers I was on from a bone infection caused by a dentist drill breaking through my front jaw the week before. And Sunday afternoon, when we flew from Phoenix to Kansas City and rented a car to get to Columbia for my Dad’s funeral, I would arrive to find a phone message letting me know that my dog of fourteen years, Max the Schnocker, had gotten loose from my friends yard in Phoenix and was killed by a car. That was when I finally broke down and cried. I wasn’t sad for my Dad. I knew where he was, so I was able to lead the private ceremony just his kids had after the main funeral. A month or two after getting back to Chandler, my company said they were closing all the offices, but the one in Silicon Valley. If only I had stayed I would have had a job and my son. We stayed in Arizona until my son finished 10th grade. My wife never found a decent job and I didn’t want to stay, so we moved back to Silicon Valley one more time. No job this time. Little hope of recovering my close relationship with my son. But it had become home. 

Chapter 10  I Would Like To Tell You My Story

Arrived in Silicon Valley, no home, no job. The year, 1996.  Picture if you will, a down on their luck family, searching for a home near or in Palo Alto, California, so their sixteen year-old son could attend a good high school for his junior year. All he would need is a place to sleep and a fun van to cruise around in. Their luck looks like it’s about to change. But the thing about luck, it’s always a bit dicey. They are about to enter the Twilight Zone. 

Looking through the want ads, we discovered an apartment for immediate occupancy near downtown Palo Alto. Reasonable rent and the occupants were mostly graduate students at Stanford. Hmm, good influence for my son. Only three rooms, but for a short time, … . Deborah found a job with little difficulty, but my search wasn’t going well. There was a short period of time, between being laid off at Hamilton/Avnet and starting work with Scott M., that I trained to sell Rainbow vacuum cleaners. I fell in love with them when I was nineteen and living in Hermosa Beach, California. One of my escapes, for a few months, from flipping and the frat house. Since searching wasn’t going well, I was praying fiercely that the flipping would never ever happen again. However, to get down on my knees, or even lie prone, in prayer wasn’t happening in that apartment. I broke out the Rainbow and dumped canister after canister of mud outside. I would vacuum five to eight times daily, every day for weeks, and still got mud. These apartments were filthy. And very odiferous! On the left lived a nice Mexican couple and their sick son. They were here for treatments at Stanford hospital. I would vacuum their apartment often to keep the dust down to a minimum. One of the unique characteristics of the Rainbow was its ability to be used as an air cleaner. On our right lived an Egyptian couple. And below us lived a family from Israel. These were not simply graduate students, but foreign graduate students. The place came alive with aromas when it was mealtime. “Oh, Lord, help me find a job. And help me never flip again.” I was losing my mind vacuuming, praying to stop flipping, finding a job, and listening to heated discussions in foreign languages during dinner prep. My son was out in his VW van with someone he met in the complex. My wife was working. And I was hanging on a thread. 

The phone rang. It was my recruiter. She had an interview lined up with Silicon Graphics. Think of the little boy on a beach who sucks himself into a Pepsi bottle commercial. Think of all the new realistic graphics starting to show up at the movies. Think of who owns and builds the largest supercomputers in the world, Crays. That was Silicon Graphics. Their largest market in the World was right there in Silicon Valley, and I was going to be that region’s technical sales manager in charge of the engineering team that supported $500,000,000 of sales annually. And I was sailing the H.M.S. WhoAmI. And as such, I recognized the imminent crash on the shoals of disaster about to befall SGI sales support. They had just lost their tech manager and engineers were bailing. I had six engineers doing jobs that required fifteen. I argued and finally got approval to recruit heavily. I had to create interviewing forms, technical tests to validate expertise, cultural-fit interviewing forms, and coordinate twenty to thirty interviews over a six month period. My manager in sales, with the typical techies-are-slaves attitude was getting upset that I wasn’t in the field more. And to top it off, he wanted me to fire one of my engineers, because he missed a day of work. His dad was dying!  I was working hard when Palo Alto High called and told me my son was in a fight and could I come down there. He was having a tough time in public school. We decided to let him finish the year and transferred him to a private school. By this time, we were long gone from the apartment, lived in a house nearby, rental, but the houses all around were selling for a million, so it was a good place for him. Scott M. called and asked if I would come work with him again at a new company. I told him no, that I was too busy trying to fix a major problem at SGI. Over the next several months, I hired engineers, I had them properly trained, I got them into the field, I got a call from personnel, my boss hated me, Scott called again. He said the president of the software company, that he represented in Silicon Valley, was flying in from Toronto to present at Industrial Light and Magic and asked if I could come to the presentation. I was in a more agreeable mood, in light of current shenanigans going on, so I went. Afterwards, Scott asked me if the software he represented had any value. Scott liked me not only for my love for God, but he also thought I was one of the brightest engineers he had ever met in Silicon Valley. I guess he liked me. And I liked him. I told him the president knew his product, but he didn’t know how to convey the value. Scott said, “And you do. You see the value!” Indeed I did. Scott could only offer around a $100,000 base plus 3% net sales. I countered with no base and 10% of gross. He said, “Are you  nuts? We only sold $250,000 last year. You would have only made $25,000.” “So, we have a deal?” I gave my two weeks notice to SGI. In the next three months we grossed $100,000. The following three, $250,000, then $400,000, then $600,000. Scott was happy, His partners were happy. My son was now in college down in Los Angeles, and we bought a condo for $125,000 in San Jose.

I was not flipping anymore. I was looking for a new church down in San Jose. I was holding Bible studies. And, I was missing the boat. I had fallen off the H.M.S. WhoAmI. I was trying to balance making money and keeping my relationship with God. Scott M. was getting me into big names customers, NVidia, Apple, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and we were having success, big success. Michael K., a salesman for Scott, was eyeing another industry we might help, the movie industry. Michael and I flew down to Burbank and met with Warner Digital. They were doing the flying saucer opening scene for Tim Burton’s Mars Attack. And Tim hated their efforts. It was the week of Thanksgiving and they needed to render an entirely new opening by the first of December or their goose was cooked. The tragedy was that it took them a month to render the last scene. You could smell roast goose as we entered the studio. After a short meeting with management, laying out a game plan with the renderers, we installed and configured our software, ran some tests, and said we would be standing by over Thanksgiving to help when needed. They were finished by the following Monday and Burton was pleased. News spread rapidly of our impact on speeding up graphic productions. We helped Pacific Data Image with their special effects for Antz and, as a result, DreamWorks released the movie a month ahead of Disney’s A Bug’s Life. A real coup in the movie industry when designing to be first release. And then Michael and I found our way in the bowels of DreamWorks and Disney, the two juggernaut of animation, with their gymnasium sized rooms filled with supercomputers. But they looked so small when I found myself inside Los Alamos National Laboratories, helping their engineers speed of nuclear explosion simulations. Yep, rolling in the big bucks, too many apparently. Scott M. had no problem with me making $40,000 or more a month, but his partners did. I was only a techie. I was just a slave. But one that could be free. I quit. 

During this time, our son had returned to the Bay Area and was taking a math class at a local junior college. He complained that the students were all Chinese, the teacher was Chinese, and discussions would often slip into Chinese. I said, enough. He and I flew to Missouri, he fell in love with the open honesty of the people he met, and on the next visit we settled him into an apartment near the University of Missouri. He would never come home to live again. He was all grown up. And, incidentally, he would spend many hours weekly, listening to his grandmother tell him her version of his past, and mine.

Deborah and I had had enough of the Bay Area’s international blending, too. If we had desired to live in a foreign country, we would’ve moved there. We had heard about Austin, Texas, being cool and American, so we packed up and hit the road. We hadn’t even left town, when word of my departure triggered offers of employment. I wasn’t interested, but one company, a Sun Microsystems reseller, offered to pay for lodging in beautiful Sedona, Arizona, if I would meet with them. I did. I had never played golf, but they insisted, and despite my 145, they offered me a technical sales specialist job in their Austin branch. It was just after Thanksgiving when they offered me the manager position. They fired the manager, but said I could only keep two of the other five employees. Laying off people before Christmas was not my cup of tea. But an office that only did $500,000 last year wasn’t profitable to support more. Due to an unfortunate event at Sun Microsystems, my office took over all their sales in Austin and we did $10,000,000 in sales for 1999. But life wasn’t kind. My son called around August, I think, and said a bump on his thigh had swelled up to the size of a golf ball. I called my brother, the doctor, who had his practice in Columbia, and he arranged for a top notch surgeon. After surgery, I received a call from my brother. He had terrible bedside manners that day. First, he asked if I was sitting down. Oh no, I moaned. He caught himself and said, no, your son is alive. It’s just that they cut out the nastiest cancer lump he had ever seen. You could see it metastasize on the slide. He said to find out where my son wanted to visit in the world and take him there this fall. My son’s doctor called after that. He confirmed that it was really a nasty cancer and being in a lymph node was not a good sign. But he did add that he got good margins. He said any indicators of spread would show up as false positives and we would have to wait a month to get valid results. It was the longest month in my life. I called over twenty different churches at all the places I had attended and said my son needs your prayers. And I was leading the prayer chains. The doctor called back after a sequence of tests to tell us he had never seen anything like it. There was none, zero, zip, evidence of there ever being cancer in my son. His words, “It’s a miracle.” To celebrate I took my wife golfing and when we got home, my beloved dachshund was floating dead in the pool. Why had I left them outside that beautiful day? It was all my fault. “Oh, God, why? Is life always going to be like this, full of suffering?”

Work has become mundane. Money wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. And that December, my company wanted me to lie to my largest customer and tell them we would ship their order this year, but we knew we weren’t. Again, I said enough. December 31, 1999 would be my last day. I packed up the family and took them to The Caymans for the holiday. The next January, my company decided not to pay me the $43,000 commission on my final sale. After months of talking to lawyers, it wasn’t worth going after. Just let it go. I stumbled around the house, replaying my life over and over again. What was the point?  “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into Heaven.” God help me. On May 19th, 2000, at 3:37 PM, I hung myself. 

Chapter 11   I would Like To Tell You My Story

Let’s do the time-warp again. “My problems were buried deep. Very deep.  But when they did diagnose it, I didn’t get checked into the St. David’s Mental Hospital for acting female. No, you’ve really got to disassociate so badly that you regain consciousness hanging from the banister by your neckties, call your care pastor, meet with him, leave your car at his office, go with him to a hospital in downtown Austin, watch him tell a surreal story, apparently about you, realize it’s serious, that they want you to commit yourself without hope of leaving unless they say it’s alright, then step through a security door, and get asked to remove your belt and shoelaces. Whatever the hell for? It’s not like I’m going to hang myself.” [excerpt from Chapter 3. I Want To Tell You My Story]

But I did attempt it. And I obviously did it wrong. Don’t remember. Don’t care. I removed my belt and shoelaces and handed them over. The man behind the counter labeled a bag with my name and slipped my belongings in them, sealed them and put them in a basket. I felt like a criminal and that made me laugh. As I turned to go down the hall, I saw people right out of every movie scene of asylums. Some had pajamas on, one had a blanket over his or her head and shoulders, and several were walking around like they were on heavy drugs. A few were dressed like me. “Lord, why did you bring me here?” I walked to the corner of the ell-shaped hallway where they had some vending machines and a television mounted on the wall with a few vinyl chairs placed for viewing. Some were occupied by more zombies, hollowed out eyes, expressionless faces. I apparently missed dinner, so I grabbed some chips and a Pepsi, l loved that kid sucking himself into a Pepsi bottle on a Super Bowl ad. I turned and went out, looked to my left down the receding hallway, that I would learn had bedrooms on the left and meeting rooms on the right, and headed back towards the entrance to a table with puzzle pieces in a pile, that I noticed on the way in. It was easy to let my thoughts flow one into another as I took stock of my situation. Taking stock of the puzzle was a different story. The pieces were small and very irregular, the box was missing, and I wasn’t even sure if this was just one puzzle or the entire puzzle inventory. Just at that moment a normal looking girl asked if she could sit down and watch. She asked if puzzling was hard. I said, “Normally, puzzles aren’t too difficult. But this one makes me want to hang myself.” Her lower jaw dropped as she exclaimed in a somewhat look of horror, “Isn’t that what you’re in here for?” I chuckled and told her I didn’t and wouldn’t ever hang myself over a puzzle. At least, I hoped not. She helped the evening pass and then a staff member came and said it was time for bed. Despite my stating that I had no need for something to help me sleep, he insisted. It was then I noticed there was no door, no sheets, no blankets, just a pair of pajamas. He said everything that could be used to hang oneself has been removed. No way that I can sleep like this, but after changing in the corner and laying down, I was fast asleep. 

I awoke and again whispered, “Lord why did you bring me here?” I went to breakfast and as I ate, I glanced, without drawing attention to myself, at the others in there. I seemed to recall about twelve to fifteen. Later, I would learn and witness that the number held fairly constant. The math seemed to indicate about one failed suicide every day in Austin. And these people looked really messed up. Losers on some aspect of the game of life and now all these eating breakfast were not only sharing a meal, but sharing in the failure of taking their own lives. After breakfast, we were called individually into offices to meet with psychiatrists. This lasted for thirty to forty-five minutes, with intense questioning, followed by a preliminary diagnosis and dispensing of appropriate meds. I told him I wasn’t bipolar, that the meds have no effect on me, but he said, “Humor me.”  

We waited in a large room with enough chairs to seat all of us, and more, in a large semi-circle facing a whiteboard. Finally, the department head of the weekend welcomed us, went over the expected behavior during our visit, and then turned the meeting over to a psychologist who began to explain what Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) was and why it was being used. Then we would go through a detailed cognitive cycle, followed by a tedious dissecting of the eleven distorted thoughts. For the last hour and a half, we would be given a few minutes to write down what we thought our distorted thoughts were and then discuss, in a round table, each of our thoughts. After discovering that I would do this everyday for the next three weeks, I decided to attach a clean copy of the handout for you to read. First, it’s a theory on how the mind works, and they believe the foundation for these thoughts occur in the first four years. (Re-reading chapter one will affirm that my first four years were messed up! Apparently, I wasn’t alone.) Second, it is highly effective (95%) once you learn to identify the distortion in an otherwise true thought. Finally, we were shown a diagram of a tree, you know, roots, trunk, branches, and leaves. We were taught that the trunk held our core beliefs, created from the roots of our early years. The branches held families of related ideas, in our case, habits of distorted thinking, and the leafs were individual thoughts. Our goal was to identify the distorted thought, remove the distortion and keep the true part, in essence, plucking off a new distorted leaf and enabling a healthy leaf to grow in its place. Eventually, the branches and part of the  trunk that held the distortions would die, being starved by lack of food, repetition, of the distortions. 

After lunch, we met in smaller groups to share our story of how we came to be here and discuss our thoughts about CBT. Later we met individually with the psychologist to review the notes we took and what we said in both meetings. Dinner was uneventful and therefore forgotten. During the evening, I tried watching television and puzzling, but just couldn’t connect, so I started roaming the hall with the other zombies. It was different tonight, somehow, perhaps from the sharing and hearing one another articulate our trauma. I soon noticed that faces would brighten just a little as I walked by each of them, and it drew me into a short chat. They liked what I said as much as how I said it, and were hopeful, like I believed what the psychologist was saying really made sense and, more importantly, was true. Truth seemed to be the elusive fairy of childhood that we all missed befriending. “This is why I’m here, isn’t Lord?” No response, but that didn’t mean ‘no’, I learned later in life. It turned out to be my last night as an in-patient. Tomorrow, after we repeated the same schedule and just before dinner, the psychologist told me that they had talked to my wife and that she was outside waiting for me. She said she would see me tomorrow. I spent the evening with my wife recounting everything that happened after she left for work Friday morning.

Monday morning, I was back at St. David’s, but in a different part. I recognized a few of the people in the group, but most were new to me. Seems they had been here the last part or all of last week. The meeting was the same format I had over the weekend except the start. They started with telling us the names of the recent graduates and how excited they were to get on with life. Graduates? Excited? This group was not excited, but, then again, we were still here. The smaller group meetings, followed by meeting with psychologists, were moved into the morning and the whole affair was over around noon. “See you tomorrows,” we’re exchanged by a few. We were told the activities to do and the ones we weren’t supposed to be doing at home. I honestly don’t remember any of my afternoons, I just wanted as much distance as I could get between me and the hanging and only the mornings could help that. I lived for the next morning. In a few mornings, everybody from the weekend had joined or had skipped out coming. New people were joining the group and others were graduating. After a few days, it became apparent that everyone, including the psychologist, would listen when I was asked by a fellow patient to explain in ’our words’ what the psychologist just said. By the second week, the psychologist actually announced that I would be explaining CBT to the group and that she would be there to answer questions that I couldn’t. It was just around that time that I noticed some of the patients I met during my weekend stay were graduating. No worries, not everyone was suffering to the same degree, maybe mine was a little worse. At the end of my second week, my regular psychologist didn’t attend my one on one meeting. Instead, I met the head of the Psychiatry Department of St. David’s Mental Health Hospital. She said she had taken an interest my case, because most patients only remained for a week and rarely two. We talked daily after the group meeting, following the schedule established weeks ago, and went over my past. Sadly, it was only the past I remembered, and a few deaths made up the extent. One day, she told me that only one type of patient didn’t respond, those that suffered abuse or rape. Nope, not me. I feel for doctors, constrained by the memories of their patients, to help them recover from those bad memories. Near the end of my third week, extremely rare, we were going through my past and I mentioned that I used to flip, think that I was a girl, but that it hasn’t  happened for over eight years. I thought I had outgrown it, or more likely, God had healed me, so I didn’t mention it. I wouldn’t have believed the change of expression on an adult’s face if I hadn’t been there myself. She was having a big ’aha’ moment. Gender dysphoria patients were still rare and, apparently, they hadn’t had one that didn’t know they suffered from it before. 

I was to be dismissed from the program immediately and set up a specific program tailored to help me, but I talked her into letting me come one more day. I was terrified of disassociating without them. CBT wasn’t helping, but being needed was, and I was going be home. Alone. Fortunately, a sinus surgery had been delayed several weeks, after my unexpected visits to St. David’s, so I was able to go almost directly from intensive outpatient directly into my second sinus surgery. I would be doped up for three weeks and be able to ease back into being home alone. After I recovered, I met with an assigned psychiatrist who took me off bipolar meds and tried some other mood suppressors. I was also assigned a psychologist to work with me on transgender issues, which I assured them that I did not have, and she would assure me that I was in denial and that we would work towards that in therapy. C’est la vie. I felt good enough to start pursuing another hi-tech job. My reputation had provided several inquiries while I was on leave, so I followed up on them. By August 18, 2000, I informed the companies that I would take the best offer I received on Monday. They were all excited to make me an offer Monday. It was a glorious and relaxing weekend. My first call came in Monday after nine. The manager said he had reviewed the budget and they simply couldn’t come close to offering what I could get elsewhere. Oh well, two more. The next call came in after lunch. The vice-president said they were notified of a hiring freeze by the CFO over the weekend, and in discussions this morning, it was clear that no matter what impact they thought I would have on sales, the CFO wouldn’t approve any hires. The third call came shortly before dinner. It was a very nice offer, however, it was only valid if I would relocate to Phoenix. I knew my wife’s position on moving back to Phoenix. No! She was never able to get a decent job there last time and she wasn’t going back. I thanked him and hung up the phone. I looked towards Heaven and said, “Lord, I don’t get it. Friday I had three very interested companies, and now, today, I have nothing. What do You want me to do?” I know God. I knew He was going to answer. I just didn’t expect the answer He gave me. 

Chapter 12   I would Like To Tell You My Story

“What would you like to do?,” He asked. “I want to do what You want me to do.  What do You want me to do?” “I will question you, and you shall answer Me.” My heart skips a beat. Though it’s been awhile since He last talked to me in words, I recognize Him instantly, especially when He quotes Himself from scripture in a translation I prefer. But if I’m asked, “Does God sound like James Earl Jones? Morgan Freeman? Red Pepper?” None of those. He sounds Perfect, recognizable with no effort, loving, patient, and so much more. He sounds better than any friend, any love, and any family. I mulled His question over in my mind. God just asked me what I would like to do? I knew He was opening the possibility to any answer I gave Him, no matter how improbable it seemed, so I said I would like to teach high school math. “How are you  going to find a teaching job?” I never thought of that. In fact, now that I thought about it, it seemed stupid to even try. High school started next Monday. Being this Monday night, that is less than a week away. The only class I ever taught was a 7:40 AM, winter semester,  Introduction To Digital Circuits at the University of Missouri, Columbia, while working on my masters in electrical engineering. In 1979! But God didn’t ask me if I could get a job, He asked how I was going to find a teaching job. “I will look in the paper and check on the Internet.” I waited. Silence. I waited some more. Silence. What was I doing? Waiting for Him to lead me like a bridled horse. I opened the want ads, searched for teaching jobs, but only found one online for a math teacher at a local high school. What? How is that possible? What school would not have all their teachers already selected? I tapped my finger on the desk waiting for some awesome explanation to pop into mind. I didn’t even get the fizzle sound after fireworks went off. Oh, well. I filled out the online app, dug up a resume and tried to doctor it up for teaching. Like what? “I worked with the top engineers in the world, so I figure I can teach 15-18 year olds.” This is silly. I minimized saying anything, just the basics, and hit send. 

It seemed like Tuesday morning, promptly at eight, God said, “What are you doing?” I said that there was nothing to do, but wait. “So I’m waiting.” “Is that how you won your most profitable sale at U-Haul?” One thing about God that you should know. He’s got the goods on you, literally everything you ever said or did. I remembered that win. I was selling against IBM and Hewlett-Packard, the biggest names in financial computers, to the largest moving company in the world, with their sales staff of dozens and engineers out the wazoo, and I just had my little unknown company backing me up. I had just been informed by U-Haul’s head of financial support and the Oracle Financials sales rep, that HP had won the contract, that we had lost. I felt, not heard, a question being asked if there was something else that needed to be done? What? We lost! Again, I felt, not heard, that HP couldn’t pass a performance test. That was it! I wrote Marie B., VP of MIS at U-Haul, a two page paper detailing an Oracle Financials test they would need to run. I also knew that only my company had worked with Oracle to make that test extremely fast. I hand delivered it, waited two days, received a phone call to meet with an executive VP, and signed the most profitable contract my company ever won. And now I’m talking to the God of creation about what I’m doing to get a teaching job. Apparently, not enough. I called the school district and verified that they did receive my application. I asked them what happened next. They said it would take a couple of weeks to process everything and that I would be called, if there was any interest, for an interview. I hung up. I guess I just wait after all. “That’s how you became a great salesman?”  Argh. Another thing about God, you can argue all you want, but you will always end up eating humble pie.  But, looking at the bright side of that, you will start liking the taste. So, even though they insisted that under no circumstances should I call the principal because he is prepping the entire school to open in six days, I called him. I left a message, he called back, we talked, he wanted me to come by for an interview the next day, I showed up, talked some more with him and the Math Department head. He said he would talk with personnel and that I should be able to start mid next week. They asked me at the end of the interview if I had any more questions? “Just one. What happened to the teacher I’m replacing?”  He said, “We got a call late Monday, saying he was in L.A. and wouldn’t be coming back. We contacted personnel right away and they said they would post the job that night.” Wow! I got the job. The principal called me the next day, said, “I just got off the phone with personnel. They didn’t know how to explain it. They said it was as if someone with great authority walked your paper through every sign-off. Can you start tomorrow and catch the last day of new teacher orientation?” I got off the phone, looked up to Heaven and said, “God?”  A tear ran down my smiling face as I recalled His words written in the Bible, “I AM.”

Three days after classes started, I approached my assigned mentor and asked him what was the purpose of homework. It had been mandatory to assign homework the first day. I had graded the first two days’ work. I saw no purpose. At his delay I said, “One, we don’t know who is doing the work, the student, a relative, a friend? Two, if no work was turned in, did that mean they didn’t understand, it was beneath them, they didn’t have time? And three, it takes a lot of time to grade and I don’t even have the answers to one and two. What’s the point?” He said it was the best anybody teaching math has come up with. That there was talk of flipping classes, have the student read the material at home and do the work in class. I asked how much latitude I had. He said that as long as I didn’t get bad results, I was free to do whatever I wanted. But to keep him apprised of my plans. I arranged the chairs into clusters of four and made sure no less that three students were assigned to any cluster. I took their grades from previous math classes and assigned the best, the worst, and one to two intermediate students to each group. I implemented the KTC’s for homework. Every homework problem they did that they believed they Knew how to do, they put a K besides it. Every problem they Thought they were getting the gist of it, they put a T, and every problem they were Clueless on, they put a C. At the start of each class, someone with a K would explain how to do the problem to someone with a C. And, if they got through all the problems, they could clear up the T’s. If everyone had a C, I would come and help. Homework now meant something. I could quickly assess what material needed to be gone over as a class and what concepts they were getting. And the masterpiece? I informed the students the day of the first test, that today, I was going to find out who was lying to themselves and to me. After I had the test results and aligned them with each student’s KTC’s on the tested material, I would know how they really performed on those problems. I couldn’t really be that precise, but you should have seen the look on their faces. I did get a general feel and when I announced that some students weren’t being truthful on their homework KTC’s, performance and honesty increased. I loved teaching. I was a natural. 

After school, about every two weeks, I would go to my therapy session and be dragged back down by my apparent disregard for my alleged gender dysphoria. But I was loving teaching and fully occupied sixteen hours a day. I didn’t have time to flip. I also didn’t have much time for my wife. It was hard on her. And when you add the 90% cut in pay, our lives had changed. During the first summer, I took classes at a university to start meeting my emergency teaching certificate requirements, but I did spend more time with leisure activities. In my Modern Geometry class, I discovered a methodology of taking differences that relegated my professor’s discovery, the one that got him a math award, to history. He was very impressed and depressed at the same time. I felt bad. I had a run in with the principal just before my first year ended. He told me not to push the students too hard, not to tell them they could live their dreams if they learned, because they were just middle class students raised in middle class homes. I was very upset, but did not flip. My second year, every teacher in the

math department was upset, because the principal had arranged for the seven worst boys in 10th grade to be in my fourth hour, 11th grade Algebra 2 class. It was hell. All year long. Still I persevered, but my excitement about teaching was greatly diminished. Near April of my second year, my wife’s company informed her that they were closing the Austin office. They offered her a position at an office west of Philadelphia. She was enjoying her job and I wasn’t doing as well. I had started to flip a little. The therapist was wearing me down with her insistence that my dysphoria was real. And at the beginning of May, the principal informed us that he will have to cut a first year math teacher due to budget constraints. “What’s the point, Lord, you gave me a chance to live a dream and I loved it. But we can’t afford to live here on just my pay. And this young teacher is just starting out. Bless her instead.” 

In May, we moved to Westchester, Pennsylvania, a place neither of us ever wanted to live. It turned out to be beautiful. I picked out a home to remodel and started investigating what was required to teach there. I also looked for someone to continue my therapy. I guess I really did suffer from Gender Dysphoria. There were definite times in my past that I really hated being male, like my brothers. And besides, one of the top doctors in the field of Gender Dysphoria was in the next town north. “How, Lord, do big coincidences like this keep happening?” This was the beginning of the end for all I held dear when I wasn’t flipping. Dr. Maureen Osborne was going to change my life. Radically. 

Chapter 13   I would Like To Tell You My Story

[Note: It is appropriate for me to mention that during the years, 2001 to 2003, there were several very significant, life threatening events, that are not eluded to, because those are someone else’s story to tell. Suffice to say that prayer requests went out and were answered and received with joy.]

Sometimes, I wish my life was like I see so many other lives. But what would I lose if it was? Dr. Osborne met primarily in group settings, observing our reaction and interactions. In private therapy she would reflect on what we did and what we didn’t do. I was wearing down, that is the desire to remain male was filled with constant inner turmoil. Even teaching didn’t remove the angst. Obviously, wealth, success, and empowerment hadn’t removed the internal suffering. And now, here I was, listening to an expert inform me that the trouble wouldn’t cease until I accepted that I was a female trapped in a male’s body. And to help me accept that reality, I must start dressing the part. Argh, this is an abomination to my Lord. 

I was so thankful that I belonged to a church that had a retired pastor leading men’s bible study. I decided to confide in him the struggle I was going through. He was not appalled, but amazed that God could live so strongly, so visibly, in me and yet allowing me to suffer through such a devastating diagnosis. For those who don’t know, the attempted suicide rate at that time for gender dysphoria was around 30-40%, one of the highest for all diagnoses. Well, I’d proven that statement true. He invited me to meet with him weekly, twice a week, and even more, to search scripture and see what God might be up to, or at least whether He would condemn me. One thing we did decide was that I wasn’t an abomination. I had no desire to cross-dress for deceitful purposes, to seek a relationship with a man, or to fulfill any sensual fantasies. I was only being told to conform to a gender identity to bring peace, and hope for some joy, into my life. We met for over a year. Before I left the area I met once more with him. His parting words were, “I do not know what God has in store for you, but it has to be something very special to make you endure so much suffering with no end in sight.” I was very happy that God brought Pastor into my life. 

I was remodeling an older home with David K.. He is one of the more fascinating people I’ve ever known and we still touch base with one another occasionally. I shared my story up to that point with him and he didn’t miss a beat. “What would you like me to call you?” I asked him how Ellie sounded and he responded with, “ELLIE, come and give me a big hug.” He became my best friend and supporter. Whatever I needed, David would do his best to make me feel whole. He truly loved me. He truly wanted the best for me. After taking a part time job at the mall, working in one of those kiosks in the middle selling calendars and games, I would see David somewhere, and he would say, “Ellie, how’s my Calendar Girl?”  He was so comforting. It helped to have David present as I worked through Dr. O’s group meetings and therapy sessions. But not even he could help me when Dr. Osborne asked me to bring my wife to one of my therapy sessions. She brought my wife up to speed on my current behavior, then dropped a bombshell not even I saw coming. She said, “If Ellie doesn’t have gender reassignment surgery soon, she will kill herself.”  What??? I hadn’t been thinking of that at all. She went on to explain that there were markers she had been observing that would indicate that the pressure of leading a double life would trigger a severe disassociative event and I would commit suicide. She said my wife had to sign off on them, too, which was why she was there. We took them home. We talked. We signed. I made arrangements with a top doctor in Thailand and flew to California to stay with my sister before catching my flight. 

I couldn’t. Not in Thailand. I was terrified. My sister helped me regain my equilibrium. I repaid her kindness by building a beautiful wall unit to hold the television and stereo and then I wired and plumbed the jacuzzi and we would lay in it and look at the stars. I would return several months later to the Bay Area to have very expensive facial feminization surgery. But I was terrified. You don’t know, sometimes, when you disassociate until after it’s over. But if you commit suicide during that time, you never know. I was terrified that canceling wasn’t in my best interest. I scheduled someone in the States. Someone, I would later call ‘the butcher’. But I had one more psychologist to see in Pennsylvania. I found a Christian psychologist who agreed to see me multiple times a week. I told him that I wanted just one thing, an alternative to surgery, a scripture that would be directly applicable, anything to say God would not desire me to go down this path. We met for five months. I informed him this was my last visit. He said that in conversations with Christian scholars, with other psychologists, Christian and secular, that he could not find an alternative or a scripture, but that he just didn’t feel that this could be God’s path for me. I agreed and left. I did agree, but I also knew that this WAS my path. We decided to move back to Missouri, and stay in Columbia to fix up some property to sell. We had dinner with some very special people who were going steady. He was handsome and loving. She was intelligent and pretty. And I was a jerk. When the conversation came up about my struggles, she would reference a gay uncle and see the similarities. I blew a gasket. Anybody, I said, can walk on the wild side and return to being normal, some more normal than others, but no one, not one, can have surgery and ever return to normal. It was a one-way street. We are not the same. Needless to say, first impressions are very powerful and my performance was negative five on a one to ten scale. I hate myself when I treat people poorly, I literally want to die. Not a good thought for someone who disassociates. I’m going to have the surgery. The first week of August, I lost a member of my body that men simply don’t want to lose. Take an arm, take a leg, but not that. A hideous time to flip back to being male is when you come out of that surgery. “O wretched man that I am. Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

I found yet another psychologist after we moved to Kansas City in August. She received my notes and figures that I had prepared for using with other psychologists. You must understand, reader, that psychologists don’t usually meet someone like me in their years of practice, because people like me don’t live long. So I had to keep notes to make the unbelievable real, with references and cross-references. I was real. She was put off that I presented as male, especially after surgeries and electrolysis. Why did I go through all the effort to appear feminine in the nude, only to turn around and cover it up with clothing and behavior? “Ah, good doctor, that is the question! Shall we get started?” A few months later, she helped me don clothing appropriate for my body, and after a few more months, I found an extended temporary job, while the office administrator that I replaced healed from invasive surgery. I was very presentable, very knowledgeable with computers (hee hee, my résumé was severely operated on), and very articulate. I thrived in my eight weeks there. I was wanted. I was taken out to lunches with ‘the guys’, and I was good. The manager of the office was even seeking my assistance on preparing his proposals. It was also very educational working for the engineers who designed containment for massive chemical spills. I could thrive. But instead, that July, 2005, the H.M.S. WhoAmI sustained a crushing blow to the midsection. I opened the formal looking envelope to discover a court order declaring I was divorced. My boat sunk. Argh. Me matey no more. 

Chapter 14   I would Like To Tell You My Story

Divorce hits everybody differently. Almost a decade after my divorce, I would be invited twice to sit in on Rebecca’s Divorce Care group. The ten or so people were going through a book, watching a video, and discussing what was on their minds. In the two sessions, I learned pretty much how each divorce came about and how they were dealing with them. Divorce is best avoided, but sometimes … . My case was very different. It was a matter of priorities. Regardless of the rationale of the justification, a wakeup call had been sounded. I quickly put away what I thought was erratic behavior, took up my male mantle, and proceeded to get a job teaching at ‘not quite’ an inner-city school. The previously white neighborhood had dropped in socioeconomic standings, trash was appearing on the main roads to the highschool, and lawns were often left unmowed. 

I believe when one tries to upright their ship, their efforts permeate all aspects of their life. Going to Sunday school resumed, albeit mostly by myself. And I did something very different. I printed up a t-shirt to throw over my clothing, purchased those little trash picker-upper poles, and headed to my future school a week before classes started. I filled three or four construction trash bags that first day. It became a habit that would last the school year. The school janitor decided that if I would bag it, he would remove the bags. The main street started looking better, and the janitor started doing a better job on the school grounds. I expanded my work to one block away from school on every side street and two to three blocks on the two main streets that cornered the school. It was nice to get honks and people shouting, “Thank you’s,” out their car windows as they drove by. Some even said they liked my shirt. On the back of the white tee, it simply had three words lined up vertically on the number 1: It, Only, and Takes. Altogether, they were the four words God told me when I asked what I could do to lift up spirits in the neighborhood. He said, “It only takes one.” I had never heard of random acts of kindness, nor was picking up trash over a year random. No, this was something different. A deliberate act to influence the people around me by helping consistently. Who did I think I was? I was basically a decent person, with a major mental issue, who was worthy of not being divorced. But when mother-in-laws are involved, worthiness goes out the window. Behavior, like my past, is not acceptable. Period! But on the good side, I was enjoying school starting. I had felt good teaching in Texas, and now that first week, kids were stopping me in the hall and saying, “You’re that teacher that picks up trash.” And their expressions of bewilderment said all that needed to be said. They weren’t used to love from strangers.

I loved teaching and continued my Know-Thinking-Clueless, though I did change it to Clueless, Learning, Know. I liked CLicK better. I was teaching Algebra 1 in three blocks and loved the kids. It was a tough place to teach though. I broke up multiple fights, the worst between two of my female students right outside of my door at the end of the day. Apparently, it had been planned and both participants were ready for it, though the antagonist was almost drooling at the prospect. I didn’t know about the planning, but something just wasn’t right with those two. I ended up simply picking up the feisty one from behind and because she respected me, she didn’t turn on me. It was the second time I got maced by our own security guards. It does sting. I understand how it is so effective. Not being able to see sure does redirect your violence in blind swinging. Nothing hits a target you can’t see. But it was one of many things that I didn’t want to learn. How do I explain why one of their classmates was shot down by gang members and will never wander the hall again with his bright smile and optimism for a better day? How do you help a pregnant student, only fifteen, get home safely when threatened by others, except to drive them home to their grandmother’s house yourself, violating all sorts of school rules about teacher-student interaction? That young woman said she sat on the front row because she believed me, that learning math would open many doors to employment in her future, and she wanted her child to have a better future than she had. My life was very rewarding, but emotionally draining. I would go home to my ex-wife’s house, sleep in a separate bedroom, and try to prepare for another day. By the time the second month of summer rolled around, I couldn’t look forward to another school year living this way. In fact, my psychologist was doing double-flips on my behavior. “Why,” she asked, “have you gone back to presenting as male, after surgery and all the good experiences you had working? Why?” After a year of this, I still had no reason. And after the divorce, regardless of the logic of the reason, I couldn’t stay this way any more. I bought a house near school using the ‘Teacher In The Hood’ financial assistance program, moved in before the second year, and donned my female attire and showed up to teach orientation. Not fun. No upside. No joy. But I persevered despite my students being even worse than the teachers. After the first week of school, the principal turned one of the faculty restrooms into a Male/Female bathroom. The other, being only Male. That didn’t portend well.  The elderly black teacher across the hall was one of my best friends. She knew my faith and we talked of God often. She was 100% in my corner. The white female teachers were just tolerant, nothing more. And the white male teachers and staff acted as though I didn’t exist. I went to a local, mostly black church, then, and one of my favorite students from the previous year was there with his mother. He asked if I would join them. [It’s raining again inside.] I loved him. He used to sit up front, right next to my pregnant student. He told me I was the best teacher he ever had.

But I wouldn’t be anybody’s best teacher this year. A month into school, the student who had coke bottle glasses, who had to be six inches from her paper to take a test, who was constantly being made fun of, found her opportunity to get into the graces of the ‘good girls’. The ‘good girls’ constantly pushed the bounds of insubordination and, a few times, were removed from my class for disciplinary reasons. So what this poor little girl did was go to the principal and proclaim that I grabbed my male member just like Janet Jackson did at Superbowl halftime. I was escorted at the end of day to the principal’s office, explained about the complaint, and, despite my claim that I had no male unit, that I was, in fact, female, was ordered to pack up any personal belongings and leave the building immediately. I could return Saturday morning, and with a guard’s supervision, pick up all my remaining possessions. Divorced from marriage, divorced from teaching, proclaimed unfit for association with others. It was a miracle I didn’t try to commit suicide then. Funny thing about being flipped. I never once thought of killing myself when I was female. Hmm. I contacted my teacher’s union and they had an attorney contact me immediately. He was a very nice man, took copious notes, and said the termination was wrongful and would get me back teaching quickly. But as the months rolled by, he became puzzled. It seems the school district’s attorneys were not responding to him on anything, only saying they understood what he requested and would get back to him. By December, he asked me if I was still getting paid. I said yes. He said, “I thought so. Ellie, they are not going to put you back in the classroom and they are not going to dismiss you. They are simply going to pay you through the end of your contract.” Later, he found out that was exactly what they were doing and that they were even going to give me a positive letter of recommendation for teaching next year.

I used the time to fully enroll at Avila University to get my teacher’s certification from the State of Missouri. I, also, used the free time to rehab my home. Therapy continued and I never let go of the belief that something just wasn’t right. My psychologist continued to work me through the difficulties of accepting gender dysphoria and I listened and practiced what she taught. The hardest event during this time occurred at church. Several weeks after presenting as female, the associate pastor and another board member asked if I could remain after Sunday school class. I did. The two of them just slammed me with scriptures declaring me an abomination and the like. They said I was from Satan and they would not tolerate my presence in ‘their’ church any longer. I was shocked. I knew every scripture they quoted and why it didn’t apply to me. I knew their fear and hatred. But I was also in tears. Just trying to follow You, Lord, and I lost my wife, job, and now church. Fortunately, several friends in church stayed near the door after it was shut and listened to the attack. I found this out later when the Pastor called and asked if I could come in. I believe it was Monday or Tuesday evening when I walked into his conference room. There were two people in there that I recognized from class. I feared the worst. However, he said these two had brought news of what happened and gave their testimony of your faith and actions in class. “I knew you myself, and know that you are the Lord’s.” [Tears of the memory course through my frame, typing comes to halt.] I told him that I didn't want to bring any division in the church, that I would leave. He said I didn’t have to, but if I wanted to, he would write out a letter of introduction to Adam Hamilton, pastor of the Church of Resurrection. He said it was a large church and he believed I would be accepted there. I met with Pastor Hamilton, became a member, and started checking out the many Sunday School classes. I even joined the single’s group, just to have fellowship during the evenings. I also started a year long disciple’s class. 

The new school year arrived and I found a job teaching highschool geometry, this time in an inner city school. The year was going great. The sophomore biology and history teachers were both females and the three of us enjoyed lunches together. Sometimes, we would even meet up for drinks after school. One weekend, the history teacher asked if I wanted to spend the night at her house, that she thought her kids would find me a hoot. I accepted. Sadly, I have never seen a house so, hmm, such a mess. Along the bottom of every wall a foot of stuff just seemed to accumulate. I wouldn’t learn how that could come about until recently, until I saw that there are only so many hours in a day and when you devote yourself to more important things, some things that aren’t really important just remain as they are. After a lovely dinner, the kids put on a karaoke game and the microphone checked your tone and timing to give you a score. I kicked butt, even parodied some of the original artists, and the kids and my hostess were laughing uproariously. We had an awesome time that I will never forget. We talked about it at school often and when the memory was awakened. At church, my disciple class was drawing to a close. The leaders decided we should have a farewell meeting one Saturday morning. We sat in a big circle. I happened to be sitting on their right. They announced that we were going to go around clockwise, starting to their left, and to talk about what each of us got from the class and then, starting with leaders and going clockwise, to say something special about each attendee. As I said, I was on the right, I was to be last. And as each person, there were about fifteen or so, talked about the class and then saying something about each other, they would end up with me. And, oh the blessings that flowed. I repeat this in all humility because I never knew it was happening. And I never ask for acknowledgment. It apparently is who I am as a female. “Ellie, you were a bright star in class.” “Ellie, you would start talking about things off the cuff that supported what was on the video or in the book, and someone would start searching scriptures and find exactly what you just said.” “Ellie, you didn’t need this class, but we sure needed you.” “Ellie, God loves you so much. We are all so thankful He brought you to our class.” “Ellie, you give us hope for a better tomorrow. That God really lives among us.” [Oh the joyful tears. I know some of you reading this don’t believe in God. And I’m going to make it harder for you to take that stand in future chapters. But for now, just realize what a broken person like me, would make of this praise. It didn’t go to my head. It went to my broken and shattered heart, to the beam and main mast of the H.M.S. WhoAmI.] I had friends. I had a job. I had a church. And I had a psychologist, who one day in the Spring of 2009, out of the blue, said, “Ellie, you are right. There is something bigger than gender dysphoria going on in your life. It is deep, very deep. It might take years of intense psychoanalysis to uncover. We would have to meet three to five times a week for those years.” I did the math on the cost. $25,000 a year plus. I didn’t have the money to do that. But I now had a psychologist who had worked longer with me than anyone else, and had finally come to the conclusion that there was something much bigger than my gender identity. I didn’t care what. I drove across the state to meet my ex-wife and tell her the good news. She talked with her company and they decided she could work from Kansas City, where our son lived. The day after school finished that year, I helped her find a new home in K.C.. I moved back in and went to work fixing it up. I also started work on solving a mystery about something that came up in one of my math classes. I thought my life was finally coming together. I thought wrong, very, very wrong.

Chapter 15   I Would Like To Tell You My Story

How could life possibly turn wrong? I was back with my ex-wife. She was working for the same company she had been for awhile. She loved them. They loved her. We had found a nice home in Leawood, Kansas, near our son and his family. I was remodeling the basement. And I was having the most wonderful conversation with God that would change my life forever on many fronts. 

The conversation actually started a couple of months before this. I was still teaching at the inner-city prep school and I was giving a test. As I walked around, quietly observing which problems were being difficult and which were not, I noticed a young woman moving her fingers in a rhythmic fashion I thought I recognized. I stooped by her desk and quietly asked her what she was doing with her fingers. She said, “I’m solving the problem,” with a hint of attitude. But I had to ask, “What are you doing with your fingers?” “I’m counting five plus eight,” said with more attitude. I stood up, looked up, and whispered ever so softly, “I thought You wanted me to teach them algebra and geometry. They don’t even know how to add. What am I supposed to do about that? Don’t answer, please. I’m giving a test.”  Later that night, I found the opportunity to ask again. When I tell people later about this conversation, I ask them to pay close attention, because during it, there will come a question that I have never heard, that I would never think to ask, and that most people can’t even figure out the answer when given time, even days, to answer. I believe it is because the question is so unexpected. I believe this is my proof, His calling card for me, that I actually do converse with the Creator of the universe! “Okay, Lord. What do You want me to do about teaching young adults in high school when they can’t even add?” “Put a number on your hands,” He said. “What? What does putting a number on my fingers have to do with this?” “Put a number on your hands.” Now something one might learn by studying the Bible is that when God says something three times, it is very, very important. And it usually is something, we humans, aren’t doing right. So, I wasn’t about to make Him say it again. Thinking myself clever, I put all the fingers up on my right hand, and my index finger and thumb up on my left. It’s one of his favorite numbers, the number of completeness. Putting a number on hands wasn’t exactly expected, but then He asked me, “What number is that?” “What?” I’m an engineer, a computer scientist, and a salesperson. I have done my own taxes for years. I can build a chicken coop and aviary extraordinaire. I know numbers. “Wait, what?” I was hoping I hadn’t heard right, but I had. Checking my emotional afront, it was God after all, I simply and clearly said, “Seven.” He simply and clearly replied, “Not those fingers.” Not those fingers, those are the only fingers I have up. Seven of them. Not those fingers indeed. But I do behave intelligent sometimes and this was one of those. I didn’t say a word. I looked at my hands. I studied my hands. Not those fingers. Did He mean the ones pointing down? Who asks that question? Seriously, I was considering His three statements: Put a number on your hands, what number is that, and not those fingers. Nobody, and I mean nobody would say those in response to, “What do you want me to do about teaching young adults in high school when they can’t even add?” To be honest, it took me less than a few minutes to figure out the answer. But the answer will have to wait. God had given me enough to work on.

I was working on what to do with my answer, turning it over and over in my mind. I decided I should write a computer program so that others could visualize the results of my number meditations. Unfortunately, I wasn’t up on current programs, but I really know technology. So, I learned Flash from scratch and kicked out a program. It worked and I would use it multiple times in future classroom situations for my research into deeper understanding. I had part of the basement finished and did all my work down there. My ex-wife would complain later that it was unhealthy to go down into a hole and work all day without seeing the light of day. I just added that shortcoming to my rather long list. Another fault wouldn’t hurt, and it was very small compared to the others. I upgraded my computer, but was still dissatisfied with my Flash program. It wasn’t capturing the essence of numbers. It wasn’t an emotional block. In fact, emotionally, I was doing great. I wasn’t seeing a psychologist. I didn’t suffer from gender dysphoria. She said it was something deeper than that, and right now, I really didn’t care, because I had this fascinating door opened by God to a mathematical world, that I couldn’t find anywhere on the Internet. All started by a negative three, three fingers down. And if a person had fewer than ten fingers, then the number of down fingers would change. That made the number of fingers more important than just ten. It made number bases, you know, like binary, base two, that all computers use for their logic, as well as base three, four, and so on, very important. But how to visualize that. I had no time to worry about psychological problems. Nope, nope, nope. 

I needed help. Help to program in 3D. Help to research the implications of the patterns playing in my mind’s eye. God was not answering questions anymore. Again, I could tell He had no desire to lead me around like a horse in a bit and bridle. But I was definitely in need of help, so rather than ask Him about numbers, I asked Him to get me some help. I decided to work on improving more of the house while I waited. During one of my times on the computer, searching for tiles or wood floor installers, I decided to check out some courses for creating 3D programs, in case I had to help myself, so to speak. I stumbled across an interesting course at the University of Washington titled, Introduction to Virtual World Certification Program. I read about it and was fascinated. However, I discovered it had started the previous week. I’ve learned by now that only my unwillingness to knock on doors keeps me from boldly going forward, so I called the instructor. He said he had a few empty spaces and that I could easily make up the one class I had missed, being a computer engineer and such. I paid my fees and would need to show up Thursday night at eight for a three hour class. The two hour time difference wouldn’t help, but I learned later that there were people from all over the world, some coming to class in the middle of their night. I downloaded a program called Second Life, logged on, selected an avatar, customized it, and used the address in my class email to teleport to UW’s island. The instructions took me several hours because it made almost no sense to me in the beginning, but the instructor was right, I caught on quickly and surpassed almost everybody in no time. I was made for this. I could build, I could program what I built, I could interact with others. And I could fly. It was my Second Life!  [Aside: if anyone would like a tour of Second Life, Rebecca Lynne and I would be glad to give you one. Just drop us a line.] The class was awesome. The instructor was awesome. And my classmates were awesome. UW is on trimesters, as are most of the schools on the West Coast. This class ran from October to December of 2009. There were two more quarters in the program. We were the second group to go through all three and obtain our Virtual World Certification. Most of the first class was very impressive in their ease of working in a virtual world. They were totally immersed in the experience, as I would be shortly. I learned of an experimental math class being offered through Boise State University in January so I signed up for that also. 

I started working on my number visualization in Second Life in December. There are no references to use when designing something that never existed before. No similar fields to cross-pollinate from. I was flailing but having fun. By the time I showed up for the experimental math class, I had some prototypes built. The professor was having a horrible time with his technology, so another student, named Ute, whose name I couldn’t pronounce for months, seemed to know what she was doing, so we divided the class into two groups and taught everyone the basics of moving around, sitting, texting (called chatting inworld), and talking. The professor finally came inworld and class began. I didn’t know it then, but there were three women in that class that would become my helper bees, right down to the cute little bee outfits. And two of them would become lifelong friends, Ute and Alexsis. We teleported from Boise State’s island to UW’s island one day so that I could show the three of them my number project. It was a lot of fun trying to explain what they were seeing, but also very frustrating because it wasn’t obvious. My 3D design of numbers wasn’t working. But these three women were encouragers, so I pressed on, listening to the issues they had visualizing my new design and tweaking it again and again. They convinced me to not share my work with our math instructor since we had signed a paper giving him all the rights to our work in class. And my work definitely existed way before his class even started. Ute took a real interest in my work and wanted to help however she could. She had taken a course in 2009, also, on building in Second Life and was a lot of help. She seemed to know a lot more about Second Life than I did, even though we started at the same time. It started to haunt me, yet more and more I saw the possibility that she and Alexsis could really help. We were all certified secondary math teachers. Alexsis was a pro at course design at her high school and Ute knew how to get pre-built objects at Second Life (SL) stores. Seemed other avatars made objects you could buy and you could sell items you made. And get this, you could exchange your dollars for Lindens, SL’s currency, and vice-versa. Real people made real livings just building things in SL. What a hoot! Ute taught Alexsis and I how to dance, took us to cultural events, and foreign lands in SL where everybody spoke German. Turns out Ute was a German name and she was very fluent in speaking German. Go figure, but she claimed to be an American living near Portland and Alexsis lived in eastern Idaho. They were good friends, too, and I learned one day they liked me because of my relationship with God. “How did you know?,” I asked. They said I made references to God telling me this and God telling me that all the time.  They both loved God, too.  Wait a minute. Didn’t I pray for a helper last summer? And now God has sent me two! Wow! You can take pictures in SL, and on one of our outings I took pictures of us dancing. Ute has been so helpful one time that I framed one of the photos of our avatars dancing, all dressed up, and wrote a little story in German to go with it. All in SL, of course. She was surprised, but thankful. I finally had help with two lovely women.  I was very thankful to God. We realized that none of us knew one another’s real names. We exchanged real names and eventually Skyped to formally introduce ourselves.  And then one day, shortly after Skyping Ute, I couldn’t take the mystery of her depth of knowledge of Second Life. She hesitantly told me. I found out that people could get so immersed in the lives of their avatars, that it became real to them. And I found out why SL had adult regions. It was for adult content, for … . I was revulsed. I wish I had never met Ute. I quit talking or chatting to her.  And I was very angry at God for making me believe that He had sent her to help me. How can You call this ‘loving me’, God?

Chapter 16   I Would Like To Tell You My Story

My anger grew as I spiraled down with what I learned of Ute. Maybe God had sent me two helpers because He wanted me to choose one over the other, to decide who was really sent by Him. Alexsis was so savvy in the educational practices. She would go on and become one of the saviors of online remote education in Idaho. And Ute, I mean Rebecca, that was her real name. Argh, God, why would You send me a Jezebel? And then my perspective was changed, not in a twinkle of the eye, but in a brief, what should I call it, video? Vision? God spoke clearly and asked me, “Do you want to see Rebecca through My eyes?” “No, Yes. I don’t know. Give me a moment.” God never asked that of anybody in the Bible, that I know, but I haven’t even read it ten times all the way through. So what do I know? Maybe He did ask someone before. But who can say what God can or cannot do. Oh, how I love the book of Job. This is an opportunity of a lifetime, to actually see a living human being through the eyes of God. “Yes.” What I saw was a very beautiful woman. Graceful. Trim. Gentle. Bubbling with compassion. One slow to anger. Child-like innocence. Always with an eye on Heaven as expecting God to show up any second. Overflowing with love for all things. I could go on and on, but I end with this, one that could easily pass for Jesus’s sister in Heaven, beautiful in all ways possible. No one could help but fall in love with the imagery. No one. “But how,” I asked God, “was this possible? She doesn’t look anything like this in real life. And definitely doesn’t behave like this.” “You are right,” He said, “but I am going to give you a choice. If you allow me to help her through you, she will become who I have shown. But if you refuse to let me help her through you, then she will remain forever as she is now.” God had prepared me for this moment on the Golden Gate bridge, the moment I realized that I had no reason to live, but I couldn’t jump because I couldn’t take my son’s father away from him by my choice. Seems that’s what God always does, gives us a choice. He never says that we have anything to do, aside from letting His will be done through us rather than our will. We didn’t need to memorize the Bible and wear What Would Jesus Do bracelets. We could literally do what Jesus did, to do nothing else but the will of His Father who sent Him: i.e. to receive His instructions daily and do. So, we do ‘do just what the Bible tells us to’? No! You do what the Spirit of God tells you to do. The Bible just gives numerous references of what He told others to do in the past and the consequences when they did as instructed and didn’t do as instructed. And here I was, being given a choice. I didn’t have to be responsible to make Rebecca’s life beautiful or leave it ugly. God would do that. He just desired to do His work through me, so He asked. I am not cruel. I did not consider for a moment the consequences of accepting His offer. I thought God would tell her to quit doing this and that, to start doing this and that, but all He did was ask me to Skype her and tell her what just happened. Life was never the same.

I awoke this morning, February 12, 2021, thinking about where My Story goes from here, and it wasn’t good. I feared this at the end of Chapter 14, but managed to avoid it with the many words and stories in Chapter 15. You see, there are many lives involved in the next four years and each one has a Story, precious to them, the truth to them, regarding what happened and what transpired. Was I to present My Story as The Story? No, I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to, but I didn’t. Their stories were precious to me. I love each of the main characters in my complete life story. How do I present fairly what I think happened? I can’t. I was spiralling down. God led me to this point and all I can think of doing is self-destructing, because I can’t deal with hurting those I love by choosing the wrong words, the wrong event, the wrong perspective to write about. Rebecca spoke! I was not even aware that she was awake, and she asked me what was wrong. Seems my breathing rhythm gives me away every time. I told her. She is so good at throwing God’s words, that come out of my own mouth, back to me. I’m getting used to that, but it does seem like I’m often condemning my own past words or past actions by my own mouth. She said, “Either there is a God or not. Either He is a God of love or not. Either He is in control or not.” Those are the three sentences I said often to her in our first years together. I told her she had to check what she believed about each one when she became overwhelmed with circumstances. And here I was, overwhelmed with circumstances. She went on to say, as I paraphrase her, that I should not be so arrogant as to assume that I controlled the joy or lack of joy, the peace or lack of peace, in these other Stories. She said, “You are not God! You are not in control. Just write and He will direct your words.” I do not and will not fill in missing parts to make this story flow. Hearts are more important than My Story. And I ask anyone reading to not fill in what was skipped or that I was missing a big point, a huge point, the main point, in a reply. I can not mention those points without dragging up a whole lot of thoughts and feelings that are not my own. I don’t know them. And will no longer subject myself to the distorted thought aptly called ‘mind reading’. It is evil. Time to get to writing.

I referred to Ute, by that name, when we were working in Second Life and by Rebecca, when we were talking outside of Second Life over Skype. Rebecca had too many problems, in my opinion, but I remember what God showed me, so I kept the channels open. Foremost, as I learned more about her, was that she felt totally unloved. She confessed to putting God on a shelf when she wanted to feel loved, mistaking that age old world belief that sex was love, so God told me to tell her, “I love you.” And in truth, I did love the vision of her that He showed me. Like I said, everyone would. E V E R Y O N E ! After that, I never quit telling her that I loved her. God didn’t have to tell me twice. But in hindsight, probably not the best thing to say in the presence of others. But she was struggling with other things, deeper things, and I wasn’t sure this God-working-through-me would work for her. So, I asked her what bothered her most in life and she said bitterness. She was bitter about almost everything and everyone in her life. Wow, I didn’t suspect that at all. But like I said, it’s not me doing the work, it’s Him. I told her that before she could start hearing from God directly, she would have to learn to recognize His voice, the words He used, the situations that He acted in, the prayers that He answered. I told her that if she really wanted to become like that image I saw, she would have to start reading the Bible, really reading it. She was familiar with a concordance, so she didn’t have any difficulty understanding that she was to write down in a spreadsheet the location of every verse that contained bitter, bitterness, or anything similar, then write down a brief sentence that would give her the gist of the scripture. “Be sure to read before and after to make sure the context is consistent with your feelings of bitterness,” I said. I was sure this would be the end of our relationship. So many people want to walk with God, but don’t want to lift a finger in-the-doing. Maybe, Rebecca was like them. Regardless, it was in God’s control. I was shocked, literally amazed, that within the next twenty-four hours she had found every word and nuance of bitterness in the Bible, recorded them by location and snippet in a spreadsheet. And surprised that there were other tabs on the spreadsheet! I asked her what those were and she said the other words that have been bothering her. Talk about exceeding expectations (teacher lingo for doing well, really well). Well, God, I guess we are off to the races. The words I remember saying most to Rebecca during these summer months were, “I love you” and “There is no condemnation.” Her self-talk was filled with judgment, harsh judgment at times. These words, taken from Romans 8:1, follow shortly after my words, “Oh wretched man that I am,” so I am quite familiar with them. It was good, very good, for my soul to be mentoring someone who really wanted to meet my Good Friend. She would comment later about these times on Skype and how often she witnessed my struggles with God. She would recount that I would argue with Him, even yell at Him, and then be silent, and then cry. She couldn’t hear what He was saying, so I had to relive the humility of my rant and retell it to her. Seems my deeper issues weren’t buried deep. Often, I would share a part of my story and how God overcame it in my situation. I was real to Rebecca. Real in my belief of the God of Abraham. Real in my response. Real in my struggles. I did not realize that Rebecca might be falling in love with me. And not the good kind. 

The first time that I realized this was at a meeting that Alexsis, Ute, and I had in real life at Alexsis’s house. That would be Anna-Marie, Rebecca Lynne, and Cooper (still my middle name). I flew into Boise and Rebecca Lynne met me at the airport. She was shy and almost hiding behind a post as I walked out of security. She walked ahead of me the whole way to the car. She stopped at a Denny’s to get me something to eat, and then again at a park to let me stretch my legs. She ran up a hill to see what she could see. So gangly, so athletic, so not waiting for me. Oh well. We finally found our way to Anna-Marie’s home. A beautiful multi-acre site, with cows renting her back pasture. We talked about my work and how I was proposing it became ‘our’ work. The number visualization had taken on the name, subQuan, which was cool with a capital letter in the middle. Our hostess led the way in discussing how to create lesson plans that would be required for adoption by teachers. She and Rebecca Lynne became quick fans of one another over cooking, they both enjoyed preparing a good meal. The visit was short and there were definitely times of discomfort caused by Rebecca Lynne’s forwardness and desire to be close to me. But, I didn’t see it as threatening. My ‘eunuch’ status makes it impossible for me to have an ‘affair’. Don’t think too long on that. Sure, she had my affections. Remember, I saw her through God’s eyes. But she was affectionate to others, especially pets and her daughter. We got up before sunrise to make the trip to Portland. We had gone about an hour and both of us decided a restroom break was in order. As we walked up to the restroom, we both stopped and stared east right at the same moment that the sun broke over the horizon. It was beautiful. As we continued on our backroad, we finally made it to Craters of the Moon National Monument. I found out she had never had friends to play with growing up. Her siblings were all older boys and she was competitive. Not the best thing for a young woman. And at 5’10”, brilliant mind, and total social ineptitude, her struggles would make an interesting read. So when we got out of the car, I immediately went into acting like I was on the moon, pantomiming large slow strides and leaps in the air. It took an hour, I kid you not, for her to take her first moon leap. Back in the car, her beaming more than ever, we drove past Multnomah Falls and up to Crown Point, just in time to see a beautiful sunset. This was a unique day by any standard. I decided that Rebecca Lynne was fun to hangout with. But then again, I usually have fun hanging out with anyone, I think. But I don’t remember because I filter out the good times. Why? What is hidden deep inside of me? I met the fam, got a trip to Washington, so I can say I had been there, spent a day going to a beach and then flew home. I knew more about Alexsis and Ute the next time we met in Second Life.

When my two helpers first met me in Teaching Math in the Virtual World class, I was on crutches. I had broken the first bone in my life, really just a crack, in my medial condyle, and tore a tendon on the other side. To fix one, I would have permanently scarred the other, so the only solution was to not put any weight on it for six weeks. None! That was awkward. And the next summer, at the end of June, I was water skiing behind my son’s boat, showing them that regular skis can also be fun. He had a boat that made bigger waves for wakeboarding and I was having fun jumping then until I had the shock of my life, literally, a shock that ran down my spine. I let the ski rope gently fall from my hands. As I settled into the water, I was hoping I could wiggle my toes. I had cracked three vertebraes in my lower back L1, L2, and L4. What was happening to me? We discovered that I was borderline osteoporosis and had no reason to be skiing on the slopes of Vail, broken tibia, or the Lake of the Ozarks, broken spine. Why was this happening? Seems your body needs hormones to stay healthy and I was on none, zero, zippo, nada. I had quit taking estrogen when my psychologist said there was something deeper than gender dysphoria. Argh, argh, and triple argh! When the doctors found out about my eunuch state (get it? Unique = Eunuch. I have to find some way to laugh at myself), they immediately started me on testosterone. I can kick myself hard for that, but it made sense at the time. My bones started hardening again, the rest of my endocrine system fell back in line, and hair started growing on my face. $5,000 of electrolysis out the window. Oh well, when would I ever need that again. 

But in between these two broken bones was a showdown with Rebecca Lynne. In January of 2011, I skyped her to say enough. I told her by saying a prayer in her presence. It went something like this, “Lord, I have a relationship with Deborah that I need to focus on. Any heart that I have for Rebecca Lynne, I am giving to You. Do with it as You see fit. Please let us continue to work together on subQuan and be supportive of one another’s efforts to repair any damage caused to our families by our affections for one another.” I was expecting Rebecca Lynne to break down and cry, or say, “Noooo,” but she surprised me again. She repeated it almost verbatim, changing words where necessary. We had just made it clear to one another that we would only have a working relationship with one another in the future. By May, Rebecca Lynne was finalizing her Master’s thesis in Secondary Math Education. We had already done tests last Fall with 5th, 8th, and 11th graders and discovered a very unsuspected result, 5th graders followed learned procedures more than the other two groups. We actually had to repeat the experiment with explicitly enforced rules by observing each and every student and stopping them when they went back to ingrained teaching. They wanted to count no matter what. But we broke them of that, and their number recognition speed became very fast. I was working with her remotely on how she could test subQuan with preschoolers and she had made arrangements to begin her testing on Monday. I had just arrived at the lake house on the Lake of the Ozarks, to meet an air conditioning service man when God said, “Go to Rebecca now!” I didn’t even have time to say, “What?” I started driving back to K.C.. I called Rebecca. She said she would not be doing the tests Monday or any other day. She no longer cared. She had crashed emotionally. I told her I was coming and asked what I should bring. “Nothing,” she said, “because I don’t want you to come. DO NOT COME!” She hung up and wouldn’t answer. I called her parents to find out what was going on and they said they didn’t know. I couldn’t fly out, the cost is prohibitive, so I packed the car and got ready to leave early Saturday morning. Though it was warm in K.C., and I dressed for warmth, I forgot that I would be heading over the Rockies in May. By the time I descended towards Salt Lake City, snow was falling and all I had was a sweatshirt. I called Rebecca Lynne again and she answered this time. She couldn’t believe that I was on my way, that I was already taking the cutoff to go north to catch I-84. She made arrangements for me to stay at a neighbor’s across the street. After our very interesting tests on Monday, which I actively participated in, I got horribly sick and didn’t leave the neighbor’s basement for three days. Finally, I drove home, stopping by Anna-Marie’s on the way home for a very nice visit. 

After breaking my back, I was becoming depressed and angry. Angry was new. I would explode and throw things. I had started seeing a new therapist at the end of July, 2011. Of course I brought my growing document on my psychological history. We would spend the next six months going over old ground. By the time February of 2012 rolled around, she was sure that I was suffering from severe (intensity) chronic (constantly occurring) Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She had dug up the early childhood trauma and worked in the impact of my mother’s death. We were talking about my brothers one day and she asked me why I hated them so much. “Because they were males.” “Because they had penises?” she asked. “Yes” “Do penises bother you?” Tears started to flow, images started to flicker across my mind. “What are you thinking?” I told her about the images. She said, “Enough, you don’t have to dig up those memories now. You’ve been raped.” Oh, shit! (sorry for the bad word) Shit, shit, shit. (sorry, sorry, sorry). Apparently that is what happened to me, a joyful fun loving kid, despite some childhood abuse, kisser extraordinaire in eighth grade. Highlight of parties. And then a nobody in ninth grade, no life, no joy, no … .  I needed help. I needed love. I needed my wife back. I scheduled a February 14th Valentine Day’s couple renewal through our local church. We went Friday night and learned about life struggles and the need to renew. Saturday we broke up into gender groups, and each wrote a renewal vow to the other. I promised the world. I even promised no more subQuan, no more Rebecca, no more gender issues, just me. When the couples were rejoined, the husbands were supposed to read their renewal vows to their wives. I read mine. And then wives were supposed to read theirs. I thought she said she wrote nothing, but it just may not have been what I needed to hear. I melted down on the spot and a care worker escorted me to an empty office. One of the conference leaders came in and said this happens and not to make a big deal out of it. I was devastated. What’s the point of anything anymore. Arrrrrrrggggggghhhhhh. The H.M.S. WhoAmI just sunk.

Chapter 17    I Would Like To Tell You My Story

I no longer thought my life was finally coming together. My life was wrong, very, very wrong. Today, literally today, February 14, 2021, is exactly nine years after the H.M.S. WhoAmI sunk. I now know that the memories of my previous fifty-nine years, filtering out the good, catastrophizing, and self-condemning, in the traditional way of PTSD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and Gender Dysphoria, would make 2012 the worst year of my life, bar none, not even 2020 comes close. In the last seven months of the year, every day of those seven months, I would face the desire to let me end it all now. I will be struggling to type the words that follow, crying often, reliving each moment, knowing what was still to come. Please pray for me in the days, weeks, even months ahead, as trying to capture the words will drag me down into thoughts I hoped were long dead. I know they are. I know I am a new creation. I know there is a God. I know that He is Love. And I know that He is in control of everything.   [ Note to reader: Skip to the end bracket if you don’t believe in God. I am giving you a choice to not read it. Skip now! I know that this last sentence, ‘in control of everything’, causes everyone, especially me, so much trouble. I recall writing the paper that earned me an A in college philosophy, that God couldn’t control everything and still be loving. I was wrong. Every catastrophic storm, earthquake, fire, tsunami, every rape, murder, burning, abortion, hanging, every mass killing from Mao’s killing of 45,000,000 Chinese farmers between 1958 and 1962, the Holocaust’s 5,700,000, and Pol Pot’s killing of 1,700,000, every  disease, including HIV/AIDS claiming 36,000,000 lives, the flu pandemics of 1968, 1918, and lesser ones, claiming up to 50,000,000, and don’t forget cholera, the Black Death, and the two plagues of antiquity, Justinian and Antonine, every one of them God could have stopped. He had the power and demonstrated His power once by wiping out every civilization, every individual, save eight, with a flood. If some of us would quit sitting on our self-righteous opinions, like I did unwillingly, through constant personal tragedies and revivings, and investigate recent research from every corner of science, looking for research that reveals Him, we would discover that every historical reference made in the Bible could be true. Why He didn’t stop them is actually easy to say. He is God. (reread Job until this really sinks in). I tried to understand it this way, people that were, “good”, in His opinion, He took to a better place, a much, much better place, without death, pain, and suffering, constantly in the presence of everlasting love. The rest, well they didn’t want everlasting love, He knew no matter what He did they wouldn’t change, so He declared their truth, and they would never have Him. Harsh words, but I am living through it.]    And without knowing that He is in control of all things, I wouldn’t make it through. Hard words, harsh words, painful words, especially for rape victims, but My Story is living proof. Do you really believe that anyone is strong enough to suffer from birth to now, in the sufferings I have, experiences memorized into the billions of nerves outside my thinking brain, that control my breathing, my heart rate, my sleep, my peace and joy. And those memories have been triggered stronger in some times than others, but they never go away, NEVER! Only living under His control, to use me to tell His story, can explain this. All miracles leave a choice to do His will. He chose to pull me out from between two cliff faces. I accepted His offer. I believe I am now steeled to write, if you are still willing to read.

When I met with my psychiatrist, the difference being that a psychiatrist can write prescriptions whereas a psychologist can not, she knew that my end was possibly coming and that meds wouldn’t cure me. After our previous discovery of abuse in childhood, and now the rape, she knew I was in trouble. Serious trouble. It was more than she could manage. She had time, but she spent the next few weeks, maybe even a couple of months, explaining why I needed help. We talked about where I could go, how much money I could spend, and how long it would take. At $10,000 a week, at the few remaining places in California dedicated to recovering from severe trauma, the cost was prohibitive. There aren’t really alternatives to the needed care, so she planted hope in me that with my strong conviction that God loved me, maybe finding the most loving place I knew would help. It was clear to both of us that it was no longer where I lived, but I’m not going to discuss why. As we talked over my options, she continued to do her best to hold back the rising tide of how I came to the situation I was in, a man without maleness, a gender dysphoric dysphoric; a male trapped in a female’s body that once was male. Argh, rape and abuse did this to me. God is helping me through. Stay focused on God. My psychiatrist was trying her best. The tsunami was approaching the little shipwrecked isle that the H.M.S. WhoAmI’s flotsam came ashore on. I was doomed. “No, you are not doomed,” she constantly reaffirmed. “There has to be someone out there that loves you, that can harbor you.” When I’m in this spiraling down mindset, it takes a while to see clearly. Eventually, talks centered on my older sister’s home, especially based on her past support, and I broached the subject. During a trip to Cabo, she and I cemented the move to her place. My therapist agreed that it was my best hope. I knew this time that I wouldn’t be coming back to Kansas City. I was leaving permanently, and in my heart, I knew that death was imminent. What do you tell your son and his family? That you’re packing all the things that would bring hardship to those you loved and taking them down with you. It is very, very common for a person preparing for suicide to clean a house, tidying drawers, and closets, even boxing up possessions that would pain the family they left behind. I couldn’t tell my son that. When I went over to say good-bye, he asked if I was leaving to marry Rebecca. It was a story that many family members had been filling his ears with and my many “I love you’s,” trips to Oregon, even some of the stupider things my asperger’s mind would do, fed the story. Why not agree with that story? “Yes, I’m going to Oregon to marry Rebecca.” I sounded upbeat, almost joyous about the event. And I lied, big time, to my son. It truly is the first time I knew that I had outright lied about what I was up to. I knew I wasn’t going to make it out there. I even knew that a high speed crash in a loaded U-Haul truck towing a trailer had enough mass for a clean kill. But I couldn’t tell him I was going back to the Golden Gate bridge and this time I was going to jump. I lied. I left. I had made arrangements to pack up my belongings while Deborah was out of the house. I had movers help put it on the truck Sunday morning. I left the place clean and orderly, like I had never been there, but I wasn’t that thorough. I would learn later that it wasn’t only me in pain. I had infested others. “O wretched man that I am.”

As I drove out, I saw Deborah pulling in. I couldn’t stop. I was in too much pain. I cried to the interstate, cried as I drove to 29, cried as I drove through Lincoln. The roads were too well curbed, the hills too low, the valleys too shallow. Death would have to wait another day. I pulled into a dingy hotel, ordered pizza, didn’t eat it, and cried myself to bed. Tomorrow would be the day. I awoke, checked out early, cleaned my room and made the bed. I would leave the world in as good a shape as I could. I headed west on I-80. I was suffering too much. The last words I had said to my son were a lie, I had left the love of my youth, I was the cause of my brother’s suffering, being loved by my Papa and Mom more than them, I couldn’t be the girl my older sister had once desired, I wasn’t a participant in high school with all my childhood friends, save a little eraser football in Mrs. Rose’s class, I had treated my college friends horribly, especially Bob S., who started Déjà Vu with me, Jim E., who came to California because of me, countless ex-friends at work because I was ashamed of flipping. On the other hand, I was listening to K-Love, trying to focus on the words in Christian songs. But ended up saying over and over, Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani, that is “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” I decided to take a shortcut to Anna-Marie’s house by turning north on 191. I would cut across 89 to join 26, and from there a short trip to Idaho Falls and then to Rigby. I lost K-Love on the way. Left in the dark recesses of my mind, I tried other radio stations, any station. I finally found one. Just one. And it was playing a country ballad about a woman whose husband packed up one day and just drove off, leaving her to care for her son. Arrrggggggghhhhhhh!  The tears were falling hard. What was the point? I had lost everything. There was no point in continuing. But I had to, Anna-Marie was expecting me. “No you don’t. You're not worth it.” “I know, but still, I promised to go.” “You’ve messed up everything, just get it over with.” At that time I turned on to a steep downhill grade headed northwest out of Alpine. Much of the road did not have any railings preventing vehicles from flying off the cliff and down, down, down into the reservoir. “Just turn the wheel.” I gripped the wheel tighter. I realized it was not my inner voice telling me this. I had just entered into a conversation with Satan. “Turn the wheel now!” I was literally fighting the wheel from turning. My knuckles were white. “TURN THE WHEEL NOW!” “Noooo, God help me.” “Where was God when you were buried in that snow fort by your brothers on January 21, 1958?” “Noooo.” “Where was God when you were blamed for the vomit on your Mama Caroline’s fur coat.” “It was fake. I didn’t put it there.” On and on it went. Several times I had to jerk the steering wheel back. “Where was God when you shaved your head and scared your toddler son with your looks?” “Where was God when you left your family for two months and went to Phoenix?” “But I had to save the company.” “YOU LEFT YOUR FAMILY!” “Grab the wheel, hold it firm. Anna-Marie is expecting me.” “Anna-Marie thinks you were using her home to have an affair with Rebecca.”  “No, that is not true. I couldn’t stop her feelings. I could not go down that road. I am not a male!” “Now you want to lean on the truth? You don’t know the truth. Are you a girl? No? Maybe? Yes? Did you ask to be raped? No? Maybe? Yes? Did you kill your mother when you wished she had died instead of your dog, Sandy? No? Maybe? Yes? You are an idiot. Turn the wheel and end your life.” [It’s raining hard inside.] Tears were pouring down my face, I couldn’t see well. They weren’t helping. Or were they? Were they giving me an excuse, that only I would know, to veer off the road and down the cliff. “NOW TURN!” Back and forth for what seemed like an eternity. If only people could read about everything that had happened in my life up to this point, they would understand why I drove off the cliff. It would be justified homicide. The male me would have killed the female me. Or would it be the female me that killed the male me? Or would it be the Christian me that killed the sinful me? Or would it be the sinful me that killed the Christian me? Eternity stretched out for miles and miles of downhill slope. I was losing my grip. I was drifting across the lane. Car honks made me jerk back. The road was leveling off. I had passed the dam on Snake River, appropriately named for me at that time. I pulled over and cried and cried and cried. Oh God, I was drained. I tried to call Anna-Marie, to tell her to come get me. No cell service for quite awhile. None since I talked to my sister and found out that my aunt had fallen and broken her back or something, that she was being transported up to her house, that I could no longer stay there. What was the point? I cried some more. Slowly, almost comatose or robotic, I slipped the truck into gear, checked off every landmark, made the slow curve into Idaho Falls, headed north on 20, called Anna-Marie to say I was near and to refresh my mind on the last few turns, pulled into her driveway, and cried some more. She got on her phone and called the only person she knew could help. She called Rebecca Lynne and made arrangements with her to fly into Salt Lake City tomorrow. She would find a way to pick her up and get her to Rigby. She would find a way to help me. I told Anna-Marie my story, ate, and slept. I loved Anna-Marie right then more than anybody. She was my mother that evening.

While we were driving from Anna-Marie’s to St. Helens, Oregon, Rebecca would call various places to store my possessions. I had planned on storing them in one of my sister’s storage units down in San Mateo. But with the angst in her voice about our aunt’s injury and the trouble of getting her transported on a ride out of hell, every bump and turn sending massive pain through her damaged parts, blaming all of it on my sister, I just couldn’t ask more of her. So, Rebecca called around St. Helens and finally found a unit available. We unloaded the truck the next day. It took a couple of weeks of intermittent crying, finding out that I could stay at another sister’s home in the Bay Area, before Rebecca agreed with me that I could make the day trip down south. The trip was uneventful. I played K-Love the whole trip except when I talked with my sisters, Rebecca Lynne, or Anna-Marie. I believe I tried to call anyone who would chat for a while, passing the time safely in their words. I arrived and unpacked my computer and suitcase in an upstairs room. My sister was renting a very lovely place near the beach in Capitola, just east of Santa Cruz. We would walk to the little ocean side village often for a snack or a drink. It was paradise. One of the key characteristics of Asperger’s Syndrome is poor social skills. I don’t know about them being poor. I tend to think about me being blessed in my ability to talk about anything at any time to anybody. Once, when I was in college, I saw a fellow student in a bar with no hands. I couldn’t help myself, I asked what happened to his hands. His friends with him gasped, but he smiled and recounted the story of the combine not being locked completely when he removed a branch that got stuck in it. Later, we met and he told me how refreshing it was to have someone acknowledge his difference and ask about it. I did this often, with people who had lost an arm, a leg, had horrible scars on their face, missing an eye because of the one time he didn’t put the double mask on his face to touch up a joint with his arc welder, and many others. All seemed thankful I had asked and cared. No, this was a blessing. So, whenever I would go out to eat at the little cafes on the beach, I would talk to everyone, asking about anything I saw of interest. One time, I was sitting at a table playing with a steak knife, trying different grips. My waitress summoned the manager who came and asked me if everything was okay. “Sure, why?” It was the knife play. I laughed, apologized, and promised never to play with the knife at her place again. I was doing okay. A few days later, I returned to the beach cafes with my niece. Seemed everywhere we went, someone would greet me by name, ask if they should keep the steak knives in the drawer, or some other intimate conversation not often shared. My niece would say, “Jesus, Coop, you’ve only been here a few days and it seems like wherever we go, people know you, greet you with smiles, give you great seats, what gives?” I guess in light of the past days, the salt air brings out the hope and joy in me and people are attracted to the love within. Sadly, most days were not like that. My sister was going through a horrible divorce and my presence enabled difficult thoughts of hers to be redirected towards me. The beach was no longer a sanctuary. Life was spiraling down as I realized all that I left. I started replaying the conversation down the long drive from Alpine. I had set up my computer in the hopes of working on subQuan and talking with Rebecca Lynne and Anna-Marie about that work. But I accomplished little or nothing. My Skypes with them grew fewer and farther between. The end was coming. I would spend hours curled up in my bed crying, only to emerge like nothing happened. I tried to help my sister stay balanced during her ordeal as I sunk further and further under the waves. I didn’t have much longer. On the last Skype call to Rebecca Lynne, she realized there would be no more Skype calls, no phone calls, no me. It was too much for her to bear. She was ready for messy, as she put it. She said she had arranged a flight into San Jose, and would I please pick her up. It was the least I could do. We drove back north to St. Helen’s. Unpacked, got me an air mattress at Walmart to sleep on in the living room. And then the realization of all that had transpired in my previous 59 years hit like a rock upside the head, a big rock. What my psychiatrist had forecasted in Spring hit, and hit hard. Every evil in my past was triggering PTSD recall. I was doomed.

Chapter 18    I Would Like To Tell You My Story

As I write this, starting on February 16, 2021, my hands shake so much that it is difficult to type. The neurologist said I have essential tremors, which seems to be a label meaning, “We have no idea what causes them.” Mayo clinic states, “It isn't clear what causes essential tremor in people without a known genetic mutation.” And they go on to say, “May be aggravated by emotional stress, fatigue, caffeine or temperature extremes.” Well, I can’t get more stressed than recalling the most difficult five months of my life. I have been more tired, though. I drink very little caffeine and no coffee. Kansas CIty is having a record cold spell (-14℉). 

That first night in St. Helens, the kids were in bed. Rebecca was going to bed when she saw me convulsing in tears on the mattress. I couldn’t talk. The ride down from Alpine was replaying in my thoughts, with each thought branching into other memories, other shortcomings, other self-condemning thoughts, often interleaving between the past reality and future fears. I convulsed heaving for a breath of air that eluded me. Suffocation by crying became a possibility to my fractured brain. I became aware of arms holding me, a warm soft body pressed on me, and someone saying prayers ever so silently behind, but another onslaught of guilt and shame coarse through my body. Some thought, some memory, wisped away like the small smoke tendrils in a camp fire finally giving up its heat. I awoke in Rebecca’s arms. She had held me all night. And she would hold me this tight, every night, for over 3,000 nights to come, as of this day.

[A song interlude: https://youtu.be/hnjeMwxFuBA  ]

It was good to wake up that Sunday. We had nachos at Muchas Gracias after church and worked in the garage. (My memory is not that good to recall what I had for lunch August 12, 2012. We had been writing Thankfuls to one another and to God for several months. We only recorded the good things. Hence, Thankfuls!) Life did go on, but those peaceful times would spontaneously combust into self-hating moments when triggered by a conversation or something I saw being done by others or myself. Day in and day out, week after week, month after month of: “Why can’t you do it right? You’re an idiot. Some genius you are.” “Going to the bathroom? Wish you could stand up? You stupid, sick, son-of-a-btich. What were you thinking?” “Why did you answer that phone call in the meeting? How rude! Someone had to get your attention and tell you to take it outside. You know how much you hate disappointing people, shocking them with disgusting behavior. Remember Jamie W.? Flying you up to her debutante party because you loved one another and you leave with another woman. Do remember seeing pictures of your grandson walking with his hands clasped behind his back, mimicking you? And you just drive away, going to your death, after lying to your son. You should have died! Others said it would have been better if you had died that day!” “Remember that day watching the 8mm slides you just recovered of your Dad’s and watching them for the first time with your sister in 2011? You both saw a good looking, buff, young man in one of the pictures down at the cabin. You asked her who it was. She looked, thought, and finally said it was you, Coop. Yeah, you didn’t even know what you took away from those who knew and loved you. Took away from your future. You selfish, self-centered sick f#%$-up.” On-on, thousands upon thousands of memories, triggered by anything. Sometimes I would just sit down and cry. Sometimes, I would take an object of mine, that I blamed for triggering the memory, and smash it on the concrete floor, hoping to put a stop to that thread of thinking. Often, I would just get up, walk out the front door and walk for miles. Once, I even went up to a plot of fir trees miles from the house,  planted by Weyerhaeuser. I went deep into the woods, laid down and covered myself with needles. I just want the roots of the trees to grow up and absorb me so that my life would come to something. Another time, I walked carefully into a very tall, uncut field, and laid down, hoping the brush hog would chop me up into fine pieces. There was nowhere to run. I was witnessing what I called God’s cruelty, not understanding at the time, His truth, but listening only to the darkness within. “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,” even the night shall be light about me; Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, but the night shines as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to You.” Over a year later, I would be sitting in church with Rebecca and her daughter. I was seized by the need to sit elsewhere, so I just got up, walked to the section on our right and sat down by myself. I sang a few of the songs and suddenly the Spirit, the belief in God, the hope of love, just vanished. I looked around and felt pity for these idiots, believing in their fantasy. I couldn’t take what was being said up front, what the words in the songs were, I was sick to my stomach of this crap. I walked out in the atrium and decided to wait there for this fiasco to be over to take Rebecca home, and drive back to Missouri. I sat there. Empty, falling between two cliff faces, thinking, “If there is a God, please help me.” No, Satan couldn’t rob me of God, even if he had God’s permission to remove the Spirit from me. Reality was planted firmly in my core belief, if there were no God, then there is no point to reality, and if there is a God, please help me.

There were some days better than others, and others worse than some. Always the same in their essence; external triggers followed by reactions, memory triggers followed by reactions, one step forward, one step back, never advancing, never receding. I was walking backwards, Rebecca was pulling me forwards. Still, I saw in her an ever increasing closeness to God. She had confessed her dark secrets with her ex-husband, and he had shared them with all. Family members were appalled, her son would eventually cease from talking to her, yet her life moved forward while mine spun in a circle like a rip pool in the Missouri River, sucking down anything that came near, never ceasing, never ceasing. We couldn’t help but notice the many of the same horrid thoughts occurred over and over. Repeating patterns are easier to identify when little time passes between the repeats. And mine had been going on for four months solid! Either seeing something that triggered them, hearing something, sometimes smelling, touching, or feeling, and many times simply popping into my mind, ceasing control, pulling me down into darkness. Let me drown in those muddy Missouri waters. Patterns upon patterns, over and over, day repeating day, whyyyyyy? Slowly, I became aware, not unlike a child that knows, “I am me!” Awareness is: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, feeling, thinking. We all know that moment when we are interrupted by a thought or an awareness of something else, taking us down a different path than where we just were in our thoughts. “Oh look at that sky!” “Did you see that cat just run between those two cars?” “Ouch, that is hot. I hope I didn’t burn myself.” “What’s that noise?” Awareness. Who created awareness in us? If you are thinking evolution, you surely haven’t researched the current change in evolutionist thinking. Easily identified by the realizations of our own evolutions. We have seen it in everything touched by man. The evolution of dwellings, transportation, agriculture, exploration, investigation, law, on and on, everything is modified, changed, added to, subtracted from, under the guidance of an external intelligence, US! Not within, tools don’t self-modify, humans modify them. We are the external intelligence that modifies them. And who modifies life, us? Perhaps the same intelligence that cosmologist and quantum physicists agree must exist before the Big Bang. The parameters or constraints on the forces, the bonding angles of water, temperatures for life, all the ‘settings’ of the universe had to exist prior to the Big Bang. Someone had to set them! And someone had to set the appearance of evolutionary forces at work in life. And someone had to create us to be aware, to see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel, and think. For the sake of my salvation from my horrible spinning day after day, bear with me for a moment. Indulge my insanity, if it is such. I realized that all our senses came from God. He designed us to be aware, to be interrupted in our thoughts by awareness. Perhaps, God created our senses to initiate communication. Surely, that is how we learned to talk, to walk, to do. What if God was triggering new experiences, memories of old experiences, thoughts about these experiences to teach us how to listen to Him? “Rebecca, we are going to try something new, something radical. We are going to assume that every interrupted thought, becoming aware of something else, might be God trying to teach us how to listen, what to speak about, i.e. communicating with God, the God, the Creator, Love incarnate. That God. 

It did not take long to understand our approach, but it might take years to master, maybe it might take our whole life, but who cares, Rebecca Lynne and I might be learning how to talk with God! We decided to treat the awareness as God’s opening remarks. We just became aware of something that we were not previously thinking of. Our thinking was interrupted. If He is starting to talk to us, then our first response to Him for initiating talking to us, the us in “what is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him,” should be one of Thankfulness. Our first response should be, “Thank You for making me aware of … .” From Cognitive Behavior Theory, she and I knew that we will have a feeling to this instantaneous awareness. I know my feelings from so many thoughts, arggghhhh. But sometimes not. Either feeling should acknowledge Him as sole possessor of the ability to permanently change that feeling or keep it coming. I would love nothing more at this time to have every good thought remain forever more. Therefore, my response to my feeling should be a request to Him, “Please change this thought in me. Fix it.” So we put this into action. Some thoughts dissipated in strength or in occurrences, others didn’t change. I was confessing my awareness to Rebecca and, occasionally, she would to me. I remembered the verse, “Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” I told her we have to share them with one another so that we can pray specifically for one another. Nothing changed. She was already praying for me whenever I confessed. I was hopeless, spinning down again, although without as many bad thoughts as before. Wait! What had happened to those disappearing thoughts. Let me think: 1) I would become aware of an interrupting thought and thank God for it. 2) I would ask Him to help me, to change it, to fix it. 3) the thought would become less painful andor less frequent. That’s it! He was responding. His response was to make some of my thoughts become less painful simply because I thanked Him for the thought and asked Him to change it. And He was. Oh, I started to thank Him every time He interrupted me with the same thought, because I realized that I hadn’t thought about it for a while and when I did, it didn’t hurt as much. He was changing me. Oh, joy, oh joy. “Rebecca, we’ve got to add this to our awarenesses, our confessions. First, thanking Him for the thought. Second, asking Him to fix it. And now third, asking Him to make it less painful or happen less often SO THAT I would know, no, we would know, that He was fixing it.” A wonderful and necessary part of the conversation, knowing that God would reply, make His presence known to us, by the decrease in pain (or increase in joy) andor a decrease in the number of recurrences. By the fourth month of my visit, my spiraling diminished greatly. He was alive in me. And Rebecca was kept busy praying those months as the awareness would sometimes come a dozen at a time. But some thoughts did not diminish in intensity or recurrence. They were shocking in intensity everytime, like a snowball being put down your back when you weren’t expecting it, that shocking! Why wasn’t God dealing with those? I love my Lord. Often, when I have a thought like that, I simply stop my thinking to say, “God, why aren’t you dealing with some of my requests?” “He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much.” As Rebecca Lynne and I pondered His reply, we realized we needed something tangible to examine what He was saying. I don’t know which of us said it first, but pickup sticks came to mind. We imagined that each pickup stick in our problem pile had a description of one of our troubling thoughts inscribed on it. Now, she had her pile and I had mine, but because we lived so close together, our two piles were very close together, intertwined in some areas. God wanted us to be faithful in confessing the little things. First, there are many, many more little things that we excuse in our lives that we shouldn’t, and second, odds are good that a little thing pickup stick is resting on a big thing pickup stick. We just want God to work on the big things and ignore the little ones. He just wanted to teach us how to communicate with Him, big and little are all the same to Him, irrelevant outside of walking with Him. We both became aware of a myriad of little things that we simply dismissed as irrelevant, the curt reply when we were busy, the poor doing of an activity we thought unimportant, the leaving of something on the floor because one of us would pick it up later. All these needed to be confessed because they came to mind. So off we went ‘awarenesses’ turned on max. And we were instantly overcome. Our plans came to a screeching halt because of interrupting thoughts. Ah! That was a big confession that just slipped in. ‘Our plans’ came to a screeching halt. “Oh Lord, thank you for making us aware that we have ‘our plans’. We only wish Your will in our lives. Please fix this. And may we have more peace and joy as we realize that You aren’t making this as painful or as frequent a reminder as You did, because we turn all of ourselves over to You.” More peace and joy? That just slipped in and it made so much sense. As my flashes and failings kept rearing their ugly heads and I kept thanking God for the awareness, asking Him to fix it, and asking for less intensity and frequency, I also realized I was having more peace and joy. Paul’s verse in the Bible finally made sense. “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Oh, this was shouting time, this is what Hallelujah is all about. We both were growing by leaps and bounds as we started 2013. We were glorifying God in all we said and did. Life was good. Okay, life was better. Of course, everyday I announced to Rebecca that I was done with confessions, I wasn’t aware of one more thing, God would drop a big one on me. Not even waiting five minutes for me to celebrate. Life went on like this through January, at which point I quit declaring I had arrived. I was communicating with God and that communication should never stop. He didn’t want it to stop, and I didn’t want it to stop, and Rebecca Lynne didn’t want it to stop. We had God right where He wanted us. Time to get to work.

Chapter 19    I Would Like To Tell You My Story

Oh, how I weary of writing my story, Lord. There are so many triggers of past events that I must recall to tell My Story accurately. I know that most people who suffer from PTSD, like soldiers in wars, people in life-threatening events, women who are raped, and on and on in the way we treat one another, that they are usually singular tragic events, lasting only a short intense time with a finite set of triggers. I know that there are others like me that have suffered multiple traumas all their lives. I do not find myself unique, but I do find myself in an elite group that has so many upsetting events, some manageable if they had been the only ones, that triggering events come from everywhere, anytime, with anyone. Conversations, weather, something malfunctioning, whether computer software or a faucet leak, videos, music, working on anything and everything, can trigger an event, a tightening of the shoulders, a holding of breath, a fight or flight response. I accept that now and push onward. But there was a day in 2013, a day that … .

“God, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this. Why? Explain it to me. Justify this. I’ve read Rabbi Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I’ve heard others justify themselves on why You can’t be all knowing, all powerful, AND all loving. With the events that have gone on in my life, why? Tell me, WHY?” “Would you like to see a page in one of My books?” “What?” “For you, I’ve created something wonderfully visual to help you understand. I want to show you a page in my book.” I looked at the page. It measured approximately thirty-seven feet by forty-three feet and was written in three point font. Rebecca Lynne and I calculated out that the entire New King James Bible, with chapter forewords, would occupy just about two percent of one page. Further calculations showed the 44,000,000 word Encyclopedia Britannica (fits in 1 GB drive) would fit almost perfectly on one page. God asked, “Can you understand all this?” I knew that I might be able to read it, but recall it and apply it in my judgment of right and wrong, of real and unreal, of love and not love, probably not. Okay, certainly not, so I said, “Doubtful.” “Do you know that there are over a billion pages of this size in this book?” My calculations showed that this one book would contain about an exabyte of data. “Lord, I can not imagine that anyone now or forever, would be able to use that much data in deciding what is right or wrong. If I need to understand that much to determine what is good or not good, I can not. Please forgive me.” [Tears are running down my face, as I usually say, “It’s beginning to rain inside,” because I know what comes next.] “Would you like to know how many books I have in My library?” How many? Isn’t one enough? But I asked and I believe He answered a billion, but it might have been a trillion. I went back to math and the Internet. I searched the Internet and found that an article published in Science magazine reported that scientists have estimated that the sum of all the world’s stored data is 295 exabytes. All our recorded knowledge would fit in 295 of God’s books! All our knowledge in 295 of the 1,000,000,000,000 God Books in His library. Argh, we are so insignificant as a whole, and I am so insignificant being one in over 7,000,000,000 people. I was down with my face on the ground, shaking in tears of humility [And raining as I typed.] But He didn’t stop. “Do you want to know how many Libraries I have in the galaxy?” Oh please stop, please. Again it was either a billion or a trillion, it made no difference. I was being reduced to insignificance. Job, of the Bible, only had to answer how the world was made, when life did life things. But now, we are a modern generation, with billions of facts ready at our fingertips through the Internet, through computers. And I knew computers. I was able to help the most technical companies in Silicon Valley, the heart of the World’s technology, and I was being humbled. I was beyond empty, I was losing my grip on reality. But He still didn’t stop. “Do you want to know how many galaxies I have in this Universe?” In a monotone voice, devoid of all pride, I said, “Please.” Again, a billion or a trillion. He must have said a trillion, at least, since Man’s estimates seem to be somewhere between hundreds of billions to two trillion. I can not imagine anybody, not one, not all the Think Tanks in the World, could determine if we could judge good from bad. If God, who declares Himself to be Love, the only possessor of Love, the only source of Love, says something is good, then it is good. Period! But God wasn’t finished. He asked, “Do you know how many universes there are?” What’s the point anymore? I was numb with being overwhelmed. The magnitude of it all. Why even consider whether something is good or bad, but I had to see what we, humans, thought that number was. According to physicists, in an article in MIT Technology Review, the current estimate of the number of universes in the Multiverse is 10^10^10^7. That is 1 followed by 700 zeroes. That number is outrageously big. An exabyte is 1 followed by 18 zeros. I am done. Rebecca is done. If God declared our universe to come into existence, which physicists are agreeing with, if God declared that Man was good, that we are His creation, and that He has chosen some of us to spend eternity with Him, then I’m good with that. He brooked no argument, no comeback. Thankfully, I was as silent as Job. I do not expect the rewards of this earth as He gave Job. I expect far greater, because He has promised me something far greater. Apostle Paul knew that and summed it up like this, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be.” But is there evidence in scripture that He might reward good by death? There is. 1Kings 14, is about God’s judgment on the House of Jeroboam. But a son of Jeroboam, God liked. In verse 13, God takes his sick son, Abijjah, by death because God found something good in him. God destroyed the rest. Perhaps God took my Mom because He found something good in her. Perhaps He takes the aborted child, because He finds something good in them. I’m not about to figure out what meaning is in all His books. If He declares taking someone through death to a better place is good, who am I to question it. 

Today, Rebecca Lynne and I are done asking God ‘Why?’. We just want to walk and talk with Him. He gave us a way through our senses, through our awarenesses, our measurements, so to speak. We started writing Thankfuls to one another in 2011 because God showed me that Rebecca Lynne lived under condemnation. Me, I just suffered from flashbacks, which can trigger condemnation, shame, and much more. So writing Thankfuls to one another, and also to God, would be very helpful. Here are a few of the thousands we wrote. 

1/16/2013 Cooper’s Thankfuls to God

“Lord, thank You for my problems. I am not really that thankful, but know that You are using them for a purpose that will work together for those who believe. I just hope that I'm one of them. I miss my kids and grandkids. I might even be missing Deborah. I don't know what to do with those feelings. I know that if I was not here, I would miss Rebecca fiercely. What am I to do but say, "Here, Lord. Take these along with everything else that I have. Here I am, Lord, take me." Thank You for loving me as much as You do. Help me, Lord.”

1/17/2013 Cooper’s Thankfuls to God

“Lord, help me move on. I am stuck. Thank You for letting me know this morning how much We actually talk. Please don't stop.”

1/20/2013 Cooper’s Thankfuls to Rebecca

“I love you. I hope that I will never treat you as carelessly as I have this past few days.  Thank you for hanging in there with so much compassion. Thank you for encouraging me to go to early service. I was almost spiritually drained and needed that. The pain regarding family was something else I needed in service. I feel very aware of my vulnerabilities and I pray our Lord will secure them for me. Thank you for sharing the truth about how Jonathan wouldn't have been so dedicated to David, if David had turned from God. Please help me always remember that as our lives grow more and more entwined, that He, the Lord must always be the focus of my life. Without Him I lose everything, especially you. That is THE CONDITION of our relationship. Always has been, always will be.  Thank you, my Love, my Precious Treasure.”

3/11/2013 Rebecca’s Thankfuls to Cooper

“Cooper, you are wonderful, marvelous, stupendous, and exciting. I REALLY do love working with you. Thank you for understanding the belief that God has put us here to work together, that we can accomplish more as one than going our separate ways, that He wants our brains connected. There is more to this work than production. There is personal growth, spiritual growth, and an abundance of blessings that I believe He has for us both. Working with you brings ups and downs, but the Joy is unmistakable. We learn from our downs and we rejoice from our ups, so it's definitely a win-win proposition. I wouldn't exchange it for anything else in this world. I love you, Daniel Cooper, I love you with every fiber of my being!”

In March of 2013, Rebecca was dealing with a very strange situation. It seems in Oregon, that one can get divorced and then reconsider the terms of the divorce once it is settled. It’s the darndest thing I ever witnessed. So Rebecca’s ex was changing the terms of her divorce and the house was in contention. In Fall of 2012, we had only done some basic fixing up work because I can’t stand to see suffering in others. I became aware of my own suffering in seeing a yard that was severely unmaintained. There were bricks, wiring, tools, and stuff I couldn’t really name in several huge overgrowths of blackberry vines and weeds all over the living half of the two acre property. We spent several weeks pulling everything out of the overgrowth and mowing them all down. It was truly unbelievable. It was very cathartic for me to help Rebecca and her teenage children regain some respect for their home. As the weather turned cooler, I overheard Rebecca’s daughter talking about bundling up in her bedroom. In her bedroom? Seems the single pane windows not only didn’t keep the cold out, but there were gaps around her windows just letting cold air pour in. The temperatures in her bedroom sometimes reached down into the forties. I’m sorry, but I can’t stand that. She had been living like this for fifteen years. I figured that since all the windows were single paned, that I would have them all replaced. It was the least I could do for Rebecca helping me during this very emotional and trying time. Neither of us knew what the future held, but we did know what the winter held. I also dragged Rebecca down into the crawl space to wrap all the heating pipes so that heat would get back to her daughter’s room. That was about the extent of the work when Rebecca met with the realtor that had handled the sale of the home when she and her ex purchased it in 1994. They were discussing whether Rebecca should ask for the home to sell or fix it up to stay, as her ex was renegotiating the property disposition. Carol N., her realtor, said the house was not worth fixing up. She had done comps before coming to the house and we wouldn’t recover the cost of improvements. One morning, we were talking about whether we should stay or move when I had a flick of imagery interrupt my thoughts. I saw two massive stone pillars in the yard. One was square and measured about ten feet a side, and the other was triangular, measuring about fifteen a side. There was maybe ten feet between them and they were at least thirty feet tall. I shared the vision with Rebecca and she said it sounded like fortifications to her. Fortifying, to strengthen, to build up, to …, to stay!!  We decided that God meant for us to improve the home and that we would be staying. We didn’t know what we were going to be doing, and Rebecca equated that to the Israelites during the Exodus. They knew they were heading towards uncrossable water, but Moses kept following God’s pillar of light and dust to the water’s edge before disclosing what He would do then. So there we were, heading to uncertainty, but preparing for our way. We were headed to the water’s edge.

4/30/2013 Rebecca’s Thankfuls to Cooper

“Thank you for starting the day off right: with prayer! Thank you for the wonderful discussion on distractions and thank you for helping me jump off the fence of my 85% commitment and follow you all the way to the water's edge. I can't believe how much stress it has removed from my shoulders! Thank you for a wonderful work day as we spend some of it on the phone trying to get our virtual DR house in order. Thank you for struggling through that with me. Thank you also for the laughter in the car when we realized that I had forgotten the flash drive today. Thank you for the laughter when you realized that you had forgotten your iPad, too. What a great evening in spite of difficulties. I so love you, Daniel Cooper. My whole life really has changed AND for the BETTER! Thank you for the tacos after a wonderful class tonight and thank you for listening to my music with a modicum of delight. I just can't wait to cuddle. 

8/15//2013 Rebecca’s Thankfuls to Cooper

“Oh, honey, I love you so much. We were definitely put through our paces today. Thank you so  much for sharing this journey with me. My head hurts just thinking about how much the world gets in the way. Thank you for talking your way through your thoughts this morning during prayers. Thank you for the drive into Portland to look at new front doors, tacos, japanese food, and picking up your computer. Thank you for helping me with the renaming of my home disk drive as you were rebooting your own. Thank you for picking blackberries, dinner during Little House, and for the tough conversations centered around my Forest Grove job interview. You are so wonderful to talk to and I don't want to change what we have right now for more push and shove of the world's plans and occupations. I want to go to the water's edge with you and the Lord. I don't want to schedule away our lives and schedule away the Lord. He has plans to prosper us and He told us to fortify. I choose to follow Him. Thank you for your straight talk tonight. I love you so much!”

9/13/2013 Cooper’s Thankfuls to Rebecca

“Rebecca, I am sorry that I have the heart I do sometimes. The heart that makes me want to help my ex-wife, Deborah. Please forgive me. I am so thankful that you can see my situation more clearly than I. Please do not give up on me. Thank you for helping me with finances this morning. I'm sure we will learn (or I will as you seem to already know this) to treat all that I have as God's and God's alone. I do not need to care what I have in savings, how fast it is going, where I spend it. I just need to be a responsible steward of it as it is His. Thank you for being so much more mature than I in trusting God. If there was one of us that I desired to trust God more, I choose you. Seems like our Father did too. Now I need your help and your love. Thank you for the hard work you did on the STEMx chart. It was great and triggered my thoughts well enough that I could flow down one side and up the other. You are truly my perfect woman. I love you so much, Rebecca Lynne. To the water's edge I will go with you. Then onward to infinity and beyond.”

On September 18, 2013, Carol N., pulled into the driveway and just stopped. Rebecca’s driveway is about seventy-five feet long and wide enough for four cars, but Carol was parked just off the street. Rebecca asked me what she was doing and I said, “Looking. Just looking.” We had fortified. In July, we had removed old landscaping tiles and completely redid the back garden and surrounding planters on the side and front of the house. We had purchased and installed a new front door. And just ten days ago, I had been walking to the pole barn when God said, “Stop. Look down. What do you see?” What? I think I always answer ‘what?’ to Him. I guess His questions are so off the cuff; I just don’t expect them. All I saw was the driveway. I don’t see anything but the driveway. “Exactly.” I looked at it again. I walked around the corner and looked some more. I walked back inside and asked Rebecca when the last time was that they re-oiled the asphalt. She said, “Never. Why?”  “Seems like God said it is overdue, so we started what I thought would take two days. Six days later, through record heat, we worked non-stop. We have some awesome pictures. The heat had people stopping on the busy road in front of the house to ogle at someone working on asphalt in this heat. Without pay! Anyway, it looked beautiful and must have been part of what caught Carol looking. I finally walked out to see what was up. She said, “I just can’t believe that it would ever be possible to give this house ‘curb appeal’, but you two did it.” It was so nice. She had just dropped by to tell us about her cancer and how, if we needed any help in the future, we would have to contact another realtor in the office named Nancy(?). We invited her in and prayed for her to get well. God had a better idea and took her home next year. I can’t think of a better place for her to be. God is good!

9/25/2013 Cooper’s Thankfuls to God

“Father, Lord Jesus, Holy Spirit, thank You for changing my life each and every day. You are teaching Rebecca and me how to live life more abundantly and we are eagerly awaiting Your instructions on how and when we share Your love for others through us, whether speaking, writing, SL, whatever. We believe we are ready but we will wait for You. Perhaps we have to go to the water's edge. Please continue to strengthen us for the days ahead. We love You. We trust You. And we want to serve You. As always, thank You for everything we know and everything we have yet to know about the love You have given Rebecca and me for each other and for You. We love each other so much more than we ever understood the word love. Thank You. She is truly the Love of my life, my Helpmate, my Sweetheart, and my Wife2B. Thank You for flowing through so strongly. Thank You.”

10/15/2013 Rebecca’s Thankfuls to God

“Thank you for days of tears, Lord. I'm not sure why I was raining so much in my heart today, but You have a way of cleansing a soul with the outflow of sadness. Thank You for touching my life so deeply. Thank You for giving me a man in my life that wants to hold me when I cry. Thank You for giving us opportunities to stand strong in Your Name and to model going to the water's edge for You. I think the waiting got to me today: the not knowing what You have in store for us. Lord, I confess to wanting Your Plan for our future laid out in clear lines. Please forgive me and work on this in me. I DO long to give You full control of my life, not my will, but Yours be done. I think I'm just anxious to get to the doing and right now it just feels like so much more waiting. It looks like we could invest in this community and do well here, but if we have no home, there is no reason to devote time,energy, and resources to facilitate the investment. If we have no home then we need to see where You might want us to go and what we could do there. These are the thoughts and desires I give to You tonight. Please take these ungodly ruminations away from me and supply me with a peace that passes all understanding. And bring more joy with the next measurement. Thank You!”

In November, we started remodeling the interior of the house. The kitchen would get real tile floors, put in by me no less, new floating wood floor in the living room and hallway, again me, and a gas fireplace, who’d you expect, someone else? But I did not do the carpeting for the bedrooms and in the remodeled garage, turned into a family room and educational teaching laboratory. I am so blessed by my living fathers to be taught how to use my hands to build. And I love teaching Rebecca all the little that I know. I do love her so. We were fortifying for the long run. This was becoming a home that we could enjoy for decades to come.

11/30/2013 Rebecca’s Thankfuls to Cooper

“Thank you for the 2am discussion on I-don't-remember-what-but-I-remember-crying. You really do bring out the best in me. Thank you for your challenging activities, thoughts, and conundrums. I love living life with you and the Lord. Thank you for being willing to go to the water's edge. There really, truly is a God and He is on our side. Thank You for loving Him as much as I do and for being a wonderfully strong and humble spiritual leader. I loved finishing the water pipes under the house, putting in the vent covers, and heading off to Sherwood to watch the game. Thank you for thinking of stopping for Anna's Christmas present at the Apple Store and thank you for stopping to pick up the cabinet on our way home. I do so love you, Daniel Cooper!!!”

On Feb 2, 2014, God dropped a bombshell. In no uncertain words, He said, “Owe no man.” We talked about what He meant, and decided He meant everything that could mean, especially no mortgage. Oh, Lord. We just spent all this time and money fixing it up to be perfect for us. We built a place to teach in and already had our first student. Things were coming together. So, we put our heads together and investigated ways to make ends meet. There was no way. We knew that I wasn’t healthy enough to stay home safely every week, nor could I go off and leave Rebecca to stay home alone. No, God wanted us together. We investigated teaching positions where I could be a full-time teachers aide, with or without pay, but we found none. We had to face the reality that we would have to move. As we expanded our search for places in Oregon, we found that the only way to not owe anybody anything was to buy a trailer. Noooo, Lord. Please help us. We expanded our research to include any techie area, since our work had been focused on virtual world research and training. We wanted high speed internet access. So we looked at the techie areas of Boston, Austin, the Research Triangle in North Carolina, and Overland Park in Kansas. Looking at homes in these areas was very depressing. I was losing hope. Yeah, I know, with all that God did for me, one would think I would never lose hope. I just saw another stressful future, even including losing Rebecca Lynne. We visited Kansas CIty because Rebecca saw some $12,000 dollar homes. I told her those chalk lines on the ground were outlining bodies. She understood, but kept looking, occasionally calling my realtor friend from church. I finally told her enough. My friend sold million dollar homes, not what we are looking for. On Feb 25, 2014, we talked with our new realtor in Oregon, and bless her heart, Carol N. showed up, too. They said our efforts raised the value of the home $90,000. Wow, we would be able to pay her ex for his share of the house and have a little left over.  But now we have to find a buyer. We waited until April to see if we could find another way to stay or find somewhere else to live first. We agreed to list it on April 14th, and found a buyer the day before it was listed. We accepted the contract. Life was good. We wouldn’t owe anybody. We would have a little money to find a new home, fix it up, and pay for living expenses until my investments in Social Security paid off, but we had to make it three years. We didn’t have enough money after all. We were at the water’s edge!

Oh, one really good thing did happen in 2014. It was a really, really, really good thing. Rebecca Lynne Weislogel became Rebecca Lynne Patterson on January 19th. I was very happy that day, watching her run down the aisle. She had requested we get baptized just before the marriage ceremony, so both our heads were wet. But we were very happy. Just like God promised when He gave the hearts He had been holding for us back, the ones we had given him three years prior, but this time He gave it to the other. Rebecca Lynne had my heart. I had hers. God is so good.

Chapter 20    I Would Like To Tell You My Story

To the Water’s Edge, like Moses, and more importantly the masses of the people following him, we found ourselves. Desiring to be more like Moses, I found myself siding with the people, wishing we weren’t here, and my past was saying that another catastrophe was in the making. PTSD doesn’t give me a choice. My body has memorized responses to past bad experiences and, at the slightest provocation, it triggers fight or flight. My misery was palatable and Rebecca Lynne saw it. She kept me upbeat and focused on cleaning up the little things left to repair and on the pre-packing exercise of what goes, what gets sold, what gets donated, and what gets thrown away. These latter activities trigger countless PTSD reactions as I have to relive the acquisition and experience of having these items in my life. My grandmother’s chair that I’ve carried around the nation for over forty years finally departs. A marble table stays. And on and on. I am losing my joy at the Water’s Edge.

Rebecca, despite my advice to not bother my realtor in K.C. anymore, stumbles across a listing in Zillow, not the most reputable listing site, and calls my realtor. She says it is NOT on the local multi-list but will investigate anyway. It is a real listing. She manages to get a key, lockbox?, and takes pics and sends them to us. Not in the best shape. Later, we learn that it turned into a drug house, so, copper wires, piping, fixtures, deck railings, i.e., anything not nailed down, was ripped out and sold. The bank was repossessing the property, which expedited the stripping. When we saw the pictures, the house was just a shell. Little or no wiring, outlets and switches, plumbing, fixtures, water heater, furnace, ducting, nothing, nada, zip. It truly was just a shell. But, and it was a great but for us, it was being offered for $49,000!! It was in a very decent neighborhood, every house on the block was bigger, and it was sitting on a beautiful lot of over an acre with a dry creek running through it. Yes, Rebecca Lynne had found a gem, so we put a contract on it. Seems my catastrophizing was misplaced. Or was it?

Lord, I hate evil people. Thank you for letting me know that You have a special place for them. Evil people are people that never change. Since Rebecca Lynne and I can never know who will change before dying, we treat everyone as hopeful. However, Lord forgive me, there are some people I hope God has die before they have a change of heart. The realtor listing the house was one of those people. His evilness slowly revealed itself. First, he said he had another offer and would bid it out on Monday. I personally have been involved with these types of sales and have won both, coming in at 10% over asking price. We offered $55,000 and won. We thought. We offered a cash deal, no contingencies, and a two-week close. Any realtor worth their salt would say this is an awesome deal for the listing agent. So why did he misspell our names on the paperwork for the Title Company? Why wouldn’t he make these papers readily available to our agent? Why was our agent, the one who regularly sells homes in the millions, tell us that this is becoming the most difficult sell she ever had. We found out at close. The title company said the papers would need to be corrected. The papers were sent to the listing agent. He replied that we didn’t close in time, so the sale was null and void. Rebecca Lynne saw that he relisted the house the following Monday for only $42,000. What??? We talked to our realtor and she said she has never received any reply to her emails or calls from the listing agent the entire time. She talked with her managing broker and they were determining a course of action. Meanwhile, the house was being put under another contract. My body’s memories are being justified, and, hence, reinforced. That has been my story all my life. Early trauma, warning lights of impending catastrophe, catastrophe happens, body reinforces by doubling up its sensitivity to events. I’m in a living hell and here it is again. “What are you going to do?” Oh the tears form instantly as I recognize the voice of my Beloved. “Lord, should I redo the U-Haul letter, but this time with a call?” “Yes.” So, I called the bank owning the property and got to the real estate department. I asked them if they were in the habit of leaving good money on the table, because they were about to forego $55,000 for $42,500? I was told to send an email with details to such and such, so I did, documenting all the events. The listing agent called our real estate agent later that day asking her to tell her clients to quit talking to his client. We explained what we did. She said she would let her broker know. We heard from the bank and they said to resend papers to the listing agent and he would process the sale through us. This time, the title company called to inform us that they received the papers with the misspelled name again. Argh, argh, and double argh. We emailed the banker right away, he replied right away, and said it would be done correctly this time. Resubmit. We closed later that week. My catastrophe, so predicted by my PTSD riddled body was averted, but only because I heard that small still voice of my Beloved. “Oh, Lord, forgive me for my lack of trust. Forgive me for my fear.” (It’s raining inside as I recall and type. I still feel so worthless.) We found out months later that the listing agent constantly made deals with banks to sell their repossessions. He would mark them down low, sell it to a rehab buddy, and split the profits. We just happened to get in the way and didn't go away easily. He is evil. 

So, we bought a house over the Internet, site unseen, but trusting pictures and my realtor that if anyone could make this house functional again, she assured me it was me. So much love from people that I didn't deserve it from. Leslie F., my realtor, is simply beautiful in heart, mind, body, and soul. We had our final garage sale on July 10th. Rebecca’s brothers offered to pack while I finished making repairs to what the inspector found for the new buyers. They packed as much as they could, but left a good deal on the ground by the truck. When I investigated with my future son-in-law, we agreed stuff had just been thrown in, literally at times, and it needed to be repacked. As we unpacked, we found that the marble table’s beautifully carved legs had been broken in half. We found other damaged furniture. I’ve packed over forty times and I should have done it one more time. So we did. Unpacked everything, balanced the severely unbalanced load so the truck stood upright, and managed to get every last bit into the truck. At the last minute, our daughter decided to throw her netting, that she placed over her bed to feel like a princess, into the back of the overpacked Prius, for safekeeping. We were ready to leave.

The trip was uneventful, albeit we threw away most of the candy we had erroneously bought to help us drive. It was making us shake and sick to our stomachs. The lack of phone service through Nebraska made that leg long. However, we felt wonderful pulling into a nice motel in Overland Park, unloading our clothes, climbing into the Prius and driving over to see the property with our own eyes. We laughed, we smiled, we cried as we stepped on the land that God gave us. The house and land that would become the Mission On The Way. In the morning, work began officially with getting into the house. There was no way into the house except with a crowbar and hammer. We eventually screwed the basement door in with a hex driver through deep holes so that one would have to know what screw tip and which holes actually had the screws in them. We purchased a front door. The shed was independent of the garage and had a concrete floor with evidence of water, so we found wood skids and placed our construction tools on the skids. There was no lock, so we parked our little Suzuki too close to the door for anyone to open. We couldn’t see into the garage and its heavy door was nailed in place. It would have to wait. We were in for a big surprise when we finally opened it, as it had no floor, just mud a foot deep as the rain on the driveway ran downhill right under the door. It was hideous. Our neighbor just happened to be a concrete contractor, saw the mess we were in, knew of our very tight finances, and gave us over a 50% discount on digging it out, dumping in a ton of gravel and covering it with 6” of concrete. Another of the many blessings we would receive since we moved in. Sticking to the garage, there was a huge, beautiful cottonwood on the west side of the shed. It died a month after we moved in. The leaves just dropped. If that tree fell, it would destroy the shed, the garage, and all its content. Again, we were blessed by finding a tree service that charged us $1200 for a $5000 removal. The trunk was over seven feet in circumference and stood almost eighty feet tall. We were pained to have lost it, but joyful to see it gone. My body’s PTSD response could come down off the walls. Everything that happened triggered responses. I was getting angrier and angrier. Don’t get me wrong, I loved being here and I loved the property. It was me I was angry at. Why couldn’t I enjoy life like others?

What I did love was Rebecca Lynne’s exuberance and joy. The day we ‘moved’ in was almost 100º. Moving in was not exactly the right term. We brought in a mattress, coolers for food and drinks, a Coleman stove on a foldout table on a railingless deck, and a tool box. We had ordered internet service and when the man showed up to install the cable, we showed him where to put it. He said, “Where’s the plug?” “Oh, we don’t have electricity.” We’re getting a generator and will run it nightly to charge our phones and search the internet. He smiled and withheld his chuckle. A little. The city was turning the water on the next day after being locked off at the street for over two years. There was NO powerline running to the house. That had been disconnected, as well as the meter being removed years ago, too. The property was void of necessities. Rebecca Lynne commented that we were just like missionaries of old. Only a hut to live in. No security, no water, no electricity, nothing! We didn’t even have very many windows with glass, mostly boards, and with temperatures pushing a 100º outside, it was over 110º inside. Yep, we were missionaries living in the heart of Africa. All we needed was wildlife walking by. That evening, with the only windows that opened in the bedroom, we co-opted as headquarters, we laid on the bed and wondered about our sanity. But, oh, were we happy. God had actually given us a property we could afford and it had land. Just as the sun was setting, the sounds of life outside invaded. Rebecca Lynne had never heard so much living sound. I only remembered something like it from spending summers in a cabin on the Gasconade river. At least it had electricity, pumped well water, and an outhouse. Bugs, frogs, night birds filled the air. Her smile was beautiful as she became aware of Missouri fauna. She got up to look out the small back window, just in time to capture several deer crossing. Were those wolves or coyotes following a short distance behind? Well, we had our wild animals. We were truly missionaries in the wild! And then came the mosquitos. Rebecca remembered the netting thrown in at the last minute so we ended up sleeping under a mosquito net. The scene was complete and the heat real. We were lucky I didn't die from heatstroke that night. A neighbor loaned us a window air conditioner the next day and we fell asleep from then on listening to a generator. But the memory is still vividly alive. Not all my experiences are bad. Some are very, very good. 

Life settled down into a routine of eating out, not only for food, but also for restroom facilities, visiting Lowe’s and Home Depot for supplies and appliances and, also, restrooms, and Nebraska Furniture and IKEA for possible furnishings and, of course, restrooms. It took a few days, even though it was a priority, to get drains hooked to where a toilet should sit and the bathtub. We used to laugh at the white 5 gallon buckets we saw at Lowe’s, wondering why they had so many port-o-pots for sale. We purchased a toilet and set just the bottom on its drain. We would end up fixing that drain five times before 2021, as the improperly laid floor is still to be replaced in the future, God willing. But, filling up a bucket with water, we could flush a toilet without running to a nearby store. We had our third utility, waste water disposal. The first was getting water turned on to the spigot in the basement, the second was the generator that ran nightly for a couple of hours, now doubling as a battery recharging station for our tools and running a light in the bedroom and kitchen. Rebecca surprised me soon after by asking me to go into the bathroom and touch the water in the tub. It was warm. She had boiled three gallons of water on the Coleman stove and poured it into the tub. Only two inches deep, it felt heavenly. We had discovered warm baths. Ahhhhhh. And the tub now doubled as a clothes washer. Rebecca would prep the water, add soap, and I would dance around on the clothes. Hung out to dry, they would be ready the next morning. Still, the heat was so oppressive anywhere but the bedroom, so I looked into the attic to discover very little insulation. It was hotter than the bejeepers. We installed two roof turbines and an attic fan. We had discovered ventilation and we loved it. It was much quieter than the window air conditioner and worked up to cold weather. When we finished off the drain plumbing to the kitchen sink, we could wash dishes and do away with the five gallon bucket reserved for only dishes. There came the day when a neighbor helped me install gas lines. We could add a hot water heater. With water supplies running to the bathroom and kitchen sinks, to the toilet, and to the shower, we discover one wonder after another. We could wash and rinse dishes with hot water. We could brush our teeth with running water. We could flush with tank water. And we could shower, and shower, and shower to our heart’s content. I don’t remember how long it was before we had a warm shower, but it was definitely too long! By this time, I had installed a 200 Amp panel and contacted the utility company to run power. They ended up putting a transformer on the pole for just us. I don’t believe we will ever over tax it. With power cords running from the one four prong outlet I connected to the box, we had power available to every room. I love electricity. I love not hearing the generator run every night. Neighbors were now coming by and expressing concern for our lack of windows. They said Falls are cold here and come unexpectedly. But God had not told us that the day to replace windows was upon us until September. Again, they were installed just before the first cold snap. During another warm day, we were informed the big picture windows would be ready soon, so we cut out the little window in the back bedroom and put a picture window in it the size of our living room picture window. It was awesome, with pics of Rebecca Lynne sitting in the cutout, enjoying the view. God didn’t tell us about the thunderstorm He had planned, but thought we would enjoy running around like chickens with their heads cut off, throwing up plastic sheets reserved for painting, to stop the rain pouring in on our refinished oak wood floors. He was right. We will never forget the laughter we shared that night. The newly named Sunroom will always have a special place in our hearts just because of that one lovely day turned stormy. I love God’s surprises! We got the HVAC unit installed before the temperatures dropped into the forties. Fifteen inches of insulation blown into the attic kept the house really warm. It was installed on a Saturday by leftovers from another job at a steep discount. God just seemed to send loving people to The Way. We had retired pastors running some companies who would come in for prayers, or song, or once, to play guitars. 

There were so many wonderful people to offset the constant struggles I suffered from. Rebecca Lynne noticed how easily I became overwhelmed, but assured me it was understandable. “You, my Love, are designing and building every system in the house with little outside help. You must have a hundred things on your mind while trying to keep costs low and your body functioning.” She was correct about one thing. I was pushing my body too hard. I wasn’t on hormones anymore because we had no health insurance. In December, we heard about The Affordable Health Care Act and were very thankful that it would start on January 1st. I saw a half dozen doctors in the first three months dealing with many health issues, one being hormones. My GP put me on a testosterone cream in March and by the end of April, I was getting angry at everything. I was becoming sexually frustrated with nothing to vent with. I hated everything about my predicament. “Hello Suicide, my old friend.” NOOOOOO!!! By May, several doctors were examining my condition and decided that I was adversely reacting to testosterone cream. And after testosterone shots, they decided I was reacting to testosterone in general. In July, I asked, “Why don’t we put me back on estrogen?” “We can’t,” they said. “You would have to go through transitioning therapy with a psychologist specializing in Gender Dysphoria.” “What? I did all that over ten years ago. I’ve even had gender reassignment surgery. Just give me the medicine.” “We can’t. You are presenting as male and the Affordable Health Care Act will only let us treat males with male hormones and females with female hormones!”  Life sucks. People are so hung up on rules, regulations, belief systems, faiths, you name it. Somebody has something to say about what you do with you. Now, I was totally screwed. Almost as bad as the rape. I had no choices. I had no hope. “I won’t say ‘if’ any more, Lord. I know you are there. Please help me.”

Chapter 21    I Would Like To Tell You My Story

With God, there is always hope, but the way through is not always easy nor expected. Rebecca Lynne, the woman I had seen through God’s eyes in 2010, the woman that gave up any future relationship with me in January of 2011, the woman who was ‘ready for messy’ in August of 2012, the woman who married me before our Lord in January of 2014, turned to me the evening after the doctors refused to give me hormones and said, “Cooper, my love?” “Yes.” “Why don’t you just be a woman?” Hmm, I think. Maybe it’s because I’m not! Well, that’s not entirely true. Stripped bare, no one would mistake me for a man. It would take a DNA test to be sure. And I had enjoyed several years of wonderful memories as a woman working as an administrative assistant, though way over qualified, and teaching, even spending a fun night with a fellow female teacher and her kids. I definitely was received as a woman when I dressed the part. “But Rebecca Lynne, why would you want to be married to a woman?” “I wouldn’t be. I would still be and always have been married to you. You are my best friend forever. We could go everywhere together, literally everywhere. We would never be separated again.” I said, “But seriously, why would you want to go through that with me?” “Oh, Ellie. You still do not get it. In my entire life, I have never heard of anyone that talks to God like you do, who literally has their eyes on God every minute of the day. You never once set God aside and did an activity where you hoped He wouldn’t notice. You are the most Godly person I have ever known. You just don’t get that I would rather be with you no matter what you looked like or what other people thought. You walk with God and I want to, too! I love you.”

Sometimes, like right now, March 1st, 2021, the truth drops you to the floor in humble thankfulness, tears flow like a river, not rain, and you can barely mumble thank You after thank You. I still question Rebecca Lynne on why she gives so much of herself, especially her love, to me, but they are coming less often and I don’t feel quite as pained as I have. It is just like our thousands of confessions, awarenesses, measurements, and all the other names we tested on our lips, that most important part to end with, a request for fewer awarenesses of the problem and with less pain when reminded. Practicing our awarenesses is what we believe is the most significant aspect of walking and talking with God. He gave us our senses to become aware. With each awareness, we consider whether it might be Him triggering it. When we feel it could be, we thank Him for the awareness, and respond in kind to the feeling the awareness triggers. Usually an uncomfortable feeling and we ask Him to help us on it, to fix it. And if there is something else that needs to be dealt with first, to make us aware of that. And then we ask for more peace and joy when He makes us aware of this same feeling in the future. We ask because if He is working on it, then we will be able to ‘measure’ the change. We will have less discomfort than last time, andor, it will occur at a decreasing frequency, with the hope it never occurs again. It will be fixed. Every time, we have had more peace and joy. Either the pain is less, the frequency decreased, or we discover something interfering with Him working on this feeling, because He says He wants to fix something else first, something that we weren’t being thankful to Him for when He made us aware. Sometimes the things seem so little, but He says, “Be faithful in the little things.” It is the continuous ‘little things’ that Rebecca Lynne observed in me being thankful for, it is my never ending turning my eyes upwards towards Him. She would often say that I would tell people, “I only know one thing. Keep your eyes on Him.” It is hard after a life like mine to trust anyone. But I had asked for someone to help me with subQuan, my math discovery in 2009, and He answered with Rebecca Lynne. Despite all my misgivings, she has become a helpmate extraordinaire. She was sent by God!

So, we changed gynecologists and I presented as female. The doctor had no problem whatsoever prescribing estrogen. A few years later, my bone density had recovered so well that I was no longer borderline osteoporosis, or even osteopenia. However, my PTSD hadn’t changed. The psychiatrist that diagnosed my PTSD in 2012 wouldn’t see me anymore because she didn’t take Medicare. Oh, that reminds me. I was now 65 years old. But my previous psychologist would see me, which saved me spending months just to bring someone up to speed on my past and convince them I was who I was. The diagnosis made complete sense, and she understood how the psychiatrist had stumbled upon the discovery of the rape and early childhood abuse. She recommended a book, The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.. It is a research based book, which I love being so “je ne sais quoi”, and it explained everything I needed to be aware of, so I thanked God and asked Him to fix me, and to give me more peace and joy the next time I became aware of my PTSD. Which of course, happened multiple times a day, every day for quite awhile. And I am getting better, praise God.

Rebecca Lynne and I have discovered by faith, and then realization, that each day begins at sunset and that the Sabbath is on Saturday, a day in which we do no work, nor activities that depend upon others to do work. Thinking both these through and responding to the revelations, therein, has changed our lives significantly. We have had plenty of daily living to struggle with in the orchard and vineyard we had planted, table grapes mind you, with multiple garden experiments, with the puppies she had never experienced in life and that I couldn’t let her live without, and with the recent acquisition of chickens. We even took in a broken and broke man for seven months during COVID-19 and he departed last December, trusting in our Lord to direct his steps and being aware (smiley face) with money in his pocket! I would find countless PTSD triggers during this time, many moments to break down and cry, like when a fruit tree I cultivated for three years suddenly died, or when we had to cut down our beloved cedar trees, because their pollen damaged fruit, when my babysitter from childhood died, whom we had rekindled a very close relationship to, though I must say I was happy for her as I knew she was going to Heaven, and finally for Bandito, the cutest little puppy who died in my hands after the vet put him out of his misery because he suffered from hydrocephalus. Lord, please don’t make me go through another beloved furry friend dying in my hands. But there is little hope of that, as we have eight little beloved dogs that make up the bulk of the Heart Ministry at the Mission On The Way. “Hearts are made to be broken,” I would say one day to Rebecca Lynne, and we say it often here on the Mission.

One day, in 2021, after an awful year of emotional upheaval for everyone in the world, God said to write my story. He said it would help in this time of great sorrow. He is so wonderful. And now we come to the conclusion of my writing, but not my story.

I still desire to find a way to share the wonders God has shown me on why He is. I’ve shared my visions with you, but many doubt the veracity of visions. I have discovered many scientists in various fields that are becoming overwhelmed by the increasing odds that there exists an intelligence beyond, before, and behind all things. They are coming face to face with God. Pick any field, and search the Internet for researchers in that field that now believe in God. You will be surprised. Several documentaries are being produced that downplay apostolitizing, and focus just on the facts. It is hard to do when you get excited about a truth you discover. The best of these are in an ongoing series, titled Patterns of Evidence (https://patternsofevidence.com). I would start with Patterns of Evidence: Exodus. No matter how skeptical you are, the filming is beautiful, the interviews unbiased, and the production very well done. No ‘come to Jesus’ request is proffered. It will give those desiring proof from God that He is a wonderful foundation. Another, albeit decidedly Christian biased film, opens the real possibility of an explanation of the flood in Genesis, titled “Is Genesis History?” An interesting take on geology with a special appeal to Rebecca Lynne and I, as she lived near Portland when Mount St. Helens exploded and we both lived in St. Helens, Oregon within easy viewing of Mount St. Helens. You’ll understand the connection when you watch it. A follow up is the finding of Noah’s Ark. Originally, Ron Wyatt’s proclamation that he found the ark was greeted with great skepticism because of who Ron is. However, he updated his original Youtube posting with credible research by the Turkish government. It’s interesting, to say the least. A recent book I’m reading right now, Finger-Prints of the Gods by Graham Hancock, has some compelling evidence of the pre-flood civilization. What is very interesting is the scientific dating of the layers in the Ross Sea Shelf, that indicate river water quit flowing into the Ross Sea around 4,000 B.C., which coincides closely with the 4000+ B.C. dating of the flood, which would bring on quick and massive world wide cooling. I guess what will be an ongoing struggle for me, is to present fact based data for skeptics to investigate and consider that the possibility that a book, written by multiple authors over hundreds of years, may be God’s declaration that He Is! The Book has been a credible witness of who God is. The awarenesses are witnesses of who He is in our lives.  I would just like to be a vessel of God’s love in His endeavor.

Closely related to helping God reach others is His gift of understanding numbers, and hence, foundational math, which we call subQuan. Rebecca Lynne and I have made incredible strides in understanding God’s direction with subQuan. We would love to share it with everyone around the world, but need a lot of help. We have published a book on the Internet, FOR FREE and NO ADS, that I would encourage everyone reading My Story, to read. What we need is feedback on where the reader, you, have difficulty understanding what we have said or shown. We need to make this easy for anybody and everyone to understand. It has been researched that 70% of college freshmen need math remediation to pursue their major, their dreams. And that the majority of these will fail to graduate because of mathematics. This is not necessary. I taught remedial math at Portland Community College for two quarters. The first quarter I used only their curriculum and ended up with the standard bell-curve distribution of grades at the end of the semester. The second quarter, I sprinkled subQuan supplementary material where appropriate and ended up with incredible results, all A’s except for two B’s. Wow! We know it works. We need help. We need you to read the book and give us feedback. https://www.dreamrealizations.org/math-courses-with-subquan

I have some personal issues to resolve, too. I still have yet to know if my son will ever read my story. I haven’t talked to him for several months and he is not replying to my attempts. Perhaps a relative or a friend will encourage him. And even if he does read it, he may not believe it. His grandmother proved to him that I wasn’t a good person. If he ever reads my story, he will find out that I agree with her in part, just not the ending.

I will continue to suffer from PTSD. The body never forgets, but the memories will become precious reminders that God will use to make me aware of His love for me and others. And I finally realize that I do have gender dysphoria. I am a male trapped in a female body. (No argh-ing anymore. I am on God’s path.) As such, I will never be able to ‘make love’ with my wife despite loving her with all my heart, mind, body, and soul. Don't worry Christians, God said He has enough of my all for me to also share it all with Rebecca Lynne. God is so good to me. I will dress as a female, I will ask to be referred to as she and her and by the name, Ellie.  I will never separate myself from Rebecca Lynne, in order that she will be by my side, no matter where we go, when God boldly steps onto the stage of my life again and says, “Follow Me. I have something for you.”

Thank you for reading I Want To Tell You My Story,  

the eunuch

Isaiah 56:4-5

For thus says the Lord:

“To the eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths,

And choose what pleases Me,

And hold fast My covenant,

Even to them I will give in My house

And within My walls a place and a name

Better than that of sons and daughters;

I will give them an everlasting name

That shall not be cut off.