Upside Down

It was four in the morning, and I was in the kitchen arranging my spice cabinet by alphabetical order and container size. Most of them were spices I never used. I didn't even like marjoram and I didn't know what coriander was but I kept them anyway, lining them up row by row. It could have been four o'clock in the afternoon, it didn't matter to me. I was wide awake and contemplated a trip to Wal-Mart to expend some energy.

"What are you doing?" I looked up and saw my husband standing in the hallway in his rumpled t-shirt, rubbing his tired eyes. This had become a predictable routine - my husband awaking in the middle of the night to find me elsewhere, usually in front of the TV, or quietly trying to pluck at my guitar, or writing depressing poetry. It scared him when he found me doing something productive in the middle of the night, like cleaning or arranging. It meant my energy was off the charts.

He took me gently by the shoulders and led me away from the kitchen. I imagine it must have looked a lot like a scene from the Alzheimer's unit of a nursing home - "Come on, Julie. Let's go back to your room." Of course, I was only in my early twenties and we were supposed to be happy newlyweds, except we weren't. I was not at all what he had signed up for.

We got married wanting a simple life - the kids, the dog, teaching Sunday school, keeping the white picket fence nicely painted so it glowed around our perfectly manicured lawn. He wanted a soft-spoken wife who could make a decent meatloaf, but instead he got me - exhausted and barely able to function by day, wide awake and wired at night. If he had known I'd be punching holes through walls or throwing plates at him, or contemplating suicide on a daily basis, he probably never would have walked down the aisle with me. Nobody signs up for Wifezilla.

Did I know I had issues before I married him? You could say there were a few signs. I believed, like a great many foolish women do, that once I got married I would "settle down" and the problems would magically disappear. Being in love would make the depression go away. Establishing a new life would make the anger subside. Being a wife would make me gentler.

The fits of rages didn't tear us apart, the expectations did. My husband walked on eggshells and tried to be the perfect man, hoping that if he could keep from rocking the boat, I'd be in a manageable mood. I expected him to understand that what he did or didn't do had nothing to do with how I felt or how I acted. When I whipped a plate at his head, it wasn't personal. I was angry, in general, and he just happened to be in the way. As many times as I tried to explain to him that I wasn't angry at him, he didn't understand it and certainly didn't believe it. To him, my actions proved otherwise.

It's hard to have a happy home when one spouse follows the other one around all day asking, "Honey, are you doing OK today?"

Translation: "Are you crazy today? Are you normal yet? How many fingers am I holding up?"


Realistically, the things that angered me don't anger 'average' people. Most people don't fly off the handle because they dropped a butter knife or something fell out of the freezer when they opened it. At least, they don't fly into a rage that escalates and escalates until they have bloody knuckles.

I found myself going through pastoral marriage counseling and sitting through individual therapy once a week, and praying for deliverance from my anger every day. I read books and hashed out a troubled childhood that I had hashed out many times before in counseling. Nobody seemed to understand - least of all my poor husband - that I wasn't seething with inner anger. I was having flashes of very intense anger that came out of nowhere, and I felt powerless to control it.

I was energetic and creative and had so many ideas, but was limited by my human capabilities. More often than not, that's what really ticked me off. How could I sleep when my mind was racing and my body felt like an engine revving at the starting line? How could I be happy and at peace when my hand was reaching for a plate but my thoughts were a mile ahead of me already contemplating what I would do the next morning and I was super-sensitive to noise and light and virtually everything around me?

I knew there was something wrong - something medically wrong - but part of me worried that I wasn't really a Christian. How could the Holy Spirit live inside of something so messy and frightening? Repentance means turning away from sin and walking as far away from it as possible. I was always 'sorry' after an angry outburst, always sorry for scaring my husband with my late-night antics, but I always did them again and again. Had I really received Christ's ultimate forgiveness? Could Christians be terrorized by demons?

Was it brain chemistry, or something demonic? Both? What was the answer?

I didn't have the answers to those questions.
All I knew was that nothing was working.




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