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"Shalom" Shattered
93 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Chris and Wendy talk through an early time in their marriage when the shine of new love began to fade, conflicts escalated, and the challenges to maintain intimacy in marriage just seemed to keep coming:
- A mother’s devastating diagnosis…
- Their own unexpected health issues…
- The ugly reality of one another’s unhealthy coping strategies…
- The after-effects of having been raised in the “purity culture” of the late 80s…
- And oh… the joys and challenges of welcoming a new child into the family…
How can a young couple find a way to grow in faith individually and as a couple, when every day it feels like they are just dodging ferocious predators, stepping on land mines, and trying to navigate a none-too-seaworthy ship through a dense and disorienting fog? (Um, yes, that mix of metaphors is intentional.)
And at the same time, how does the grace & kindness of Jesus become more real through the tangible care and comfort of His people in the church?
Tune in for an intimate conversation as Chris and Wendy pull back the veil on those days of feeling unmoored, anxious, and overwhelmed—and yet also seen, held, and cared for… by a God who really honors His promise to be a “very present help in trouble.”
[And just a quick reminder, since you are one of those people we already adore because you actually read these descriptions: if you are enjoying or benefiting from this podcast, we would be even more grateful if you would take just a minute or two to rate it, leave a review, SUBSCRIBE, and tell your friends and neighbors... Thanks!]
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Transcript
Introduction to Surviving Saturday
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Surviving Saturday, a podcast about holding on to hope in the midst of life's difficulties, disappointments, and dark seasons. Times like that remind us of the agony and despair the followers of Jesus felt on the Saturday of Easter weekend, in between the Friday on which he was crucified and the Sunday on which he rose from the dead.
00:00:23
Speaker
That Sunday forever changed the way that humans can relate to God. But what does it look like to be honest about the very real pain we experience in the in-between? To fervently cling to hope in the God who promised us his peace and his presence at times when he feels distant or even cruel.
Meet the Hosts: Wendy and Chris Osborne
00:00:40
Speaker
I'm Wendy Osborne, a licensed counselor in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I'm her husband, Chris, a marriage mediator, conflict resolution coach, and trauma-informed story work coach.
00:00:51
Speaker
Join us each episode for authentic conversations about how life not turning out as we'd expected has created the contextual soil for the growth of a tenacious hope in the resurrection and in a God who is still making all things new.
Early Marriage Challenges: Job Changes and Family Illness
00:01:07
Speaker
So today we're going to talk about a time in our marriage. It was early on.
00:01:15
Speaker
We had been married about four years, and it was two years after we were up in this beautiful part of the country. Do you remember what I'm going to say? Yes, yes. We were up, as we mentioned in the last episode, we were recording these first episodes from up in beautiful New England. We're in Maine in Bahaba.
00:01:34
Speaker
And yeah, about two years after we had gotten back to Charlotte, I started my job. You were working, I think, at first at Charlotte Institute of Rehab. And then that did not work out great. And you ended up transitioning over to CMS schools and doing pediatric speech work there. Yes. And what I'm talking about today happened a little bit after that. And we had just found out we were expecting our first child. Yes. So this was in 1997.
00:02:05
Speaker
And before we had shared with anybody, we realized that your mother had cancer. Yes. She actually, her doctor was a father of one of my best friends growing up and he called and kind of gave us the heads up that he was going to have to tell her the bad news.
00:02:27
Speaker
on of some breast tumor. And so we kind of got that heads up. And I think we were sitting on the knowledge that we were expecting Savannah, right? Yep.
00:02:38
Speaker
And so, yeah, so we went ahead and told your mom to buffer what she was getting ready to hear. So that she could, we knew how excited she would be. It was the first grandchild for both families, both sides of the family. But your mom was single and was going to be going through this battle with cancer. And so we went ahead and leaked the news to her first when we knew.
00:03:04
Speaker
And so it kind of we didn't even really appreciate this until years later, but it's sort of the whole of our first child's life was really.
00:03:12
Speaker
colored by the mom's journey with cancer through chemotherapy, radiation for 12 more years until she passed away in 2010. But really, that was an element of life for us for that whole season that was super, super challenging. In fact, there was one point we thought about moving to Atlanta where she was. We actually considered it, maybe even looked at some places and we got some good counsel not to.
Struggles with Lust and its Impact on Marriage
00:03:39
Speaker
because we barely had a support network or... Well, we had a really good one here and we would be stepping into none there. Yes, that's what it was, right. And so it seemed like a lot for us to care for her in the absence of our own community.
00:03:56
Speaker
And the wisdom we got was that with support and community that we had here, we'd be able to care for her. And that was that was true in a sense. But what it meant was she was with us a lot. She came up and stayed with us a lot. She'd come and stay for weeks at a time. My sister was I had just finished college and was, you know, getting established in her career and she could take care of mom for stretches of time. But then there'd be time she wanted to be with us because of the grandkid and then she needed to be with us. And so we sort of had started off on that whole
00:04:25
Speaker
journey of, okay, we're bringing a new life into the world and we're dealing with his mom going to, you know, at that time we didn't know what her prognosis was. She had a really good prognosis as it turned out, but she had radiation, chemotherapy, the whole nine yards on that first go round. Yeah. And so right before we found out about her diagnosis, but probably after we knew we were pregnant, so this was in the first eight to 10 weeks,
00:04:56
Speaker
I overheard you on the phone with a friend. Yes, this definitely happened while we were still expecting one day a friend of mine called, this is back when we all had the landlines and this is a call from the house phone and I picked it up. It was before going to work and Wendy heard part of a conversation with this guy was in my Bible study group that we had at the time.
00:05:21
Speaker
and he basically had called and asked me to come and get his hard drive from his laptop because during the course of our accountability relationship we had kind of like we called it a prayer triad I think and he had mentioned that he had struggled with looking at this was again 1998 so this is very early
00:05:38
Speaker
in the dawn of the internet age, but with looking at pornographic images or salacious or lust-provoking images on the internet, he had mentioned as a prayer request to just us guys before that, that, you know, his wife's gonna be gone. That was gonna be a hard time of temptation. And somebody asked, you know, do we need to take your computer? Do we need to, you know, what do we need to do here? And he said, no, I'm fine. And then this was him calling and saying, oh, I've had a stumble. I need you to come.
00:06:09
Speaker
And so I said, okay, I hung up from this call. And when he's like, well, who was that? I was like, well, this is my friend and said his name. What did he want? Why is he calling him? This is unusual. You know, eight o'clock in the morning. And I was like, because he wants me to come get something. I wanted a way to work.
00:06:26
Speaker
And that again, not a very satisfying answer to Wendy. What in the heck? And what I didn't know is that this was, so I explained to her, well, what he asked for and why, and she was sort of shocked. Like, this is something you talk about. Why are you talking about this? And that was where I had to say, well, because this is the thing that some men talk about, that men need to talk about because it's a struggle.
00:06:51
Speaker
As it turns out, it had been a bit of a struggle for me. This was, I think, in the age of America Online and dial-up, but I had discovered fairly quickly that the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition was which was my sort of a place that I went a lot growing up and learned kind of a lot of my own
00:07:13
Speaker
journey of self-soothing and sort of escape and dissociation. It was available online. And so I'd found that there were bathing suits and pictures of cheerleaders and things like that. And this was not something Winnie and I had discussed at all or was even on the radar. In fact, what was your level of kind of awareness or understanding of any of that? I would say very naive.
00:07:34
Speaker
And I would say very uncomfortable with my own sexuality. And so in short, it was devastating to me. Yeah, it was devastating in a way that I could not even have imagined or predicted.
00:07:52
Speaker
I had kind of bought into the myth as a lot of us sort of raised in 80s and late early 90s purity culture of you know you save yourself for marriage and we guys are all you know can't wait until okay we're gonna get married and then we can have sex and all these natural urges and drives that are in us and so bad that we have to battle against now they will have their free
00:08:12
Speaker
you know, place to be and all will be, you know, swimming in roses and you'll never have to struggle with that again. And that had not been the case. I think our, you know, physical relationship had been challenging and not as, you know, smooth and free flowing again, more damage from purity culture, I'd say, but you can speak to that side of it. Yeah, there's probably more than I want to go into here, but there, there was a lot of harm I had suffered that I was not aware of at this point in life.
00:08:42
Speaker
And so I was at war, not just with my own body, but with myself as a sexual being. And so to think about you following less of other images devastated me. I can sort of feel my heart begin to race now. Yeah.
00:09:06
Speaker
And long story short, I mean, that was really devastating. It really meant that if my image as the good guy, the nice guy, the great husband, which I sort of invested a lot in and thought I was able to pull off, if it hadn't been shattered before that, it was done. It was completely exploded at that point. I felt probably as low as I had ever felt in life, as terrible as I ever felt. The more I learned about
00:09:34
Speaker
what it landed on for Wendy because we didn't really have a handle yet at that point and how much she struggled with body image and just belief in herself and all that.
00:09:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think at that point, I didn't see it as a struggle. I saw it as a truth. It's a place where evil had really come at me hard. And so I had gone for several years without being willing to look in the mirror, unless it was absolutely necessary. So I had such a
00:10:05
Speaker
hatred toward my own body that my first reaction was I should have known better. I should have known better than to think that a man would be loyal to me and to this body. And so it took me into a deep spiral of shame.
00:10:24
Speaker
But at the same time, I was pregnant, which was super
Medical Trials: Tumor and Community Support
00:10:30
Speaker
exciting to be expecting a baby, especially our first. And then your mother, to whom I was very close, was diagnosed with cancer. So we were facing birth and mortality at the very same time, as I was finding out about this struggle of yours.
00:10:51
Speaker
And I think I was definitely desperate to try to fix things. I would say I was clean to the gospel as much as I could at that time. It became less and less theoretical. I think that had always been a private struggle between me and God and maybe me and an accountability partner or some guy I talked with.
00:11:09
Speaker
there was where I really started to see the harm and started to see this is not a victimless crime, a victimless issue. This has impact on the people involved in making such stuff, but also on the people I love around me. And so let's say that began a period of, you know,
00:11:28
Speaker
relative strength and freedom from that challenge for me, partly because of fear, partly because of, oh my gosh, I don't want to get caught with that, but I also don't want to do anything, that kind of harm again. And then it also was a season as we were expecting a child, and that took a lot of energy and time anyway. I didn't have time energy for too much else. But it was...
00:11:52
Speaker
I would say, I know you've spoken to you sometimes when you're feeling like, you know, we kind of shortcut that whole subject. Yeah. And that's because of what I'll get to in just a second was going on at the same time. But I didn't share the devastation or the struggle with anybody for about 15 years.
00:12:12
Speaker
I was so convinced that this was a confirmation of the undesirability of my body that I was too petrified. And so when we talked in the last episode about shame and keeping people apart and hidden, that was exactly how evil used that experience for me.
00:12:34
Speaker
But yeah, if we fast forward, um, not long down the line, um, we had our first child and she was about eight months old and you felt a lump in your neck. And this is the second time we had dealt with this. So why don't you share that? Yes. So actually when I was in my first year of law school, so I was in Virginia, you were doing your grad school in Georgia.
00:13:01
Speaker
Um, I got mono actually, which explained why I had been falling asleep a fair amount in some afternoon classes in particular, um, diagnosis mono and had swollen lymph nodes and all. And then, uh, as I got better from that, which didn't take very long, all my lymph nodes went back down to right size, except for there was one place that stayed.
00:13:21
Speaker
swelled on my right side of my face kind of in front of my ear. And so a very astute ENT at UVA Medical Hospital examined that and said, we need to do a biopsy of this. And he biopsied it and found benign tumor material, a benign tumor of the parotid gland.
00:13:40
Speaker
And so what that meant was, thankfully, it happened towards the end of the semester. And I actually was home in Albany and could have that parotid gland tumor surgically resected, the same doc who actually diagnosed my mom's cancer later. We've jumped back in time. He's the doctor who performed that surgery. And that was probably your introduction to sort of caregiving for me, but not a big deal. No, it was very easy.
00:14:09
Speaker
super in and out easy. So when this lump appears, you know, six years later in 1998, now we've got a situation where, okay, there's another lump there and the doc's like, hey, we'll go in, we'll do the same thing as last time, set it up for a three hour outpatient surgery one day. And so I think we arranged for some family to be there initially. And then,
00:14:36
Speaker
What happened is you're sitting out there in the waiting room cause I'm conked out this whole time. Yeah. So originally we just had friends keeping our baby, but she spiked a fever the day before. And so my parents graciously came to keep her while I was at the hospital with you for what we thought would be, um, a morning long outpatient surgery.
00:14:58
Speaker
And so I kept waiting and waiting and waiting. And it was coming close to the time that I had been told we'd be going home. And I'd heard nothing and started calling friends, asking for prayer, trying to find any medical professional that's kind of in this waiting room that seemed to be
00:15:18
Speaker
closed off unto itself. And so eventually two doctors stepped off the elevator and called my name just as a pastor friend came down another hallway. And so at that point they told me that they had actually found hundreds of tumors and they had never seen such multiplicity of tumors when the situation was benign.
00:15:46
Speaker
And so they asked if I wanted them to continue the surgery and pull in another surgeon because given the five branches of the facial nerve and the area where the tumors were, they'd have to be just incredibly delicate.
00:16:02
Speaker
to try to save your form and function of your face. And so they said, do you want us to wait and biopsy everything and decide, or do you want us to keep going? And I remember just blurting out, you have to keep going. If you think it can be cancer, you can't stop. And they said, okay, we, that's what we will do. And so we will get another surgeon.
00:16:22
Speaker
and we will give you updates every hour or two throughout the process. And that lasted, I think the surgery itself was about 12 hours. Yeah. And I was out 14 completely. I'm oblivious to all this because she's had to make this call and the surgeons described it. They had to keep spelling each other. That's why they
00:16:43
Speaker
brought another doc in, they described as being like picking concrete off of dental floss to try to extract it and preserve the facial nerve. We weren't sure what level of paralysis I would have or anything. I wake up and I'm just sore as all
Emotional Burdens: Feeling Isolated Despite Support
00:16:57
Speaker
get out. I have been cramped in this one position and on my side and what you're not supposed to be for that long and then I had a difficult
00:17:05
Speaker
time with the Foley catheter extraction and with kind of the meds coming out of that. I was probably out of my gourd for a day or two. But what was that like for you in terms of the care that you had there with you while these docs are giving you updates every few hours or so?
00:17:24
Speaker
Well, it was petrifying. I mean, I was 28 with an eight month old and you who were my husband and closest attachment figure were out and so I was left alone navigating this. Now a ton of friends joined me up in the waiting room and there was a lot of prayer and a lot of
00:17:50
Speaker
Support people brought meals people planned all kinds of things they helped with child care But underneath it all it was super scary now is also I Feel like Jesus showed up in the faces and the bodies of those people and like I had ever experienced so it was transformative And it was also really scary so it was both and
00:18:17
Speaker
Um, and, uh, you mentioned our friend, the pastor who showed up, how, how was that, have that play in terms of, you know, God giving you some care? Yeah. I mean, he, he called his elders, he called friends, he cleared his calendar. Um, he set up a meal train. He, um, checked on me almost every day for a while. And so it was,
00:18:43
Speaker
incredible care. I think he was there with you until like they wheeled me out of recovery. Yeah, until I could go in and join you in recovery and he waved at the door. Yes, because you were still out. They were
00:18:57
Speaker
taking you off the meds, but you were still very much out until the next day. And you had never really experienced that kind of presence, that kind of tender care. And so that kind of happened in the middle of this whole season of we're adjusting to this new child, which was a challenge in and of itself. I really had some misimpressions about babies in general. I thought they came out like the Gerber baby kind of crawling and smiling and playing with toys.
00:19:26
Speaker
And that is not how that works. It was a lot of adjustment. And our oldest had challenges with sleeping in particular. Not going to sleep at night. We were trying to make sure that they learned to sleep. Oh my gosh. But it was just a really gut-wrenching time. What did that, that sort of facing my mortality, what did that land on for you that went?
00:19:50
Speaker
Well, it took me a long time to see past the fear. And I didn't realize it at the time, but I think my body had felt anxiety for a lot of my life. And I just had never known what to call it. And it was cloaked in a lot of shame. Like I've said before, if I were struggling, it was something I was doing.
00:20:15
Speaker
And so it took me years to be able to get outside of the story enough to see what was actually happening. But it was landing on themes in my life, like me needing to be the strongest one in the room. So I needed to be the one to care for a baby.
00:20:33
Speaker
I needed to be the one that cared for my mother-in-law as she was enduring chemo. And then I needed to care for you while you did seven weeks of daily radiation. And there was nowhere I could exactly turn. I mean, I had friends bringing meals. I had friends keeping our child. I had a lot of support, but nobody that was able to hold me in the ways that I probably needed to be held.
00:20:59
Speaker
but at the same time was not going to give myself freedom to be held because I thought, well, if I can keep going, then I should.
00:21:07
Speaker
Yeah. And we felt sort of like this spectacle of needing all this care, certainly. For me, it was very fortunate. I was working for a judge and I had probably the best work set up I could have had to have something like this happen to Mary. We stayed on top of things. This judge was ahead of deadlines, was very understanding, was a very
00:21:29
Speaker
lived out family first. You got to do what you got to do for your family. And we got our work done. And there was no FaceTime or showing up or busy work. It was real work, but we stayed on top of it. And so it was as good a time. I wasn't billing anybody by the hour, which is nice to have to go because the whole each radiation visit, even though they only radiate you for about a minute or two, there's all the setup and
00:21:53
Speaker
You had sores in your mouth and you couldn't eat. Oh, yeah, it was it was painful and Yeah, it was it was a hard hard long season We lived on meals that people could bring to us and they would have to bring something that I could you know Slurp down like a smoothie or something with a this kind of you know, the radiation therapy so we didn't mention but
00:22:14
Speaker
because it was so diffuse throughout the parotid bed, they recommended this radiation. And so it basically zaps the whole side of my face. It took a while for my facial performance of my lip to kind of come back. They weren't sure I'd be able to get salivation on that side.
00:22:32
Speaker
I was bringing out my old speech pathology oral motor exercises to try to get movement back in your lip and your tongue and your eyelid. I remember the stack of tongue depressors that were supposed to try to get my teeth around to try to get jaw movement back.
00:22:50
Speaker
But this was just super disruptive for us. Again, we're still adjusting to an eight month old, a one year old. And the thing we'll mention as we bring this episode to a close, we'll come back to it later, but we really never got to fully dive into all the effects of what my struggle with the lust type things, where that landed. We had no clue of the complexity of it when you really didn't get a chance to
00:23:16
Speaker
Connect with yourself and figure out what is this doing? How is this landing? I mean while I was in super I think you know Performance get it all done mode if you would ask me what I was feeling at the time I don't know that I could have said anything. I would have had an answer but I
00:23:32
Speaker
I was basically, I've got to get my work done. I've got to survive this. I've got to parent a child. I've got a mom with cancer. I wasn't thinking about, you know, who am I? What do I need? What do I feel? And that felt normal. It's not, and it's certainly not healthy, but it felt like for me, everybody is sort of sick or needs something. And that's how my mom had been kind of growing up. That's a whole separate subject. And so it was kind of, you know, get it done, put your head down.
00:24:01
Speaker
dive into church, do whatever.
Unresolved Grief and the Fear of Loss
00:24:04
Speaker
But we were definitely, later we came back around to and had to recognize that the interruption of that grief and the interruption of dealing with that was staying with us. It was an underlying unresolved tension or thing that we really couldn't name until a lot
00:24:22
Speaker
Yeah, it took years and years for me to finally see that the core terror for me was being left alone. Both that shame made me feel I needed to be alone, but also the fear that no one would come and find me in the aloneness. And so I think on both ends, I felt I would be left. I would be left by a mother-in-law who could die of cancer.
00:24:51
Speaker
I would be left by a child who would one day grow up and her job would be to leave.
00:24:56
Speaker
I would be left by you either to death or to lust. And so I was sitting in the middle of this swirling cocktail of what was going to be the pecking order of how I would be left and didn't, um, didn't understand or value myself enough to even be able to stay with myself. And so I was just spiraling a lot of shame.
Surviving Saturday: Reflections and Future Challenges
00:25:24
Speaker
This was definitely one of those Saturday moments.
00:25:33
Speaker
We kind of made it through, but we sort of tough it out. When we come back on the next episode, we'll drop in around there because we then had some other challenges that came from other directions, vocationally and otherwise, that really kind of sent us even further for a loop, if you can imagine that. Let's stay tuned and we'll see you on the next episode of Surviving Saturday.
00:25:57
Speaker
The Surviving Saturday podcast is brought to you by Nurture Counseling PLLC, a counseling teaching and training center based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We help families flourish one story at a time. Nurture Counseling provides counseling, counseling intensive for couples, conflict resolution coaching, story work groups, seminars, workshops, and retreats to provide a safe and welcoming context for exploring the agonizing experiences of pain, brokenness, and evil that disrupt our lives.
00:26:24
Speaker
and that God often uses to nurture deeper trust and intimacy with Him and with each other. You can find us online at www.nurturecounseling.net