Flight Instructions: A Journey Through Guilt to Forgiveness

By Kathleen P. Perkins

A story of self-discovery, leading to forgiveness, redemption, and healing. Flight Instructions: A Journey through Guilt to Forgiveness is a touchingly honest memoir - the story of a decades-long journey that began when author Kathleen P. Perkins answered an inner call. This call was a summons ferocious enough to wrench her from her husband of fourteen years and their three young children. Loosed from her family, severed from the life she had known for over thirty years, she uncovered a powerful spiritual dimension which eventually forced her to take her hands from her eyes - and the shield from her heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Jan 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634134149

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INTRODUCTION

The first, and often the only, person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiving. When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.

– Lewis Smedes

Kathleen Perkins' memoir, Flight Instructions, A Journey Through Guilt to Forgiveness, is a poignantly insightful, informative and inspiring variation on the consequences of abandoning one's self in the search for fulfillment.

In telling her story, Kathleen's theme is developed as a heroine's variation of the hero's journey. This memoir intimately and unflinchingly portrays Kathleen's round trip. Beginning with her innermost being, she travels outward from her true self, and eventually back, as she reaches a healing that is beneficial to herself and her loved ones.

This memoir addresses every person who senses negative energy impacting his life, who feels a need to forgive himself for past actions or has a desire to heal old wounds and reconcile with loved ones.

It is hoped that the ultimate gift you receive for the attention you give to Kathleen's memoir is, paraphrasing psychologist Abraham Maslow, to grow healthy, fruitful and happy as your own true nature is permitted to guide you.

Noel Frederick McInnis, Minister of Emerging Initiatives New Thought Center for Spiritual Living,

Lake Oswego, Oregon

Time heals all wounds, adjusts conditions, explains facts; and time alone satisfies the expanding soul, reconciling the visible with the invisible.

– Ernest Holmes

Part 1

Abandonment

Prologue

What kind of person makes the life-changing decision— make that a lives-changing decision—to essentially abandon her husband of fourteen years and their three young daughters, shattering five lives in the process?

In 1972, at thirty-three years of age, I did not own the emotional resources to ask myself that question. I made the decision to leave with no understanding of the psychological cause for my actions and their effects, which would forever reverberate through our lives.

I've lived with the consequences of that momentous act. At the time, an act almost as morally reprehensible as homicide or incest. I have spent the last forty years of my life reassembling those relationships as well as struggling to understand and forgive myself.

Through the years I have been absorbed in identifying, examining, and reconstructing the choices I made which led to the decision to leave my loved ones. Those years of intense scrutiny enabled me to break down the barriers to self-love, creating a space in which to be more fully cared for and loved. I came home at last to my true spiritual nature.

Today, nearly a half century later, I embark on my story of personal discovery—a story with its roots in a California hospital where a two-and-a-half-year-old child lay near death. It is a story about forgiveness, redemption, and healing.

Abandonment

The only time you should look back on your life is to see how far you've come.

– Kevin Hart

The room is full of shadows and there's a funny smell all around me. It makes my nose wiggle. My parents and a man in a white jacket stand beside the crib staring down at me. But I know it isn't my crib and I'm not at home. I hear their voices. I'm afraid. How did I get here? I feel like my pillow might swallow me. My face burns. There are tears running down my cheeks. The man they call doctor props me up and puts a cold shiny thing hanging from his neck on my back. It makes me jump.

My momma looks very sad and she has tears. She pulls her sweater closer together. My daddy stands next to her in his blue work coveralls and looks stormy—and he has made fists. He does not look at me. Is he mad?

The man isn't mad—I think he's sad. He looks at my parents and his voice is real low when he says something about a problem and tells them I'm really, really sick and he doesn't know what to do

The doctor moves a little bit. I think he's leaving, but he turns around and says something about a new medicine that he thinks might help me get better. He calls it a word I don't know and tells Momma and Daddy they need to sign something or else he can't use it on me because it could hurt me. When he says this, Momma starts to cry again. She looks at Daddy, then the doctor, and I see them both move their heads up and down and hear them say, Yes. They thank him, and he leaves the room.

When the doctor went out the door, I saw Mother walk over to the window. It was dark outside and the moon peeked in the window. Momma put her hands together under her chin, and said, Dear God in Heaven, Kathleen is in your hands now.

I remember I lay motionless in the crib, gripping the white bedcovers my mother had pulled snug under my chin before she left. I was alone in the eeriness of the hospital room, waiting for God (whoever that was) to take me away. But God didn't come, and I lived.

At the time, I was too young to understand what the doctor meant about the new drug he wanted to use. I now realize that sulfa hadn't been approved by the FDA because of possible harmful side effects. However, what I thought I heard that night was my mother giving up on me, relinquishing me to another. Some part of my tiny self took her prayer literally, and I've ever since felt a sense of abandonment.

From that night forward, I subconsciously began a search for Mother/Father Love, a decades-long journey.

I now believe I was given a choice of whether to live or die. I chose life, but grew up feeling as though I never belonged. Periodically an ethereal sense of having been left behind skirts the edges of my consciousness. Through the years, as if in a recurring game of hide-and-seek, my mind reaches back, trying to grab hold, to relive the moment. But each time, just as I'm about to go deeper, it eludes me.

As an adult, I often asked my mother for details of the hospital experience. On occasion, I could persuade her to talk about it, but I never got a real feel for what it was like for her. She sidestepped my questions with vague responses, accompanied by a far-off look. My father was no more approachable.

Over time I gathered fragments of collected memories from family members. I coupled this with my remembered sense of that night, painting it with an active imagination.

In 1941 we lived in Vallejo, California where my father took a temporary job in the shipyards to support the family and the war effort. We'd left Pocatello, Idaho six months earlier when I was two years old and my brother Dee, was six months old.

In the story I managed to stitch together, I learned that my father worked long hours, and habitually went out drinking with the guys after work. I assume Mother had her hands full taking care of my baby brother and me more or less alone.

I discovered that my hospital stay was the result of a streptococcus infection, pneumonia and septicemia, a blood infection. While playing outdoors I'd scratched my ankle on a rusty screen door. The scratch became infected.

After a couple of surgeries to drain fluid from my lungs, and several rounds of drugs, I was not getting better. I don't know how long it took the last resort drug to have its effect. Apparently, it was weeks before I was back to normal.

One could think that my feelings of being abandoned by my mother would make me determined to never abandon my own children, but it didn't turn out that way.

Thirty-one years later, at another time when I felt especially vulnerable, I sensed an inner voice so strong I knew I must pay attention. I wish I could say my inner call was as clear and pointed as the migration calls of those hundreds and thousands of magnificent birds that take their journeys in the same season each year. My call was vastly different, but there are some similar components.

The first time I was even vaguely aware of an inner call came when I was still spiritually asleep—completely unaware that a voice was hollering from somewhere deep inside my core. Its summons was eventually ferocious enough to wrench me from my family.

The beginning of this journey was fraught with low-level vibrations of fear and guilt. It has been a long and circuitous route. I liken it to the message in T.S. Eliot's poem, Little Gidding: We are always exploring and in the end arrive back where we started, seeing the place for the first time.

Like my feathered friends, I found the resources I needed when I was ready to use them—some took longer than others to arrive. Grace came first and last.

God does not avenge, but the law of cause and effect exacts the uttermost farthing.

– Romans 12:14

Three decades had passed since that tiny girl was given over to God in the dimly lit hospital room in California. I am married and have three young daughters. In a flash, the incident happens that is instrumental in changing the course of my life.

I am standing at the kitchen sink in a purple chenille bathrobe and my hair is still damp from my morning shower. The bitter smell of coffee growing old on the warmer reaches my nostrils. My hands are in dishwater and I am I choking back tears. I sense a presence behind me. Turning, I see an image of myself standing on the other side of the long counter separating the kitchen from the dining room. I feel, rather than hear the words: It's going to be okay, Kathleen. The girls will need you more when they get older.

The apparition happens so fast I almost miss it and it disappears as abruptly as it arrived. I stand in numb disbelief, shaking my head, trying to clarify the message.

The presence returns, once, as if to calm my alarm, repeating the utterance, It's going to be okay. Long after the image fades, the reassuring words soothe me just as a warm, flannel, baby's blanket swaddles an infant.

Kathleen, that inner dialogue you heard that day in your kitchen was Grace—the Divine in you—giving you the permission you needed to set yourself free, to spread your wings and fly.

– A therapist, years later

For many years to come, that freedom proves to be elusive. I didn't have the wisdom at the time to recognize the smooth stone of Grace, mixed as it was with the thistles and thorns of angst and indecision. At that point in my life I felt utterly incapable of seeing myself set free.

My husband, Dave, had just designed the plans for our lovely new home in Twin Falls, Idaho. He fashioned them after the architectural style of Southern California where we'd lived for two years while Dave attended school to earn his master's degree. After graduation in 1967, he accepted a job offer as financial aid director at the community college in Twin Falls. We were excited to be back in Idaho, and to move into our long-awaited dream home. The shared experience of planning our house had been a good time for Dave and me. The rambling, split-level home, decorated in the same Mediterranean style as the structure, was picture-perfect. Our family of five cheerfully settled in.

Dave even included a tree house for the girls in the plans. It was located in the tree on the backside of our property, which abutted an open pasture. Tracie, nine years old at the time, took charge of decorating it with scraps of carpet and wood left over from construction, gleefully pressing her younger sisters—Kelly, six, and Stefanie, four—to do her bidding. Included in our big happy family were two cats, and Ruffles, the dog. I had a fine husband, three beautiful daughters, and a lovely home: a Father Knows Best perfect lifestyle.

Despite all my efforts to convince myself that I should appreciate that good life, deep down I felt miserable. The deeper truth: I was grindingly, depressingly unhappy--a moping-through-the-days, doing-tasks-by-rote unhappy. Some days I turned into a crying machine, staring out the window, shoulders shuddering with sobs. Searching for answers I read Ibsen's A Doll’s House, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. The messages I received from these books only made matters worse. As the years passed, I began to feel I had been duped. In trying to live my mother's dream, an impossible dream, I had almost become a Stepford wife!

I didn't have the emotional tools to explain it all to myself, much less to Dave. The restlessness kept growing. I wasn't happy. That’s the best start I could make. I know how trite this sounds, but it seemed the only way to describe to him my dis-ease, my unease, my unsettledness.

I'd approached Dave more than once, trying desperately to explain my feelings. Because he didn't seem to be able to tune into the depths of my discontent, I suggested we go for counseling. Probably out of frustration, he responded, I'm perfectly happy. You're the one who needs counseling. You go get help. I ended up feeling pathetic and helpless, trapped, and inept at getting through to him.

One night when we'd just tucked the children into their beds, Dave and I were seated side-by-side at the long counter, the same counter where, two years earlier, I'd unexpectedly received my flight instructions. I knew there was no way I could possibly describe to my unaware husband my out-of-body, light-filled, brilliant moment of clarity.

Yet I desperately needed to attempt another conversation with Dave regarding my confusion and angst.

Finally, out of mounting desperation, I blurted out the words that changed our lives forever. Dave, I'm leaving. I'm sorry. I've tried to sort out my feelings, and explain them to you, but I get nowhere. I don't love you anymore. I'm so, so, so, so sorry! I can't go on like this; it's not right.

His face distorted into an expression that can only be described as shocked disbelief. Dave screeched, What in the hell are you talking about? Not right for who? You? It’s sure as shit right for me and the girls! He lunged forward, shoved his finger in my face, Where are you getting these ideas? Who have you been talking to? His shoulders dropped, his voice lowered, You can't just leave. Not after all we've gone through—school, the girls, our new life here.

Please try to understand, I begged, this isn't easy for me either.

By this time, we were both crying. I stood up and walked the short distance to the large laundry room off the kitchen, needing space to breathe. Dave followed.

His voice, as if on a roller coaster, shot up again, Understand! Understand! No, hell no, I don't understand, he yelled. You must be out of your ever-loving mind, how can you be so damn selfish? I swear, Kathy, you've lost your mind.

At this point, Dave seemed to go completely out of control, screaming at me, the veins in his neck popping out, bulging and purple. I turned my back to him, but he grabbed my shoulders and whirled me around to face him.

You can't just leave behind your children and everything we've worked for on a whim. Walk away. To what? What is it you said? To ... He almost choked on the words, To discover who you are? Utter and complete nonsense. Maybe I'd understand if you were leaving for another man, but to ‘find yourself'... His voice dripped mockery, then a pause and he shifted his plea. Kathy, for God's sake, think about what you're doing. Think about the girls!

As if ashamed of begging, his voice changed again and filled with a tone I'd never before heard. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? he howled, as if in agony.

Calmly,