Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing (20 page)

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Authors: Stormie Omartian

BOOK: Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing
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As a result of that night, we stayed on the tour and there was a total turnabout in Michael. Five days later we finally had a free day in Jerusalem, and because of the intensity of the tour it was the first chance Michael and I had to spend time alone with each other. After that day the hectic schedule resumed. We rose before dawn, went full speed, and fell exhausted into bed at night.
When we arrived at the Sea of Galilee I became extremely ill. I was dizzy and nauseated every day and could not keep any food down. It got progressively worse, and we tried unsuccessfully to get an earlier flight out of Israel back to California. The only solution was to send me on to Tel Aviv to stay in our hotel there and wait for the rest of the group to catch up.
When we finally left Tel Aviv, our plane made an emergency stop in Paris for mechanical reasons. I was taken to the hospital there and given a shot to control the nausea and vomiting and to ward off dehydration long enough for me to get back to California. Even so, the ride home was miserable. I was so violently sick that everyone, including me, thought I must have food poisoning.
Being pregnant didn’t occur to me because I associated the violent sickness of my first two pregnancies with my own psychological rejection of them. But once in California, I soon found out that I was indeed pregnant and that my extreme illness during pregnancy was a condition I had inherited.
All the talk I’d heard for years about my grandmother dying in childbirth flooded my mind with fear. My mother’s frequently spoken words of “Once you have children your life is over” played repeatedly in my brain. I was afraid—afraid of the violent nausea and pain I felt in my body day and night, afraid that I might die in childbirth like my grandmother, afraid that my life really was over, just as my mother said.
Mother’s reaction to my pregnancy was hard to read. She was more concerned with all the people who were following her. She said the President of the United States was having her watched and that the communists were going to kill her because she knew too much. There were times when she seemed so normal and her story sounded so convincing that I wondered, “Wouldn’t we feel terrible if what she’s been saying is true and all this time none of us believed her?” But then she would give herself away by saying that Frank Sinatra and the Pope were conspiring to have her shot. I guess if I were convinced that they were trying to have me shot, I might be more concerned with that than the birth of my first grandchild. It’s hard to say. Anyway, I was disappointed that she didn’t seem to care.
Dad, on the other hand, was very excited, yet also worried. I was so sick that by the end of four months I had lost 13 pounds. On a body still too thin, this did not look attractive. Dad was well aware of our family history of serious pregnancy complications and his concern was evident.
I called Sara Anne about the problem. I knew my fear had to go, and I thought the nausea and pain might be caused by it. She assured me that I was not the same as my grandmother and that this was also a different time, so I would not be dying in childbirth. She also pointed out that what my mother taught me on the subject was a reflection of her own feelings and totally opposite from the Word of God, which says that children are a gift and a blessing from the Lord. Then she prayed for me to be free from the fear. As she did, I felt a heaviness lift immediately. Unfortunately, the nausea and the pain remained.
When nothing helped my condition, I became increasingly concerned that I might lose this baby. One evening while crying out to God about it, the words He had spoken to me nearly six months earlier flooded my memory.
“You are going to have a son and he is going to be conceived in Jerusalem.”
I thought back. Michael and I had been together on that one free day in Jerusalem. First because of my lung infection, and then because of the hectic traveling schedule, it was the only possible time I could have conceived. I was amazed as I put all the facts together. “God,” I said, revealing the magnitude of my faith, “if this turns out to be a boy then I’ll know I really heard from You.”
When I told Michael all that God had spoken to my heart he was relieved. Over the next difficult months of the pregnancy I hung onto God’s words, repeating over and over to myself, “God has ordained this pregnancy and He will bring forth this child.”
Four weeks earlier than planned I suddenly went into heavy labor. The baby was positioned sideways and unable to be born naturally, so I had to have an emergency cesarean. We were frightened, but I still kept hearing God’s words to me over and over. Just as predicted, a healthy baby boy was born on June 25, 1976—right on Pastor Jack’s birthday! Christopher Scott Omartian was immediately our most memorable souvenir of the Holy Lands.
Very soon after bringing the baby home from the hospital, old feelings that I thought were dead began to rise up in me. All the rage and hatred I had ever had for my mother returned in full force. I looked at my beautiful boy and thought, “How could anyone treat a precious child the way my mother treated me?”
“God, why am I feeling all this?” I questioned. “Haven’t I forgiven her?” I didn’t yet realize that when God begins a work, He keeps perfecting it. All of these negative feelings were surfacing because God wanted to take me to a new level of deliverance. I felt like I was going backward and that I had lost the deliverance I had already received. But God’s truth was that as long as I was following Him, I would go from “glory to glory”
11
and “strength to strength.”
12
It was God’s desire to give me more freedom in this area than ever before, and now was the time for me to receive it. What surfaced was something I had no idea resided in me. Only having my own child would fully expose it.
I was determined to be a good mother—in fact the best mother possible. After all, I was well aware of the pitfalls of bad mothering. “I will never be like my mother,” I pridefully told myself. “My child will have the best care I can give him.”
One night when Christopher was just a few months old, I couldn’t get him to stop crying. Michael was working late and I was alone in the house. I tried feeding him, but that didn’t help. I changed his diaper. I put warmer clothes on him, then cooler clothes. I held him and rocked him. I tried everything a mother can do, but it made no difference. He screamed all the more. In the middle of his crying I was close to crying myself.
The frustration built until I finally snapped and lost control.
I slapped my baby on the back, the shoulder, and the head. My heart pounded wildly, my face burned, my eyes were blinded by hot tears, and my breathing became shallow and labored. I was out of control.
The baby’s screaming suddenly became a rejection of me. “My son doesn’t want me because I’m not a good mother” was the lie I heard in my head. Because rejection was so foundational for me, it pushed me over the edge.
“Stop crying!” I screamed at him. “Stop crying!”
I realized I was one step away from throwing him across the room. The energy inside me was limitless, and I knew if I yielded to it I could injure him badly—maybe even kill him.
The only alternative was to get away from the baby. I laid him in his crib, ran to my bedroom, and fell on my knees beside the bed. “Lord, help me!” I cried. “There’s something horrible in me. You’ve got to take it away, God. I don’t know what it is. I don’t understand it. I love my baby more than anything in the world. What’s the matter with a mother who hurts a child she loves? Please, God, whatever is wrong with me, take it away.” I sobbed into the bedspread.
I was on my knees before God for nearly an hour. Finally the baby’s screaming subsided. He had cried himself to sleep.
Michael came home before the baby woke up again, but I didn’t tell him anything. I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say. It was too mortifying to even think about it, let alone confess it to my husband. When the baby woke up he seemed to be fine. He acted as if nothing had happened, and so did I.
Four or five days later it happened again—the baby crying, the feelings of rejection, something snapping inside me, my emotions going out of control, the desire to beat and beat, catching myself just in time, putting the baby in the crib, going into my bedroom, falling on my knees before God, and crying to Him for forgiveness and help.
I was flooded with guilt. What kind of mother was I? All my good intentions were melted by the fire of rage that burned within me. Again I stayed on my knees until I felt the intensity of what gripped me lift and the forgiveness of God flood in to wash away my guilt. God’s love sustained me in the terrible loneliness I experienced because of the secret I couldn’t bear to share.
Over the next few weeks I began to understand some of what was happening and why. The face of the abuser became clearer. All my life I had looked at my situation from the standpoint of one who has been abused. It was shocking to discover that I had all the potential in me to be an
abuser.
It was built in me from childhood. I had seen that violent, out-of-control behavior before—in my mother. I knew it wasn’t my child that I hated. It was me. And now I also saw that it wasn’t
me
that my mother hated; it was herself. My compassion for her grew.
I eventually confessed all this to my husband, and to my relief he was not horrified. Surprised yes, but not fearful, repulsed, or rejecting of me in any way. He offered to pray with me anytime I needed it, and added, “You know, I get irritated too when the baby doesn’t stop crying.”
“It’s more than that,” I tried to make him understand. “In between the times I lose control, I experience what I believe to be normal irritation and frustration. What I’m talking about is different. It’s way out of proportion to the offense. It has an energy that derives some kind of pleasure in hurting, and it isn’t satisfied until it’s been fed. Taken to its extreme, it is the same energy that causes someone to be a mass murderer or rapist or to commit other acts of violence. I can see that the more abusive and violent the childhood, the more serious the offense that may be committed.”
With Michael’s support I called Sara Anne and told her the situation. She prayed with me, and we both believed that as long as the baby was safe, I was mature enough to work this problem out alone with God. She told me this wasn’t going to be solved through instant deliverance. This was a step-by-step process, a little at a time.
Sara Anne was absolutely right. The healing process from my child-abusing tendencies was long and slow. I prayed about it nearly every day over the next few years and what the Lord showed me through it all was how much He loved me.
In the beginning I found it shocking to find child abuse hidden in my personality. What I was facing was a little-understood problem at that time. I had always thought of child abusers as scum-of-the-earth, insensitive, uneducated, despicable, low-life types. As I looked at that image of them and then examined myself, I didn’t feel that I fit into any of those categories. My husband and I had a music ministry, we had positions of leadership in our church, and we led a prayer group that met in our home. No one would ever have imagined I was struggling with this problem. Was it possible that the common denominator between all abusive parents is that somewhere in their past they were abused too? If so, what about my mother? She wasn’t abused as a child. As I checked into this, I saw that there were other factors to consider.
People who abuse their children have emotions that have never been fed. A child needs love and affection, and without these the child fails to develop emotionally and becomes crippled in that area. Whether caused by trauma, having love withheld, verbal abuse, physical abuse, or sexual molestation, the emotions have shut off and stopped growing. The body grew because it was fed food and the mind grew because it was stimulated, but the emotions never grew. Down inside every abuser is a child that needs to be loved into wholeness. My mother had not been abused, but through great trauma and tragedy she felt rejected and unloved. Whether it was real or imagined, she still suffered the same consequences.
This gave me increased compassion for abusive parents. Like me, they were caught in a trap. Once started, child abuse was something that would be passed on from generation to generation unless it was stopped. I knew that the power of God was the only thing to stop it. Fortunately, in spite of my intense feelings of rage, I stopped just short of child abuse because of the healing I’d had. Without that I, too, would have been an abusing parent.
When Christopher was 3½ years old I wrote a song called “Half Past Three.” It was the prayer I prayed time and again during his early years. I cried desperately to God daily to help me raise him because I knew I couldn’t do it on my own. That little boy was the most wonderful gift God had ever given me, and the thought of harming him was too painful a prospect to bear. I prayed, “God, don’t let Christopher suffer the way I suffered. Don’t let him feel unloved or rejected like I did. Don’t let me damage him in any way.”
After the song was finished, it was months before I could sing it through without crying. When I was finally able to talk about what happened and sing the song in public, I knew I had been healed. Performing it for the first time in concert, a hush came over the crowd as I sang:
Only half-past-three,
And yet you’ve got a way of taking self-control from me.
Only half-past-three-
Who knows at four-and-twenty where you’ll be?
Sitting on a mountaintop
Or at a poor man’s table,
Leading sheep from anywhere
As far as you are able?
I want you to know love the way that I never knew it.
I don’t want you to travel life the way that I’ve been
through it.
Oh, Lord, don’t let me ruin things with faults and weak
displays.
Don’t let me make a monster from a perfect piece of clay.
It would be so easy to do,
Unless You take what’s inside of me
And replace it all with You.
Only half-past-three,
A curly-headed shadow who is never out of mind.
Only half-past-three,
With eyes that want to trust that you are kind.
What else do I ever see
Preparing him for solo flight,
But all the possibilities
For good, for bad, for love, for fright?
I don’t want him to ache inside the way I did for years.
I don’t want him to have to shed more than his share
of tears.

 

Oh, Lord, help me to teach him all that You have taught
to me.
Show me how to guide his footsteps and when to set him
free.
Give him a time to know You
And a place inside Your kingdom
For when his time is through.

 

Sometimes I think, Oh, Lord, It’s getting very late for me.
But the sun is just about to rise on half-past-three.
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