The Descent I

What was life then? I asked myself that constantly. The experience I had didn’t solve anything. If anything, it made everything more confusing. How could something like that happen? What had actually happened? It would be years before I understood anything about it.

In the meantime, nothing had changed. I was still who I had been—a confused single mother, doing whatever I could for my children, living in a world that felt hostile and unwilling to support me. My parents made that clear. They reminded me constantly that I needed to get my act together, that I needed a job, that I couldn’t expect them to carry me forever. I was a grown woman. I understood what they were saying, but it didn’t change how things felt. I never felt like I belonged there. If anything, I felt like an intruder in their home.

When things became too tense, when the hostility built past a certain point, I would leave with the kids. We would try to make it on our own, but it never lasted. Being out there with three children and no stability was worse. After a couple of months, I would come back, grateful to have a place to land again. No matter what was said to me, no matter how degrading it felt, it was better than being on the street. This cycle went on for years.

Then my mother suggested something different. She wanted to buy land. We could move somewhere rural and try homesteading. She said my stepfather wouldn’t be coming. There was no talk of divorce, but she was clear that he was the problem, the source of everything that had gone wrong. Without him, things would be better.

I believed her. I wanted to believe her.

She made it sound simple. We would get chickens, plant a garden, raise the kids in nature. At the time, it felt like a way out. We started looking in Arkansas because the land was cheap. For months we drove around the state with the kids, looking at different properties. Eventually we found one. It was a large house with a barn and twenty acres, set back off a dirt road with no neighbors in sight. It felt perfect. My mother paid cash. We moved in late November.

The first night should have told me everything.

Our furniture hadn’t arrived yet, so the kids and I slept on an air mattress upstairs. It was already well below freezing outside. The house wasn’t just cold, it was frigid. The kids were young—four, five, and six—and even with blankets it wasn’t enough. I went to my mother and asked her to turn up the heat.

She snapped. No, it was warm enough. Was I going to pay the heating bill?

The shift in her tone caught me off guard. Up until then we had been getting along. I didn’t expect that kind of response, not on the first night. I went back upstairs, added more blankets, and we got through it. But something in me registered it immediately. Whatever I thought this was going to be, it wasn’t.

What followed was another version of the same thing.

By that point I had come to a conclusion about myself. This was my fault. My life had been one failure after another. There had to be something fundamentally wrong with me. I couldn’t understand how other people seemed to be happy. It didn’t make sense. The only place I felt anything close to joy was with my children. They could do no wrong in my eyes. I loved them without condition. Taking care of them gave me something to hold onto. Outside of that, my life was a series of painful states I couldn’t escape.

I had almost forgotten about those two weeks when everything had disappeared. It had been three years. It didn’t seem connected to anything anymore.

Then one day, in a small thrift store in a nearby town, I found a book called Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damndest Thing by Jed McKenna. I was always picking up spiritual books, but most of them didn’t land. This one did. I read it in two days. I couldn’t put it down. After that, I ordered the others he had written.

At the time, I didn’t know anything about him. Books still carried authority for me. If someone had written one, I assumed they knew something I didn’t. I wasn’t anyone special. People who published books were.

I didn’t understand what I was reading. Not really. I liked it. Something in it felt familiar, like it was pointing at something I had already touched without knowing what it was. But I didn’t know what it meant. I think I read it the way you read fiction, letting it pass through without needing to understand it.

Still, something happened.

I couldn’t describe it then, and I’m not sure I can now. It wasn’t something I noticed in the moment. It wasn’t a thought or a conclusion. It was more like a shift that didn’t announce itself.

Looking back, that’s where it started.

A trajectory had begun without my knowledge. I had stepped into something I didn’t know I had stepped into. The movement out of hell had already started, but it wouldn’t look like that at all. If anything, it would get worse before it got better.

Much worse.