In hardly 10 years, my psychical life had been destroyed, and then my soulical life had been demolished. I was a tatters of a man.
I went to a psychiatrist...what a hopeless effort: at $150 an hour, I would've had to spend the next 10 years, and several hundreds of thousands of dollars, to "explain" to this man what I'd experienced. Even then, he wouldn't have been able to understand. I think he knew this too; so, he prescribed Xanax.
In the midst of my financial woes, my Dad accepted my request to move back home...yes, once again, even though I was 30 years old, I had to abjectly fall back on the support of my family. Not a bad thing, really, but part and parcel of what I said in my last post: I'd lost my dignity. He gave me the very room in which I had spent so many nights reading Rutherford.
This was the early 80s, and a deep recession had gripped the US, so for the next 2 years my brother and I traveled to San Francisco and Seattle, doing commercial construction. I drank like a fish, started smoking again, and did a repeat of Mountain Farm: hardly a meeting, and no service. It just wasn't in me.
Somehow, I gradually shook that fog of pain; don't ask me how, or why--to this day, I can't explain it. Maybe just the indefatuigeable desire to live.
One night, I mentioned to my Mom that I sorta desired some female companionship; not in a sexual way (masturbating can be quite self-satisfying), but as a companion, a soulmate, someone who might understand what I'd been through. It just so happened that Mom and Dad had studied with a young lady (about my age) who'd recently been divorced from her MS husband (he'd also committed adultery against her). She suggested that we might just be a match for each other.
And we were. She had a son and daughter, from each of her two previous marriages, and we felt like equally disappointed, and hoping and searching, souls, just simply longing for some happiness in life, some small vestige of what a husband and wife should have together, with their family.
My Dad married us, at his home, with a couple of dozen of our friends.
For the next 10 years, I focused on fixing the house, raising the kids, becoming "acceptable" in the congregation.
I just wanted some predictability, some kind of "this is normal" life. I thought I'd almost achieved it.
Damn, I tried so hard to make it happen.