The following is a written version of a presentation I gave during a women's spiritual retreat weekend. This is the story of how I am using art therapy to heal my troubled heart and move forward so that I can eventually create art to heal the spiritual and psychic wounds of others. -- Peg Gerrity

Part 1: Childhood Abuse
Growing up in a family of 10 children, I never thought I would be the one writing this story. As a teen, I’m sure my parents would have wondered, “THIS ONE? Of ALL the kids we have, how could THIS ONE ever end up speaking at a church retreat?”

To put it mildly, I was a bit of a pain to my parents growing up. I’m the 3rd youngest in a family of 5 boys and 5 girls, and I was the black sheep…or at least that’s how it seemed.

1 John 3: verse 2: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed.”

There were many, many happy times growing up in such an active and busy home. One of my favorite memories is of the summers when my Dad would plant my Mom and the family at a campground in beautiful Mauthe Lake, Wisconsin, and then commute 3 or 4 days a week into Milwaukee for work, leaving us kids free to enjoy God’s beautiful earth, endless hiking trails, heartwarming campfire stories, and a quiet lake…at least until the 10 of us got in the water!

But there were some difficult times, too. Starting at the age of 5, I began being sexually abused by someone close to me whom I trusted, and by another person whom I didn’t know well at all. My parents tried to explain to me that I wasn’t to blame, but like many little girls, I grew up feeling ashamed and believing the abuse was my fault. I also suffered physical abuse for most of my childhood and teens, sometimes from the same person but also from others whom I trusted.

By the time I was 9, I began to think that both the physical and sexual abuse were somehow related to the fact that I was a cute, vulnerable little kid with blond ringlets. It seemed to me that the best way to stop the abuse would be to get tough and change my appearance to something less vulnerable.

Dressing like a boy and becoming a jock seemed to work in my favor. I was quite successful at the transformation from cute little girl to tough guy. Biology helped a bit, too, and it still does today.

In fact, while planning the Stations of the Cross for a recent women’s retreat, our team leader said, “We need someone skinny with no breasts to play Jesus. Peg?” So I responded, “What you’re saying is, you need a woman with a man’s body?” “EXACTLY!” she laughed!

Today, I can laugh about these kinds of comments, but when I was a little kid, it absolutely devastated me. The abuse behind the scenes had left me feeling SO ugly and gross inside. And I was angry, too. Very angry, and confused.

Throughout elementary school, I was unusually sexually precocious - crossing boundaries left and right. I was also physically abusive towards weaker children both at school and at home. The person who got the worst of it was my youngest brother Tommy. My cruelty towards others just added to my feelings of shame, ugliness, and self-loathing. There was RAGE within. No matter how hard I tried to control myself, it seemed I was always in trouble. Worst of all, I felt that no one could love me, not even my parents and siblings. This lack of self-esteem would stay with me for decades.

Now I can guess what many of you who’ve met me are thinking. You might look at me and wonder, “her? Self-Esteem Issues? Give Me A BREAK!!! She’s tall...she’s skinny enough to play the Jesus...”

But the truth is I spent most of my life despising myself over things that I had done and things that had been done to me in childhood. How I Hated the Little Girl I was. Little Peggy. THAT little girl was weak, and vulnerable, and guilty, and ashamed.  She was troubled and troublemaker, and I couldn’t stand her.

My self-hate lead to fear that others would find me out; find out what a horrible person I was. To combat my fears, I denied “Peggy” altogether as a young adult and created an outward appearance of being strong, confident, successful, and attractive, while inside I felt vulnerable, insecure, and ugly.

By the time I got to college, I looked pretty together on the outside, but inside I felt horribly insecure and undeserving. I dated lots of wonderful, solid men with kind hearts, but I didn’t end up marrying any of them. Nope. I never even considered it. No, I waited for the alcoholic financial disaster with a mother complex who couldn’t keep a job, and THAT’s when I made my move!!! 

        Alcohol dependency? You’re my guy!
        Got kicked out of school for drugs? I’m gettin’ frisky just thinkin’ about it!

And the truth is, I can’t blame him for the marital problems we had, anymore than I could blame him for the fact that I CHOSE him out of the group.
Something was missing in me that drew me to him.

I was just as much to blame for the state of our marriage in that I was the Queen of Co-dependency. And if any of you don’t know what a ‘co-dependent’ is, I’m sure there’s at least ONE woman you know who can explain it at length, and even draw a pie-chart. Heck, she’ll probably loan you a book filled with post-it notes and highlights in various colors. Of course, she can’t FORCE you to read the books, but being a co-dependent, she feels YOU are HER Project, and she’s going to knock herself out trying to improve your life to the point that you might just think to yourself, “Hey, why bother?”

Codependent people like me make wonderful friends because we’re so very giving, but that’s part of the problem. In giving so much of myself and trying so hard to help my husband overcome his addictions I was actually enabling the problems. By taking sole responsibility for his drinking, his career, and our finances, it kept his cycle of irresponsibility going, and our relationship became one of a mother-child rather than as two adult equals.

And you can just IMAGINE what this did for our sex life. Treating a husband as a child when he’s already got a mommy complex is like asking for life in a Benedictine Convent...but without all the excitement. No Catholic Night at the Roller Rink, if you know what mean! I can remember doing cartwheels in front of the TV naked, and my husband saying, “Honey, can you move? I can’t see David Letterman!”

For the wife of an alcoholic, being a codependent means that I spent way too much energy doing the following:

• Waiting by the phone for the call to pick him up from the bar when he couldn’t drive.
• Pouring bottles of liquor down the sink (It took me years in AL-ANON to figure out that they can actually MAKE more vodka than I could pour out, or that my husband could drink, for that matter).
• Making excuses for my husband when he was too hung-over to go to work.
• Minimizing his actions when he became violent.
• Accepting his apologies and ‘undying love’ after nights of embarrassment, verbal abuse, or worse.

I even hid the physical abuse from my family and friends.

I can remember a particularly violent night when we lived in Alaska. I was pregnant. He had been drinking heavily, and he’d smashed my head against the front door and broken the glass. I ended up running away from him in the snow with no shoes. It was dark, and I hid beneath the counter at the gas station on the street corner while the attendant called a cab to take me to a friend’s house. I never told my family. I was too ashamed…and besides, something inside told me that ‘Peggy’ was to blame anyway.

I did confide in my priest though. This guy was a good friend with a great sense of humor. His suggestion was that I greet my husband at the door with an AX and just say, “Either you quit drinking or I’ll chop you up into very small pieces right now”. I think he was joking, but you know, Alaska is a really bizarre place. You can throttle an abusive husband in November, shove him in a snow bank and he won’t even start to thaw until late May. By then, you’ve had plenty of time to pack up and move to Hawaii or Mexico.

Needless to say, I didn’t follow my priest’s advice. I stayed in the marriage for a full 13 years, keeping the problems mostly to myself, normalizing the abnormal, thinking I could make things work, and all the while, polishing the brass on the Titanic.
There were some wonderful times, too, during those 13 years. We had 3 remarkable children together: Melanie who is now 21, Trevor who is 16, and Samantha, who just turned 14. I am such a lucky person that God entrusted me with the care and nurturing of these 3 individuals. I love being a mother. I’m a good at it, too, and each pregnancy made me very, very happy.

This is surely why the saddest period of my entire life began with a miscarriage that my husband and I experienced together. I was in great pain, but my husband was unable to talk with me about the baby or the loss. I didn’t want to burden my friends or family either, so I hid my grief as well.

To make matters worse, when my doctor found out that I was a Catholic, she told me NOT to have a D&C to remove the dead embryo because of the whole “ABORTION” issue. She told me to “Let things happen naturally, and when I go into labor, just sit in the bathtub or something”. At the time I thought, “She’s the doctor, she MUST be right”. About a month later, when nature finally did take its course, I was miles from home visiting in-laws, and it was 4 o’clock in the morning. I was hemorrhaging alone on the bathroom floor when my mother-in-law rushed me to the hospital for an emergency D&C.

I woke up alone in the hospital the next morning, and had to call my husband to come pick me up and give me a ride home. I experienced a solitary free-fall into a deep depression where there was nothing but sadness…oh, and of course, guilt. I blamed myself for the miscarriage. The sense of shame I had internalized as a child was clear: When in doubt, it’s Peggy’s fault.

My marriage continued to unravel. My depression grew worse. And I wondered if I were strong enough to continue living.

Just when I thought it was hopeless, I found that God’s grace was indeed sufficient for me. God guided me to a licensed therapist from my church named Steve LaBonte. My husband and I spent 2.5 years in counseling, together at first, but then he stopped going and I went alone. The therapy wasn’t enough to save our marriage. The titanic was still sinking, but I found a new sense of hope and grace through therapy. I began the journey of self-awareness and finally came to understand how self-hatred was eating away at my life.

At my therapist’s suggestion, I started attending weekend retreats at the Cenacle Retreat House in Houston, and my spiritual journey blossomed. One of my favorite retreat leaders was and still is, Sr. Lois Dideon, who always refers to her retreatants as “Beloved”.

John 4:7, 11-12

“Beloved, let us love one another for love is of God; and every one that loves is born of God and knows God…Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another; God dwells in us, and His love is perfected in us.”

Working with Sr. Lois, I learned that we are ALL God’s Beloved. This helped me tremendously to overcome the pain of my divorce. I realized that I had to let go of the anger and bitterness I still harbored towards my ex-husband. Through God’s grace, I came to understand that if I love my kids, I must acknowledge those aspects of their personalities that came from their Dad. Much of their humor came from their Dad, as did their freedom in verbalizing their love for me and for each other. I love those things about my kids, so I must be thankful to the man who helped to give them life. He too, is God’s Beloved.

After the divorce, I continued to see my therapist off and on for several more years, and I realized that it wasn’t enough to forgive others. If I was ever to become a whole person, I needed to forgive myself, too. I needed to love myself as the adult I had become, but also as the little girl I once was. The little girl I had spent so many years hating. That Peggy person.

I used art therapy to help in the healing process. After dream work and journaling, I created an illustration that honored the troubled child I once was. The following is a poster I made in 2005, called “Peggy Gerrity, Grade 2” .

I had to learn that THAT little girl was a child of God, too. She began as one with God, and would always be His Beloved. This was so hard for me, but I had to get it! Only THEN could I make the connection between my inner child and the child I had lost through miscarriage. As much as I ached to mother the child I had miscarried, that’s how much I needed to mother the inner child I had hated so much.

I had to accept her brokenness, embrace her vulnerability, cheer her hopeful heart, console her lonely spirit, salve her wounds, marvel at her lively countenance, acknowledge her talent as an artist and musician, accept her anger, calm her fears, see her in pain, and gently guide her when she wanted to lash out. I needed to mother her in the very way I have mothered my own children.

But most of all, I needed to thank the little girl I once was for giving me the sweetest, most valuable gift of all: For it was she who began the relationship with God that I still have today. A relationship that was founded on the innocence and complete trust of a second-grader who desperately needed to feel loved by somebody ...anybody. As an innocent, I believed that God (and Santa Claus) were the only 2 beings who could love me regardless of the bad things I did or the bad things that were DONE to me.

The relationship I entered into with God at the age of 7 was what allowed me to accept and be open to divine grace for the rest of my life. How could I have ever told that 7-year-old she was anything less than beautiful?

A few years after my divorce, I married another man who seemed to think that everything about me was beautiful. My ex-husband had always wanted a short, buxom, brunette. And, well, that’s not exactly me. (She couldn’t play the Messiah!)

My new husband, Joe, on the other hand, was pleased as punch that I could toss on a pair of super high heels and meet his gaze eye to eye. Joe and I had a lot in common. Still I wondered why he came into my life when he did. My divorce was not yet final when we met, and I remember thinking that we could stay on platonic island while waiting for my divorce, as if passion were this slowly moving river that I could navigate with one oar, when in fact, it was RAPIDS! And I’m not talking Colorado rapids here. I’m talking SCHLITTERBAHN! The waterpark ride that shoots you our through a tube where you’re hanging on to the sides trying to stop and before you know it, BAM! You’re under the water, you can’t breathe and you’re having sex!

Sleeping with Joe before my divorce was final is a sin I held as a noose around my neck for over 10 years. The weight of it was tremendous.

It wasn’t until after working with the women of this retreat team that I finally gained the courage to seek reconciliation for this sin. I don’t know that I believed God could forgive me for this, but hearing the stories of other women led me to formally seek reconciliation this past Lent, where I experienced God’s most complete love, and the freedom to let this sin go once and for all…to remove it from my soul and psyche like an ill-fitting scarlet red cap…take it off, and let it drop.

Still, I have wondered for many years why God put Joe in my life at the time He did. That’s when Joe asked me “Did it ever occur to you that God put YOU in MY life for ME?” And no, that never did occur to me. In fact, it never even crossed my mind. (This is when Joe started this “God Loves Me Better” song and dance)

Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you’ says the Lord. ‘They are for good and not evil, to give you a future and a hope’”

I have learned that God does have a plan for me, and it includes a wonderful man who likes to dance, fish, and even collect antiques. Here I am, the biggest tomboy on the planet, and I married into all kinds of fancy furniture and Limoges dinner plates that you can’t even eat off of. I’m serving Chex mix in his antique brilliant cut glassware, and he’s telling me, “You’re not supposed to USE those.” My response is, “Well, 100 years ago, these were used by people everyday...pass me the cheese whiz, will ya?”

The best part of my new marriage is that Joe brought his 2 sons, Kyle and Josh, into my life when they were 10 and 13. Kyle is now 20 studying at UL and Josh is a 23 year-old marine bound for Iraq this summer. I absolutely adore them both, as do their stepsiblings.

Now before you start thinking that my new marriage is this happy, blissful ending to a dime store novel, you have to realize that emotional health is a life-long process. At least it is for me.

Things have not always been peaceful in this marriage and there were times early on when I allowed my current husband to cross my physical boundaries. I have also tolerated much verbal abuse from Joe, so my self-esteem is still very much a work in progress.

I have to constantly be aware of my personal boundaries, pay attention to my intuition and to my inner wise crone, and forever protect my inner child. I continue to work on these areas through retreats like this one, through spiritual direction and therapy, through music, and through my work as an artist.

As a career, I chose commercial illustration, and this is where I feel God ‘set me up’ so to speak, to fulfill His purpose.. As a kid, I loved to draw. That, and playing my guitar seemed to be the only things I could do without getting into trouble.

At school, my favorite books were the beautifully illustrated Bible stories. I can remember one painting in the children’s Bible of Adam kneeling in the forest, with the light of God shining from heaven, and all the deer and animals around him. Now it didn’t hurt that Adam was modeled after a really attractive man, and the fact that he was naked in the forest kind of caught my attention, too. Of course, this is a kiddie Bible, so they had well-placed tree limbs and such, but the effect was the same. I thought how beautiful the painting was and it stayed with me my entire life, as did the painting of Samson with his thick, black hair, struggling to free the chains on his wrists as the columns of the palace fell all around him. Come to think of it, Sampson didn’t have on a shirt either, and again, the model had a lovely physique! But there were other stories with illustrations that were equally as beautiful: of a pregnant and glowing Elizabeth when Mary visited her; of Joseph and his colorful coat.

It seemed like God was speaking to me through these illustrations and I wanted to draw just… like…. that.

I became a medical illustrator about 20 years ago, and I create illustrations for anatomy books, scientific magazines, pharmaceutical companies, and the like. I draw bugs and dinosaurs and kidneys and molecules. My friends always ask me to paint landscapes for them, or worse, portraits of their children, and I’m like, uh…I can draw their spleens?

In the year 2000, I got a call for a project that changed my life. The Department of Health was putting together a brochure in response to passage of the Women’s Right To Know Act, requiring that all couples seeking an abortion be given brochures that showed how the fetus grows so that they can make an informed decision before terminating a pregnancy. I was asked to draw the older fetus at 28, 30, 36, and 38 weeks.

Now, even as a teen, I can remember being faced with the whole abortion debate questions. When does life begin? What if the mother could die? It was always so confusing and wrought with emotion, and I remember at the time, thinking to myself, “When I am an old woman, God will give me the answer to this whole abortion dilemma” but for the time, I was going to stay right on the fence!

So when I got this project at the ripe age of 39, I immediately thought to myself, “Well, I’m really glad they didn’t ask me to draw any of the early embryos when pregnancies are sometimes terminated. I can just draw the older fetuses that actually LOOK like babies, and I don’t have to face the whole abortion issue! I can stay safely on the fence, and what’s more, this means I’m not an old woman yet!!!”

Then, just like that, the art director called and asked if I would draw the 2-week-old fetus as well. I wondered if God was trying to tell me something. But then I thought, “Hey, at least I don’t have to draw the 10-week-old embryo, which is age of the child I miscarried. THAT would be very hard, and then I’d REALLY have to think about the BIG abortion dilemma”.

This is where I think God figured “I’m gonna have to hit THIS one in the head with a brick,” because I soon got a call from Johnson and Johnson, who also wanted some fetal images. Would I mind creating a prototype image for them? Perhaps say, a 10-week-old fetus???

As I drew the 10-week-old embryo, it brought back the memories of the miscarriage, almost as if it had just happened. They say that any woman who has lost a pregnancy, for whatever reason, will always know the age that child would be on any given day for the rest of their lives. My little one would have been about 13 years old at the time I began the painting.

I remembered the mission I attended with Catholic Theologian Father Bob Hunt, where a woman asked him the following question: “Will I see the child I lost in Heaven?” and his answer was so quick and so definitive: “The first human face to joyfully greet you in the Kingdom shall be that of your unborn child!” I thought of this as I continued to paint.

I also thought of one of my dearest childhood friends, who’d had an abortion when she was very young. I think she was 19 or so. Years later, she got married, but had several miscarriages. She believed God was punishing her for the abortion she’d had in her teens.

I thought of my mother, who’d miscarried her 11th child, my sibling. To think that a woman who already had 10 children could grieve so deeply for an 11th helped me to realize that the grief I still felt over my loss was valid, regardless of the number of children I now have.

I thought of my dear sister, Karen, herself a twin, whose own twin daughters, Katya and Olivia, died on the day of their birth.
(Note: for this portion, I’ve asked these women in advance if I could share their stories as part of the presentation.)

There was so much pain in the loss of all these little ones. I felt God was calling me to do something, but I wasn’t sure what.
At first I thought, maybe I should write a song? My friend Belinda is a gifted songwriter, and I’ve always admired her talent. So I tried to write a song, but nothing came to me. No music, no lyrics, nothing! I felt so frustrated! Then it dawned on me: Another brick in the head from God - “You silly, you’re an artist! Try DRAWING something!”

That’s about the time I went on an ACTS retreat with my church last fall. I listened to brave women speak of the loss of a pregnancy. I learned about Rachel’s Vineyard, a group that ministers to women who’ve had abortions in the past. I knew then that God’s plan was for me to create a poster for Rachel’s Vineyard, and for other groups that minister to women who’ve lost a pregnancy or child, regardless of the reason.

I drew a quick sketch of the hands of God holding a fetus and had the umbilical cord reach up to heaven. I decided to make God’s hands blue because I didn’t want to imply that God was a particular race or gender (although I forgot about the whole Smurf thing).

For the title and phrase, I remembered a retreat with Sr. Lois at the Cenacle where she talked about the conceptus being ONE with God and I was suddenly overwhelmed with the thought that I too, was once a conceptus, and one with God. We ALL were. I thought about the little girl I once was, and how necessary it had been for me to accept her value before I could create something that would help heal my grief over the child I had miscarried.

I started to cry as I wrote the title that came to me: “The One Who Never Left Home.”  The words are as follows:

The One Who Never Left Home
Remember Beloved, As you grieve the loss of life within,
That such life began as one with God,
And there it shall remain,
Growing in the arms of the Creator
for all eternity

I also included the saying from Father Bob Hunt because it had been so comforting to me: “The first human face to joyfully greet you in the Kingdom shall be that of your unborn child.” Fr. Bob Hunt

Wisdom 3:1-3 “But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them…they seem to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace”

The people at Rachel’s Vineyard are currently planning to use the poster in their ministry and perhaps on their website. I have also made free copies for spiritual directors and others who minister to women.

Looking back, I have to wonder sometimes if this is not why it took so long for God to give me an answer regarding the abortion debate, and why, you’ll notice, I never DID actually get the answer I was looking for. Instead, I got a completely different take on it all together. I felt like God was trying to tell me that when a pregnancy is lost whether it’s through miscarriage, or abortion, or still birth, or whatever, there is a need for tenderness. There is a need for ministry.

And that is how this troubled tomboy became an artist God could use to heal others. I’m not certain of God’s plans for my future, and frankly, I’m scared. My husband now lives in Singapore and the original plan was for me to move there this summer with my 2 youngest kids, however, I’ve spent the last year wondering if our marriage is strong enough to make such a move. Through the clarity of this retreat, I have come to the painful decision that I will remain here in Houston this fall to give each of us more time to heal ourselves individually. This way, when God decides we should live together again, we will no longer be 2 broken ‘half-people’ trying to piece ourselves together into one being, rather than 2 separate, whole individuals capable of supporting our own spirits and that of each other.

1 John 3: verse 2: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed.”