When we got home, Mom told my dad what had happened. Dad took both my sister and me into his office and started lecturing us on how no one had the right to question me or make me feel bad, and I could no longer just freeze up when cornered.
“You need to yell and scream!” he said. “Go ahead. Yell. Try it right now. Scream your heads off.”
My sister and I caught each other’s eye in a sideways glance, knowing that we were both thinking the same thing: Dad has lost his marbles.
But he insisted. “You’re not leaving my office until I hear you scream the biggest, loudest scream I’ve ever heard.”
We both giggled. It seemed so silly to be screaming in Dad’s office when we were both perfectly safe, but we acquiesced and screamed. Loud. Maybe not as loud as we screamed at our brothers when they entered our room unbidden, but loud enough to satisfy Dad’s request. It felt so odd to be doing the very opposite of what we had been taught to do our whole lives. We’d been taught to behave ourselves, use “inside voices,” and be quiet, polite, well-mannered girls. It was strange to let go of all that and stand there screaming our heads off.
My parents contacted the police and were told we could press charges. “But chances are, it would just stir the media frenzy,” the authorities added. “Do you really want that?”
My parents have always, at all costs, wanted to protect me to the utmost, and this time was no different. They decided that it would be more harmful to press charges and have a court appearance and go through being re-scrutinized by the media and the public. But they did tell other members of our congregation and asked them to let us know if they saw anyone who looked suspicious.
The following Sunday, my parents were traveling back from New York, and my grandparents were in charge of us until their return. The day started off like any other normal Sunday; everyone was in a mad rush, trying to find matching socks and something that wasn’t wrinkled to wear to church. I suppose finding something not wrinkled was more difficult than usual because my mom wasn’t at home, but other than that, it was a typical Sunday. We all trooped out the door and headed to church. When we arrived, my brother Andrew noticed the same strange woman lingering around the building. He immediately pointed her out to my grandpa, who alerted several other members of the congregation. I didn’t actually witness the foot chase, but I was told that they lit out after her and pursued her through backyards and across streets until she finally disappeared into the Salt Lake City Cemetery. At that point, the police were contacted again. They were able to find her and inform her that if she approached me or my family again, there would be severe consequences.
That’s the thing about screaming out loud—or at least telling people what’s going on—instead of being stiff-lipped and trying to tough it out alone. People who love you want to know if you’re in pain or in trouble. They want to come to your rescue in big and small ways. The people who love you are part of the muscle and teeth with which you fight back.
I’m so happy that Bre is speaking out about self-defense being more than purely physical defense. It is so much more: mental, emotional, and spiritual.
* * *
Mary Louise Zeller is a sixth-level black belt tae kwon do master, twenty-time U.S. national gold medalist, and nine-time world champion whose tutelage has produced over a hundred international champions. I’m not sure what I was expecting to learn from Mary Louise when I reached out and asked her if I could interview her for this book, but nothing about Mary Louise is what one would expect.
I knock on the large front door of her house in South Jordan, a pretty, quiet community outside Salt Lake City. The door opens, and here is this woman in her early seventies with short brown hair and bright red lipstick. She has one leg bent, resting on the kind of medical scooter they give you after an orthopedic injury or operation. The weather outside is overwhelmingly hot, but she looks cool and immaculate.
Mary Louise jokes, “I just had surgery on my foot. A thousand kicks a day can make a world champion but apparently takes a big toll on my foot.”
Walking into her home, I notice the care and attention to detail that seem to abound in every aspect of her life. Matthew and I had recently remodeled our kitchen and had had to compromise on our countertops, so I immediately notice that she has the exact rough-hewn edge on her granite that I had wanted. Her dining table is beautifully laid out, with the proper salad plates, forks, and goblets. She invites me to sit down and tells me, “Everything we’re about to eat is organic, natural, and homemade.” Hearing this, I’m not sure what I’m more excited for—the food or the conversation. As it turns out, both are amazing.
“I wasn’t always like this,” Mary Louise tells me over lunch. “I was raised in Atlanta, Georgia, where girls don’t fight.”
She briefly describes the somewhat ordinary life she lived until one fateful day when she was forty-six years old. Mary Louise and her family were visiting friends who had recently moved into a new home in California. The house had large windows running floor to ceiling. The happy group of friends were upstairs on the second level, admiring the magnificent view and chatting while Adam, Mary Louise’s eighteen-month-old son, played nearby. In the space of just a few seconds, Adam ran to the windows to look out, pushing himself against the screen to get the full effect. The screen tore away from the window, and baby Adam fell headfirst to the ground two stories below. People outside saw the whole thing and said that Adam landed on his hands and knees and bounced as he hit the ground. Mary Louise rushed him to the hospital and spent the next several hours in the ER, numb and shaken to her core, gripping the tiny hand of her critically injured son.
Though I already know that Adam did eventually make a full recovery, I still shudder at the thought of his little body hurtling toward the ground. My beautiful little Chloé is eighteen months old right now, and I feel like I have to have one eye on her at all times. She’s constantly trying to make a break for the horse pasture across the street or opening the cabinets under the sink where all the cleaners and detergents are. Yes, of course, I have childproofed multiple times. And of course, Matthew and I always try to watch her, but stories of a toddler slipping away or getting into something or falling from something are surprising only if you’ve never had a toddler in your life. It takes less than a moment, so there isn’t a moment in the day that I’m not thinking or worrying about Chloé.
When Matthew and I first brought her home from the hospital as a newborn, I felt like my heart had been dislodged and relocated in my throat. I no longer could do anything without feeling this new sensation of love, anxiety, protectiveness, and complete adoration. We were discharged from the hospital with a perfect baby, but a day later, her pediatrician said she was jaundiced. Being a brand-new parent, overbearing and overprotective, I about had a nervous breakdown. I was crying my eyes out, refusing to set Chloé down. It’s my worst nightmare that something could happen to her, and that includes worrying about myself being an overprotective mother. I think it’s fairly understandable that I might have some deep-seated feelings about the vulnerability of children.
This firestorm of conflicting emotions rings familiar to Mary Louise. In the wake of her son’s accident, she tells me, she struggled. “I had post-traumatic stress disorder. The counselor told me I needed to spend a couple hours a day away from the baby, because I was hypervigilant and hyperprotective. I saw an ad for tae kwon do that said it would improve mental clarity, improve focus, and improve fitness—all the things that I needed at the time—along with developing self-confidence after I had been literally shattered.”
“I’ve never tried a form of martial arts,” I tell her. “You’re so passionate about it, I’m really starting to wonder if I’ve been missing something in life.”
“No other sport did for me what tae kwon do did,” she says. “The sense that I could stand strong in the face of all the bad stuff, and I could empower others to be stronger. I think for women especially, we get attacked because we’re the ‘weaker sex.’
Skill is really good. I tell people, ‘I’m a very old woman of seventy-two, but I know things you don’t. I can do things to you. It wouldn’t go well for you.’ It’s a bit of a joke, but it’s a little true.” With a mischievous sparkle in her eye, she adds, “Actually a whole lot true. I would hope if someone attacked me, they’d wake up in the hospital wondering, What happened? Wasn’t I the one attacking her?”
Mary Louise leans forward, looking at me so intently I feel like she is trying to see beyond my face, right into my very being.
“We all leave this earth,” she says. “We all die, and we don’t get to know what comes next. It takes a lot of courage just to live life. If you’re feeling like you’re powerless, like life is bigger than you, like bad things can happen and you have no power to stop them, there’s something about the martial arts rather than yoga, or aerobics, or weight lifting, that leaves you with a sense of power.”
This one sentence, more than anything else Mary Louise has said, rings true to me: It takes a lot of courage just to live life.
While I was kidnapped, my captors moved me to California for the winter. We initially lived in an old riverbed that was actually a lot like the fire swamp in the movie The Princess Bride. We stayed there for a couple months before my captors decided that it was too close to people. They started searching for a new hidden camp. They eventually found it: an isolated place far up a mountainside so steep we had to crawl on our hands and knees to reach it. After the move had been made, I was no longer allowed to go out in public. I was held captive at the hidden camp night and day. Barzee was my constant jailer when Mitchell went for food and supplies.
One day in February, Mitchell and Barzee got into a huge argument. Arguments were in no way rare; they happened frequently. This one was like a raging inferno. Both Mitchell and Barzee were whaling on each other. Usually Mitchell would say in his sickliest, sincerest, calmest voice, “Hepzibah, Hepzibah.” (That’s what he called her.) “I love thee. The Lord hast heard thy cries and wants to speak with thee. I need to give thee a blessing.” Then he would give her a “blessing” and tell her how special she was, how she was on the right hand of God, and how she had a throne and a crown awaiting her in Heaven, if she could only endure this life and the weaknesses and shortcomings of the Lord’s servant and prophet, Immanuel. All this was done to calm Barzee down so he could keep on doing what he was doing and make Barzee not only deal with it but accept it as needful. (I’m honestly getting a little sick just writing about it.) That was how he would always get his way with her.
But during this terrible fight, he didn’t fall back on his usual line. Instead, he grabbed his little money pouch and stormed out of the hidden camp, yelling over his shoulder, “I’m going to minister.” (By that he meant he was going into town to beg and steal.)
I said hardly anything that day. We’d had very little to eat the previous few days, and despite being hungry, I didn’t want to incur the wrath of Barzee or tempt her to vent her frustration on me. I remember going to bed very hungry that night. The following day was even harder, if that was possible; we had no food or water. I was starving. We did eventually catch some rainwater. I remember drinking as much as I could, but then I had to go to the bathroom. I was so light-headed when I stood that by the time I made it outside and over to the bucket that we used as a toilet, I almost collapsed on the rough rim. I made it back to the small tarp shelter, crumpled to the ground, and didn’t move the rest of the day.
A week went by before Mitchell returned. At this point, all thoughts of hope and escape had disappeared, and I was trying to make peace with myself and God before I starved to death. Maybe that was childish—thinking I would die after only a week of not eating—but I was just so hungry, I didn’t think I could go on much longer. All of a sudden, in the midst of my silent prayers, I heard a voice singing. Not a pleasant, angelic voice. It was a voice I recognized and hated. There was Mitchell, singing a hymn as he tramped back into the hidden camp as if he were a conquering hero. I don’t recall which hymn—he ruined so many good ones—but it could have been “I Need Thee Every Hour.” Or maybe “There Is a Balm in Gilead.” He started talking about all that had happened. As it turned out, he had been in jail, and because it was Christmas weekend, the three-business-days holding period turned into seven days. He talked about the bed he’d slept in, the food he’d eaten, the hot showers he’d taken, and the relaxing time he’d spent in jail.
Oh, how I envied that lovely jail cell! Unbelievable. I was practically dying of starvation and thirst. The condition in which I was imprisoned made a stint in county lockup sound like a luxurious vacation.
Then he had the audacity to pull out the leftover remains of KFC, as if he were providing us with a Christmas Day feast. Truth be told, it might as well have been a Christmas Day feast. The stale chicken was greasy and tough as leather, and my stomach felt shrunken and fragile. I couldn’t eat very much, but I told myself I couldn’t stop. I had to force myself to choke down as much as I could. I couldn’t forget my resolve to do whatever I had to do to survive. I had to eat whatever I could get my hands on. I had to drink dirty water. I could not allow myself to lie down and die.
It takes a lot of courage just to live life.
I think of Mary Louise running down the stairs, calling her son’s name, knowing that he might be dead when she reached him. But hoping …
“What is hope?” I ask her now, and she settles her chin in her hand, thinking about it for a moment.
“What I’ve learned,” she says, “is that hope is first created in language. We hope for better things in life, and life has not-so-good things too. Then who do we be after something bad happens to us? It occurs here, in our mouth.” She touches her finger to her lips. “What do we say about it? What do we create? We literally create with our language. ‘I’m going to be a champion’ or ‘I’m going to be a world-class international marketer.’ But hope for me is empty in language if there’s not action to realize it. In language, you create possibility. You create the hope. You create a new possible future, and then you take action—to learn from those who have more experience than you and to do the work. Even in the very beginning, I was practicing two hours a day. I’m happier when I’m fully engaged in a project that makes a difference. That’s when I’m happy. That’s when I’m most alive. That’s when I’m most well. I think human beings thrive on that.”
I take all this in, tracing the handle of my spoon with my finger, pondering my next question, but before I can ask it, Mary Louise sits back in her chair and asks me, “What have you found? Did you get better when you started talking and wanting to make a difference for others?”
The short answer would be yes, but I don’t get the sense that Mary Louise is the kind of person who goes for the short answer.
“Initially,” I tell her, “when I first got home and everyone was saying I needed to see a therapist and doctors and I needed to be debriefed and hospitalized and all these things, I remember thinking, There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t need to talk to anyone. I’m fine. Just let me be. I needed help when I was with my captors. I don’t need help now. I think I felt that way for a long time, and I think time did a lot of healing for me. I wasn’t able to go back and reclaim my old life, but I was able to go on to high school and continue on to college. I did study abroad in London. I did my mission in Paris. I think that time was very healing for me—just continuing to experience life.”
“Bad stuff happens,” Mary Louise says quietly. “I was date-raped—and back then, I felt stupid. Guilty. Responsible. I wasn’t! But that takes its toll on you. The thing is, I don’t have to become that. I can’t ever forget it, but I don’t have to doubt or mistrust myself. What is hope but creating better life in the face of all the misery?”
I notice the afternoon sun stretching across the dining room floor. I’ve stayed longer than I intended, and if it were up to me, I’d stay another hour, but I decide to limit myself to one last question. “Mary Louise, do you
believe in happily ever after?”
She nods a sharp, sure nod and declares, “I do. Along with all of it—all the imperfection—I think we can create as much perfection as we can. Like in the physical environment I try to create in my home. Cleanliness. I don’t do it myself now that I can pay for it, but I have done it myself. I’ll clean this place to the nth degree, like Jesus is coming over for dinner, and I’ll create something beautiful to my eyes. I think that creation of beauty, trying to create the best of life, that gentle part of life amidst all the imperfection…”
She digresses a bit, talking about Downton Abbey and her cats, but eventually she finds her way back to the original question.
“I do believe in living happily ever after. I already am,” she says. “I believe in fairy tales. But you have to be willing to do the work to make them come true. Sometimes you have big goals, and you don’t reach them, but you accomplish great things in the process. It’s worth all of it. I didn’t know what I was doing with tae kwon do; I just kept doing it because I was most alive when I was doing it. I didn’t like the feeling of just taking care of my home and my family. They’re precious to me, and I like that, but it’s not all there is to me. I don’t know what else I’ll do in my life, but I’m going to live it fully. I have had some grand experiences.”
So this seemed to be another vote for happily ever after—if you’re willing to fight for it. That fight may happen as it did for Bre in a violent, six-minute blur that had no greater goal than physical survival. Or that fight may be the long fight that happens in the heart. The fight to reclaim calm and happiness after our strongest doors have been broken down, our safest havens invaded.
Where There's Hope Page 5