Testimony From Kelly Watts

It's Testimony Time...
All my life I have been depressed, I was sexually abused by my grandfather when I was little, as were my two older sisters. I was a shy girl and wasn't too involved with my family. They were all apart of a Country Band and played at bars my entire childhood and they left me at home alone since I was about nine years old. When I was 11 my family started going to a Foursquare Gospel Church and we all gave our lives to Jesus on the same day. We moved from a small town to the big city when I was 13. I continued to go to Church with my middle sister until she got shunned from the Church for getting pregnant at 16. When she had her baby she instantly became a grown-up and I felt like I had lost my best friend. Depression set in and I gained weight. When I went to Church to seek comfort the youth made fun of me for my weight gain. I stopped going to Church.
That same year I was almost raped by a 23 year old boy at a beach but my sister saved me. I didn't understand at the time what was happening, which led me on the road to more confusion when it came to the opposite sex. During the next few years my sisters both became very permiscuous and unfortunately they shared their journey's with me. I became very disgusted and was bent on not being the same way.
When I was almost 18 years old I began seeing a boy who on New Years Eve thought it would be funny to get me drunk and take advantage of me. This is how I lost my virginity. I stayed with him for 4 years not understanding that how I was treated was emotionally, verbally and sexually abusive. During those years I became bullimic and felt I was not good enough for anything, I wasn't pretty enough, thin enough or smart enough. Because he cheated on me so much and abused me so often I felt worthless. At the end of those 4 years my parents convinced me to go on a trip to visit my oldest sister in the small town I grew up in. This is when it finally clicked that this boy was no good for me. I broke up with him on the phone. He stalked me for three months and then convinced me to go and see him at his house, he said his parents were home ~ they weren't. He raped me. I didn't realize that he had, I thought it was my fault because I had gone to his home willingly ~ I never pressed charges.
For the next year I was on a self-destructive path. I drank every weekend and some times would black out. I would have no memory of people when they said that they were the ones that picked me up from the dance floor of the night club just a week before. I was intimate with 4 guys during that year and each time I fell hard. I thought that I might find one that would actually love me... then I gave up.
It was when I finally gave up that I met Randy. I started working as a receptionist downtown and for the first time I felt like an adult. I wasn't looking for a relationship ~ God had other plans. Randy was the first man in my life. The first to open a door for me, to give me his jacket when I was cold, to hold me while I walked in the snow with high heels... and he looked at me with pure adoration. He was in love with me at first sight. I wasn't. I didn't know how to love... but somehow it felt right being with Randy. He asked me to marry him just three months after our first date and I said yes. Our wedding day was the calmest day I have ever had ~ everything felt right. We started going to Church shortly after we got married and two years later Randy gave his life to Christ and I came back to the Lord. Five months after we married two things happened; my father passed away by a massive cardiac arrest and I learned that I was pregnant. I was in shock when I learned that he passed away (he had just been over for dinner the night before). It took me many years to grieve this loss and I blamed myself for his death that my faith was not strong enough to bring him back. After our first son was born I grieved deeply that my dad would not know my children. Then one night I had a dream/ or a vision of my dad receiving all my memories of my son's life and then God gave me complete peace and I no longer grieved that they would not know one another.
A year and a half later... I got pregnant again. This time things did not go like clockwork and I was bed ridden 8 months of the pregnancy while trying to care for our firstborn. This is when a darkness settled over me and I became lost in depression. When I gave birth and held my second son for the first time it was as though I were holding someone else's baby. They called it post-partum depression, I called it 'darkness'. My friend introduced me to a lady who 25 years earlier had gone through the same thing I was going through and she became my mentor, my gift from God. Through the help of my doctor, my mentor and my husband I was hospitalized for 3 1/2 months for wanting to take my life. During this time a tornado was in my mind holding captive all my memories and traumatic events that occured throughout my life ~ it was not a gentle tornado but one that ravaged my brain with knives and daggers. I became someone else as the doctor's filled me with more drugs to calm the anxiety and depression. When I was released from the hospital they placed me in group therapy that was to last for 9 weeks during the day. I would attend from 9 until 3pm everyday regardless of how I felt. This was not a good idea. I became worse. My husband had to care for a newborn and a toddler, we hired a nanny to come and help, he also had to work and to add to that I would disappear for hours at a time and he wouldn't know where I was. My mentor helped me through that first year by meeting with me everyday, praying with me and introducing me to inner healing. We lost our condo because we could no longer afford it. A year into my depression Randy was offerred a relocation position within his company to the other side of the Country, he thought it would do me good. We stayed there for a year... I have no memory of this. Randy says that I stayed in my bedroom when he and the boys were home and at night I went to a movie (every night). Apparently that was the only place I felt safe. He wasn't sure what I did during the day. We moved back to our home and still I was deep in depression. Four and 1/2 years after my second son was born and numerous counselling, medication and psychiatrist visits later I was finally coming back to myself. I had NO memory of the previous four and 1/2 years. God had taken it all away. I was able to spend time with my husband and children a little at a time, and with time it became much much more. Now... it has been almost 11 years since Ben was born... I am still on medication but have never felt closer to God or my family than I do now.
I know that during the darkness I would read my Word over and over again ~ I do not know what stuck in my brain but I know that God got me through. I started writing poetry during this time as well and it flowed out of me as though I were reciting it from a book. It was healing and brought me closer to God and I believe closer to finding myself again.
Here is a poem I wrote during the darkness... and after once the skies began to clear.

This is what the first poem in the first picture above says.

KELLY IS A DIFFICULT WOMAN

Kelly is a difficult woman,
her creative desires burn within her soul.
She loves with full intensity of her heart
but does not love herself.
When she fears, she fears all.
When she's sad, she cries for all.
Emotions swelter so deep buried
in brick rooms without doors.
Her restless, transient mind sleeps,
exhausted from the storing of her painful memories.
An agonizing loss often beckons her from
her restless sleep,
forcing her to feel.
God envelops her life and
holds her frail body in His arms
as she momentarily finds comfort.
Day after day she battles the evil darkness
with the armor of God
and places her trust in Him.
Her child within her is lost,
unable to escape the closed box
in which she hides.
The only solace she has ever found
is through the One who really knows her soul.
Kelly as a mother, and Kelly as a wife
have been driven far out by her depressed state.
Kelly as herself cannot exist
right now and possibly forever,
for she is trapped in a web of masked emotions.
Lost inside herself, Kelly is a difficult woman.

By Kelly Watts 1998

And the Next Poem

A LOOK INTO MY FUTURE

In a dream I can see...
I hold my breath and look intensely into my future...
I see no pain, no pain at all.
The tears do not fall,
they cannot fall in the future.
There is no suffering, no suffering at all.
I see light, light coming from everywhere,
the light of the future that shines through the dark,
the darkness of what I used to know.
But am I dead, my body and my spirit
just lying there thinking, though silent and still?
I cannot die though my body might be broken,
no brokeness holds place in the light.
He comes to me, standing right before me.
I fall to my knees in awe... He comes to me.
Closing my eyes, my eyelids thick and heavy,
scales falling down, fall down around me now.
Murky waters pungent in smell break free from my shell
bursting through the seams of my skin.
Lifting my face His eyes empty all the darkness,
without a word filling me with new life.
Waters straight from the streams of Heaven
replace the murky waters now forever gone.
His hand touches my new skin translucent
and free from the boundaries it once contained.
He guides me gently to a glowing furnace but I am not afraid.
His peace envelopes, engulfs, protects and secures
my spirit now on fire... a fire that does not burn...
but melts away the old...
I fire within my heart churning, yearning and new.
He waits smiling with a Father's smile,
proud He stands waiting
for me to be refined in the furnace.
Illuminating light looks upon His face
and is reflected in His eyes,
I realize the light is coming from me...
and my heart is in awe.
My emotions melt within my spirit
overflowing with a beauty I have never known.
I see now I am whole... alive in His presence.
I am ready to be presented to my Father.
"Awake now," He says...
"Awaken and know your future".

By Kelly Watts 2005