Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir (13 page)

T
he MOPS group at Corona Presbyterian became my sisterhood. The women I called on for last-minute babysitting, went out with for a rare dinner without families, and laughed with until Diet Coke came out my nose. I was following Julie’s lead to trust in grace and let others do the same. Julie was stepping down as the group’s coordinator. She needed someone to take over, and I agreed to help.

I sat on the stone hearth in front of the fireplace, the cool seeping through my pajama pants onto my outstretched legs. I felt like I was home in lots of ways. The women with me were my closest mothering friends. Some, like Cindy and Kathy, I’d met through the group, and others, like Jen and Crystal and Kristi, I’d recruited to join. We were on a summer retreat at my in-laws’ house, a half hour outside of Denver, but it may as well have been Mexico with the vacation-like quality of a night away from kids. We were planning the year ahead for the group of fifty or so moms we knew as our MOPS group. The living room was obviously familiar to me, my weekly getaway spot where Derek and the girls and I often got together with extended family for long weekend dinners. Sitting
there, with it filled with the friends I’d prayed for those first months of motherhood, I felt God’s provision in their presence.

Earlier that day, when everyone arrived and saw their personalized clipboards and notebooks out waiting for them, Kathy turned to me. “How do you do it? You always have everything so together.” I thought of the hours put in to making goody bags, photocopying agendas, and planning meals. That performance side of me wanted to do it right for appearance’s sake. To show that I was capable, in control, put together. I was willing to get the details just so at the expense of my stress level. Derek did not have the pleasure of a peaceful wife the week leading up to the retreat.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I said as I waved my hand at the table decorations, but Kathy’s comment gave me just what I was wanting: affirmation. Affirmation that I was good at other things besides doing dishes and wiping bottoms. I’d done plenty of other things in my pre-mothering days, but the last few years I’d been consumed with laundry and running errands to Home Depot. That year I’d sat on a committee for some changes at our local elementary school, but leading this MOPS group was my first time leading a team. Ever.

I put my glass down on the hearth and leaned in. We’d been doing a team-building exercise all day, taking turns telling our life stories. Hours earlier, we’d each taken a poster board and some markers and spread around the house for twenty minutes of alone time to make a life map of significant events in our lives. A visual of where we’d been and how that shaped who we’d become. Some showed topography with high and low elevation changes, others a winding path with stops along the way. Mine was the earth with lines showing a mess of back-and-forth stops between Europe and the United States, to Colorado and Portland and Colorado again.

The plan was that we’d each take fifteen minutes to share our stories between planning sessions. But how does one sum up her life in fifteen minutes? One person’s fifteen minutes bled into an hour.

So there we were after dinner, pajama clad, settling in for more stories.

“Pass her the Kleenex,” I whispered to Crystal, who was sitting next to Kathy.

It was inevitable with each one that the tears would start flowing. Going back to places in memory where we hadn’t been in years. Realizing how it was impacting us today. We said things like:

“I didn’t realize how close to the surface this was.”

“I haven’t thought about that in years.”

“I don’t want my kids to have to go through that too.”

And that’s when it struck me: we were all talking about pains from somewhere in our childhood. They must be an inevitable part of life, of parenting, that hurt—those valleys, those low points, are unavoidable. The realization that I wasn’t alone felt hopeful. Being raised by imperfect people is a universal experience. And seeing how we all had grown as a result of those painful experiences made me appreciate them in a new way. Many of my good qualities stemmed from things that were difficult in the moment.

“We better start saving for our kids’ therapy now,” I said, “because they’ll certainly be blaming us for something when they’re our age.”

My short fuse the day before flashed in my mind.

“Gabi, put these things away,” I’d snapped as I threw toys into their baskets in her room.

She stood frozen, staring at me.

“Come on. Move!” Was English not her first language? Did she not see I was trying to clean up?

The snapping came with more intensity and faster than I would have liked. And it was frequently my reaction.
Maybe she won’t remember
, I thought.
She’s still only four.
But I knew that wasn’t the point. I wanted to raise her in an environment of love, and instead I was getting stressed about toys on the floor and acting like the
mess was a personal attack. But if it was true that my imperfection as a mother was inevitable, how did I balance what I wanted with what I could realistically offer?

Any confidence I’d had from pulling the details of the day together was now shadowed by the guilt of falling short with my kids.

I looked around the room at the others in my grown-up slumber party. Makeup cried off, hair pulled back in sloppy buns, most barefoot, and some even pregnant.

“How do we do this?” I asked. What “this” was, I wasn’t completely sure. This life with its topography of ups and downs. How do we manage to keep pressing forward, dragging our baggage behind us? How do we help each other through it? How do we mother, knowing we will make mistakes? Mistakes that would certainly impact our kids?

Kathy wiped her wet cheeks with a tissue, looked at me, and waited for me to answer my own question.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “Pray, I guess. Isn’t Jesus always the right answer in Sunday school?”

I didn’t know either, but I supposed she was right. I was a mess. Despite my efforts to be slow to anger, I was falling short all over the place. All I could do was pray. For patience. For grace. To remember grace had already been extended by the grace giver. He was the right answer. The best I could do was expect my own imperfection, offer grace to others, and hope they would do the same for me.

I
’ve had a headache for eight days.” Derek rubbed his temples as he said it. “I’m sure it’s a brain tumor. I’ve been waiting to find out when it would be my turn. I’m genetically predisposed,” he added, referring to his dad’s recent diagnosis of brain cancer. Our life with cancer was causing us to make wildly morbid, inappropriate jokes with increasing frequency.

“Ha-ha” was my sarcastic response.

“No, I’m serious. I think I have a brain tumor.”

Examining his face, I couldn’t see any break of a smirk, and I realized he was serious. He’d convinced himself there was something wrong.

“It’s stress related,” the doctor told Derek when he went in. Not a surprise, since both of his parents had recently been diagnosed with advanced stages of cancer and were undergoing treatment. And Derek was daily going to a job that felt like prison, sitting at a desk and watching the clock as he wondered if this was what the rest of life held. Hospitals. Cubicles. And bills.

“So what are you going to do about it?” I asked Derek when he relayed the doctor’s diagnosis. I was tired. Worn down. Exhausted
from the emotional ups and downs of the last cancer-filled year. Emergency hospital visits. Days in waiting rooms with two kids. Hopeful news and then devastating setbacks.

And my husband with his ever-increasing headaches. He couldn’t sleep. He was retreating into himself. Not talking. Not sharing. A wall was slowly building up, invisible brick by invisible brick, between us.

The truth was he had shared in the past and I didn’t respond well. His job was feeling like a slow death. Every day he went to an office and stared at the walls and his clock, watching the minutes and the hours tick away.

“I need something more than this,” he said.

“We have more. We have kids. We have our life.” Why couldn’t he see that sometimes a job is a means to an end? Why couldn’t he see that now was the time to enjoy life, to be happy? From the outside, we were living the life I’d always wanted, and he was ruining it. Yes, I thought that. I thought his poor attitude was ruining everything.

“Looking ahead at my life, I thought I’d love my job. Like when we were at the Dale House. It was hard, but I knew I counted for something. Now I feel replaceable. But maybe that’s what grown-up life is. Maybe this is real life, and we just didn’t know it when we were younger.”

“Sometimes life doesn’t work out the way we want,” I snapped back. “Our response is what matters.”

Even as I said those words, I knew I wasn’t good at putting them into practice. As far back as I can remember, I knew this lesson, but I still wanted life on my terms. Life doesn’t always look like you think it should. Sometimes life isn’t fair. As a girl, I hated when my mom told me that. Probably because it smelled of so much truth. Prayers don’t always get answered the way we want. Dads don’t call. So we have a choice: to move forward and enjoy God’s blessings that are in our midst, or sulk. Why didn’t he see that?

“It’s different for men,” he said. “Our jobs are tied up in our identities differently. In a way, I am what I do.”

I got it. Kind of. I got it in a way that I didn’t feel it but could imagine what he was saying. But I was still mad. Angry that he couldn’t just snap out of it.

I was finding anger was too often my first response.

Six months earlier, my mothering accomplice Jen called to tell me some news. “I’m going to take a temp job as a social worker.” The lilt in her voice indicated she was excited.

I was confused. Why would she want to go back to work?

“I’ve been so restless, like I haven’t been using all of myself, and I want to see if going back to work is what’s missing.”

What’s missing? Using all of yourself? Isn’t part of motherhood dying to self?
I could feel myself judging all over the place, but I didn’t care. Going back to work was not what we did, and I felt strangely betrayed. It’s not like we’d made a pact of any kind or even said these things out loud. Still, I felt abandoned.

“I’ll have to work on Fridays, so I’ll miss the last three MOPS meetings, but I’ll get the door covered,” she said, referring to her role as official greeter in the group.

Now it felt legitimately personal, like she was letting me down. She wasn’t following through on her responsibilities. On what she promised me she’d do. I had no awareness that the reason it felt so personal was because it was tapping into all of my childhood issues of desertion. Poor Jen didn’t either. She just wanted to go back to work.

In the weeks that followed, Jen called on her days off. “It’s fun. I’ve missed this, but I miss you,” she reported.

If you weren’t working, you’d see me
, I thought. I missed her too, but I couldn’t see past my own disappointment to celebrate with my friend. I let my hurt and newfound insecurity stand in the way. I was still holding on to the idea that there was a right way to mother, and the biggest factor in the way I’d done things up to
that point was to stay at home full-time. She was challenging that notion. Implying she might be a better mom if she went back to work. That there was more than one right way.

Spring turned into summer, which turned into fall. The phone rang as I carried my empty suitcases up from the basement.

“I don’t know why you’re treating me this way.” Jen’s familiar voice sounded garbled on the other end of the line.

Standing in my living room, I got the feeling this was going to be a long conversation.

“I feel like you’re making fun of me in front of everyone.”

I was shocked and a little bit annoyed. What was she talking about? I did a quick mental inventory of the last few weeks and all of the places we’d been together. I thought of our last MOPS meeting and remembered making a quick joke from the stage about Jen, but I thought it was in fun.

“I can’t go on the trip with you if you’re going to keep treating me this way.”

I felt it was safe to roll my eyes since she couldn’t see me. We were getting ready to leave in a few days for the MOPS Convention, and I had a thousand things to do to get ready. Gabi was at preschool and Genevieve was taking a nap; this was precious productive time. I didn’t want to use it talking to Jen about her hurt feelings.

“Well, I’m sorry.” I could hear the snap in my voice. I tried to take a deep breath and not feel so defensive. Part of me knew she was right, but the other part wanted to explain it away. I was busy, rushed. I thought we were just playing around. I wasn’t being literal when I made comments.

But I knew it was the pent-up frustration of the spring and summer bubbling up in side comments. The feelings of anger, betrayal, insecurity, and then embarrassment that had snowballed into one big not-such-a-good-friend mess. And the snippy side comments that came out were clothed as jokes but really were
intended to hurt, with a bite that she could detect and I didn’t want to own up to.

My pastor, Steve, tells us that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. And when Jesus was asked if he had to pick one thing for us to do, one rule to follow, what it would be, he answered to love God with our everything and to love those around us like we wanted to be loved. I certainly wasn’t following those instructions.

Jen and I talked for an hour. I could hear the hurt in her voice from my comments the week before, and I was truly sorry. I didn’t know why my snippiness was seeping out all over the place. With my kids. With Derek. With her. In all my attempts to live the right way, I wasn’t doing what God called me most to do: to love the people around me.

A
s far as I’m concerned, she gets a pass on everything.” Derek had just hung up the phone with his mom. She was canceling plans to come down to Denver for dinner and wanted to know if we would make the half-hour commute up to her house instead. She’d been changing plans a lot lately, which often meant us schlepping kids a half hour each way, no adherence to bedtime, and late-night car rides home filled with exhausted screaming from the backseat. Changes that would have annoyed me in the past. But Derek was right. She should get a pass. She was on chemotherapy, and so was Derek’s dad. They were living a double cancer life, and they deserved to act like pure lunatics if they wanted to.

I knew my big-picture husband was wise, so I decided to follow his lead. Give a pass. Comments she made that in the past I would have resented: I gave a pass. Plans changed that were an inconvenience: I gave a pass. It was easier to let things slide when she was so sick. I couldn’t fault her for not wanting to make the half-hour drive. And there was the possibility these were our last days with her. Her prognosis was not good. Would this be the
last birthday she would celebrate for this grandchild? The last Thanksgiving she would be at the table?

As I made the conscious decision to let things go, I noticed my attitude started shifting. I remembered past comments and how internally I’d stewed, and realized how often I simply chose to take my mother-in-law’s words the wrong way. Give a pass. I was doing a better job of keeping the main thing the main thing.

It was easy to be gentle with a grandmother dying of cancer. It was not so easy with a husband who seemed fully capable. Capable to meet my needs. I was angry that he wasn’t able to snap out of his funk. And because of my anger, the invisible wall grew thicker, taller. A barrier between us. I couldn’t go to him with my daily hurts or with my isolation because he was the reason for my isolation. Well, the wall was.

A silence developed. My confidant, the person I dreamed with, was slipping away, emotionally unavailable. Gone were the late-night talks, the whispers of love, the confessions of hurt. We spoke about life’s logistics, but real-life matters, those of the heart, were off-limits. I didn’t want to hear that he was unhappy, and he knew that, so he didn’t want to talk about it.

The nights were the worst. Lying in bed, I’d hear his steady breathing indicating he was asleep. And I’d wonder if this was it. Maybe Derek’s fears were justified; maybe this was as good as life got. Two kids I adored. A husband who seemed distant. In-laws who were sick. God never promised me life would be easy, but where was the joy? I couldn’t become one of those women who got her needs met through her children. But I was starting to understand how that could happen.

So I prayed. Prayed like I’d never prayed before—out of loneliness.
God, please fix us. Fix him. Fix me.

In time I heard the shallowness of those prayers. They implied we’d get to a point where we’d arrived, and I knew that was impossible this side of heaven. We were works in progress until then.

The prayers evolved to
God, change us.
Things weren’t working, so something had to change, and it seemed like it should be us. God was consistent, never changing. He wasn’t the problem, so we must have been. But I knew that implied that when Derek changed, then I would be content. That it was about him.

The prayer finally became
God,
change me.
Oh, that honest self-examination can be painful. Harsh. I knew God wanted me. My heart. And he didn’t want it anger-soaked. Dipped and saturated with resentment. And I knew I couldn’t change on my own. I’d tried and I’d failed.
God, change me. Help me to love him better. To not be so selfish. Change my heart.

The nightly prayers as I heard the breathing next to me spilled over into morning prayers as I made my coffee. Scooping the grounds into the filter, I prayed,
Lord, change me. I’m starting this day with a terrible attitude. Change me.

Gabi would cling to me as I dropped her off at preschool. I was annoyed, wanting to maximize my two hours of errand running without a three-year-old, and she wouldn’t let me leave.
Lord, help me to remember I’m the adult in this relationship. Help my patience right now. Change me.

The “change me” prayers began to seep into other areas. As I looked at our bank account on the computer screen, the pending bills more than the amount available, I prayed,
Lord, change me. Help me to trust that this will work out. Help me to trust that you will provide.
I kept praying because I saw it was making a difference. I felt better when I sent up those silent prayers. I was involving God in my every struggle. Not to change the circumstances but to change my heart.

After a while I could look back and see my prayers were being answered. He was changing me. It was true my anger was melting. I wasn’t so quick to snap. But it was more than that. I was realizing my actions weren’t defining me; my anchoring in the grace giver was.

The fruit of the Spirit—love, patience, self-control—we’d spent a whole year at MOPS learning about it. Before that, I didn’t know these qualities were more accessible, more evident the closer you were to their source. So I went to the source with more frequency.
God, change me.

Months later we found out Derek’s disposition was more than just a bad mood. It was chemical—he was clinically depressed. Once he was treated, I felt I had my old husband back. His spark and his humor returned.

But he wasn’t returning to the same wife. I’d changed. Before I got to that place of change, I’d had to walk through some dark months. Dark for me. Dark for us. Had I not felt so angry, so alone, I wouldn’t have gone to the source of love as consistently, as desperately, as I did. But when I finally did, his grace was waiting and took me in and changed me.