Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir (14 page)

I
stared at the dirty dishes in the sink and thought about how much I hated them. The caked-on tomato sauce revealed they’d been sitting there since lunchtime. I needed to tackle them. Derek would be home soon, and I didn’t want to admit that another day went by and I’d managed to avoid my chores. I was mastering the skill of stepping over piles of toys to get to those tasks that energized me: making phone calls and sending emails for our MOPS group.

I loved everything about my job as the coordinator. The meetings. The creativity. The energy of being part of something with a larger purpose, bringing moms into the fold to tell them they had a place where they were welcome. Where they could be encouraged. Checklists were created and completed. Tasks were delegated and events produced. I loved my girls and being their mother, but I had to admit these other tasks were fueling me in a different way. I was gravitating toward wanting more of it in my days. In fact, as I prayed,
God, change me
, I was feeling his pull toward other things.

I’d never been a good housekeeper. I could discipline myself to clean the toilets, but my heart didn’t sing when the laundry
got done or things were in order. I had friends, Jen included, who found great satisfaction in spending the day organizing closets. And yet, even she needed a break from the housework. Work offered that for her.

The truth was Jen’s decision to go back to work had impacted my own thoughts on the subject. Despite my resentment of her changing her mind, it opened a door to options I’d never been willing to walk through before. Could that really be a possibility for me too? I dared not say it aloud. It would require admitting there wasn’t a right way.

As I found my heart changed, I began to trust God with more. If he could take my anger and soften it, he could certainly be trusted with other parts of my life. My marriage. My children. Even my talents. Maybe my ideas about motherhood, my priorities, and what I was called to do with each day were totally off. Maybe I was placing my prescription for motherhood above all else and giving it a disproportionate amount of weight in defining myself and my life.

I wanted God to change all of me, so maybe . . . probably . . . I needed to trust God with all of me.

“Gabi! Stop it!” I grabbed the marker cap and jammed it back on. We sat at the dining room table together while Genevieve napped in their bedroom. Gabi was using the front of my magazine as a coloring page, despite my instructions thirty seconds earlier not to. My eyes went back to the bank statement in my hand. Another month, and I wasn’t sure how our bills were going to get paid. They always did, but the savings account didn’t leave much space for going over budget.

We could use more money, and I wasn’t winning any mothering awards. The blissful stay-at-home mom I was not. Four years of living paycheck to paycheck, and I was drained from the daily stress
about the budget. I was getting to the point where the thought of figuring out child care sounded less stressful than facing another month of bills I couldn’t pay. All of the moms I’d judged in years past for making a healthy, or just plain necessary, decision for themselves and their families flooded to the front of my mind. I wanted to crawl under my bed in embarrassment.

“I think I might want to go back to work,” I finally had the courage to tell Derek out loud. The internal seed had sprouted weeks earlier, but the guilt was there. I felt I couldn’t leave my girls, so I didn’t say anything. But I had started looking for jobs online, picturing what life as a working mom might look like. I knew I had to tell him.

He raised his eyebrows. “Okaaay.” He drew out the word, knowing there was so much in there. He’d always said I could decide how much or little I worked outside the home, and he stood by that, but there were lots of logistical questions. What about child care? Schedule? What would I do?

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I feel like it’s time to at least explore it.”

“Okay.” He paused, and I could tell those logistical questions were swirling around in his brain like they had been in mine the last few weeks. “We aren’t the first family to figure this out.” He put his arms around me. It was going to be okay. We had no other option but to trust that.

“I just don’t know what I’ll do about child care,” I told my sister-in-law Lindsay. She had recently moved with her family from California to Colorado after her parents’ cancer diagnosis. “It’s so expensive. It almost doesn’t make working worth it. Besides, I can’t leave them just anywhere.”

My heart felt torn. I was starting to believe God was directing me this way. Prompting me to get out of the house, to admit I wasn’t a domestic diva and my kids would benefit from a thriving mom.
But I couldn’t get past this hurdle of leaving them with someone else. Even if it was for only a few days a week.

“I’ll watch them for you,” Lindsay said. “If it’s just a couple of days a week, I’ll watch them until you figure something out.”

I knew what it was like to watch other people’s kids for an entire day. That was no small offer. But her voice didn’t reflect the gloom I would have felt if I was saying those words. I wanted to scream, “Yes!” but I didn’t know how I could accept such generosity, so I didn’t say anything.

“We moved here for Karis to be with her cousins,” Lindsay answered my silence. “Besides, that’s what family does.”

It hung there—“that’s what family does”—between us. I knew that. I’d had that with my mom and my aunt. My cousin and I were always being cared for by the other’s mom. We were one big mushy group. And Lindsay’s comment connected us that way. Sisters of sorts. I would never have the childhood memories she shared with Derek or Kendall, but she was offering a generous gift of her time and energy. Because we were family.

So my girls were taken care of. Now I just needed to come to grips with the shift in my perspective. Or, really, with what I was sensing from the Holy Spirit, that mysterious third part of God in three persons who nudges our hearts, speaks to us in hints and whispers, and every once in a while shouts. I felt God saying, “Follow me. Follow me with your talents. With your days. If you are under my wings, following my call, you are mothering the right way.” And a weight was lifted. I couldn’t identify it until it was gone. But there was a new freedom. Slowly I was starting to get it.

My purpose was to follow God in every area of my life. I was learning to keep the main thing the main thing.

D
erek sat at the table with the newspaper open as I topped off his coffee like a diner waitress. We’d been on the verge of an argument all morning. Biting comments back and forth that hinted at the regular annoyances. Me thinking he was awfully sedentary for a man who was about to leave me alone with two kids on a Saturday. Him thinking he would like to enjoy a cup of coffee in peace before going to a day of church meetings. Despite the thought of hours of two whiny kids and housework ahead, I was partly grateful he was leaving so we could stop the bickering. We were all going to Kristi and Jeff’s for dinner that night; I would have some social element to the day that I could look forward to.

Derek put his coffee cup down on the table with a definitive clunk.

“Look at this.” He pointed to an article on the second page of the paper. I looked down at a headline that read “Two children killed in hit and run.” Above the article was a picture of a mangled stroller on a dark downtown Denver street, with a police car in the background.

“It happened last night.” He read me the first paragraph. A family—mother, father, girl, and boy—were crossing an intersection
downtown when they were plowed down by a pickup that sped through a red light. The truck and driver were still at large. Witnesses say the mom was pushing the kids in a double stroller and the kids both died on the scene. Denver police reported the mother was in critical condition. It sounded like the father had survived.

My mind did a two-second inventory of our friends we would see later that night, all with a girl and a boy: Jen and Dennis, Crystal and Brian, Kristi and Jeff. Any of those families could easily have been out for an evening stroll downtown.
But what are the chances it was one of them?
I thought.
Unlikely
, I just as quickly concluded. I wondered who this mystery family was and if I had any connection to them. Denver was a big city with a three-degrees-of-separation reputation.

Derek focused his gaze on the picture and shook his head back and forth as if telling the newspaper, “No, this isn’t possible.” His eyes moved up to my face where I stood, the coffeepot perched in my hand. His expression silently asked, “Why do we fight so much?” I knew he was thinking that could have been us.

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He was a good husband. I should be grateful he was spending the day ahead offering his skills to our church. I placed my hand on his shoulder and let it linger a few seconds before I turned to walk back into the kitchen. A silent apology of sorts.

A few hours later, the phone rang. Still working on getting the breakfast dishes finished, I wiped my soapy hands on my shirt and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Did you see the news?!”

I could tell it was Jen, but she sounded garbled. Was she crying?

“Did you see the news?!” she shot out again.

“What? Is everything okay?”

Gabi and Genevieve were playing in the living room only feet away, and recognizing I was on the phone, they instinctively raised their voices three octaves.

“The accident. Did you see the news about the accident?” Now I could tell she was crying. I could barely understand her words.

“What? What accident?”

“The accident downtown.”

My mind flashed to the picture in the paper. I couldn’t breathe. Was it Crystal? Kristi?

The girls were starting to scream in the next room. I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t understand, but I knew something was very wrong. I pressed the phone as close to my ear as it would allow and plugged my other ear with my finger as I ran down the steps into the basement to get away from the kid noise.

“Yes. Yes, the accident downtown. I heard about it,” I answered quickly. I tried to swallow and braced myself for what her next words were going to be.

“It was Becca. We think she died.”

A flash of relief flew through me. Who was Becca? I didn’t know who Jen was talking about. She knew everyone, and though we went many places together, she must be confused. She was talking about someone I’d never met.

“Who’s Becca?” I shouted into the phone

The screaming from upstairs was following me down. I went into our guest bedroom and closed the door.

“Who is Becca?” I yelled again.

“Becca Bingham. She was at MOPS last Friday.”

The MOPS reference made me freeze. I must know her. This was my group. But my mind was blank. I couldn’t picture her. How did I not know who she was? I thought I knew everyone in our group.

Jen continued. “We think she died. Cindy called me. She heard it from friends from their old church this morning.”

This was not making sense. I didn’t know who this Becca was, and there seemed to be lots of holes in the information.

Jen couldn’t talk. Through her sobs I made out, “I’ll call you back.” And
click
, she hung up.

I sat frozen on the bed, my hand grasping the phone inches away from my ear. I wanted to understand what she’d said, and at the same time I didn’t. That inner conflict made even holding the phone confusing. I needed to figure out what was going on. I needed to
do
something. To control the situation. How could I find out? How could this be true? What was I supposed to do? I was in charge of this group of moms, or at least that’s what our group structure said. That’s why Jen called me.

I needed someone to tell me what to do. I thought of Carol. She’d be home on a Saturday morning. She’d know what I should do.

When I heard her “Hello?” I tried to swallow. It was now my turn to be the hysterical caller on the line. My breaths came out in choppy spurts, garbling my words as I pushed them out. “Accident. Kids killed. Mom from my MOPS group.” Somehow I was able to describe an outline of what I knew to be happening.

“Oh, Alex!”

Those two words were just what I needed—someone to confirm that this was horrific.

“Okay, let me see if I can find anything.”

Thank God. She was going to take over. To tell me what I should do. I could hear the clicking of the keys on her computer keyboard.

“Here it is. On the
Denver Post
site.” Then silence as I assumed she was reading.

She quickly read me the first few sentences out loud. The accident. Hit-and-run. Two children. A boy and a girl. Killed. I knew all that. I wanted her to get to new information. Who was the mom?

“It is just confirmed the mother has died at Denver Health Medical Center.” Carol stopped and then said again, “Oh, Alex!”

I couldn’t breathe.