Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir (16 page)

J
ill is starting a new book group for women from our church. Would you be up for it?

I read Kathy’s email and winced. Not what I needed, another thing to add to my schedule. Another program in my life.

Who else is going to be there?
I typed back. Kathy and I had maintained our friendship since our MOPS days. I knew it wasn’t the question I was supposed to ask—it wasn’t supposed to matter who else was part of it—but any nonwork time away from my kids was precious, and I had to spend it carefully. I was easing back into work from maternity leave. Baby girl number three was one more person who needed me. We’d named her Gracelynn. I’d always wanted a Grace, a reminder of God’s continued gift of over-the-top love. And we’d planned to give our son my father-in-law’s name, Lynn, as a middle name. But at the news of another daughter, we figured it was now or never, so we combined the two for a perfect Gracelynn.

I’d known Jill for years as Kathy’s friend, but as our family was settling into our new church where Jill was on staff as an associate pastor, I thought it would be good to get to know her and other
women better. Once I saw Cindy was on the list of potential group members, I agreed. It would be good to have a regular place to see both of my longtime friends.

Then the coordination of schedules began. When? How often? I held on to my time like the precious commodity it was. If anything new was going to happen in my life, it had to be when the children were sleeping. Early mornings were easier for me than late nights. We landed on Thursday mornings at six. I would pull out of my driveway at 5:40, in the dark, to get there.

Then the book was announced:
Codependents’ Guide to the Twelve Steps
.
[5]
Codependent? I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but I was sure it wasn’t me. Maybe it had been at some point in my life, when I was a young, silent woman afraid my boyfriend would break up with me, but I’d changed. I didn’t need to spend my precious few hours of social time a week with a bunch of pathetic whiners. And twelve steps indicated this was for people who really had a problem. I considered pulling out, emailing that my schedule had changed and I wouldn’t be able to make it. But Cindy said she’d do it too, and I figured most book groups don’t really talk about the book anyway.

The weeks that followed reminded me it is possible to make new friends. And I was pleasantly surprised that the book had some actual application to my life. Each week I learned that this wasn’t a group of pathetic whiners; in fact, they were the opposite—all capable, mature women. But being capable didn’t have to exclude us from hurts from our past. As Jennifer shared about her memories as a substitute teacher at Columbine the day of the shooting, her eyes filled with tears. She had lived with it and “dealt with it” for a decade, but the pain was still there.

Even though Jill didn’t want to be the official leader of the group, we all looked to her. She was our pastor, after all. She latched onto my daddy story, or lack of one. I brushed it off. That was my life twenty years ago. It had little bearing on my days now.

“I don’t ever think about him,” I said. “Besides, I don’t even know if he’s still alive. It’s been at least five years since I’ve heard from him.”

I had birthday parties to plan, preschool snacks to make, and a car to vacuum. I rarely thought about my dad. And why would I? I’d moved on.

Or had I?

That was the question that hung over every angry outburst at my kids, every insecure comment to Derek. Did I have “issues” I wasn’t dealing with? Had I shut my heart so tight from fear that concealed hurts were in turn hurting my family? I didn’t think so, but I was afraid to dig too far to find out.

We came to Step Four in the book, which was a required exercise, an active examination of multiple hurts or a single thread of hurt in our lives. I felt a tug at my heart—God’s nudging, in a sense—that said I needed to revisit the issues around my father. To not let fear keep me from looking at my heart to assess the damage. I resisted. Why would I bring all of that junk back to the surface? It felt as though my wound had been hardened over with scar tissue. Didn’t that work? Scar tissue, thick and rough and protecting the open gash.

“I think we should schedule a separate night to review this exercise.” Jill moved her eyes around the coffee shop, pointing out the lack of privacy, and then looked around the table to see if we were in agreement. She knew the moms had a harder time sneaking away for a few hours, but we nodded. Yes, we needed more time and privacy than our hour at the coffee shop allowed. We got out our calendars and started the circus of finding a time that worked for everyone.

“What are you going to focus on?” she asked me in front of the group. I didn’t appreciate the directness, but she was right to ask, to get us to commit.

“Well . . .” I could feel the emotion rising in my throat. I didn’t want to cry or have any feelings about this issue. I was over it.
Wasn’t I? But emotion was turning on me, a traitor of my held-together self. It didn’t go unnoticed. Jill’s gaze became more intent. More intense. And she sat looking at me, waiting for an answer.

“I guess my dad . . .” The tears were now taking over, preventing me from speaking clearly. Me in this codependent support group. “But I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of what might be down there. Stuffed for so long.” I was quite aware we had an audience in the other members of the group, but they were kind spectators. Trusted friends.

Jill leaned toward me, her eyes piercing past my face into my soul. “I think it’s time,” she said. Her words hung in the air, waiting for a response.

I nodded. She was right. I needed to face it head-on. It was time.

I procrastinated completing the exercise until the day before we were scheduled to meet. I prayed for God to give me the courage to feel what had been pushed down for so many years. Though I had lots of friends who were counselors, the only counselor I’d ever seen professionally was the one who did our pre-engagement sessions. And she ended our sessions recommending I do some work. I figured I was in for some serious pain once the floodgates were opened.

I waited until naptime. I made a cup of tea and sat in my living room with a pad of paper and a pen. I started to write free-form. Let the words come out in the order I wanted. And in longhand. That seemed more personal, more primal, than typing on an electronic device. And I waited. I waited to have more to say. To feel more. But there wasn’t much.

There was some anger that surprised me. But not a lot.
Where is it, God? I’m ready, ready for the dam to be broken and the floodwaters to come rushing out. Whether they be tears or pain, I can handle it because I know you’re here with me. You’ve always been with me. I’m ready to be honest. Bring it on.

Silence.

Nothing.

I heard the swish of the water in the dishwasher. Moving. Swirling. And waited for the same in my spirit. It was still.

It turns out that my fear of the pain was mountains worse than the pain that was actually there. I had, in fact, done lots of hard work all of these years and had let go of more than I realized. The pain had certainly shaped me, but it didn’t own me. I could be free of the fear it left behind. Now the scar tissue remained as a reminder, almost as a memento of God’s redemption of my hurt places.

I heard the baby’s cries from the other room. Naptime, quiet time, was over. I closed my notebook and stood up to face the rest of my day.

I
locked myself in the bathroom and took the hidden pregnancy test out of the plastic bag. I’d used the half hour during Gabi’s piano lesson to go to our neighborhood Walgreens to buy it. I couldn’t have her with me on this errand because she could read, and I couldn’t handle the slew of questions my eight-year-old would ask. Her younger two sisters were safe chaperones, though. They had no idea what Mommy was buying at the store.

Dinner was cooking in the oven, and I couldn’t wait another minute to take the test. It had to be negative; we were just too planful, too responsible, too unspontaneous for this kind of thing to happen. But there was that one whoops incident a few weeks earlier that gave me just enough room to consider the possibility.

I ripped open the plastic pouch that held the test, a rush of past test-taking memories flooding my brain. As I prayed for the test to be negative, I felt like a teenager.

Two blue lines immediately appeared in the window. I knew this meant I was not only pregnant, I was well on my way in the process. I’d never miscarried; it was safe to assume I was having another baby.

My heart stopped, the beating frozen. How could this just happen? We’d tried for a year to get pregnant with Gracie. I’d had months of disappointing negative tests, and now when I was full to the brim with life and couldn’t imagine one more person needing something from me—this?

Gabi pounded out a new song on her keyboard in her bedroom. The notes pushed past the bathroom door, along with Gracie’s toddler screams as Genevieve chased her through the house. Their screams were of joy, but they were screams nonetheless, and I wasn’t sure I could handle any more noise in my life.

“Whaa?” Derek stood in the bathroom doorway after I sent Genevieve for him. He couldn’t even get the question out.

I nodded and started crying. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t sad. I was simply emotional. And now on top of that, I was pregnant-emotional. I couldn’t believe we were going down this road.

He stepped into the bathroom, shut the door, and stared at me until he finally said, “This is great!”

I knew he was right; I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

The next few weeks, I walked around in a daze. I believe wholeheartedly that God decides when new life is created. I’d believed it from the moment I felt found. I was no accident to him, and neither was this child.

During those weeks, I thought of my mom, imagining her as a single woman with the news of a baby coming. She’d always told me I was a surprise. But she always stressed that she’d been excited, and though I wasn’t planned, she loved me. But she must have had other feelings too. Was she overwhelmed? Scared? Apprehensive? I was having those feelings, and I was married and already in baby mode. Though overwhelmed, I realized this unexpected baby would just accentuate the chaos that was already present.

My mom came to visit a few months later. At the dining room table, between water cups spilling and a toddler taking her diaper
off, she said, “I had a baby who was a surprise, and she was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

I knew this baby was a good thing.

As I folded laundry and loaded the dishwasher, I said many quick prayers for women around the world who were in desperate places. And I thanked God I wasn’t. Despite all of my expectations that needed adjusting, I knew I would get to a place of pure excitement and joy for this child. How could I not, with the three complete beauties surrounding me at every turn? And I was not alone. Derek was with me. God was working in my womb. Cocreating a new beauty for me to experience.

At work, I sat in my office and wondered if it was the right time to tell my boss, Karen. I was nervous. I knew she would be disappointed by the pullback this would require in my workload. But I also knew she loved me and really wanted what was best for me. And God had clearly spoken that I was to be a mother of four. I cried as I told her, embarrassed that I was sad about something so precious and miraculous, and also because I knew she was safe. I could tell her I was torn. She would let me feel exactly what I needed to, would journey next to me without judgment, instead offering encouragement for the unexpected ahead.

“I have no idea how much I’ll be able to work,” I said. She and I both knew that with three kids, I was already saying no to many work opportunities.

“You are a woman with many calls on your life,” she said. And then she offered pure wisdom. “Do what only you can do.”

I don’t know why it struck me as profound, but I knew she was right. God wasn’t calling me to do everything. He was calling me to do certain things. And for now that included having another baby.

In the months that followed I repeated that phrase in my head:
Do what only you can do. Do what only you can do.
As questions came up about assignments at work, starting a new MOPS group at our church, activities my kids would be involved in, I asked myself,
Can
somebody else do this? What part of this has God uniquely shaped me to take on? If any?
Those questions helped me immediately let go of many things I knew were jobs others could do. I was reminded that what could be a task for me could be a calling for someone else.

And I grieved the plans I’d made for what the next few years would hold: to work more, to have mobile kids who could sit in restaurants and go to movies, to leave them overnight with friends for a weekend away with my husband. Plans that did not include a newborn. As much as I knew what I wanted, I trusted God knew what was best. It was starting to sink in: faith is believing when you still have questions.

A couple of months later, I was getting used to saying it out loud: “I’m having another baby.” After three babies, my abdominal muscles were as close to Jell-O as a human body part could get, so I started showing right away and needed to tell the world, and convince myself, that I would be a mother of four.

“Oh, how many do you have now?” a dark-haired woman sitting across from the bar-height table asked me. Her name was Rachel, and we were at a dinner for women from our church. She was new, and I’d seen her around, checking her girls in and out of Sunday school next to mine, but we were really just meeting for the first time.

“Three.”

“Oh, wow. We’ve talked about having a third.”

“You should,” I said, now a self-appointed recruiter for everyone around us to have more kids so we wouldn’t be the lone large family.

“If we’re going to, we should do it soon, so there’s not too much of an age gap.”

Neither of us knew that within a month she would go in for an ultrasound, wondering if she was indeed pregnant, only to be diagnosed with stomach cancer instead.