GLIMMER
“Hey, friend! I know this is totally last-minute, but I was wondering if you’d be available this Friday to babysit? Jack and I have his office Christmas party and our other sitter fell through. It won’t be a marathon night, I promise. We just need to stay long enough for people to know we were there and then we can exit, stage left.”
I was actually tempted to decline because I was on a mission with Granny’s journals. But I didn’t feel right leaving my friend in the lurch, and anyway, I never wanted Millie to stop thinking of me as her dependable and lovable ‘Sissy.’
True to their word, my friends were home within a little over an hour and a half. I didn’t even have to put the cutie patootie to bed. And as soon as their shadows appeared in the doorway, an almost earsplitting squeal erupted right next to my ear. I assumed Millie was just that excited for her parents to be home. She launched herself off the couch where we’d been reading a certain Dr. Suess Christmas book and danced around her parents while shouting, “Yay! I give to Sissy now!”
Jack laughed and picked Millie up, carrying her upstairs. Kathryn grinned at me and said as she closed the door, “She’s been dying to give you something, as you may have guessed.”
Millie came bounding down the stairs and only very quick reflexes on Jack’s part averted a tumbling disaster. Once ensconced on my lap again, Millie proudly stuck a rectangular package in my face.
“Open! Open!”
Have you ever tried to open a package with a wriggling, squirming, ridiculously excited toddler in your lap? After much giggling, I managed to get the package open and no sooner had that been accomplished, Millie exclaimed, “It’s you and Jesus!”
I’m not sure if it was in response to the emotions that were probably clearly playing across my face, but Kathryn quietly explained, “She drew it in Sunday School. Her teacher asked the kids to draw their favorite people and that’s what she came up with.”
“I’m sorry.”
Kathryn looked at me with a quizzical expression.
“Shouldn’t she have drawn you and Jack?”
A knowing smile passed between them and Kathryn said, “It’s okay.”
“You and Jesus holding hands like Mommy and Daddy. ‘Cause you’re bestest friends!”
I opened my mouth but nothing would come out. What could I possibly say? That I’d never met Him? That we weren’t exactly on speaking terms?
Think of something. Fast. She’s just a little girl.
I looked down at Millie’s beaming face and felt my face compose itself into as genuine a smile as I could muster.
Wrapping her in a bear hug I told her, “Thank you so much, Millie. I’ll hang this on the wall as soon as I get home.”
Her little arms squeezed tightly around my neck.
“Okay, Millie, I think we’d better let Sissy go now.”
Kathryn retrieved her daughter and in an effort to replace the look of disappointment on Millie’s face I said, “How else can I hang your special drawing on my wall?”
That did it. I got to leave to smiles and waves instead of tears and sad looks.
I had to dig around for a nail when I got back to my apartment. Millie’s picture was given pride of place in my living room right next to the Christmas tree. I stared at it for a while in the glow of the tree lights.
Me and Jesus, huh. Never in a million years…
My thoughts naturally wandered to Granny and her relationship with God and Jesus. She hadn’t seemed too keen on either in the last journal entries I’d seen before I stopped reading.
I wavered for a good while then decided I should go back to where I left off a month ago and see if it stayed that way. As I sat back down on the couch, I began to wonder, again, how much my mother knew. How much any of my relatives knew. I couldn’t recall a single time hearing anyone talk about Granny’s past. Is it possible she didn’t tell anyone? Could you really do that — live your whole life without letting those closest to you know a thing about your history?
Except there was a flaw in my thinking. I knew my relatives. And ‘close’ is not really an apt adjective.
Did you have anyone, Granny? Anyone at all?
My brain rummaged through as many of the entries as I could remember and I couldn’t recall a single mention of anyone she had confided in or shared her burden with. Not even Granddad. Maybe she just didn’t want to include things about other people in her journals. But still. Even if she had what would have been the most perfect and pure integrity known to humankind and believed that writing about others without their permission was somehow unkosher, surely that wouldn’t have extended to her husband. Was she that isolated and alone?
I had to blot the pages of her journal with my sleeve before I could start reading.
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October 5
It truly never occurred to me to look into the circumstances of my early life, of what happened and why.
I was fed a story and I never questioned it.
The discovery that said story was a total fabrication is…well, it’s world rocking.
It changes absolutely everything.
It changes the very foundation of my life.
For the first time in my life, I don’t feel like I have to contort my thoughts and feelings so they will fit neatly into the narrative someone else has constructed for me.
I don’t feel like I’m a horrid piece of crud because I don’t feel thankful or blessed.
For the first time —
THINGS ACTUALLY MAKE SENSE!!!!!
My feelings make sense.
My thoughts make sense.
My confusion.
My terror.
My rage.
My despair.
My desolation.
IT ALL MAKES SENSE!!!!!
No one EVER allowed me to feel any of that.
They almost seemed desperate in their need for me to feel immensely blessed by God and thankful to be alive.
That always left me thinking and feeling like I really must not know what was what because I felt NONE of that.
Result?
Nothing ever made any sense.
At all.
But for the first time, it DOES make sense.
Every single one of the countless people who told me my abandonment was a blessing was absolutely, unequivocally WRONG.
There was NOTHING right or righteous or even remotely GOOD about that act.
NOTHING.
It was NOT good.
It was NOT loving.
It was NOT compassionate.
It was SINFUL and SELF-SERVING.
I guess it would be fair to say, though, that maybe I needed to believe the stories people told me.
I can’t truthfully say I wish I could go back to believing them, but I understand why my mind was so eager to accept what people told me.
The alternative is…excruciatingly painful, to put it mildly.
Then there’s the other camp.
Those who try to say that my abandonment was actually deserved because God doesn’t owe me anything except justice.
If He determined I should be abandoned, who am I to argue?
It was nothing more than my just reward for being a sinner.
But that’s like saying that because I’m a sinner, I deserve to be sinned against.
Because unless you have a particularly twisted way of seeing God, no one can tell me that abandonment would be God’s justice on a toddler.
Maybe that’s why people have always seemed so desperate for me to believe that my abandonment was an act of love and compassion.
Seeing it as anything else would necessarily mean wrestling with some uncomfortable questions about God and whether or not He causes evil or allows it, and if either, how He can be considered good.
I really cannot come up with any words that are strong enough or intense enough to describe how I feel.
Right now, it simply defies description.
October 25
It has been so difficult to remember hope.
But something has been stirring each morning when I’m reading the Psalms.
A call to my spirit.
I am most definitely walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
The stench of it often threatens to suffocate me.
I’m not sure how it will all work out.
I have no idea how I will be able to hold all these emotions and feelings in such a way that I will discover how to be a whole human being.
But I think it will come to me.
My heart and soul and spirit will find a way to sing.
And for the first time in my life, it will be my true voice.
November 19
Is my brain still fighting me?
Is that the reason every time I take a step in the direction of hope my body rebels in some way?
I thought I had moved past that.
But I think maybe my brain simply got more devious and subtle.
It started convincing me that I no longer needed to take the time to practice truth every day.
It started telling me that the hard work was behind me.
And that made it all the easier to slip back into the old patterns of thinking.
Believing that flashback state is normal and I should just stay there since that’s where I’ve been my whole life.
Believing that nothing will ever change.
Believing that I must accept this as God’s will for my life and surrender to remaining ill in body and mind and emotions until I die or Jesus comes back.
Why?
Why should I fear health and wholeness?
It makes zero sense and yet that is exactly where I and oh so very many others find ourselves.
It really isn’t just a matter of powering yourself into health.
If it was that simple, all the kids would be doing it.
Pithy posts and motivational memes be blasted.
You’re not only battling against your past, you’re waging a brutal and bloody war on your own brain.
And it is nothing if not the most brilliant strategist.
Deceitful above all things.
That is no joke.
People have gotten so hung up on the idea that the only thing anyone struggles with as a Christian is lusts of the flesh, meaning sex.
So, they conclude, if they don’t struggle with that, they’re good to go.
Why is it that modern Christianity only wants to talk about illicit sex, homosexuality, and abortion?
All these teachers manage to see those three topics and only those three topics in every verse in the Bible.
What about those of us whose lives have been utterly and completely wrecked by abuse and assault?
Where do we fit in your trifecta of sin?
We don’t.
And therein lies the problem.
You’ve got nothing to say to us and you never have.
You try to smash everyone into your neat and tidy boxes, but guess what?
Nothing about God or His Word is a one-size fits all kind of proposition.
If that was the case, we wouldn’t need more than one short little treatise of truth.
Which, I suppose, is exactly what some people want.
They want it to be easy.
But it’s not.
It’s messy.
It’s filled with horror.
Which is precisely why Jesus became a human being.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I think my mouth was actually hanging open.
I could not wrap my mind around the fact that even with everything she’d been through, everything she’d suffered and endured, Granny still talked about the Bible and God like she did. Sure, whatever gets you through the day, but how could she stay so committed to a God who put her through all that? I struggled to believe that this was — how did she phrase it? ‘Life as it was meant to be lived.’ Or something like that.
Maybe the thing that surprised me the most was the fact that she seemed to be more upset with people than with God. She didn’t seem to blame Him as much as in her earlier entries. I couldn’t remember if there was an actual progression of thought or if it just sort of happened. But I noticed a definite difference.
I had questions.
So. Many. Questions.
Man, I wish you were still here, Granny.