An Emo Moment

I’m not good with people.

Really.  I teach around a hundred wonderful children, claim a score of loyal friends, and I try to be courteous to cashiers.  At the end of the day, though, I really prefer being alone to being around 14 people in a beach house for a weekend.

I wonder: what does this make me?  A bad person? Self-centered? Depressed? Rude?  Perhaps I am perceived as a cocktail of negative reactions.  It’s not that I dislike people.  Most people are relatively enjoyable, and God loves them all equally.  I don’t feel that I should measure them more harshly than God.  I don’t think the individual matters at all.  When I say, “I’m not good with people,” I mean, “with people… I’m not good.”

With that, I will add to my list of Awesome Things.

#7  A vacation from vacation: I love the beach and eating out and even the ~8 hour drive to the beach, but what really excites me now is not being on vacation.  Thank God for a relatively empty house and my own bed!

April 11, 1993

I was six years old,
miles and years away from you,
the day you were born,
but I, dressed in my Easter best,
smiled.

Day 692

“If only there could be an invention… that bottled up a memory, like a scent.  And it never faded, and it never got stale.  And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again… I’d like to keep this moment and never forget it.”
–Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Hours before I was lying in bed reading my just-because present from the Manhattan bookstore, I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of my car.  My hair twirled out of the band and dangled out the window.  My eyes blinked back sun-induced tears.  We were not in Monte Carlo: we were not even in Manhattan.  There were no peasants wandering the streets.  There were no haunting Rebeccas or fat Van Hoppers, thank God.

I thought to myself, “if I could pick a day to live again, I would pick today.  Today: perfect.”

We fell in love, but not today.  We traveled to Gallop, Bryson City, Savannah, and New York City, but not today. We were married in a perfect service on a rainy day, but not today.  Today, I sat by my husband after a trip to the grocery store and a walk around the Forum.  The windows were down;  the sunroof was open;  his favorite music was blaring.

We didn’t talk.  We weren’t, at the moment, holding hands, but I would take the second Mrs. de Winter’s invention and apply it to this moment over all moments.  In this moment, I realized not that I loved my husband but that I loved him more on Day 692 than I did when I told him I loved him on Day 63 or when we married on Day 321.  I think I would keep Day 692 bottled up as if a scent, but I know the scent of Day 693 will be too intoxicating to compare to 692.

My (so far) Only Published Work: The Clinic

Libba thought of Nathan. He has dreams. He deserves to know. The test hadn’t even come back yet, but she knew it was positive. She was twenty-one and had just finished her first “womanly” exam. She went not because of any “upcoming nuptials,” the only reason her Southern Baptist father acknowledged for going to that kind of doctor. She went because she knew. The test would be positive.

Positive meant so much. Libba thought of her first phone conversation with Nathan. They’d been flirting for weeks before he even asked if he could call her, and when he did, he didn’t even ask her out until he was sure of her stance on children. He had definite opinions about them. His sister had a little boy, and Nathan saw him often. He knew all about dirty diapers, late nights, first words, and baby fat. His opinions were set. He knew his stance on kids, and Libba knew too. She knew she had to pass the test to even date him. They’d never have gone out at all if she answered that question incorrectly. His question, “So, do you like kids?” was important enough to be asked even before a date, and her answer haunted her now. If she’d only known then that she’d be here and the test would be positive.

A squeeze on her right forearm drew her stare away from the open book on her lap. Her eyes had been fixated on the words “wrap around porch” for twenty minutes. She’d either become Nicholas Sparks’ most adoring fan or his worst. The breaker of her stare, her mom, nodded toward a mother with two young children leaving the back rooms to exit through the waiting room. Mom probably noticed the Indian war paint on the youngest girl’s cheek, most likely decorated with red marker by her older sister, but Libba noticed other things—the small leftover baby pooch, two sets of blue eyes and two round brown eyes, and the small diamond chip on the woman’s wedding band. She envied it all.

Her only other experience at what her mom called, “the butt doctor,” an anatomically incorrect description, had been as a little girl, no older than the face-painter now begging for McDonalds. Every October her mom would age a year, and Libba and her sisters would sit with their coloring books behind a long white and blue-checkered curtain. After they brought home Libba’s second sister, the visits to the doctor became more frequent. Mom would leave Libba in charge of Candace and Ashley, and Libba’s dad would drive Mom to the doctor.

Sometimes it was the hospital. Then, things didn’t make sense. Mom’s olive skin would turn yellow before sinking to a shade lighter than Libba’s fair skin. Dad would help her rise from the bed—she’d always feel very tired for weeks before having to go to the doctor—then they’d leave.

Once, Libba and her sisters went to Papa’s while the church deacons came over and prayed for Mom. The girls had to clean the house by themselves because Mom had been sick in bed again. Dad smiled when he picked the girls up from Papa’s, but three days later, Mom’s skin turned light, and she went back to the doctor.

The times when it wasn’t the hospital, Mom came here. She left four unborn children here, and even more failed attempts to conceive. This was her doctor. Libba turned toward the blue textured wallpaper. She thought she remembered it being more aqua when she had viewed it through little girl eyes. Now she looked through eyes bordered with pale pink eye shadow and mascara. She didn’t remember the exam taking as long with her mom as it seemed to take with her, but today of all days, she wished the waiting room were aqua and that she was still the child behind the checkered curtain.

Walking into the blue waiting room, a tall black woman in a light pink lab coat called for “Elisabeth Law.” Back toward the exam room, Libba and her mom walked. The navy hallway seemed too narrow to allow the many pregnant and not-pregnant women to access the awaiting exam rooms. Libba shuffled most of the way, looking like a grandmother with her mom’s firm grip on her elbow pulling her along the hallway. Nathan will find someone else. She thought. Better that he finds out now, before things get too serious. “Too serious” meant before he showed Libba’s dad the ½ carat princess cut diamond he’d bought last week. “Too serious” meant before Nathan made a promise he didn’t want to keep. It meant giving him an opportunity to leave, to take advantage of the thirty-day return policy on the ring that cost too much anyway.

Her blank stare dropped to focus on her naked ring finger. It wasn’t the ring that she’d miss. She never felt its texture barely hang around her size five finger, but she’d miss the calloused palm that once rested against her manicured hand.

Libba could hope that surgery would fix the problem. Maybe she still had time to take one of the pills she’d read about. Maybe she could again feel the calloused palm against that white-gold band. With a burst of energy reminiscent of her real age, Libba hopped onto the exam table and sat cross-legged, but her back slumped. Surgery didn’t help Mom, and no pill ever saved those babies from spontaneous abortion, when babies were conceived at all. When the doctor finally spoke, she only confirmed what Libba already knew.

Infertility passed from adoptive mother to her virgin daughter. The test was positive. Libba could not conceive.

A Recovering Pessimist

Once upon a time, there was a girl who believed that the best way to have a happy life was to expect for everything to go horribly awry whenever that something got the chance.  Every test she took, she expected to be marked as an F, though she cried if it received anything under an A-.  Every friend she made, she expected to disappoint her. Every achievement she earned, she expected to be forgotten.  Every boy she dated… wait, that never happened.  Every boy she wanted to date, she imagine that he saw her as a fat blob.

Then one day, that boy she expected to date wanted to date her.

Then things got worse.  Every word he spoke was a comparison, and she failed.  Every place he went was a memory of someone else.  Every plan they made had been done before.  Every feeling she felt, he didn’t feel.

Then things got worse in a different way.  She pined

and pined some more

and pined a pathetic amount of pine-age.

Then, things got better.  She decided to finally play the part of Abraham in the story for which he’s most famous.  He had to kill the thing that had become his life, but she did things a little differently. She decided to, in effect, run away (thus ending her current life).  She applied to a very exclusive program–a 2 year commitment during which time participants couldn’t date or wear fashionable clothes or attend the church of their choice.  Well, perhaps it was assumed that participants would want to attend the required church, but I think that was hardly the case.

Then, things got complicated.  She failed a class.  She didn’t have experience.  She wasn’t Baptist.  She was too thin, which she found hysterical.  She had a bipolar grandfather.  She couldn’t control every aspect of her surroundings.

Then… she saw the ram.

Then, she smiled.

In high school such phenomena were considered almost sacred.  Zach used to sit in front of her–turned around in his desk–and stare/joke/humiliate her into grinning.  At dance, she was always told to relax her forehead and stop scowling.  At home, her parents told her that boys would date her if she would just stop scaring them.

Here at the cross-roads of pessimist and not-quite-so-pessimistic-ist, I find that this girl is me.

It may seem like the strangest thing.  I used to believe that always-smiling people were completely fake and must have an underlying mental or emotional condition that kept them from facing reality.  If people faced reality, they would smile as seldom as I did.

I am not Joel Osteen.  I do not have a smile plastered to my face.  My natural face falls into a expressionless, straight mouthed emoticon, but… Zach no longer has to tell inappropriate jokes to turn up the sides of my mouth.  In fact, I haven’t seen Zach in over 6 years, and I can still smile.

I would call myself a “recovering pessimist” because I am hardly an optimist.  Realism is a seldom praised worldview, but I would claim it over romanticism  any day.  See, realism does not expect the worst; it expects what would or could happen in my world.

In my world, marriage works.  My husband has hurt me, and I have hurt him, BUT neither of us desires to hurt the other person.  Daniel loves me.  Even when he asks me the same question about finances or my choice of clothes for the umpteenth time, he loves me.  He likes me.  He wants the best for me.  He doesn’t cheat.  He doesn’t abuse me.  He seeks God. I am not naive.  I’m honest.  In my world, it would be completely against his character for him to negate those truths.  It’d be like my deciding to love cats or roaches or driving slowly.  Things like that just could not happen.  It’s not realistic.

In my world, God is.  He’s proven His presence.  I have been hurt.  I have hurt myself by living life as an open wound, but even in the hurt and the decay of my life, God is.  He’s been my only friend, my Daddy, my confidant, my sanity, my healer, my assurance, my guidance counselor, my agent, my banker, and my attorney.  Even in the times I let the consequences of sin–mine and others–hurt me, He protected me from becoming the druggy or whore or invalid I could have been.

In my world, life is not rose-colored.  People die.  Things are stolen.  Children are hurt in unspeakable ways.  Tests are failed.  Speeding tickets are issued.  Alarm clocks break.  PMS sucks.  I am alive.  Daniel is beside me.  God is.

“To My Dear and Loving Husband”

As I write a test on poetry for my high school students, I find this poem for my husband, who cleaned the kitchen for me last night when I went to bed early with a sinus infection. He then woke me up at 4am, so I could finish my prep-work for school.

Here’s a poem (that even rhymes!) for you, my love.

“To My Dear and Loving Husband” by Anne Bradstreet
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold.
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor aught but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live, no more we may live ever.

Daniel and me at West Side Story… which he lovingly endured with enthusiasm, eventhough it was my kind of musical–sad ending and lots of dancing!