“I was wrist deep in suds when the shrill sound of the alarm pierced the air. I turned to see the apnea monitor flashing and my daughter with eyes wide and lips tinged blue. I swiped a finger inside her mouth and beat hard on her back until it brought forth a breath, I pulled her to my chest and and sank down among the shattered remnants of our wedding china, which having slipped through my soapy fingers was now strewn across the kitchen like shrapnel. I gingerly picked my way through the pieces in my bare feet and it felt like a metaphor. I had no idea how to pick up all of the scattered pieces or heal where the shards had pierced.
I adjusted the tubes on our daughter’s face and wondered if she would only ever know the wreckage of our marriage and the love that had conceived her. One thing that I have learned about most marriages is that the times of marital strife are something that we all collectively experience but we don’t share it. We lock it up and keep it silent, this blistering broken.
There is a high cost to this tribulation, the emotional devastation left a wake of ruins in the landscape of our dreams. The process of rebuilding is slow and laborious. I thought I had swept up all the splinters but still find myself sometimes cut deep on the shards of what shattered.”
~ excerpted from Anchored: Finding Hope in the Unexpected
My husband and I celebrated our 10-year anniversary just a couple of days before Christmas.
What a decade has taught me is the depth of my vows, and about how love is risking yourself again and again in a safe cradle of the unknown.
February is the month of love and so I wanted to honor this journey by sharing a series of posts that I wrote several years ago chronicling our love story. I am republishing them here one at a time over the next couple of weeks in celebration of Valentine’s Day.
When I was seventeen years old all of my friends went away to winter church camp in late December. It was the Christmas after my parent’s divorce, cold and bitter and lonely.
I was home alone, the first winter break where all of my family members had gone in different directions, and mostly spent my time working on an in-depth Beth Moore bible study. I was stumped over one of the verses I was reading and so I decided to call my Bible study teacher to ask her about it.
She just so happened to be my now-husband’s mother.
I only knew J peripherally, his presence a constant in the perimeter of my life. Since elementary school we had walked the same hallways but never into the same classroom doors. Our connection was like a tenuous game of Kevin Bacon – he had briefly dated one of the girls in my circle of friends, my best friend was friends with his brother.
The previous summer my best friend had dragged me to see J get baptized, which I realize seems a bit of an intimate moment to intrude on for someone that you do not know at all but y’all, we are southern. Baptisms are basically social events around here. Which is what led to all of us hanging out at his house a lot. And that is the story of how us girls began doing a Bible study with his mom.
On the day that I called his house that winter morning he had been on the fringes of my group of friends for about six months but without us ever really interacting with one another.
He answered the phone, which surprised me because I had assumed he was off skiing and rocking out to The Newsboys with everyone else. His mother wasn’t home, he informed me, but when I told him why I was calling he gave me his opinion on the verse. I liked his thoughtfulness and the way his warmth rang through the deep timbre of his voice.
We stayed on the phone for hours and by the end of the conversation we made plans to hang out. After all, we were the only people left in town.
By the end of the week, we’d watched a lot of movies and I had a crush the size of Texas on that boy.
Just a few months passed and then it was time for another youth church retreat.
(Like I said. We’re very southern. I spent most of my adolescence at some sort of event where we all slept in the fellowship hall.)
In a sleeping bag on the floor of Laura Anne’s house I had a vivid dream in which I stood in front of an altar, hand in hand with J and saying “I Do.”
So obviously I woke up all the girls so that we could have an in-depth discussion about what it might mean, because that is what you do at 3’o clock in the morning when you are sleeping on the floor with all your best girlfriends.
I was not in the habit of documenting my dreams but this one I wrote down in my journal and dated the pages for permanency, knowing with an odd certainty that it meant something. It had a shape to it that I couldn’t quite catch, a soft assurance around the edges that felt real, if real equaled true.
That same weekend J and I went for a drive, a long aimless drive through the mountains, which used to be our favorite pastime back when gas cost a couple quarters a gallon. He wanted to tell me about the girl he liked and I waited in expectation for the news I already knew.
Except that when he spilled his confidence, that girl was not me.
{to be continued}
