At Home

“Unacceptably high risk,” is what my doctor told me. When New York was slowly reopening, the latest COVID studies told people like me (I’m high risk because of a non-curable kidney disease that also affects my liver which all was a genetic mutation at birth) to continue to stay home. I asked my doctor if there was a chance it was overblown, if I was ok to resume “normal” things, and if there was a way to walk in wisdom and not just fear. 

She had no real answer. She told me to be in it for the long haul. To assess the risk of every outing. To consider who I want to see, and who I won’t see for awhile. 

And so, while it feels like everyone else’s life has resumed some normalcy, I feel stuck in Groundhog Day. Maybe it’s that familiar fear of “Is everyone hanging out without me?” and the reality is, yes. Yes, they are. 

My days move molasses slow. Even with two kids and homeschooling and gardening and emailing and preserving, I still feel like I’m in a time warp. To be totally honest, it’s hard to not slip into a depression. The kind that no one notices because who is around to see it? The kind that can be covered up with exclamation points and gifs in a text. The kind that doesn’t have words to match it. Just a hollowness that carves out the joy when I’m not paying attention. 

And for what it’s worth, social media doesn’t help much either, does it? Between a world of hate and anger, grief and death, national headlines and private stories of loss, it’s a continual reminder that what we’re all “returning to” isn’t always beautiful either. I see the posts from people who say that COVID only seems to affect those with underlying conditions, “...so what’s the big deal?” I see those words and push back against the diseased organs in my own body, the ones that have decent function right now but COVID could kick them over the cliff edge and I wonder if that’s all I am to people. Just someone with underlying conditions. A likely statistic. “She was going to die anyway. She had underlying conditions.”

So I take those thoughts in tears to the Lord. To my husband. To the garden where the tiniest gourds grow on vines, surviving the scourge of squash beetles and powdery mildew. If they can outlast the disease, maybe I can too. Even if the risk is unacceptably high. Maybe the bigger battle I have here is against fear itself. 

I haven’t returned to church. I haven’t been back to the office. We’re homeschooling which means no school pick ups, drop offs. No more days of childcare so I can go work or write. Cancelled speaking engagements. The same day in and out. 

But also the daily dose of the same beautiful faces who I get to serve every day. New recipes. A garden full of growth. Music at 6am with coffee. No rush. Singing with my husband at 10pm with a little whiskey in a tea cup. Simple ease. Seeds collected from dried flower heads. Herbs hanging from the ceiling. Tinctures soaking in the cupboard. Lavender and sage and eucalyptus. Nina Simone and Glenn Miller and The Andrews Sisters. Beeswax candles and chocolate chip cookies and fresh sheets out of the dryer. I certainly feel pressed, but not crushed. Losing parts of myself and who I wanted to be and also finding new pages, places where the Lord is pushing and pruning and working as the ever-faithful gardener He is. 

I know we’re all in different places throughout all of this. I guess I just wanted you to know that if you’re waking up at 4am in a panic, or crying at home at 8pm on a Friday night, or if you’re not sure what’s next and that terrifies you too, I get it. I think we all need to remind each other that no one is handling any of this perfectly. Give grace like daily bread and seek grace like living water. 

April 17, 2020

I’m in a writer’s group and our writing prompt was “Together in the Solitude.” I don’t often write…whatever this is, but it was all my fingers could crank out yesterday. I thought I’d share it with you too.

I stretch my cold feet across the bed to yours
The distance only inches 
But today we’ll rise again to the same routine, the same distance from
family, friends, the normal that 
slipped away 
when we were falling asleep

I never imagined that we’d be home
All of us here, working, eating, dreaming
The days stretching on 
Threads of gold tied to the steam rise of coffee each morning
strung up to the lemon sky 
tucked under lake storm clouds by dusk

We are far from the hum of Saturdays at the market
Sundays before the throne
Tuesday mornings at the coffee shop
Thursday nights with a house full and dishes clattering 
and cars lining the edges of our field

Maybe if we could see the way hymns rise from our lips
and prayers around the table
Early morning worship 
and the pleas I make on my knees in the garden
How they’re all woven together with the body
Wherever the body is these days

With every day that passes, 
what was slips further and further into
the shadowed corners of memory
and so I stretch my cold feet across the bed to yours

A reminder that your warmth is mine to share
as we are together in this solitude. 

In This for Life

I don’t remember the argument. I don’t remember what set my heart on edge against my own husband. Isn’t it funny how in the moment, those things feel like the biggest things but now, weeks, months later, I don’t remember the actions, words, feelings that had me seething with anger and emotion. 

But I remember the teary phone call I made while I drove to work. We each had gone our separate ways. He dropped our girl off at middle school. I drove the winding roads with our three-year-old to my mother’s house where I’d leave him for the day while I worked. I hated the lack of peace between us and yet I was still unreasonably upset. I called him without a plan. Without a resolution but really just wanted him to know I was sorry for making the morning so difficult. 

I cried, knowing I was still upset, knowing we didn’t have an answer yet. “I’m so sorry,” I sniffled while the cornfield passed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. We’ll figure it out, right? We’ll be ok?”

He was calm, steady. “Of course babe,” he said from the other end of the line. “We have the rest of our lives to figure this out. I’m not going anywhere. I’m in this for life.” 

---

I’m in my second marriage, as you well know. The first erupted and ended badly. Fire and ice, pain and betrayal, sin and brokenness. All of the things that steal from a home instead of sustain it. And as much as I hate to admit it, even 5 years into my marriage to my husband now, I still fear that one day I will do the thing that sends him running. I will say something, complain about something, look a certain way, not fit into a certain size, and he’ll shrug his shoulders and murmur something that I’ve heard before.

“I never loved you. I don’t even remember promising to stay with you at that altar. I have no interest in being your husband anymore. I want out.”

I know that healing never follows the same timeline as pain. We all know one moment of heartbreak doesn’t take one moment of healing. One brief action of devastating abuse is not undone in a few minutes of peace. The emotional car wreck of a divorce obviously still lingers in my peripheral now, 10 years later. Maybe that makes me weak, or too driven by emotion. Whatever it is, I know the Lord isn’t finished overturning those rocks and gently leaning in to fix and restore the shattered edges of who I am. 

He does it in moments when the wind is blowing the fresh snow across the country roads and my husband says “We have the rest of our lives.” I think of us, Lord willing, 80, 90 years old, slightly hunched and still figuring it out. That would be a tremendous gift of grace. 

Remarriage doesn’t solve the pain of divorce. There is no person who can cure or heal the after-effects of such covenantal failure. Except for Christ, who no doubt was with me when I woke every morning with my heart on edge and said words to Him that were messy and broken. When I cried, “Lord, I’m trying to figure this out” and he’d remind me that He was in this for life. That nothing could take me out of his hand. That he would keep me.

So when my husband said these words, my heart remembered what faithfulness sounds like and it wasn’t just romance or empty promises but the echoes of the kind of love that doesn’t falter under pressure but rises up under it. We have the rest of our lives and somehow that makes marriage the easiest thing. It doesn’t scare me and it doesn’t make me uneasy. I know we’re still babies in this thing. Five years of marriage means we’re just kids and we haven’t been fully tested by the gauntlet of life, but something about the even keel nature of commitment has my heart at rest. Marriage is no ball and chain but the deep breath of patience and long-suffering that says by God’s grace, we’ll figure it out. We won’t grin and bear it. We’ll cry and apologize and try again. We won’t claim to have found any secrets or methods that are foolproof. We’ll walk the long road to our final home until one day one of us says goodbye to other, knowing we had many country roads, many frustrating phone calls, a lot of imperfect apologies, and that we were in it for life.