Fruit of This Spirit

‍

A mirror selfie. Zoom in, past the balayage-booties combo of 2016. There’s a crumbled piece of paper taped to the corner of the glass. In lower case, the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. In all caps, beneath that: DON’T BE CRAZY. The fruit of my spirit, I suppose. Printed stick-figure children dance across the page in a cartoon parade. Their cheer at odds with my lack.

*

Another snapshot, a captured memory: The same mirror, curling my hair. A Tuesday night, or Wednesday, maybe. He screams at me. Why aren’t I ready yet? My husband

expands through the house, all footfalls and broad shoulders. He thinks we’ll be late for his last volunteer coaching gig. I respond with fine, I’m not going. A decided slam of the curling iron, twist of the cord. He didn’t want me at the other games, anyway. He calls later, from the car, apologetic. You can’t yell at me like that, I scold. Mhm, he

says. It scares me, I say. Quiet in the black space between us. You know I’d never do anything, he says. He means I know he’d never hurt me.

Do I, I say. Is it a question? A statement? Do I? Do I. I do. I did. There are dents in the freezer door hinting that someday, something else could be true. Maybe this is simply a practice in patience. A chance for me to grow. Because maybe I am crazy, and I need it.

*

I snap. I’m short. Night shifts as a nurse make it worse. Nursing, then sleeping, then waking, then sleeping again. There’s a kind of tired, at three in the morning, when your stomach starts to turn. Dimmed gray lights of a hospital unit, shadows in the bays. I can still see her, when I close my eyes: the woman who walked to our unit, shaking her head, no English, blood pouring down her legs. Rivers through leg hair to a dirty pair of flip-flops. A hand pressed to her stomach. She is small. A C-section, STAT. She is screaming. No anesthesia, we whisper, only numbed her skin. Shift after shift, I endure the hour-long drive, metabolizing the violence of nights like these. They fill me up, cast shadows over the tedium of other mothers’ most miraculous days. Those sit with me too. In a gorgeous, hope-filled way, and in a faintly jealous way. Either way, each shift ends with a drive into the sunrise. Windows down and radio blaring, cool morning air against my cheeks until I get back to our home by the coast. To the peace of sleep, and, more and more often, a dwindling desire to wake up

When I do awake, I cry. Sometimes I yell back, into the void that is growing, towards the empty ears of my husband. Why don’t you talk to me? Why won’t you look at me? Why won’t you touch me? Sometimes I beg. Where are you going? My voice small, I’ll follow you. I lean on door jams, watching him not watch me.

I don’t care, he shrugs. This keeps happening. I want to press each finger deep into the skin of his arms until bones come through. Mine, his, both, a bloody rage, a violent shake, a why won’t you just love me. I turn it towards myself. Food becomes the weapon. Either too much, or too little. I’m either starving or wishing I were.

Despite it all, I am also still wishing for motherhood. We are young, yes, too young, probably, but my parents were young, and everyone turned out fine. Still, he wants to wait. So, I wait on him. Murmur prayers for him to be sweeter. More ready. Hold my breath on the months I’m not so sure about.

Images I’d rather forget: the days I left my body to hover over myself, watch me-but-not-me buy pregnancy tests with eyes cast down. Unwrapping the plastic, hands shaking, in grocery store bathrooms. Too anxious to wait for the privacy of my own home. Anxious for what — better that they’re positive? The wink of new life? Or negative? So he won’t do whatever he does when he’s upset? Ignore me, mostly.

Flowers of frost grow on the walls during weeks like that. They glitter in the right light. Layers of cold crystal creep across door frames and window sills and front porches and follow us all the way from those first few homes in North Carolina to our last few homes in California.

More months pass. Frost becomes ice. You can see your breath if you tilt your head just so. The air stills, finger tips and lips turn blue, the day he decides he doesn’t want kids at all. I didn’t want to tell you, he says, I changed my mind. He’s referencing the home we just bought, the empty bedrooms yet to be filled. I was scared of what you’d do, he says, looking away. What could that be, I wonder. What would I do? Cry? Ask why? “You’d go crazy” is what I think he means.

The ice cracks. Shatters. Deep ravine echoes, glaciers falling. This is the sound of the world falling apart.

Through chattering, gritting teeth, the words escape my lips: We’re done. As much a surprise to me as to him. Like the words left my mouth before I could think them. We’re done. We’re done. We’re done.

In these end-of-days, I grip my rosaries. In the other hand, a bottle of wine. A bag of chips. A half-gone cake. A sleeve of crackers, a box of pretzels. The years of careful, careful counting undo themselves around me. Better to feel this, this loss of self-control, than the hurt. My body wears the signs. I stop looking in mirrors. Hands grow too swollen to pull off the wedding ring. I show up to shifts already spent, salt caked in the corners of my eyes. I twist the ring around the etch of my finger until it burns.

Meanwhile, I deliver other women’s children. Go home to an emptying house. Make plans. Cancel credit cards. His face is an empty slate as he asks why would you cancel the cards. I want to punch him and kiss him and drag the moving boxes back to the curb, respond with this was a mistake. You’re right. I'll stay. But this confusion of his — how could he be so confused? — is a last final sign. He will never hear me. He is hardly listening.

He cannot hear that I am learning to listen to myself. Taking these first steps towards faithfulness — not to him, any longer. I am stoking the flickering light on the cave floor of my gut. It’s licking at the walls, hurting from the inside out. I soothe the sting with whatever half-empty box of crumbs is at the back of the cabinet, but nothing, really, can stop the thaw.

Nothing, really, could make me want to. The fruits of this spirit grow, and they are good. Because this is a heartbreak, but at the same time, a breaking open. A kindness. A surgical untangle of the things that felt safe: the neat rows of breakfast, lunch, dinner tapped into an app. The careful checklist of do this, do that, God responds. The known entity of twelve hours, clocked in and clocked out. As the walls continue to fall, something new shows through. Softer, slower days. Softer, safer body. Softer, sweeter heart.

*

All the way from Tennessee, ten years later, I come across this picture of me in the mirror. I imagine myself reaching back in time to the house by the sea. I sweep that girl, balayage and all, into my arms. I pat my own back, stroke my own hair. Shhh, shh, shh, in the rocking rhythmic patting of a mother, I mother myself. You’re not crazy, I tell her, with gentleness. You don’t need to pray yourself out of this, I whisper. You’re just not well, I say, and he’s not right for you either.

What else do I say? Thank you. I’m sorry. You’re going to be okay. You’ll put down the crumbs. The job. The man. The comfort of a known God to the mind-expanding mystery of a real one. There will be joy, as your list of holy fruits shrinks down to the word that links them all: grace.

Grace. The water that makes the frost melt, the flowers grow, when you’re not grasping and clawing, digging after it all.

*

Found last week in a night of home videos, one last moment frozen in time: Me, just shy of three months. Mom, holding the camera. Dad, pushing play on a cassette. A folksy rendition of “Amazing Grace” crackles out. He sits down, folded up by where I perch in a bouncer seat. Pink sweater with too-big ears, dark hair, button eyes. He sings with the track. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. She joins. Baby button eyes round, mouth widens, arms extend. Smiling, gurgling, stretching to sing along. Every verse and chorus, every I once was lost, but now I’m found, answered with baby-fat arms that reach and lurch and open palm at the world around, reaching for the grace that already, always, sparkles in the air. Simply there for the taking. Just open your hands.

‍