Blog – Ericka Clay: Recent Episodes
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Okay, well, not really leaving. But doing things way differently.
Instead of receiving a blog post from me every time I (or a guest) publishes one, I’m instead going back to my weekly format of sending one email every Friday. It will have all the links to everything I publish (podcast episodes included).
But here’s the deal. WordPress won’t give me access to your email address if you have a WordPress account (even if you signed up by email!), so I might lose you in the mix when transferring over to Converkit to send those Friday emails.
If you don’t mind, can you please subscribe again by entering your email below? This is a different subscription box that will let me access your email and add it to my email list.
If you’re new, please also go ahead and subscribe. I’d love to send you a free book!
Submit a form.I appreciate it! Looking forward to sending next week’s posts and podcast episode on Friday, June 2nd!
Talk soon!
-Ericka
Dear Ava,
I once wrote a poem to you from the future. I’m no Marty McFly, so in reality, the poem was from the right now, but it was a vomited strand of all the darkness in my heart in one place,
Adorable.
Since then, I’ve come to see things differently. I no longer fear being alone, or maybe I embrace it in a way that speaks to the holiness of aloneness.
You’ve just got to understand how much it takes out of a person to see and process more than is humanly reasonable.
Whenever they develop a pill for something like this, I’ll be the first one at the pharmacy.
For now, here are the things I’ve come to observe and the awareness God’s gifted me, although “gifted” is a word I struggle with sometimes, like putting pants on a toddler.
Everything is about them, not you. Unless it’s about you.Your father pointed out once that I’m often the common denominator in my own stories. This happened a long time ago, and it was a bit of meat that’s still stuck in my teeth. I have so many flaws. This is true. Although knowing your father, that’s not how he meant it. I think he realized something about me. I have a sincere heart for knowing what I am but a hard time walking away from it.
Isn’t that like a lot of us though?
I’ve learned that sometimes people can’t see these things in themselves. If they did, I wouldn’t have to point them out and then politely be asked not to come over for Thanksgiving dinner. But alas, here we are.
Kidding though. Kind of.
I’ve been given grace upon grace for the blackness inside of me, and I’ve slowly (painfully slowly) been learning that grace can be multiplied and even given and handed out like Halloween candy (the good kind. Think Sour Patch Kids).
How long did I ignore this possibility only to hand out my own cellophane-wrapped criticisms and the bitter frustration of living inside my head but nobody else living there too? How hard to communicate the soft parts of my heart, how sorry I am for all of us, and knowing there’s not much I can do about anything but type words on a page.
These aren’t the things thirteen-year-olds can admire like a brand-new pair of Lululemon leggings. They’re the things that most people can’t admire. But here you are with a bag full of all the sad things I’ve put into it over the years.
I guess all of this is to say that you’ll one day be the common denominator, too, and maybe give out the better thing–God’s grace to those who haven’t realized this in themselves.
There’s always a bandwagon. So run, fast.I used to be a feminist and then an atheist and then there was my kombucha phase where I made sticky batches of fermented tea on my counter. I didn’t eat meat or dairy for an entire year and a half and talked about the dangers of carrageenan like it literally could steal your soul.
I’ve grown out my hair just to cut it right back off and have sharply edited my body’s freedom to look good in a bikini, which I did once upon a time by the way. Stop rolling your eyes.
I think we’re all sheep and sheep need shepherds or at least very tall platforms from which to fall. The thing about anything big and looming and trying to steal your attention is that it’s often doing so as an aspersion to God. There are no innocent bandwagons, no good-natured soapboxes whether you lean hard to your left or your right.
It’s all evil, the same kind really. And if the fronts of all society were removed mid-march, you’d see the same evil pulling the strings of its puppets.
I guess all of this is to say that there’s only one way to outrun the masses: live with a humble heart and a fear of the Lord. Otherwise, the ideology of man will have its way with you.
We all believe in something, even when we don’t.You can also claim not to believe in God or anything else for that matter like I once did. I refused to believe, not out of my own volition of a creature separate from creation, but more like a toddler whose pants I still can’t get back on. I wanted nothing to do with a world or God who is older than time, older than me, and decided to throw my tantrum for an exhausted audience. I knew better than everyone because I was twenty-one and had read several biographies on Gloria Steinem. Just hand me over that Nobel prize, please. Again, another aspersion to the God who must sit back and burn a million calories from laughing at his children in the way you do when you love someone so much despite the fact that they’re pantless.
I’m sure there are more things to say here like a list of all my personal pet peeves (people standing too close to me at the gym, people standing too close in general, people being “polite” at a four-way stop and waving me to go when they obviously got there way before me, culottes…), but this isn’t the time or the place. I’m sure the number of times I’ve thrown up my hands in traffic or stared down a woman who only thinks she’s wearing shorts has already brought my personal aversions to your attention.
Instead, I guess I’ll leave you with this: I only know one thing that’s worked in my life and that is to fear God. All else will waste your time and the hair on your head. The fear of the Lord brings you closer to God and gives you enough sense to let your fellow man off the hook. It humbles the stupid behind all of your actions and the ways we keep believing we’re the stars in our own shows. We don’t have a show. We have this time and space God has granted us the privilege in which to live.
You’ll mess up. You’ll cut your hair and make weird fermented tea in your kitchen. You’ll wear terrible clothes and pretend you know better than everyone else, because if you don’t, then what do you have left?
You’ll have your God who loves you, and you’ll have me who always had the hardest time keeping you clothed when you were two.
But that’s okay, bub, because I’ve seen our future, and well, there’s really not much to complain about.
Love always,
Mom
© 2023 by Ericka Clay
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I thought from time to time I could republish some work lingering in my portfolio. Here’s a piece from that collection. I hope you enjoy.
There’s a very small and beautiful Japanese lady called Marie Kondo who goes into people’s homes, helps them assess what’s needed in their life and what isn’t, and then has them say a deep and heartfelt goodbye to all of the personal items that once had a place in their existence but have long since wreaked havoc on the state of their affairs.
She’s basically me if she came with a set of matches and an affinity for the phrase, “Do you really need that sweater seeing that we’re all gonna die one day anyways?”
Matt and Ava have learned how to hide their things. It really is a glorious art to find that pair of sweatpants with the knee in the hole and the waistband that’s too tight, scrunching itself into a neat little ball in the closet as if I’m some well-mannered Japanese TV host with a penchant for sparing people’s feelings and who doesn’t enjoy the smell of burning fleece.
I just feel that stuff is stuff. To tag a sentimental value to something seems almost foreign to me, save for the few trinkets from close friends and family that actually mean something. But gathering stuff for the sake of stuff gathering is akin to the man storing surplus grain in the larger barn he builds so that he can take a load off, pop open a cold one, and enjoy the feats of his labor (Luke 12:16-21).
Oh but then spoiler alert: he dies.
I have to ask myself daily where my treasure is. I have to light my own match and hold it close to the things I think I own. I own nothing. I am a steward of God’s good graces. I am merely borrowing my home and my car and my dog and my daughter and my husband and all the other things that surround me that reflect an erroneous semblance of safety.
There is nothing safe about this world. Remember that. I’m not saying there is no joy, no hope. Oh gosh no. WE are that joy and that hope to a barren world that thinks it knows better. Which is why it’s so important to burn the mental ties to anything that keeps us from being salt and light.
The more tethered we are to “our” treasure, the less valuable we are to others.
But the more we light the fire to the ties that hold us to worldly thinking, well, we lift up and away, feet dangling, eyes toward heaven.
© 2023 by Ericka Clay
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My thumb fans recklessly through all these years until I find her, blank-faced, the tears a silent delight, the stoniness the only thing that can keep the rough barbs of a thirteen-year-old at bay.
There she is. My mother.
And there I am, small and stupid, because what else would you call a reckless mouth and a self-centered heart? I am young and growing beautiful like a rose rooted in poisoned soil.
I don’t know any better, and isn’t that the sweetest gift a person can receive?
But one day, I do know better. I’m in my late thirties like my mother used to be. I hit the gym, and listen to other parents wax on about parenting. I take my dog for a walk and try not to stumble on loose pebbles. I’m reaching the age of “she used to be,” while I’m still firmly footed in the “she is.” What can you say when your biggest adversary sprung from your womb?
I shuffle back there again, my finger holding the page to look at my mother’s face. I’ve hurt her again, but to hear me tell it, I’ve never hurt her at all. I love her, that I know, but I must be going now because sixth, and seventh, and eighth grade, onward and upward, offer all the things a mother can’t. And she knows this too. Maybe that’s why her suffering is basking behind her steely resolve. What hope is there in hoping for everything you’ll never be able to change?
I think of my mother’s prayers, each one braided like flowers in my hair. Each one anchoring me in the ground as the angels watched me drink my life away. I wonder about their eyes, round orbs, watching my next move, waiting on God’s. What will happen to this girl who thought she knew everything, hoarding nothing at all in the back of her mind?
But I didn’t die, and I suppose it was my mother’s reckless heart, breaking through any bit of stoniness, her steeliness, her frank understanding that nothing can be done, so nothing she did.
Except pray.
And now here I stand, heart for God as if I’ve cut it out and offered it in my trembling hand. How powerful those prayers were. I shuffle through the pages, gathering all of them, hoarding them in my empty mind for my own daughter, her face not close enough to touch.
© 2023 by Ericka Clay
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I thought from time to time I could republish some work lingering in my portfolio. Here’s a piece from that collection. I hope you enjoy.
I’ve been playing at this for so long, I sometimes don’t know the sound of my own voice.
I’ve become the thing I think that I used to hate. The woman sandwiched so perfectly into life that you’d never think to pop her out of it, put her in brand new territory.
Have I gotten stale? Am I nothing more than a useless bag in the wind?
Nah, I’m just thirty-seven.
I had a conversation with a friend about leaving your phone’s flashlight on. I’ve done this several times, but the worst part is scrambling to find how to turn it off. And it’s like my brain just can’t remember that step, so there I am, illuminating my whole world. Or rather, blinding everyone in the eyes.
My daughter giggles at me, gives me an “Oh, Mom.” And I look around like, is she talking to me? When did this happen? When did I become a mother of twelve-going-on-thirteen-year-old? When did this phone become the Rosetta Stone that I’ve still not managed to crack?
The world would make me think it’s all over. I found the first gray hair a few days ago in the Pet Supplies Plus parking lot. It was wiry and at half mast, and I ripped it out of my head. “Don’t do that!” Matt said, and I would have been more suspicious of myself if I hadn’t. Who goes around with a broken TV attena jutting out of their crown and clawing at the sky?
All of these things remind me of the thing I knew I’d never become. Old. No longer easy on the eyes (Ericka had her day, friends). I’m a walking, talking hormonal mess who keeps dialating people’s pupils at the random, and I no longer have any balance. I turned my head the wrong way the other day in our shed and almost ended up sprawled over my daughter’s bike.
I’m the female version of Mr. Magoo, slightly less myopic and with enough sense to worry about these things. But then again, I don’t worry much.
The whole world will pass away. Did you know that? You’re sitting here but one day you won’t. I’m typing these things, but one day I won’t.
I see the beautiful injustice in it all, but if it were purely just, God wouldn’t let us breathe anymore in the first place.
Sinful hearts and all that.
So what do we do with this thing, you and me? What do we do with aching backs and cracking hips and the dust of ourselves wrinkling and wearing like an old coat that just doesn’t fit right anymore?
Well, the world would give a whole lesson on how not to be and look like you. But Jesus, well, He wants every dying second of it.
Because we die, we walk a little closer to Him. And as we live, we’re proof that He exists.
Because who else would want a bumbling thirty-seven-year-old who once was going to marry Prince William and now practically loses a finger each time she slices an orange?
He does. And I’ll never stop being grateful.
© 2023 by Ericka Clay
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You’re still here in all your flesh
and memory serves to correct me
on the little details caught up
all around me like dead skin in dust.
How often I look at photos memorizing
the ghost lines of a gone face,
paying my condolences to an empty casket
and curled consciousness, yellowed with the wear
of bringing you out and setting you in my sun.
And grief is a cruel mistress, keeping the dead alive,
or maybe the living just dead enough for me to still own you,
take your future captive,
to tell stories to my friends of the used to be,
ignoring that there is a right now going on in a universe
I don’t belong to.
And it’s only when I set my heart on my Portion,
On the lone One who knows the intricate weave of all the cells
I can’t see,
That I can see my right now, too, how it doesn’t have to be
darkened by the once was.
How I can bury you whole and still breathe,
watching you breaking through all my wrongs
like a flower breaking earth.
© 2023 by Ericka Clay
You might also like…
Forge me anew.
The elder’s wife.
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Sometimes in the space of my ribs or the span of my arms, I’m still three. I’m sitting on my grandfather’s lap, and he’s feeding me sips of his beer from his bottle cap. My grandfather’s hair is black and shiny and smells of V05 hot oil, and I’m the most important person in the world until my mother comes and takes the bottle cap away.
Sometimes in the space of my ribs or the span of my arms, I’m still five. The boy across the street comes over, and we swing on the swing set in my backyard. I’m swinging higher and higher and he twists and he twists his swing around until he sets himself free, and I see the trainwreck in the width of a second. He hits me hard as I fly high, setting out into the ether with no one to bring me home except the solid weight of gravity and the sick thud of my body against ground. My father shuffles him out to the tune of my wailings. I never want to see that awful boy again, and my father pats him lightly on the shoulder, knowingly nods, and in a quick glance, offers a lifetime of sympathy, knowing himself the shrill sound of the girl you hold in your heart.
Sometimes in the space of my ribs or the span of my arms, I sit shell shocked as my mother leaves us at the chicken sandwich place. My father and I gape, two fish at a table, the checkered tablecloth covering the nervous bounce of my knee. She’s never left me. She’s never walked away. And it’s only years later with a husband and child and two dogs that bark a nervous twitch in your eye that you understand the art of wanting to leave and the grace of coming right back.
Sometimes in the space of my ribs or the span of my arms, I’m a stupid teenager who did stupid things and loved a boy and lost all of it like the time I was three and I dropped the crystal bowl at Jones department store after my mother firmly told me not to touch. Everywhere there are shards of it, bits of story and one-liners, and lost smiles, sunflowers growing wild like weeds and every bit of happy I’m sure I’ll never have again.
Sometimes in the space of my ribs or the span of my arms, I’m a grown adult who spits in Your face. I do it like rhymed verse and broken characters and swooping storylines that lead to nowhere, and my hands are invisibly inked with the pain of wanting to lose yourself tub-deep but not even having the guts to start the faucet.
Sometimes in the space of my ribs or the span of my arms, I let go, my pride like broken diamonds crushing into the soles of my feet, and all I can see is the bright lights of the megachurch above my head, and that deep water, that filled tub, that turned faucet, and down I go, buried with You, until somebody’s strong arm brings me back, and I’m there again where I started, only it’s not the same place in the slightest.
And there You were, all in the thick of it, even when I couldn’t see You. I sometimes wonder, why didn’t You stop it? The hard parts, the pain, the constant whine in the back of my spine? That voice that licked at my ears and broke my heart? But then I know now, You were there, on Your knees, broken shards stabbing through the skin of Your palms, picking up my lost pieces, holding me close until it was time to forge me anew.
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There’s a group I belong to that meets every week. It’s a beautiful thing I would have never thought of joining back in my “people-hating” days when the thought of sharing my heart was akin to that time I randomly got my period on an amusement park log ride in the sixth grade.
At one time, I wouln’t have known which was more horrifying.
But now I know it’s definitely the waterpark thing because sharing your heart is like lifting your burden off your shoulders brick by brick. It’s having all these “You too?” moments that make you feel a little less alien and a whole lot more human.
We live alone on all these tiny islands in our heads, only to look up and find the land bridge.
The other day during our group, we were talking about our knowledge of Scripture. I’ve been accused of knowing the Bible inside and out, which always elicits a “Girl, please!” because what I do know is how much I don’t know. And I’m finally making friends with that feeling.
There are a million Bible scholars out there and a million scholarly books on the subject, some of which can make you feel pretty darn dumb if you forget who Esau was or don’t understand what the word “hermeneutics” means. (Pssst…it has absolutely nothing to do with Herman Munster no matter how much you protest. Learned that one the hard way.)
What I do know is that my relationship with Jesus has nothing to do with my IQ. As Paul said, I can have all the Scriptural knowledge in the world, but if I don’t have love, I am nothing.
If I don’t know my God on a relational level, there’s no point in reading verse after verse.
Just because you know what something means doesn’t mean you know what it means.
If you want to know God, submit your whole life to Him. It’s that easy. Snort. No, I know, that’s not easy at all.
But what is easy? Making millions until there’s nothing left to buy? One-upping your neighbor until you realize your neighbor has died, and guess what, you’re next?
Living a lie until breathing hurts just as much as not breathing?
Maybe we all just stop pretending and understand what this truly is: God waiting for us to wake up. To stop sleeping. To start reaching out our hands to the only hope we have on this earth.
Or maybe we keep scrolling Facebook.
But me? I’ll keep reading the Word and being confounded and loving the truth and hating myself in those small hiccups of deception, and confessing my pain, repenting my sin, and loving the only thing that will get me off this ride and into the ether.
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It was my 38th birthday yesterday. This week, this month, this entire year has brought me closer to the point of this whole operation: abiding.
Sometimes, I forget that. Sometimes the cart is so far in front of the horse, that I can’t even hear it neigh anymore. I want things. I’m human. And God is pruning away any want or desire for success.
And I’m so thankful.
Pruning is a weird thing. Jesus talks about it in John 15. God, the gardener, prunes the righteous, the ones who are truly abiding in Him. And He takes away what we understand to be good things. Sometimes they are. Sometimes, they’re not.
But they must be removed so our fruit can flourish. So we can truly remain in the vine, Jesus.
I’m not writing to succeed. I’m writing because it’s my love language to God. When I write, I feel closer to Him. And I just can’t place a dollar sign on that.
And honestly? I think that’s okay. It’s okay to abide, to obey.
It’s okay to watch the fruit flower, a miraculous endeavor that has nothing to do with the work of my own two hands.
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The worst thing I ever did was force my mother to return our puppy.
Okay, that’s not the worst thing, but I’m striving for a PG rating here, so let’s go with it.
When I was in kindergarten, my parents bought me a boxer puppy. I had named it Sox because I believe its paws and legs were white like stockings. I also think I added the “x” to the end instead of the “cks,” which is strange because at that time in my life, I was a five-year-old girl from Arkansas who didn’t know who the Sox were, red or white.
This puppy was terrifying. I know, you’re rolling your eyes, but this thing was insane. And I love dogs. I even got bitten in the face by one when I was three (rude), but that in no way deterred me from them. I wasn’t scared. I just wanted to love them like Elmyra from Tiny Toons with roughly forty percent less force.
But the three days I owned Sox, I was in utter terror. I would come home and my mom would send us outside to the backyard, me in my uniform jumper, Sox in his…well…socks. And the first day wasn’t bad because I didn’t know the murderous glee this dog was holding inside. You can’t be scared of bottled-up insanity. But you definitely can be when it’s running at you like a bat out of hell. And there he’d come, lunging at me with every maniacal gallop. And let’s face it: boxer puppies aren’t small. And kindergartners aren’t big. It was a terrible combination. And the worst part was when he’d attach his giant jaws to the edges of my skirt, and I’d twirl faster and faster and faster until he couldn’t hold on anymore and there he’d go, flying through the ether, those murder eyes memorizing every curve of my face.
But I didn’t have long to watch him soar because I’d be high tailing it back to our kitchen’s glass sliding door, the relief washing over me that I was this close to freedom. Only to find that it was locked. And I as beat on the glass and waved my hands around my face, my mom would smile and nod at me with our house phone in the crook of her neck, her finger pointing to the fact that she would rather engage in a three-hour long phone call than scrape my remains off the back patio.
But like I said, the first day wasn’t so bad because I didn’t know the outcome yet and had pretty high hopes that spending time in the backyard with my puppy wouldn’t result in some sort of violent nightmare.
It only took two more days of this until I was ready to ask my parents to return their love for me to the lady who was nutty enough to raise these ferocious beasts. They did. And a few months later, my grandparents bought me a tiny black toy poodle that could fit in both of my hands and only showed her disdain for the world with a quick sniff of her nostrils and a belittling glare.
I still miss Sox. I really like boxers now that I’m practically the size of a full-grown human. I said prayers for him for the longest time until I realized he’s dead now because you know, it’s 2023, and I’m no longer in kindergarten. But I feel good knowing the God I serve already planned his journey, and I hope Sox got to spend the better years of his life with a masochist who thoroughly enjoys torture.
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I’m feeling clipped and left in the pile,
only hoping to be whittled,
or used for some sort of decorative
mantle piece that will gather dust
and spiders,
but suddenly I’m lifted high,
and I can feel Your face like the sun.
The root in me is the root in You,
and all is deepened and brought water
and learns to rest, then grow,
an undulating dance of branch
against vine.
And all I ever thought I was is merely kindling
for the fire,
but all I ever am in You is everything from beginning
to end.
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There’s a character on one of the episodes of The Simpsons named Frank Grimes. He moves to Springfield and starts working at the same nuclear plant as Homer. Frank is flabbergasted by Homer’s incompetency, by the way his friends fawn over him, and the fact that Homer has been afforded such a nice job, and family, and home while Frank remains alone and forever given the short end of the stick despite his intelligence and acute awareness of life’s little hypocrisies.
I relate way too much to Frank Grimes.
As a Christ follower, I’m to “love them anyway.” My heart is no longer a heart of stone but a heart of flesh. But whenever I go to feel it, there’s the hardness in it. The understanding that I’m to multiply grace upon grace to people who seem utterly blind to their own deception.
To be “frank” (so to speak), it’s mind-numbingly difficult for me.
I know too much for my own good. I’ve known too much since I was a kid, looking at all the adults around me and picking up the discontent in their voices. I hear, and see, and feel things I wish I didn’t. I just wish I could go blind and slowly be destroyed with a smile on my face too.
But I can’t.
He who has been forgiven much loves much. That first part hits the nail on the head. The second part worries me beyond belief. I can love my family. I can love the few people who poke and prod at their eyes, aware of their own blindness. But how hard to play make believe with someone who never intends to grow up.
Or maybe they do, they just don’t know how. Maybe I’m that answered prayer. In some strange way, God’s way, He’s put us in such a situation that the sheep need a shepherd, and I need to swallow down my own bitterness and pride and lead those who are having a hard time walking out of the dark, into the light.
At the end of that episode, Frank loses his mind when an attempt to embarrass Homer backfires, and Frank ends up grabbing hold of high voltage wires, which leads to his untimely death. At Frank’s funeral, Homer hilariously mutters in his sleep while dreaming, and everyone laughs and laughs as Frank is lowered into the ground.
It’s my own bitterness, my own sense of ego that chokes any last breath of love my lungs contained. And I’m certainly not the one laughing.
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This is my third attempt.
I first started with a podcast. It’s good for SEO. Maybe people would like the sound of my voice and hypontically end up on my site, books in their checkout basket before knowing what hit them.
Or maybe I’d try YouTube. Throw on a little concelear so all the years I’ve tried and failed would be a little less noticeable under my eyes and give them seventy-two free ways to publish a book.
Or maybe I could write this post and be honest like always even though I hear honesty is never really en vogue.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
There.
I pray to God all the time, but I also have a sick feeling that prayer is only as good as the person who prays it.
I am not good. I am barely so-so.
Scripturally, I know better. But humanly, I don’t. I feel the human edge to all of this, the twenty million ways I can say everything I do is for God and truly believe it, only to realize I’ve made an idol for myself.
I want people to buy my books. And I sometimes feel deep shame in that.
I’m not sure why. It’s a hard puzzle to crack. I’m tired of doing for the sake of doing and pretending that all these little efforts will somehow be the key to success.
But can I even define that? And is it even mine to define?
I guess what I can do is what is most comfortable. That’s to write to nobody and pray that nobody reads these words. That maybe there’s a book I’ve written, a story I’ve told that nobody wants and nobody will buy it and read it and learn a little more about how God calls a human heart and coaxes it out even when it’s lodged so deep within them, the whole world has had a terrible time trying to dig it out.
I pray nobody knows what I’ve been trying to say from the very start.
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One year, we moved.
We seemed to do this for several years, somewhat sporadically. We weren’t nomads or degenerates on the run. My dad just kept getting promoted or changing jobs, and we’d find ourselves in Texas, and then Massachusetts, and then Texas, and then Massachusetts again.
We somehow managed to forget other states existed.
But the first time we moved to Houston was one of the best Christmases ever because nobody bought me anything.
That sounds terrible, but I suppose now that I have a kid, I can appreciate how really hilarious it is. “Merry Christmas! Open this box. Just open it!” as I have my iPhone camera waiting, and I’m trying not to giggle until I choke.
Some would say that’s pretty cruel. But that’s probably just because they haven’t met my daughter.
The first part of an IOU Christmas involves your mother finding your father’s fake office plant that’s wedged in the back of the U-Haul. You have to give it several good tugs, and then everyone shouts “Christmas shall commence!” as a couple of plastic leaves are shed and one annoyed spider hangs on for dear life.
This tree is then placed in the middle of your brand new and preferably very empty dining room. You don’t bother putting actual furniture in it because you just arrived the night before and you still have “car body” that makes you feel like walking spaghetti. I mean whose grand idea was it to put Arkansas so far away from the Lone Star State?
But no worries. You don’t need furniture. What you need is an imagination.
IOU Christmas is much like that scene from Hook when the lost boys teach Robyn Williams (okay, I guess they’re actually teaching Peter Pan) how to use his imagination as he’s “eating,” and suddenly real food will appear. Except instead of a five-course meal, it’s more like those jeans your best friend wears and you’ve always wanted and a poster of Hanson.
“Look! It’s the Game Boy I wanted!” And everyone oohs and aahs as you lift up a tattered sheet of paper your mother ripped from back of her People Magazine with the words IOU sharpied on it.
“Somebody’s going to get a lot of use out of that!” Your grandmother says as she sips from an invisible mug of coffee because nobody’s unpacked the dishware yet.
It really is hard to choose the best part of IOU Christmas, but mine really is the familial trek to the local Marriott where you eat a holiday buffet with roughly nine other people who either also have car body or accidentally lit their kitchen on fire.
Together, you consume some of the more traditional Christmas fare like crab legs on ice, or macaroni and cheese with way too much salt, or a lone pudding cup that you’re pretty sure is pudding. It’s best not to ask questions.
As you look around, you’re thankful to be there because you’re alive, and besides, Christmas is not about the gifts or home cooked meal. It’s about Jesus and being with the people He gave you to weather this crazy thing called life.
And for the fact that when you get home, you’ll get to watch that brand new IOU TV for hours because nobody can fight you for a remote that doesn’t exist.
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He looks good for 105. Okay, he’s technically just fifteen, but for a dog, he should be dragging at least one hind leg around and losing teeth in his breakfast.
Instead, Rocco reminds me of one of those old men you see walking in a jogging suit around the mall while his wife phones it in and sits morosely with an Auntie Anne’s pretzel in front of Hot Topic.
He just won’t quit.
And this is evident by his smiley dog face and waggy tail, both of which are set off every time he tries to urinate a small puddle roughly the size of a half-dollar on my carpet. I mean either go or don’t. Why make me get out the steamer vac for dribble?
Rocco’s lost a lot in his life: his sister and two uncles. Okay, he wasn’t technically related to any of them, but I’m not sure that matters in dog world. I think it just matters that he loved them with that same stupidly open dog grin that reminds me how my heart isn’t as pure as I wish it were.
Riley was the one we worried about the most. Technically, according to my parents (mostly my father now that I think about it…maybe he is trying to kill me), Riley is the fourth born. It was me and then my sister, Fifi (she always had a knack for pulling off a tiny bow in her black curly hair. Not fair considering we all can’t be poodles) and then Ross who was overgrown as a puppy and had a permanent worried look as if he cheated on his diet and he was afraid somebody was going to rat him out. And then there was Riley.
Riley. If a dog ever needed a helmet.
Riley was afraid of the fan. Riley, in short order, was pretty much afraid of everything. He was an apricot standard poodle, and there was something almost otherworldly about him. Like he was some sort of alien-slash-deer that ended up on my parents’ couch one Christmas.
My mother had asked for another toy poodle like Fifi, and instead, my dad decided to get Riley because who doesn’t like it when a full-sized dog vomits during an anxiety attack?
Maybe he’s trying to kill both of us. Hmm.
Anyways, I’ll always remember Riley looking far off, as if his mind was somewhere his body would never catch up to. It seemed like a nice place, wherever it was.
My parents were excited to get a puppy, but when I stumbled home one college night into their room, I wasn’t met with a puppy.
I was met with a chocolate-colored butterball turkey shaking with anticipation on its doggy bed. I sat down on the hardwood floor, and the butterball let me pet it, and it calmed down a little. It was thick, soft, and about ten times the size of Fifi who was perched on my parents’ bed, giving me a look that said, “Can you believe they did this to us?” I could just foresee a future where all three of us were sitting in the lawyer’s office, the entire estate being given to Butterball Ross and Fifi fainting from the audacity of it all.
Good thing dogs have shorter life spans. And can’t own property.
Ross was solid in body. You’d often see Rocco lying on Ross’s back like one of those birds that eat insects off a hippotamus. He was good-natured, and a great snuggler, and was easily embarrassed when he passed gas, and my father would make a big to do about it.
I know, Ross. But at least he never tried to kill you.
And he, of course, was the best swimming instructor money (or the absolute lack of it) could buy. Our three-year-old daughter would hold onto his back in my parents’ pool, her legs kicking as he took her around, and she’d choke him silly with her tiny arms and massive-sized floaties.
Maybe that’s less dog smile, and more dog terror, now that I think about it.
I find myself randomly missing Ross, like when a day is really cold and the chill has wormed its way inside of your bones. Or when I see other chocolate labs, none that are as thick or soft.
But there’s something about them that catches your eye like you’re seeing a ghost. Like you’re catching a little piece of something you used to know.
Roxie. What else can I say that I haven’t said here or here?
Nothing, I guess.
But maybe, I should look at it from a different angle as if I’m holding a small diamond in my hand.
If there ever were poster children for sibling rivalry, it would be Roxie and Rocco. From head humping to charging into each other to get out the back door, these two were a constant study into how to not make friends.
And yet, they loved each other.
At three o’clock sharp every day, Rocco would clean Roxie. He’d lick her face, and inside her ears, and scrub her eyeballs hard with his tongue. And she’d sit like the queen of Sheba, sending a strong vibe of “Jealous yet?” to which I’d firmly shake my head, “Um, no.”
It always looked like a one-sided love. Rocco, the beta, sitting dumbly by as Roxie eats the last bits of his food with what she’s considered stealth and planning when in reality a rhino with a metal bucket on his head would have been quieter. But there would be moments when she thought no one was watching, when she’d put her head on his neck and those freshly scrubbed eye balls would be looking into something I couldn’t see.
Like when she was dying.
I think I’d like to always remember them together to know that kind of love can exist. You don’t have to like everything about a person to love them. It’s sometimes a choice whether their tongue is in your eye or they’ve just stolen a bite of your cookie.
You can choose to walk away or you can still meet them every day at three o’clock sharp.
The choice is always yours.
Rocco keeps trucking. Everyone else is long gone, everyone he loved. I like to think he still loves them, but I’m not sure, considering sometimes, he eats his own vomit.
I think a lot about God, how you can see Him in the intricacies of a wide-open dog eye and the warm assurance of its tongue letting you know the world isn’t always as cruel as it lets on.
Because in the beginning, there was the Word, and there was constant relationship with our beautiful Creator, and there were animals He made to keep us company.
To love us, even though we know how much we don’t deserve.
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At the gym today, I realized that most people have to succumb to the merciless grips of either Fox News or CNN to receive their bad news.
Fortunately, growing up, I had my mother.
My mother was what one would call a curator of a very dismal museum. Instead of bright floral patterns or even thought-provoking pieces that edged beyond the expanses of the human imagination, my mother dealt in small, clipped-out articles of random destruction and had the foresight and adept scissor-cutting skills to make sure that destruction always remained eye-level on our refrigerator.
Headline: Local Man Decapitated While Driving His Convertible Down the Highway
Me: “Well, that seems unfortunate.”
My mother: “Unfortunate or kismet? Life’s what happens when you’re busy not wearing a helmet.”
Headline: Local Girl Drowns in Pond Behind Her Family Home
Me: “That’s just…terrible.”
My mother: “It is. And so is trying to swim right after eating.”
Headline: Local Animal Lover Takes in A Family of Newborn Kittens
Me: “Well, that one’s quite lovely.” Scans to the headline underneath this one that is circled in red and underlined three times. “Oh no. Why would she go jogging at ten at night??”
My mother: “Because common sense isn’t an innate life skill. It has to be beaten into your head…by your mother.”
Finally, I moved to college. I attended a small liberal arts school while my parents moved back down to Texas. And for a much-needed and peaceful reprieve (roughly six days), I didn’t even know who was getting murdered where or which manufacturer was currently supplying the best deals on pepper spray.
But then, of course, she found me.
Roommate: “My mom baked and sent me cookies! What did your mom send you?”
Me: “A ten-car pile-up on Interstate 95.”
Some people say I’m, well…different. Maybe it’s just because I truly understand this world for what it is: an absolute dumpster fire. And maybe, just maybe my mother is the smartest, most dedicated evangelist in the world. Because Lord knows it can only be Jesus Himself who will one day come to put a final end to this nonsense.
I mean, it most certainly won’t be me. I’m still waiting for my order of half-priced pepper spray.
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Working with my father was the best and worst thing I ever did.
Best because it was with my father.
Worst because I almost died.
The first time, we worked on an all-girls school in Massachusetts. It was exactly like you’d imagine an all-girls school in Massachusetts to be. I remember it was made of stone and there were a lot of trees and the bathrooms felt like they were possibly time portals to the 1940’s.
Essentially, it’s pretty much the way everything is in Massachusetts.
My father was a waterproofer and so was his father, and even my mother’s mother’s father was a waterproofer who happened to teach my dad’s father how to waterproof.
And for the longest time, I had no idea what waterproofing actually was.
But that day, I got to learn.
Essentially, waterproofing is ensuring a building doesn’t leak. I can’t remember exactly what else I learned that day because at one point I was too busy trying not to die, and during the first part of the day, I was too distracted by what I was going to eat for lunch.
I’m one of those people who you see and say, “Well, my goodness, where does she put it all??”
Wouldn’t you like to know.
So, after a morning of attempting to stay fully planted in the year 2000 (even after I flushed the toilet) and balancing in the sky on scaffolding precariously hanging on the side of the all-girls school, we got to eat grinders from a sandwich shop in the downtown area that looked exactly like you’d expect a Massachusetts downtown to look like. We ate in my dad’s truck which always smelled like sweat and caulking.
I don’t remember what I ate, but it most likely involved salami.
After lunch, it was time for death.
I was up on the scaffolding doing whatever it is I was supposed to be doing (which I’m sure involved a strict set of important tasks that were shoved forcefully from my mind to make room for daydreams of Prince William) when I did the thing my father precisely asked me not to do: I attempted to die.
Well, actually, he just told me to be careful to watch my feet because there was one section of the scaffolding that didn’t have any boards. And I proceeded to forget this.
I went down quickly. I should have plunged from our thirty-foot perch straight down past the beautiful tall trees and windows to the time-portal bathrooms to my death on the pine-needly ground, but I didn’t. My hands reached out, and I grabbed blindly for a board that magically appeared and held on tight as my father helped me back up onto the scaffolding.
Needless to say, our work day was over, and I was forbidden by my mother to ever waterproof again. Which was a shame because, well, salami.
The second time I almost died was when I was working again for my father. I’m starting to see a pattern here. Either work or my dad is trying to kill me. I’ll perform more experiments and get back to you.
Anyways, this time, he worked in an office for a waterproofing company, and I was to be his assistant. This was great because never have I been more skilled in the art of Minesweeper or attempting to take a nap under a small desk sandwiched in a cubicle.
Pro tip: bring a coat. It makes a glorious blanket.
On one of these days, I decided to be helpful and make popcorn in the microwave. This ended up being partly unhelpful since I put the popcorn in for way too long, and we ended up meeting the Boston Fire Department.
They’re exactly how you’d expect the Boston Fire Department to be.
I didn’t die, and I didn’t even kill anyone.
But let’s just say naptime didn’t feel the same that day.
I have never since been invited back to work with my father. I’m not really sure why since I’m the sort of person who can sit quietly for incredibly long periods of time until I’m either plunging to my death or burning down a building. But that’s fine. His loss.
If he’s ever interested in hiring me again, he knows where to find me. Under this desk.
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We’re children, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we learn to dance, more specifically, the polka. Why the polka? It’s not really a question we ask because we all very well know we go to a Polish Catholic school and the question is somewhat akin to “Why breathe?”
Marcie’s grandparents teach us how. Full disclosure: her great-aunt and her grandmother married her great-uncle and her grandfather…or some combination of the four. I can never keep them straight in my head. I just remember warm smiles and whole histories that are often lost on us early ’90s kids. I just remember them being kind, and I suppose that’s the most important thing I could ever remember.
I’m paired with my best friend, Alex, who is a boy and has to be led correctly due to this impediment. But then I quickly learn that it’s Alex who is supposed to be leading me, and after a quick break for me to giggle at this insanity, I’m then led around by someone who feels like bird bones in my hand but who has always beat me rollerblading regardless.
I’m then paired with Patrick and I think even one time Gregory who kissed me on the back of the head in kindergarten, setting off an explosive desire to have him arrested for his poor decision-making and lack of regard for my personal space.
We 1-2-3–our feet quick and agile–during designated school time, and I don’t even think it’s during recess. I think we get both recess and this absurd exercise that doesn’t at all seem absurd when it functions as a sense of one’s history.
We eventually go to “the competition.” Other kids are dancing, too, but I don’t remember them doing the polka. I think perhaps they were ripping off dances from other people’s cultures and using them as an excuse to try and win first place.
Not us.
We danced the way Marcie’s grandparents taught us because there are people buried behind the old school house in the cemetery where people we know still go to be buried. We dance because of all the black and white and sepia photos of people unsmiling that we’ve seen since that first regrettable year of kindergarten when Gregory usurped my dominion over my very own skull.
I often think of the blood God pulsed in our veins, and the community that grew because of it, and how grateful I’ve always been to do something nobody else can or ever really cares about.
And I’m not even Polish.
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In all the world,
there was only one man
like Jonah,
who knew Your voice so well,
he came to ignore it,
and even in the belly of that
great big fish—
tree days, rotting and stinking
in the acidic waters,
crying out to the Lord
who wanted only to giveth,
while he longed only to take away—
he emerged at the feet of a people
he declared as rotten as the stink
in that stomach, and only had a heart
for the plant that gave him shade.
Of all the people, I link hearts with the prophets,
how great Thou art, and how great the journey,
the message.
How great the need and great the desire.
But like Jonah, how I’m spit out upon the hot
earth, eyes opened to the boiling sun,
wondering about the who behind the why,
wnd is it worth it,
wnd where’s a leaf when you need one.
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If there’s a memory that I can feel the taste and smell of everything, it’s the day I did the splits and ended up in the emergency room. Not because of the splits but because of the lone piece of wood that popped up unabashedly from the floor to defend itself from me.
Into my leg it went, a pain so clean and succinct, I made myself pretend I had imagined it, the heart in my chest knowing otherwise.
I didn’t tell anyone about it until my mother came to pick me up, and only then I whispered it to her like I had been a victim of a very cruel game.
My crime was being alive and not knowing where my voice went.
Years later, I tell a friend about this event, and I laugh because children are silly, and she stares because who suffers pain due to the guilt of feeling that pain in first place?
I do.
The whole time you’re a young Catholic girl, guilt licks you like a kitten. It’s not all a horrible thing to have a pet, especially one that’s gentle. But it follows you around, and you just assume, as young children do, that everyone else is just the same.
That everyone has something small and breathing that nestles against their necks when they have the audacity to do or say something just left of what’s right.
There’s a friend I have who I truly wish wasn’t. I play with her when my other friends can’t see. Her name is Marcie, and she’s the opposite of cool. I am, too, with my big flutter bangs and coke bottle glasses, but I’m best friends with the most popular girl in our class so you really can’t mess with me.
Plus, my mom’s a teacher, and I can make her give you detention. At least I’m pretty sure I can.
I go to Marcie’s house, which is cluttered and smells like dust. There’s a fine coat of it everywhere, and some dances mid-air in the light streaming through the windows and glass sliding door. We pretend to be veterinarians, her sizable congregation of stuffed animals our patients, and I like typing on the blank-screened computer as I check our patients in.
It’s the most fun I’ve had in a very long time, and when Monday comes, I ignore Marcie completely.
My guilt is a bird in my ribs I shut up with excuses.
Marcie sings in church and her voice is the loudest in the building. She stands in front of me so I can watch her thick, waist-length hair sway like a pendulum. The girls in my row stare and giggle, and my face stares and giggles, too, but my insides wonder what it would be like to do what I really want to do. To sing at the top of my lungs to God, eyes shut to the cruelty of unrelenting hearts.
Marcie dies when we’re sixteen, but it’s been years since I’ve seen her. I moved and live in New England while she stayed and lived life in Arkansas. I imagine myself her best friend if things would have remained the same. I can see myself sitting next to her in class and having sleepovers, talking about boys. The best of friends we’d become, time and a backbone changing my outlook.
But time is vicious and they ran plumb out of backbones, so I never did tell her how much I wanted to sing next to her.
And I suppose her leukemia wouldn’t have acknowledged me as a formidable adversary anyhow.
My guilt grew and had to be fed, and it’s exhausting when it barks at me late at night. It will be a constant rendering, this existence of quiet prayer in the dark to something I don’t even understand and swallowing down that chirping bird until all I can feel is a slight flutter.
Until I can finally go to sleep.
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I never understood death until my dog died Christmas morning two years ago. I wasn’t a stranger to human death. My great-grandmother died when I was sixteen, and before that, my great-uncle. I had seen their bodies still, and I had seen their bodies in motion.
But neither of them knew my heart.
There’s a fine line in your life when somebody or something you love can no longer be reached. There is the “before that moment” when life hurts and there is the “after that moment” when life still hurts, and you find yourself shuffling to the corners of your house to find something that’s no longer there.
It left me in a panic when my dog, Roxie, died. That evening, I had an attack, one that I hadn’t had in a very long time, and only two things calmed me: stepping outside to stare up at heaven and going inside to find my daughter. I could see her body still breathing, a reminder that maybe not all the good had decided to pack up and move away.
When I first got Roxie, I was young and stupid. I was an instant dog mom, dressing her up in clothes (a blue t-shirt and a black hoodie. I didn’t conform to the world’s standards so why should she?), and I would carry her around like the baby I wouldn’t have until a year later. She was so small, she’d belly under our couch just to poop. We didn’t even realize she was pooping under there until we moved, and as she got older and I studied her habits, I realized she was uncomfortable with us watching her every time she used the bathroom.
Finally, a dog with some sense.
I think the worst thing I ever did was tell her my secrets. It had been a long six years of suicidal ideation, a fancy word for “I just don’t want to be here anymore.” I loved my parents, I loved my husband. But I never saw in their faces such a pure sense of loss every time my heart broke.
In their defense, she was the only one who I’d ever let see me cry. And given the chance, I probably wouldn’t let them lick my tears.
But she did, with relish.
At night, we’d drink together—vodka water(s) with a twist of lime. She’d lap a drink while I’d watch Bridezilla late at night, watching women fly off the handle. And in cozying deep into my functional alcoholism like snuggling into a down blanket, I’d be thankful I wasn’t anything like them.
At least I had my life together.
She’d sit and watch me as I wrote, my attempts at being the next Shirley Jackson ever-present and as real as the giant aspirations I had created for myself. I’d get famous and maybe cart her around as Paris Hilton did with that little dog of hers, but Roxie was pretty fat, so I considered some sort of baby stroller contraption instead.
But then soon enough, I’d need a real one of those. I was pregnant. I didn’t let my heart catch up to my brain and realize that maybe I never would be what I always knew I would. So there I was, my dog side-eying my growing belly, leery of what would break open sooner than later while I closed my eyes to reality. Something I was pretty decent at if I do say so myself.
My child was(is) a force to be reckoned with, and sometimes, Roxie and I would hold each other, watching the havoc. It was like another being had invaded our space and dashed my dreams of glory and Roxie’s dream of pooping in peace.
We were tormented in the worst and best ways, having to grow outside ourselves. So we took to our late nights, sharing our vodka and mild regrets but not overly concerned because at least we had each other.
In the house with the demons, Roxie walked the wooden floors, never being able to sleep at night. The clip-clip-clip of her nails was morse code signaling her fear and discomfort until it echoed in my dreams.
In my room at night, God showed me the evil, and it was too strong for me without Him. I gave my life over, trusting Him and not a bottle of vodka to light the darkness. No more late nights and freshly made drinks.
I could tell Roxie was a little miffed.
My soul sang, but my mind was still a mess. Jesus saves, but the darkness especially craves souls willing to follow His lead. I worked hard and late and would look at Roxie sitting next to me on the couch and think, “One day, this, too, will only be a memory.”
Years marched as years often do, and when you look around, you realize how things have changed. My daughter grew, her body rivaling mine, and we’d play “pass the Roxie” as I’d teach her things about math and science and personal boundaries people often cross, people who have no real understanding of who Jesus is.
And I also taught her about grace, too, because without it, I would have been stuck on the couch, drink in my hand.
Roxie was who she still is in my heart and mind until she suddenly wasn’t. She got sick and her body detroriated, her spin protruding out of her skin. To hold her was to hold weakness, helplessness, a past slowly wearing away.
The worst part was her eyes because she knew it too. Soon enough, she wouldn’t know us anymore. I think maybe they were a soft reminder of my own suffering. How it pained me enough to live behind my own flesh and bone and how I was helpless to help the soul dying behind hers.
I think if anything, Roxie reminds me of Jesus. I mean obviously not the anxious pooping or nonstop barking or clip-clip-clipping across the hardwood floor. But the desire to just sit next to a person and look out into nothing and know the end of something is so near.
And the beginning? How beautiful it always is.
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My great-grandmother used to wash her hands up to her elbows. Which I guess was more like washing her arms. She was obsessive-compulsive, something that wasn’t diagnosed until much later in life when she was also diagnosed as manic-depressive and schizophrenic. I remember the smell of soap and old skin, washing away something I just couldn’t see.
When my mother and I would take her to the grocery store, I’d always sit under the basket, being chauffeured by my mother who navigated the abuse of someone who wasn’t technically in her right mind. I know now this was the love that Jesus talked about, an unconditional concern for those who can’t fend for themselves. My mother would pick the wrong can of peas, and there’d be a tug of war, a show for all the world to see (at least the world inside of Kroger’s), and I was more than happy to be teetering far below it on four rusty wheels.
At the end of these trips, my great-grandmother would purchase a box of Virginia Slims, and I was eerily attracted to how long and thin they were. I imagined it was something Lucille Ball might have smoked—the heroine of my five-year-old heart—and it’s a miracle I’m not a smoker now. But maybe it has something to do with my great-grandmother deciding to quit in her early eighties like she was as tired of smoking as she was of the world’s inability to choose the right can of peas.
In her home office, it smelled like the dust of faraway years, the same ones I saw Lucy live on my TV. There was her marble pen and clock set she still used and her drawers with her checkbook and stamps. I can see her sitting there, almost unconcerned about how old she was and how almost everyone had died, allowing the strength of her will to keep her upright.
In the hallway, outside of her office was the project my great-uncle—one of her sons—had done as a kid. It was a plaque that on one side listed facts about Lincoln, and on the other, facts about Kennedy. And from the tender age of five, I couldn’t stop thinking about Lincoln having a secretary named Kennedy and Kennedy having a secretary named Lincoln, and how all the world seems like a mess of coincidences unless you know the truth.
I’d sit at the upright piano where the picture of my grandmother, my great-grandmother’s daughter, was framed in black and white. It was beautiful and haunting because she seemed closer to my age even though it was taken on a day God didn’t need me to exist.
I’d play from the yellowed piano books in the front room—the same ones my grandmother and great-uncles played from—and make music about little boys and their dogs and clocks that wouldn’t stop ticking.
When I was done, I’d creak the pedals of her ancient exercise machine and pretend to watch the broken TV that hadn’t worked since the fifties.
The dead fish on the wall my great-grandfather had caught and mounted would watch me as my great-grandmother poured another mug of whole milk into her Campbell’s soup mug. She’d drink it down, and I thought maybe it was the secret elixir behind everything—like why her air conditioner had been stolen twice while she was sleeping but nobody had laid a hand on her. Or like how her elderly neighbor had been kidnapped in broad daylight and beaten and killed in an alley for a gang initiation, but she had remained unscathed.
She wasn’t the type to open the door for anyone.
I’d sit on the couch, the hurt in my heart knowing what this house, this home used to be and what it was now. There goes the neighborhood was such a heavy rift in the air, you could play it on the piano.
I’m frightened of my great-grandmother even at fifteen when I haven’t seen her in years. She’s sitting in a wheelchair at her nursing home with the other older people waiting for something, anything, to come through that door. When she sees me, she says, “Ericka, get me a cup of coffee,” as a way of a hello, and I try not to be spooked by the fact that she still knows who I am all these years later.
We sit in the dining hall as she doesn’t eat and talk with her, or at least my mother does. All the things I know about her like hopping on the back of my cousin’s husband’s motorcycle that one time or chasing the ones she loved with a hammer are piled high in the back of my mind, and I take a slow climb as I recognize she’s scared, too.
“Can I have that?” she asks my mother and reaches for the medal chained around her neck. It’s of the Virgin Mary, and at the time, I think it was a weird request, but you get used to weird when a person fills a sink full of soap and water just to wash their hands.
Later on, she dies and joins all the ones who already have. Older now, and betrothed to Christ, I know what that fear was. Your whole life you spend washing the past off you and chasing it away with tools in your garage or closing your eyes to missing air conditioners or looking at that funny bass hanging high above your head, and you can smoke all the cigarettes in the world, and take their diagnoses, the ones that pretend to define you.
But.
You’ll never truly defy the weight of all that weighs you down. Not unless you find the One whose yoke is easy, whose burden is light.
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Matthew 11:29-30
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My darkest fear
and biggest regret
are all the children I never thought to have
because aren’t we to go out and multiply?
But then I see the one that God
Has given me on a short, lifetime loan,
An embodiment of all those children
I never thought to have. Her sculptured skin
And carefully carved heart, her moving lips
And wind-whipped hair, are all the things I
Could never think to own, even on a good day.
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She looks at me through the same lens I once looked through to find my mother. But maybe that’s not at all accurate.
After all, we’re now knee-deep into the twenty-first century. Who am I to her but an old relic who likes to whip out the macarena when waiting in line?
She just loves that.
But when I look at her, sitting in the car with the music blaring, us singing our lungs out to all the music I used to listen to (because originality is not something our culture values), I look at my hands on the steering wheel. How old they’ve gotten. And then I look at her in the passenger seat and think, “Who are you?”
“And where is my mother?”
My mother has dark brown hair and warm skin and freckles, and therefore, I look nothing like her. Whereas my nose has been stuck inside books, hers has sat defiantly on her face, waiting for someone to make the wrong move. She’s all heart and smile otherwise, but there’s something instinctual inside her I’ve never had. I think maybe it’s her Latina side, a brush stroke of passion God has given her that was weakened genetically like watered-down wine by the time that I was born.
I only tend to get perturbed when my library loan expires.
In the car, we’d sing to Stevie Nix and Carol King and Carly Simon, And sometimes we’d invite the boys, humming along to James Taylor and Chicago. I used to live in the seventies in a 1990’s GrandAm, wondering what it would have been like to be my mother at the exact same age.
But then I remember the story of when she first moved to Saudi Arabia and showed her ankles off to the guards stationed at the airport, an openly defiant Latina-American, and I break out in hives.
It would have been heart-stopping.
I used to love hearing about the boys my mother loved because they were like stepping stones to my father. Here’s a bit of life that’s gone broken, the pieces and ash swept up by God’s own hand, and look—there he made something new, a man that loved her enough to not even think about breaking her.
The seatbelt got tighter and my legs grew as long as hers. My legs are my mother’s legs. I remember trying to elliptical them off in our basement, striding like a gazelle while watching Shakira on MTV. “Lucky I have strong legs like my mother” I’d sing, trying to believe the luck in it.
We’d still sing sometimes in the car, but I’d usually be in my boyfriend’s, head against his passenger side window, wondering what life was like beyond small towns and front yards filled with sunflowers.
When she was supposed to die, she didn’t. Even when my faulty grasp on prayer was hinging on nonexistent, I still kept frantically yanking the net back in for a catch of God’s answers. I couldn’t be sixteen and alone with nobody to sing to.
She remained alive, body intact, and it won’t be until years later that parts of her go missing. My miracle cat with nine lives and counting.
My daughter has inherited her father’s voice and we laugh about it. We sing long and loud in my car now with my ancient hands grasping the wheel, but it’s no longer the seventies. We find ourselves on the cusp of the new century as the Back Street Boys sing about wanting it their way, and I think about how much I love my daughter.
And how much I miss my mother too.
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Sometimes, I consider writing
down all my sins and pinning
them to my shirt. Or maybe holding
a sandwich board that reads
“I’m not an elder’s wife,
but I play one on TV.”
I can hold a hand as hard
As I hold a smile, but is
This the real me or is the real
me the one who came before
And spit on any desire for hope
I ever had?
Then I know from the deep down,
Walking one day should-to-shoulder
With a daughter whose love is the
ephemeral whisp I keep pinching
With the tiniest bit of luck.
He made me for this moment
And all the “those moments”
That I hardly ever measure up to.
But oh how He measures me
With a generous cup, spilling over.
Spilling over.
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How much are you an accomplice to everything intent on killing you?
You don’t think this is a question you would have once considered. In fact, this question would have seemed absolutely ludicrous.
Because, after all, you can never stop anything from happening to you.
And maybe in some circumstances, that’s the case. Maybe there’s a loose grasp on the reigns so there’s no surprise when the horse bucks you off.
You live there in the dirt and don’t give it a second thought.
But at some point, you noticed the dirt wasn’t really the best place to live. And when you lifted up your head, you noticed how clean everyone else was.
But there you lay, as everything happened and with no reigns to hold.
Suicide seems like such a lofty goal for some. An insidious undertaking that claims a loved one or a person of someone you used to work with who always brought bologna sandwiches to work. But it’s never really been about you, even though you collect your own dark moments when it’s tried to nuzzle your shoulder.
But you don’t talk about that. Those things won’t get you followers on Instagram. So instead, you collect those instances like stray kittens with no mother, foster and hold them awhile but only in the quiet.
On the outside, everyone thinks you’re the best.
After a while it wears. Being the best. Being the smartest and being pretty and being fit and being…well, everything the world craves.
Eventually, those things wear away. We have the Fall to thank for that, and even though it all goes on its slow, downhill march, you still claw at it. Your humanness always needs to be fed.
It’s such a headache to feed it because it mostly means starving yourself. You don’t eat, which means you sleep standing up but never laying down. When you’re in bed you count the stars and talk to no one because you don’t believe in God. You silently pat yourself on the back for not needing a crutch.
You, my friend, are so strong.
The bags are thin-skinned under your eyes and you rub your ring finger round with concealer. You pat-pat-pat, pretending you’re erasing away every little regret.
At work, you are the best worker. There just isn’t another option for you. You eat in the breakroom, careful to look like you’re feeding your unfed body because everyone knows rumors are worse than calories.
You’re promoted and there’s a vile sense of self-worth from everyone’s projected hate. You only need friends from the outside looking in.
You go home alone to no one but a cat who is less concerned about you than you are. You drink white wine and accidentally chip a tooth on the glass but you keep on drinking anyways.
Your stomach rumbles, a reminder that you’re in control, and you will let it rumble with every ounce of will you have left. You watch a show on Netflix about tiny homes, wondering why seemingly competent people would be willing to contort their bodies just to live in a shoebox.
Your days are weeks now and your family are voices lost in your voicemail. You sometimes call back when you know they’re not available and turn off your read receipts on your phone.
You text like Lazarus, back from the dead.
Everyone smiles if they see you in Wal-Mart but their well-wishes are tinged with an “Are you okay?” You thwart it, though, with a question about the baby, a soft touch on the arm, a general warm undertone that emanates from your malnourished skin.
“No, absolutely not,” your eyes struggle to say, but you swat them away, batting your lashes.
There’s a church you drive by where all the people are. You think about those people more than the people you actually know. What is so different about them that they can congregate every week, being their same selves, and not panicking or vomiting as they walk up the steps?
What’s so different about you that the notion plays like astrophysics in your head?
One day, you think, Maybe I’ll get there. Maybe, I’ll clean myself up, scrub off all the dust, and walk in like I’m my same self too.
There’s a tug deep, deep, deep. It’s inside of you as your eyes scan the out. You’ve sunk chin-deep in the tub. It’s the perfect scenario for your friend, Death, to come and whisper all the things you already know: you’re alone, you’re so hungry and tired. That cat won’t stop staring at you. Why don’t you just walk away? Let’s walk away together.
You sink, sink, sink, a little deeper than you thought you might. The water is warm. There’s a soft end to all the hard you’ve had to endure. Don’t you deserve it?
But then, a still, small voice. It says your name. How does it know your name? You push up, break the surface of your bath and look around, but the only thing you see is the cat staring back at you. Again, you hear your name, as if it were knitted long ago before your cells ached and danced. You want to hear your name forever, so you clutch onto it, wondering why it feels like it’s inscribed in your very DNA.
All the regrets under your eyes are there in the tub, and something guides your hand, removing the plug.
The water—it washes you clean as all the burden swirls down the drain.
Your heart finally has something to hold on to.
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
Psalm 34:18
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There was always a little bit of death on the pages of the books I read.
I think I wanted to nudge my toe against the thought, quickly jostling it with my foot and then bringing my foot back to safety.
What would it be like to die? What would it be like if those I loved died first?
Being an only child is not terrible.
One day, later on in life when I’m an adult and have a child of my own, a woman in one of our homeschooling groups will ask with a slight strain in her voice, “But my daughter’s an only child. Do you think she’ll be okay?”
I’ll try not to laugh. I’m not being cruel. I just think this lady is giving me far more credit than I’ve ever given myself.
Who on earth is ever okay?
We live in a fallen state of Eden—the beautiful world God created, doing an about-face to our own sense of evil.
I’ll tell her, “I was an only child and turned out relatively unscathed.” Then I’ll whisper softly about hearing the voices again and slowly back out of the room.
Kidding.
I think being an only child was beautifully lonely in a way that a lot of people will never have the chance to understand. I learned what being quiet meant. I learned what listening was.
I never opened my mouth to cut off someone else to get a word in edge-wise or thought what I had to say was more important.
And that’s only because I respected the integrity of allowing a moment to be free of my noise.
We don’t all always get that memo.
I sure wouldn’t have it weren’t for the reality of my circumstances: when I was alone in my room, there was no one there to hear me.
I had friends regardless of my lonely “only” status. Sometimes, friends who were only children themselves.
But more than friends, I had books.
Books were like friends but ones who sought you more than you sought them. They wanted to learn more about that quiet side of you—not to call it out as regrettable but to nurture it because here you are, a soul alone willing to know all of their pages.
I cried when Leslie Burke died and spent an entire evening looking for mixed-up files in a museum. I met an old wise man, The Giver they called him, and stared at the face of God with Margaret who kept asking if He was even there. I looked eagerly for the face on the milk carton and babysat so many kids, my kid kit contained nothing but crumbs and broken Crayons.
I grew and got older and met Sylvia the poet and her good friend, Anne, and made best friends with my own bleak existence in the company of Beckett, Kafka, and Camus.
I baked bread with the yeast of my yearning.
I eventually have an only child too. She’s so uninhibited, it feels like she’s twenty children in one.
At three, she talks to Jesus in her room, disturbing the hem of my atheism. I chalk it up to fairy tales. I blame it on her poor listening skills.
Doesn’t she know she’s supposed to honor the quiet with the weight of her silence?
But something is brought back as I watch her standing there at the edge of her doorframe.
Didn’t I always feel never alone, even at my loneliest?
Who else was there to listen to all the words I wished I could say?
The moment is long gone when the lady is fretting over her daughter, the one sentenced to a sibling-free life.
I think of what I’d say to her now, now that I know how the moments we let water our worry turn out to be nothing more than drops in the sea of time.
“Fine. She’ll be just fine,” I’d say, allowing no other option.
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I live inside the secret world of my father’s ambition.
Maybe it isn’t so secret.
How to describe Mel? I don’t know. I suppose if being a child meant my mother being the sun, then Mel was the moon. There was something about him that lived in me too. Perhaps, our drive.
Our want to leave this world for a better one.
Mel lives inside so many different spaces in my memory. My favorite space is always the early nineties where I look my worst but feel my best. I’m long-socked and crimped-banged and fanny-packed and have developed an absurd need to find and marry Macaulay Caulkin.
I like to think I’ve grown.
Some.
And Mel’s there too. He’s the skinny guy in the trucker hat and short shorts at my grandparents’ doublewide in Pangburn. He has a mustache but doesn’t take that or himself too seriously. I remember him joking and laughing and everyone saying his name, the type of blessing you never concede as one.
And then there’s the fish, all hanging dead-eyed on the lines ready to be scaled and gutted. Mel works with an electric meat carver and the smell is metallic, the sort of smell that should turn you off unless it reminds you of someone you love.
As I get older, Mel becomes more elusive. He is the man whose plans went sideways yet he still manages a shade of greatness. He was supposed to be a lawyer and then the governor of Arkansas, but God rescinded the memo. He would have been phenomenal at those things. And I think maybe that’s why God couldn’t let them happen.
We yearn for greatness and then become it. So who’s left to trust but ourselves?
Instead, he becomes a businessman—a national sales manager—and he travels the skies in a metal bird. I think a sliver of me misses him when he’s gone but whose heart yearns for the moon when the sun is still around?
We go on trips though. We go everywhere. Disney World and California, out to the desert, and then travel the waters on big boats with all-you-can-eat buffets.
Mel comes alive in these pockets of time because who doesn’t cut ties with reality when reality wasn’t invited?
As an adult, I want to go back in time and ask things like: “Are you stressed?” “Do you need a hug?” “What are you worrying about right now?”
But perspective is never tempting to a child.
As I get older, I write and Mel reads it—Mel, who’s an incredible writer himself. I’d read all his books if he ever got to write them, but again, I think this is something God knows about.
It reminds me of a story a friend told me once. How this man knows he’s to lead people to Jesus but he only leads one man to Christ. But that man becomes one of the greatest pastors the world has ever known.
Is that what’s happening to Mel? Is he pouring out all of himself into me because it’s spilling over and all the glasses are dirty?
I know the feeling.
I have a daughter now myself.
I grow and we grow apart. How did that ever happen? Because even in the times when he wasn’t around, he was always around.
He’s there teaching me tennis and basketball. He’s with me when I do my report on Kareem Abdul Jabar and when I buy my Sean Kemp sneakers. He suddenly pops up like a lone flower in a field at my volleyball games with his infamous hand-held camcorder. And I’m brokenhearted for all the generations who don’t know what it feels like to be forever esteemed on VHS.
But we both know there’s a boy. There was always “a boy” in that flighty heart of mine, and how I wish I could go back there, down the bleachers and past the screams of sweat-stained parents to meet me on the court and rip that heart right out.
Time passes, and I get older. I hear that happens a lot. And I see the same things my father saw. We sit on that bright edge of darkness, weighing it with words. For so long we watered those seeds of ambition only to realize they grew nothing but weeds. We’ve pulled them out, the roots dangling in front of our faces, and buried them with all the hope and desire that haunt our human flesh.
They say you relate to God in how you relate to your father. So maybe that’s why I’m always in awe or talk to Him like we’re just two souls sharing a skiff. All the fish are alive and well and swimming.
But still, I can smell the scent of something we never lost but will never get back again.
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There’s always the checkbox. It asks me if I’m Caucasian, and I say yes. And then it asks me if I’m of Hispanic descent.
I sometimes say yes. And sometimes say no.
I am. So I’m a liar but only sometimes.
I’m fair-skinned. No, that’s an understatement. I’m paper-thin white, a lovely shade you don’t often see soaking in the sun. I do tan, which I suppose is due to my Hispanic descent, the heritage I often avoid on most official documentation.
Sometimes, I guess I just don’t feel worthy.
What would this privileged white girl know about anything like that?
The thing I remember most about my grandfather was his hands. He had part of his finger chopped off when the hood of an airplane came crashing down and smashed his fingertip. That happened when I was old enough to process it. I felt like I lost my own fingertip too.
Another thing about his hands was how brown they were. When I was young I was in love with Rudy Huxtable. I wanted nothing more in life than to be Rudy Huxtable. And I figured my grandfather was my ticket to truly embracing my African American roots. And when I discussed this with him, he just shook his head and said, “Sorry, I’m Mexican.”
That blow was as painful as losing a fingertip.
My grandfather told me a story once. When he joined the Air Force, they’d bus him from Eagle Pass, Texas (which was where he was from) all the way to Little Rock, Arkansas at the Jackson Air Force base. The first time he headed back home on that bus, he had to wait at the bus stop. He remembered walking inside, looking for a seat, and seeing two signs. One said “Whites” and the other said “Coloreds.” He told me he looked down at his hand then back at the signs and then back at his hands. He chose the sign that said “Coloreds.”
He went to sit down, and a white gentleman stopped him and said, “No son, you’re with us.”
So he went with the white man and sat with all the other white people and pretended nothing about what had just happened was the least bit confusing.
I got a nosebleed once. Well, not only once. I suppose several times in my small lifetime. But this one time, when I was five, I was watching the Miss America pageant with my grandfather and a slow red trickle of myself trailed down my lip. My grandfather told me to lie down, so I did, and he put a cold washcloth on my forehead. I watched his brown hands hover above my face—the cool feel of terrycloth against my skin—and noticed his fingers, long and whole.
It would only be a matter of time.
In the back of my grandfather’s car, I watched the world go by. We were going somewhere on the highway, my grandmother sitting in the passenger seat. We were listening to the “oldies,” the sounds of their youth, and I’d study the side glimpses of their faces, making my brain see them as maybe they once were.
And as I looked out to my left, two young white guys were shouting and throwing up their hands at my grandfather who hadn’t been doing anything wrong. But my grandfather just ignored them, staring straight ahead, and all my brain could process now was the brown of his skin.
In the sixth grade, my social studies teacher was teaching us about the ethnic makeup of the greater Houston area. We were taught that the Mexicans lived on “the other side of the tracks.” I never understood where these tracks were or how I was never aware they even existed. You would have thought I would have at least received a memo.
Later on, a cherished family member would talk about her maid, about how this maid was Mexican, and how she lived on “the other side of the tracks,” and I told her how I was part Mexican.
“Oh well, you’re a different kind,” she said, smiling reassuringly.
I don’t talk to my grandfather anymore, for reasons that I won’t go into here. I love him, I forgive him. I pray for him weekly. And losing him, I suppose, hurts much worse than losing a fingertip.
I struggle with myself sometimes, as if the two versions of me are shouldering their way to the forefront. I want to be something I am, but I don’t know the least thing about being something I’m not. How presumptuous to check a box that holds all my stories. But then my skin. How it always betrays me.
At least the One who created it never will.
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I wrote my first novel when I graduated college. I decided to shop it, and lo and behold, an agent was interested. I WAS INSANELY PUMPED. That is until I went to email him the first fifty pages only to find the last half of my manuscript had randomly deleted itself. So much hypothetical vomit. […]
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Oh what a fool I’ve been when you’ve kissed my lips, and I keep looking to the sun as if the sun is You. Just call me Gomer, girl gone wrong and off the beaten track, lost and lonely in Your wilderness. If only I’d look up to seek You. I’ve broken my own heart […]
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It’s in between the little bit of light and little bit of dark, the heaven-prone edge of my eye where I see it all unfolding. And as a tiny, hurt little heart, You’d think I’d want to run away, be something that’s nothing like a heart at all. And You’d be right. But there’s this […]
I am like fire and tar, burnt out and stuck to the pavement. I’m leftover and left out and everything in between. But you see, there’s a strange culture here, a community, an entire ecosystem where the world thrives around me, and I wither away. I was planted here, but my roots don’t grow. My […]
Like a dog returns to his vomit… Oh, that hits home. The Book of Proverbs hits the head on the nail when it comes to defining fools. And I often feel like my picture needs to be plastered all over it. For the most part, I tend to err on the side of discernment. I […]