A place to begin.
I have long known that I have a story to tell. Year after year, I would grow frustrated at myself, restless with this mission, feeling like it was just another idea on the grand list of ideas I would never finish. Someday, I would write. Someday, I would declare in conversation. And then, never that day.
The three children that we are raising are surrounded by beautiful stories, poetry, Shakespeare, and grammatical promptings. They have all announced that they will be authors. My horse loving daughter dreams of being a farmer and a writer. My daydreaming son only hopes to create video games, characters, and stories for all his days. My youngest, well, she is going to be a vet/fashion designer/author who lives in Paris. I will admit, I have believed that they will write books before I do. But, isn't there something so deeply inspiring about fostering a new generation of poets and storytellers. That feels like noble work, yes, but it's not quite enough for me.
It has only been on this prolonged journey to "someday" that I am learning. The story I would have told ten years ago would have been flat and heavily romanticized. It would have been unremarkable as far as personal histories go. People could comment, Is this what you call suffering? Do you call that struggle? In some ways they might be correct, but I am not interested in the battles of ultimate victimization that hurting minds play. I prefer redemption.
To discover redemption in a story, we almost always have to go back and travel that road again. We are generally blind to the angels that lead us, to the roadblocks that could ensure demise. We rarely understand our good fortune until we are brave enough to see what could have been.
I am thirty-six years old and there are a countless places to begin, all of them winding and interwoven, but I will start with a dream.
When I was young, I had this reoccurring dream. I was a lone passenger in the back seat of a car. The car was locked in reverse. The car was swiftly rolling down a narrow road, winding this way and that, picking up speed and always, absolutely always in my view was the place where that road ended at the edge of an ominous cliff. I felt helpless and terrified of the very impending doom that was sure to be my fate. There was no way to stop the car. I would reach the cliff and plummet below into the water.
My heart skips a beat as I recall this familiar and frantic feeling. I always woke up in a start, just seconds before any demise. I woke up and breathed deep relief. It wasn't real, just a dream.
Except.
One day in December, I was traveling down the road filled with memories. As an artist and dramatic soul, I am prone to ponder things like the ever-changing expanse of the universe and other existential matters, usually including at least one great abyss. I have been trudging through the memories of my childhood and often my parent's tumultuous marriage and inevitable divorce.
I had a happy childhood and two wonderful parents. With a family of seven, there was always a brother and finally, a sister to join in adventures or instigate a fight. We had plenty of woodland adventures with sightings of bears, collecting worms and moss by the creak, building forts, and finding hidden lakes. We were free range children, when that was still just called childhood. We rode our bikes to the gas station for treats. We played football and baseball in the yard. There were snow igloos and sledding hills, canoe trips and the beach. We watched every Harrison Ford action movie that ever existed. My dad wrote stories on a typewriter that he read us at night and when we sat on the couch, never crossing the line of our own cushions, he read the Bible. He took us to Narnia and other exotic lands. My mom worked tirelessly to care for her large family. We always had a warm dinner, usually, meat and potatoes, and casseroles, so many. There were cookies and treats, if you got to them before all the boys and we were generously and lavishly loved.
In the years that we homeschooled, our work was simple and we were encouraged to be our own captains of industry, meaning, school took as long as you decided it would take and the great outdoors was waiting, so don't waste your day inside. That would be your own fault. There was a piano for lessons and various gallons of paint from the clearance aisle for creating whatever I wanted on my bedroom walls. All my life, there were three mysterious oil paintings and one battered old tin of paints-- and a mother who only painted furniture and walls.
We were the ideal, Christian family.
Except.
Well, all the above was true.
And so was this.
My parents both hailed from small Northern towns in Michigan and Minnesota. Both children of alcoholic fathers, they left home as soon as possible and set out of the wide world of possibility to never become like their own parents. They met in Bible college, my dad was 17 and my mom was 23. Through what is still a confusing and incredibly brief span of time, they drove to a different state that did not require parental consent and married. My brother was born the following year.
For the purpose of this episode, I will summarize. All of the above was true, but also-- the following. In 12 years, my father burned all the bridges of distinctive careers, not just jobs. He was a minister, then a police officer, and finally became a salesman. These jobs ended as well was the phrase "burned bridges" might suggest. My parents moved at least a dozen times, before I was nine, when we bought and built our first home-- which was the last home.
Five children, multiple career transitions, and countless moves. Add in depression on both accounts. Depression that looked like the world's greatest dad one day and the one who slept till noon the next. Depression that looked like struggles with food and losing oneself in motherhood to escape unhappiness. Behaviors that looked like praising one child and belittling another.
The money stress alone of that previous paragraph would be daunting for a couple with a strong foundation, but pain and darkness wedged deep into those quiet places and created fractures that formed early.
The church said mental health was a lie of the devil and pride said, look at our perfect Christian family. Look at our nice, big house on land and all our cars. So, they swept the pain and brokenness into the dark places and those shadows filled the house with rage that roared through the vents and rattled the walls of our home at night. I brought my younger siblings into my room and we waited together until silence came.
How many families suffered that same fate, because pride didn't allow Christians to be wounded and broken? How many hearts have been rendered as stone, because we did not allow God to be the healer that we sang him to be in church, three times, every damn week. And when this pain became too great a burden to bear, when fractures resulted in collapse and failure, when surrender in a losing battle looked like divorce, how many families were met with hushed whispers, oh you, you're not welcome here. God hates divorce.
I would argue that God hates for his children to be swallowed up in pain, consumed with fear, and deceived by lies. I am almost certain that God's heart breaks for the people who struggle with monsters of depression, but believe they must continue to hide among their tormentors, at the risk of shame. He weeps for the children of alcoholic fathers, whose hearts were imprinted like wet cement in their earliest years. I imagine that He detests the spirit of an age that cries for more wealth, for an "American dream," that will leave you enslaved and barely breathing.
I am certain that God sees divorce and He is waiting with open arms for beloved and wounded souls to find refuge and healing.
I was in college when this inevitable turn of events split apart my family and I had long since stopped having that dream. However, it was only this past December that I understood it. It's always been easy for me to see la vie en rose, the world in rose colored glasses. So I collected all the best parts, painted that picture and told that story.
What I can see now is that no matter how much golden-hazed goodness I squeezed out of my childhood during the day, in my sleep, my subconscious screamed of the very real threat of impending doom. Perpetually inching nearer to the cliff and I could do nothing.
Except, yes, another except.
The reason we can't tell stories before it is time, is that we have not yet begun to see them in full light.
And as I begin to look back on an illuminated past, light shining in the darkest corners and lowest valleys, I recall something my mom always said. It is only by the grace of God that any of you are okay. She said it all the time. Only the grace of God. I, so foolishly, cast that aside as a rather dramatic declaration. How could I have known? Things looked pretty golden and rosy to me.
The day that I understood that dream, I broke into heavy, heaving tears for a child who carried all the fears in the dark and faced each day in hope. I shed tears for shattered illusions that I could no longer see, because it wasn't real. Yes, there were so many beautiful parts, but there were so many lurking shadows. As my tears fell, I saw this picture of my very favorite poem. I thought I knew the reason I loved it and the ways it moved my soul. I thought I knew. We always think we know until we are dazzled by love.
I saw my tears falling, one by one into a forest, completely connected by this dark net.
you, the forest that always surrounded us,
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