The next few days spooled out like so many weeks that had come before. Joel worked ten-hour days. I fell into my usual autopilot mommy mode. The minutes played out at the same pace they had for months. My head had returned to the same fuzzy space I’d been operating in. I didn’t make many inroads to improve my communication with Joel, nor did we find a chance to be creative with our time together. But I did try to be less critical of him and of myself.
It lifted my spirits to think that Christy, Sierra, Emily, and Tess would be coming over on Thursday. All five of us hadn’t met since before Thanksgiving. I was certain none of them had any idea what a lifeline they had been to me.
My wonderful mother-in-law volunteered to take Eden to ballet on Monday. Eden was excited, and I was grateful for the break. I put Alex down for a late nap and used the free time to take a bath. I will never again underestimate the value of a luxurious twenty-minute soak with lavender bath salts while being enveloped by spa music.
The evening got even better when Joel said he would bring dinner home. Grilled salmon with asparagus and wild rice drizzled with Joel’s perfect aioli sauce—my favorite dish on the menu at the Blue Ginger. We put on a movie after the kids were in bed. It had been a long time since we’d had such a leisurely evening.
“Thank you for bringing dinner, Joel. It was perfect.”
Joel leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “Thanks for all the encouraging things you’ve been saying to me the last few days.”
I wasn’t sure what he was referring to. They only thing I was aware of was that I’d made an effort not to say the words, “you’re never here” or “if you were home more.” He hated it when I used those phrases, and they had served only as a wedge to separate us over the past few months.
Joel leaned over and kissed my forehead, my eyebrow, my cheek. I cuddled closer. He turned down the volume and encircled me in his arms.
“I love you,” he murmured. Joel’s kisses were soothing and persuasive, and I welcomed them. I wanted him to keep kissing me, captivating me.
“I’ve missed you,” he said.
We kissed more intensely, and I started crying the sort of languid tears that come from the deepest wellspring of the heart and are barely noticeable by sight or sound.
Joel drew back, trying to read my expression. “What’s wrong?” He looked at me the way he had many times over the last few years. I knew he was trying, really trying, to be patient and to understand my ever-shifting emotions.
“Nothing.” I blinked and tried to fix my gaze on his dark eyes that were studying me from beneath his thick eyelashes.
He turned off the TV, slipped his hand in mine, and led me upstairs, pausing halfway to draw our joined hands to his lips. He kissed my wrist, my forearm, and the back of my hand.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asked.
I nodded and managed to say, “I’ve missed you.”
He paused before lifting my chin and kissing me tenderly. I responded with a long and lingering kiss. It had been far too long since we had shared a moment like this.
The next morning the welcoming fragrance of rich French roast coffee roused me from my faraway dream and enticed me to return to the real world. My eyelids fluttered open.
“Morning, beautiful.” Joel turned on the soft light on the nightstand. He smiled and smoothed back my hair. The mug of steaming coffee waited next to the lamp. I noticed he was already shaven and dressed.
“You’re not going to work already, are you?” I propped myself up and squinted to see the clock. “Is it really only 5:30? Are the kids awake?”
“Not yet.”
“Joel…” I reached for his arm but didn’t know what to say. Stay? I love you? Don’t leave me? Can’t you call in sick?
He paused, a half-grin rising on his lips. I knew it amused him that I was not a morning person. I never understood how he could be so coherent and cheerful before the sun was up.
“Joel, I…”
He kissed me on the forehead. “I know. Me too. See you this afternoon.”
His exit was as quiet as could be, but as soon as the front door closed behind him, I heard Alex call out from his crib. With a sigh, I tossed back the comfy bedding and swung my bare legs over the edge of the bed.
Back to my real life.
Joel didn’t come home until after the kids were in bed that night. It was the longest day I could remember him ever working. As soon as I heard the front door open, I left the dishwasher halfway unloaded and went to meet him.
“Hi! What a long day for you!”
“It was rough.”
“What happened?” I reached out to take his hand.
He gave my hand a squeeze and let go. “Just a lot going on with the new chef and some other employee issues.”
“You want to talk about anything?”
“No.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No. I’m going take a shower and go to bed.” He paused on the third stair and turned to look at me. “You okay?”
I nodded and forced a close-lipped smile.
He seemed to believe me and continued his climb.
I stood in the entryway for a few minutes, evaluating my options. I tried to see things from Joel’s perspective and knew I shouldn’t let my feelings be hurt. I’d fallen into that rut too many times.
It didn’t take long for me to finish the dishes. I decided this would be a good time to think about a word for the year since the DOEs were coming over in two days. I settled into my favorite corner of the sofa, with my Bible and my barely used journal on my lap. In the past, I’d followed Christy’s pattern of asking God for a word and then looking up the verses where that word appeared. It seemed like a good way to pick a word once again.
I felt both expectant and hypocritical, sitting in my quiet house, about to ask God for a word. I wanted God to lead me and reveal Himself to me. Like nearly everything else in my life, though, my relationship with God had been set on cruise control. As much as I wanted to ask Him for a word, I didn’t feel right asking for anything right now.
With the dishwasher’s faint whirling sound in the background, I closed my eyes and prayed the longest prayer my heart had managed to pour out in months. I felt a sense of calm. The quiet always made me think of God’s love, and I suddenly realized why. It was because of my mom’s favorite Bible verse, the one my dad had engraved on her headstone. I opened my Bible to Zephaniah 3:17, where I’d underlined it years ago.
The LORD your God in your midst,
The Mighty One, will save;
He will rejoice over you with gladness,
He will quiet you with His love,
He will rejoice over you with singing.
The beefy fist of grief came at me in a rush and sucker punched me in the gut. I should have realized how this passage would affect me. I gave into the pain and folded over, releasing a shoulder-shaking waterfall of tears.
I don’t know how long I’d been crying before I looked up and reached for tissues from the box on the coffee table. The purging had waited a long time to be released. I felt spent. Bone weary and solemn. The house was quiet. Joel was undoubtedly asleep by now. I was alone and felt the thickness of the mantle of solitude as it covered me.
Drawing in a breath for courage, I reminded myself how much my mother loved God. She often told others how she surrendered her life to Christ on her fortieth birthday and how she wished she hadn’t waited so long. She loved well. I wanted to love others the way she did, with kindness and generosity.
Love.
The word settled on me with a sense of finality.
Is that my word, Lord? Is love my theme for this year?
I wrote the word LOVE in large swirly letters in my journal and then wrote my mom’s verse in block letters, underlining the words He will quiet you with His love. I
put down my pen and felt exhausted. Poured out.
Putting everything aside, I turned off the lights and stretched out with my favorite cozy throw blanket covering me. I slept all night on the sofa because I didn’t want to leave this space. I felt close to my mom there and closer to God than I had felt in a long time.
The next morning I was up before everyone else. The kids woke soon after. I made some coffee and started cooking oatmeal before Joel came down. He greeted me with a warm kiss, but I didn’t think he realized I hadn’t slept beside him all night or that I was wearing the same clothes I had worn the day before.
“There’s something we need to talk about, Jennalyn.” He leaned against the kitchen counter and held his coffee mug with both hands.
“Okay.” I spooned oatmeal into Alex’s eager mouth. “What is it?”
“Let’s talk tonight. After the kids go down.” His expression didn’t appear as serious as his tone, so I wasn’t sure which of the two was the stronger clue about what he wanted to discuss.
All day I wished I hadn’t agreed to wait. A slew of possible topics bumped around in my thoughts, and lots of them made me feel anxious.
When our conversation finally started a little after eight o’clock that night, I had narrowed down the possible topics to a short list. Ninety percent of them had a negative vibe. Joel appeared calm. He was stretched out in the recliner with the footrest up. I had made cappuccinos with our fancy machine just in case his mystery topic fell into the ten percent possibility of happy thoughts, the way our cappuccino conversations used to be.
“Everything is going to change, you know,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Our lives. Vincent is working out great. His training is almost over, and we’re ready to bring him on board. This is what we’ve been waiting for.”
“Oh.” I leaned back. “That’s wonderful. I was afraid you were going to tell me something was falling apart somewhere.”
“No. It’s all finally coming together, not falling apart.” Joel smiled. “So I’ve been thinking we should take a vacation.”
I blinked and let his words sink in. Of all the topics I had sorted through that day, “vacation” wasn’t one of them.
“Now that I can finally take some time off, I thought we should get away for a while and recharge. We haven’t taken a vacation since…”
“Since our honeymoon?”
Joel leaned back. “You’re right. That weekend in San Francisco for my cousin’s wedding wasn’t exactly a vacation.”
“No, it wasn’t. I don’t think going anywhere with a teething baby can be considered a vacation.”
“True. So…” Joel’s eyes locked on mine. “What do you think about going to Hawaii?”
It was as if he had just tossed a handful of confetti into my life. “Hawaii? Really?”
Joel grinned and handed me his phone. “Todd told me about this the other night, and I think we should go.”
I swiped through the website’s images of pristine blue water, palm trees, and rows of vacant lounge chairs on a white sandy beach. I scrolled back to the top to see the name of the resort and saw the title of the website. All the glittering confetti in my mind vanished.
“The Marriage Rigorous Renewal Conference?”
“It’s being held at a four-star resort. They have speakers at night and workshops in the morning. We’ll have the afternoons free.”
“You think we need to check into some sort of marriage rehab?”
Joel looked hurt. “It’s not rehab. It’s a retreat. A couples retreat. Did you see the workshop topics? I thought the ones on ‘Managing Expectations’ and ‘Parenting as a Team’ would be helpful for us.”
I placed his phone on the coffee table and tried to think of the right thing to say.
“What’s wrong? Why don’t you like the idea?” Joel seemed stunned by my reaction. “I thought you would be all over this.”
How could I explain to him that going someplace to work on our marriage was not my idea of a vacation, even if the destination was a tropical island I always had wanted to visit?
Joel added, “Todd said he and Christy are thinking about going to the one over Easter vacation in April. I thought…”
“Christy and Todd are going?” I reached for his phone and had another look at the dates and the resort photos.
“Whoa! What was that?”
“What?” I looked up.
“I tell you about the retreat, and you act offended. I tell you Christy and Todd are going, and suddenly you’re interested.”
“Joel, when you said, ‘Let’s go to Hawaii,’ I thought you meant let’s go on a cruise or rent a condo on the beach or something. I didn’t expect you to be pitching a marriage conference. Especially one with the word rigorous in its name.”
“What’s wrong with getting some help? Especially with our communication? We obviously need help in that area.”
“We do.”
“I thought it would be good for us. I honestly thought you would want to go.”
“I do! I want to go. I would love to go to Hawaii.” My eyes suddenly filled with tears as a herd of rogue hormones broke loose and ran amuck.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Why do you always say ‘nothing’? It’s obviously something.”
“I don’t know. It’s everything lately. It creeps up on me, and I feel overwhelmed.”
“By what?”
“Hormones. Exhaustion. Grief.” I wiped my eyes and tried to reign in my emotions.
“Grief?” Joel picked out what must have seemed like the least expected word in the lineup.
I nodded and drew in a wobbly breath. “I’ve been wanting to tell you. I keep thinking about my mom. Little things pop up that remind me of her. I miss her. A lot. Last night I was reading the verse that’s on her gravestone, and I couldn’t stop crying.”
He lowered the footrest and came over to sit beside me, pulling me close so that my head could rest on his shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because…” I didn’t want to say it was because he was never home.
He stroked my hair and kissed the top of my head.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. I reached for another tissue and felt calmed. The tears had come quickly, like a springtime shower, and ceased just as fast. It wasn’t like the deluge that had poured out the night before. Still, I felt exhausted. “Grief is a thug,” I said as if it were my closing statement.
“Maybe we should get some sleep,” Joel suggested. “We can talk about all this later. If you would rather rent a condo somewhere or go on a cruise, we can do that. I just thought it would be good for us to get away. Just the two of us, without the kids.”
“I agree.”
Joel stood and stretched out his hand. “Come on.”
Chapter 4
The next evening Christy was the first to arrive for our Daughters of Eve gathering. I was glad she was early because it gave me a chance to ask if she and Todd were planning to go to the retreat.
“If you asked Todd, he would say yes, we’re going. But I don’t see how we can. It’s so expensive. He’s planning to take on side work to earn the extra money.” Christy looked embarrassed. “I got mad when he told me because I want him home with us on the weekends, not painting houses or making benches out of surfboards.”
“I get that.”
“I know you do. The deadline for registration is March 21. Todd thinks we can save up enough before then.” Christy sat on a stool at the kitchen counter. “You know what this means?”
“You won’t see your husband for the next six weeks?”
“Yes. There is that. It also means that my word for the year is already waving over my life.”
I tried to remember what she had told m
e at her house last week. Lately my memory was so fragmented.
“Trust.” Christy graciously filled in my memory gap without missing a beat. “This is my first chance this year to trust God for something that seems impossible. Well, not impossible, but definitely something outside the norm. Something I can’t control.”
I nodded. “I think I have control issues too. As soon as Joel brought up the idea of a vacation, I wanted to change the plan to something different, like a cruise. Why do I do that? Why couldn’t I just let my husband be happy and tell me all about his ideas for our vacation?”
Christy seemed to be contemplating a response while I filled the electric kettle with water. Before she had a reply, a knock sounded at the front door. Christy smiled. “That’s definitely an Emily knock. I’ll get it.”
The two of them returned to the kitchen, and I felt instantly warmed by Emily’s trademark gentle smile.
“It’s so good to see you,” I said as we hugged. “It’s been months!”
“I know,” Emily agreed. “I’m glad you set this up. I’ve missed being with everyone.”
She was standing by the stove, and it struck me that, for the first time in more than a year, Emily and I were together in the same spot where she had held me while Alex made an early entrance into this world. Ours was the most unconventional beginning to a friendship ever. I was home alone when my water broke, and in the quick shuffle, I fell and twisted my ankle. The terror that came from the pain in my foot and my inability to stand up was intensified when I went into labor on the kitchen floor that December morning.
Like an angel, Emily had showed up unexpectedly at just the right moment. She bolstered me up and coached me while the two paramedics handled things efficiently, as if they assisted emergency deliveries every day.
Calm, shy Emily had infused me with her strength in that frightening moment. She convinced me everything was going to be okay, and it was. For such a petite woman, she was an emotional stronghold and added so much to our group.
I heard the front door open with a quick knock added as an afterthought. The atmosphere in my whole house changed when free-spirited Sierra made a grand entrance, having let herself in as usual.
Being Known Page 3