Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Flatiron Books ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For Grandma Alice, whose fingers danced across those beads and brought Mary to me
I am not afraid … I was born to do this.
—JOAN OF ARC
Prelude
IT’S ALMOST TIME. My father and I stand at the edge of a long white carpet, laid just this morning over the freshly cut grass. Craig’s childhood backyard is transformed by the start of fall and the promise this day holds. My shoulders are bare and I feel a chill, so I lift my face toward the sun. I squint and the sun, leaves, and sky melt together into a kaleidoscope of blue, green, and orange. The leaves, my soon-to-be husband, our families sitting upright in their dressiest clothes, and I—we are all turning into something else. We are becoming new. It’s a becoming day.
We wait for the music to play so we can begin the short, forever walk toward Craig. I watch him, standing at the end of the carpet looking handsome, young, and nervous. He adjusts his tie, clasps his hands in front of him, then pushes them into his pockets. After a moment he pulls his hands back out, pressing them to his sides like a soldier. He looks untethered, and I wish I could go to him now and hold his restless hands. But my hands are occupied: One is in my father’s hand and the other is on my belly. I’m a bridge between my past and future. While I watch Craig, the guests turn to watch me. I feel embarrassed by their attention—fraudulent, like I’m pretending to be a bride. My dress is too tight around my waist and I’m wearing fake eyelashes, a rhinestone tiara, and heels like stilts. I am more costumed than I am dressed. But this is what a bride is supposed to look like, and since the day I decided to become sober and a mother, I’ve been trying to become who I’m supposed to be.
Our music begins and my dad squeezes my hand. I look up at his face. He smiles and says, “Here we go, sweetheart.” He wraps his arm around my arm so that all of him is holding up all of me. As I walk with my father I start to feel dizzy, so I shift my eyes toward my sister. She is standing to the left of the minister in a flaming red dress. Her hair is pinned up, her back is straight, and her certainty is a flood that drowns out my fear. If there is anyone in charge here, it’s her. She is smiling at me, and her fierce, steady eyes say: If you keep walking—I’m here to stand beside you. If you turn around and run, I’ll follow and we’ll never look back. Whatever you do right now, Sister, you’re fine. I’m here. This is what she has been telling me since she was born. You are fine. I am here.
I keep walking. When we reach the end of the carpet, the minister says, “Who presents this woman to be married?” My dad answers, “Her mother and I do.” My father passes my hand to Craig, who accepts it because that is what he’s supposed to do. Then my dad is gone and Craig and I are facing each other and holding each other’s shaking hands. Our hands are a trembling pile. I look down and wonder which one of us will steady the other. We need a third person to still our hands. I look at my sister, but she can’t help now. There is no third person. This is what marriage is.
When it’s time to say our vows, I tell Craig that he is my proof that God knows me and loves me. Craig nods and then vows to put me before all others for the rest of his life. I look into his eyes and accept his promise on behalf of me and our baby. The minister says, “I now pronounce you: Mr. and Mrs. Melton.” It’s done. I am a new person. Mrs. Melton. I hope I will be better as her. I hope I become. That is the hope of everyone in the backyard.
I set out to write the story of my marriage. The first time I wrote it, I started with the wedding day, because that’s when I thought marriage began. This assumption was my mistake.
We’ll get back to my wedding day and all the terrible magic that followed, but for now, let’s begin at the beginning. It’s our only choice, it turns out.
PART ONE
1
I WAS LOVED. If love could prevent pain, I’d never have suffered. My leather baby book with Glennon branded on the front is one long poem written by my father and filled with pictures of my tender-faced mother holding my pink, flaky, braceleted hand. About my birth, my father wrote:
It really wasn’t
a cry
That first noise
It was a fanfare
Announcing a marvel
That will never
Be
Repeated
There are no satin sheets
There are no handmaidens
No emissaries with jewels
No trumpets or announcements
Where are they!
Don’t they know what
Happened here?!
A princess has arrived.
I was loved. Just like my daughter is loved. And still, one evening, she sat on the edge of my bed, looked up at me with naked brown eyes, and said, “I’m big, Mama. I’m bigger than the other girls. Why am I different? I want to be small again.” Her words came out jagged, like she hated to break this to me, like she was ashamed to reveal her hidden truth. I took in her tears, pigtails, lip gloss, and the dirt on her hands—left over from climbing the banyan tree in our front yard. I scanned my mind for a response worthy of her, but there was nothing to find. Everything I’d learned about bodies, womanhood, power, and pain scattered upon hearing how my little girl said the word big. Like big was her curse, her irrefutable condition, her secret, her fall from grace. Like big was something inevitably unfolding inside of her that threatened her contract with the world.
My daughter was not asking: How will I deal with my body size? My daughter was asking: How will I survive being this particular type of person in this particular type of world? How will I stay small like the world wants me to? And if I keep growing, how will anyone love me? I looked at my daughter and I did not say But you do not look big, honey. She didn’t, but neither do I. I’ve never looked big a day in my life. No matter. My daughter and I pay attention. We know what the world wants from us. We know we must decide whether to stay small, quiet, and uncomplicated or allow ourselves to grow as big, loud, and complex as we were made to be. Every girl must decide whether to be true to herself or true to the world. Every girl must decide whether to settle for adoration or fight for love. There on the bed, in her pigtails and pain, my daughter was me—the little girl I once was, the woman I am now, still struggling to answer the questions: How can I be expansive and free and still be loved? Am I going to be a lady or am I going to be fully human? Do I trust the unfolding and continue to grow, or do I shut all of this down so I fit?
* * *
I am four years old and my father is a football coach at our neighborhood high school. On game night, my mom bundles me up in a fluffy coat, earmuffs, and mittens. When she’s done, she kneels in front of me and admires her work. She is pleased. She moves her hands to my cheeks, pulls my face toward hers, and kisses my nose. Together we wrap my baby sister, Amanda, in a puffy snowsuit. Amanda is our gift, and my mom and I spend all day wrapping and unwrapping her. When she’s dressed, we take turns leaning over and kissing her cheeks while she kicks and giggles—he
r arms jutting straight out from her sides like a starfish.
We pile into our van, drive to the high school, and listen as leaves crunch under our boots during our walk toward the stadium. As we climb the popcorn-littered stairs, the drum of the marching band fills my chest, the smell of hot dogs fills my lungs, and the roar of the crowd fills my head. The night is thumping chaos, but my mittened hand is safe inside my mother’s and she guides me forward. When we reach the entrance, the ticket ladies smile, put their hands over their hearts, and say, “Aren’t you three the most precious things?” They wave us in, because we are the coach’s girls, so we don’t have to pay. Mom and I smile at the ladies, say thank you, and together we join the crowd under the bright stadium lights. When they see us, the students and parents collectively hush and step aside. A path appears. Quiet reverence is the world’s response to my mother’s beauty. When people see her, they pause and wait, full of hope, until her eyes rest upon them. Her eyes always do. My mother takes her time with people. Strangers give her their attention and she returns it. She is a queen who reigns with kindness. This is why people stare. They look because she’s lovely, but they stare because she’s love. I am always studying my mother and I am always watching other people watch my mother. She is such a beautiful child, strangers say to my mother daily. I have to learn what to do because beauty is a responsibility. People expect so much of it, it seems.
My childhood beauty is apparent in pictures: golden brown ringlets to my waist, porcelain skin, a smile as wide as the horizon, and bright hazel eyes. When strangers admire me, I practice returning their attention. I understand that beauty is a form of kindness. It is for giving away, and I try to be generous. In an attempt to maintain balance, my parents often remind me that I’m smart. I’m an early reader and, at four, converse like an adult. But I soon realize that smart is more complicated than beautiful. Strangers come close and pat my curls, but when I speak to them with confidence and clarity, their eyes widen and they pull back. They are drawn in by my smile but repelled by my boldness. They recover quickly by laughing, but the pulling away is done. I have felt it. They wanted to adore me and I complicated things by inserting myself into their experience of me. I begin to understand that beauty warms people and smart cools people. I also understand that being loved for beauty is a tenuous situation for a girl. Years later, when I become less beautiful, when I no longer have regal ringlets to pat or perfect skin to admire, when I’m no longer small and simple and precious, I wonder how I’ll ever be worthy of offering or receiving love. Losing my beauty will feel like a fall from grace, rendering me useless. It will be as if I have not kept my end of the deal and the whole world is disappointed in me. Without beauty, what do I have left to warm people with?
But for now, the three of us are still perfect. We snuggle into the stands and cheer for our team together. When the game is over, I run onto the field because my dad is looking for me, always looking for me. I run through the players’ padded legs toward my father and he lifts me up above his head. His players step aside to give us room. We spin until the stadium lights and the crowd blend together and the whole world is a blur. All that’s clear is my dad below me. He puts me down, and while I steady myself I see that my mom and sister have made their way to us. As she approaches, my mom shines all her brilliance at my dad. She is brighter and more powerful than all the stadium lights combined. My dad hugs her with both arms and then takes our starfish baby and kisses her cheeks. The four of us are an island. This celebration happens after every game, whether we’ve won or lost. We are my dad’s victory. We turn and process out through the crowd—no longer an island, now a parade—and people smile and wave and the four of us hold hands and sing the high school’s fight song all the way back to the van.
* * *
I’m ten years old and trying to disappear into the corner of the velour couch in my grandmother’s living room. My cousins chase each other from room to room, a tornado of squeals and skin. It’s summer and most of them are wearing bathing suits, as if that’s easy. Their bodies are light and wispy and they seem to float and flit together, in a unit—like a school of fish. They play together but playing requires a loss of self-consciousness and togetherness requires a sense of belonging. I have neither, so I can’t join them. I am not a fish. I am heavy and solitary and separate, like a whale. This is why I stay sunken into the couch and watch.
As I clutch my now-empty bowl of potato chips and lick the salt off my fingers, an aunt passes by and notices me. She looks from me to my cousins and says, “Why don’t you want to play, Glennon?” She’s noticed that I don’t belong. I feel ashamed. “I’m just watching,” I say. She smiles and with kind amusement says, “I like your eye shadow.” My hand goes to my face as I remember the purple eye shadow my cousin Caren applied that morning. On the car ride from our Virginia home to Ohio, excitement swelled in my chest because this would be the year I’d return a different girl. During this trip, Caren would make me over, change me into someone who looked like her, smelled like her, flitted like her. She would make me beautiful again. So that morning I sat on Caren’s bedroom floor surrounded by curling irons and makeup, waiting to be transformed. When she finished, she held up a mirror and I tried to smile while my heart sank. My eyelids were smeared with purple and my cheeks were pink, but I just looked like me wearing my cousin’s makeup. And that is why my aunt looks amused instead of impressed. I smile and say, “I was just about to wash it off.” I put my bowl down and pull myself up and off the couch.
I climb my grandmother’s stairs, walk into the bathroom, and lock the door behind me. I decide to take a bath, because the bathtub is my hiding place. I start the water and the downstairs voices fade. When the tub fills, I peel off my clothes, climb in, and float there for a while. Then I close my eyes and sink beneath the surface. I open my eyes to my underneath, underwater world—so quiet, so far away, so safe. My hair swirls around my shoulders and I reach up to touch it. It feels like silk, and I imagine I look just like a mermaid under here. I come up for air and then back under, back underneath. Eventually the water gets cold, so I let it drain out slowly and watch my body reappear. There it is again. I can never keep myself from reemerging. I start to feel heavier and heavier against the porcelain tub, as if gravity is increasing exponentially, as if I am being sucked toward the center of the earth. The water is only inches deep now and my thighs are spread out wide and huge and I wonder, Is there another girl in the world this massive? Has anyone ever felt this heavy? Eventually I’m pinned to the bottom of the dry tub—naked, exposed, beached. Being underneath never lasts. I pull myself out, dry off, get dressed, and go back downstairs. I stop in the kitchen to refill my bowl of chips before I settle back into the couch.
The television is on, turned to a show about a woman thirty years older than I. She kisses her children good night, climbs into bed with her husband, and lies with her eyes open until he falls asleep. Then she climbs out of bed and walks quietly out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. She stops at the counter and picks up a magazine. The camera zooms in on the skeletal blond cover girl. The woman puts down the magazine and walks to the freezer. She pulls out a carton of ice cream and a large spoon and she starts eating the ice cream, frantically at first, spoonful after spoonful, like she’s starving. I have never seen anyone eat like this before. She eats the way I want to eat, like an animal. Eventually the madness on the woman’s face is replaced by a faraway look. She keeps eating, but robotically now. I look at her and with shame and joy I think, She’s just like me. She’s going underneath. She finishes the carton, wraps it in a bag, and shoves it to the bottom of the trash. Then she walks into the bathroom, locks the door, leans over the toilet, and vomits up all of the ice cream. The process looks painful, but afterward she sits on the floor and seems relieved. I am stunned. I think, This is what I’ve been missing: the relief. This is how to disappear without getting bigger. This is how to make the underneath last.
Within a few months, I’m bingeing
and purging several times a day. Every time I sense my unbelonging, my unworthiness—every time my sadness rises—I numb it frantically with food. Then, instead of sadness I feel fullness, which is as intolerable as sadness. So I purge it all out, and this second emptiness is better because it is an exhausted emptiness. Now I’m too tired, too wracked, too weak and worn to feel. I feel nothing but light—light-headed, light-bodied. And so bulimia becomes the place I return to again and again to be alone, to go underneath, to not feel so much, to feel it all, safely. Bulimia is the world I make for myself, since I don’t know how to fit into the real world. Bulimia is my safe, deadly hiding place. Where the only one who can hurt me is me. Where I’m far away and comfortable. Where my hunger can be as big as it is, and I can stay as small as I need to.
* * *
There is a price to pay for sinking into bulimia, and that price is sisterhood. Until I choose bulimia, my sister and I share one life. There is nothing that is mine or hers. We even share one security blanket. I lie in bed snuggling my corner while the blanket stretches across the room to her bed, where she snuggles her corner. We sleep like that, the blanket connecting us, for years. One night she lets her side fall to the floor and I scoop it up, but she never asks for it again. She doesn’t need our blanket anymore. She is less afraid than I am.
My sister’s legs are long and she uses them to move through the world easily and beautifully and confidently. I can’t keep up, so I build bulimia and live there. Like our security blanket, bulimia is mine and she can’t have it because she doesn’t need it. If there was a picture of my life’s path you would see our footprints side by side and then you’d notice that one day I sat down in the sand and refused to travel any farther. You would be able tell by her footprints that she stood still for years, wondering why I was too afraid to keep walking. Wondering why one day we were together and the next we were each alone.
Love Warrior Page 1