Later, I sit on the edge of Craig’s bed, listening to him frantically list our “options.” I hear myself say, “The thing is that I am having this baby no matter how you feel about it.” I think: That’s the first time I’ve said this is what I want, so this is what I’m going to do instead of What do you want? What do you want me to do? This shift has thrown Craig off, and he’s grabbing the wall for support. I am unable to help him through this landslide moment because it’s taking all of me to steady myself. But steady, I am. Craig is staring at me like he’s never met me before. He hasn’t. I am new. All the rules have changed for me. How this man feels about me is no longer my greatest concern.
So we sit, side by side, strangers again, with some unknown being we accidentally made between us, each of us utterly alone and never alone again. I have decided that I’m ready to stop destroying myself and start creating. I have already accepted my invitation and no one will convince me again that I’m not worthy. Not ever again. I have been invited and I have said Yes. My Yes is final. From now on, when I sense No—in a facial expression, in a tone of voice, in someone’s disapproval of me, in my own mind—my mental response will be, Fuck you. Fuck you is what I say to fear, to doubt, to shame, to every form of No, Glennon, not for you. Fuck you is all the language I have for now. It’s my shield. It’s my ode to Mary. It’s my prayer and my battle cry.
The next night, Craig and I sit with my parents and I tell them about the baby. They are, at the same time, weary and ready for battle. My mother looks past Craig, directly at me, and says: “You do not have to marry him, Glennon. We can raise this baby together. We can do this.” This is the bravest thing anyone has ever said to me. The rest of the conversation is very hard. My parents ask us questions we are not ready to answer. Where will you live? Will you get married? We don’t know. We can’t even look at each other when my parents ask these questions. It’s humiliating to acknowledge how much we don’t know.
On the way home from my parents’ house, Craig dresses his panic in enthusiasm. He says, “I know what we can do! What if you get an apartment and I get an apartment and I come stay with you and the baby on the weekends?” He is trying to hold on to his old life and have his new life, too. I understand, but it won’t work. I don’t need him that much. Or I need him more than that. I say, “That could work, if we break up first. We need to move forward together or move forward separately, but I’m not going to live in the in-between. You need to decide, and I don’t want guilt to affect your decision. You heard my family. They will help me. The baby and I will be fine.” We stop at a red light and Craig turns toward me. He does not look relieved, he looks hurt. I am confused by his hurt. I’m just trying not to be needy. Does he want us to need him or not? I don’t know. He doesn’t know.
We decide to take some time apart. He drops me off at home and I climb the stairs and go to sleep. On my way out to my car the next morning, I see an index card taped to my front door. It says, “Everything will be okay.” It’s written in my dad’s handwriting. He must have driven over in the middle of the night to leave this message for me. I believe him.
* * *
I do not take my sobriety one day at a time, because every day is an eternity. I tell myself that I will do only the next right thing, one thing at a time. I start to think of my life as a path. I can only count on the next step to appear once I’ve committed to the step right before it. I wake up every day and ask myself: What would a sober, normal, grown-up person do next? She would get up and make her bed. She would eat breakfast. She would drink a glass of water. She would shower, then go to work. So I do these things, one thing at a time. And since I am doing the right things, I expect life to start being wonderful. I am horrified to learn that sobriety is, in fact, horrible. The first two weeks I shake and itch and feel desperate for a way to escape myself. I am claustrophobic in my own skin. Everything hurts. My beloved numbness is gone and I’m reminded, every moment, why I started drinking in the first place. But I do not drink. I do not binge and purge. Instead, I read books about babies. I keep my pregnancy test by my bed and I pick it up to check the blue cross several times a day, just to be certain. Just to remind myself that my invitation is real.
One night, several weeks into my sobriety, I lie down on my bed and my eyes wander to a pile of CDs in the corner of my bedroom. I stand up, walk over to them, and shuffle through the pile until I find the Indigo Girls. I hold them in my hand and wonder if I dare to let them sing to me. I open the case, slide the silver disc into the player, and press “play.” Then I lie back down and wait for the music to hurt too much. When they start singing, I begin to feel that familiar ache that music always brings. I hold my breath, but I quickly realize that my ache feels different than it used to. Music usually makes me feel left out and yearning, like I’m looking at a photograph of a party I wasn’t invited to. But now I feel drawn in, pulled closer, like the music is a bridge between these two women and me. I feel comforted. The Indigo Girls promise me that it’s okay to feel too much and know too little. They insist that my sadness is not new, it’s ancient. I listen for hours and every song makes me feel less alone and more a part of a universal, underground sisterhood. Gradually, I feel something like joy growing inside of me. This joy brings me to my feet and I start to dance. I dance in my bedroom, all by myself, with Amy and Emily. No one is watching me, which means I’m not performing. I’m just dancing. Whirling, whirling. For me.
This becomes my ritual. Instead of drinking, every night I shut my bedroom door and meet with the Indigo Girls. Sometimes I whirl, but usually I just lie in bed and practice feeling my feelings. The music is a safe place to practice being human. In the span of one song I can feel it all, let it all come—joy and hope and terror and rage and love—and then let it pass. The song always ends. I survive every time. This is how I know I’m getting better: I become able to survive the beauty of music. I have accepted another one of life’s dangerous invitations: the invitation to feel.
My heart seems to be doing its job, so I wonder what my body is capable of. As I listen, I hold my hands over my growing belly. I feel my thighs expanding, my breasts swelling, and my cheeks filling in. I feel grateful for all of it. For the first time in my life, I want to be big. I want to keep growing large enough to hold my baby. Some nights, as I lie there in bed growing and practicing being human, I wonder what Craig is doing. Is he out partying? Or is he in bed, too, wondering how to respond to his invitation?
Eventually Craig calls and asks me to dinner. When he comes to pick me up, I’m waiting for him by the window. As I watch him climb out of his truck, my body floods with affection and relief. I can do this alone, but I don’t want to. I want the dream. I want to be a family. After dinner, he drives me to his parents’ house and we walk to the backyard. He leads me past the koi pond to a swing that sits beneath a white gazebo. I sit down on the swing as Craig falls to one knee, holding a diamond ring up toward me. He is shaking when he says, “Will you marry me?” For a moment I wonder if he’s afraid that I’ll say no or afraid that I’ll say yes. I say yes. Craig’s face breaks out into a smile as he slides the ring on my finger and rises to sit next to me on the swing. He holds my hand in his and we stare at the ring together. He tells me that he got the money for it by emptying a bank account he opened when he was in middle school. When he was twelve, he started mowing lawns for his father and then expanded his business to the whole neighborhood. He made twenty bucks a month and he put it all away, saving it for something important. He says, “I was just a kid. I didn’t even know that I was mowing lawns for you and our baby.” I look at him and love him. We go inside to show Craig’s mom. She takes my hand in hers and tells me that the ring is beautiful and that I am, too. She hugs us and claps her hands. I drive to my parents’ house and it’s late so I unlock the door, climb the stairs, and wake them up. I sit on the edge of their bed and hold my hand out for them to see. They look at my eyes before they look at the ring. Both my eyes and the ring are clear and sparkly
—full of promise. There will be a wedding day. I am going to be new. I am ready to put who I was behind me. Shove it all into a box and tuck it away. Together, we are beginning again.
5
I’M BACK IN Craig’s childhood backyard. My father and I stand side by side at the edge of a long white carpet, waiting for the right music to start so we can begin our walk toward Craig. My heels are so high that my shoulders are almost even with my father’s. I’m wearing fake eyelashes and a rhinestone tiara in my hair. My hope is that they will distract everyone from my bulging belly.
My dad takes my hand, turns to me, and says, “You look exactly how I always imagined you’d look at this moment.” I do not know how to respond because this moment is nothing I’ve ever imagined. I smile and squeeze his hand back. Our music begins and now he is walking me down the carpet, past my grandmother and my mother, past Dana and Christy, past Craig’s aunts and uncles and mine. When we reach the end of the carpet, I hear the minister say, “Who presents this woman to be married?” My father says, “Her mother and I do.” I look back at my mom and she is so beautiful, so young. She is wearing a bright red dress like my sister’s, and she is concentrating—her whole body at attention out of love for me. She is protecting me and vouching for me, even if in this moment she can only do it with her posture. She is sitting next to her best friend, her mother, my grandmother, Alice. They are holding hands. I hope that somehow they’re having the shared moment they imagined.
My father passes my hand to Craig. There is no time for my hand to be in no one else’s hand. There is just not enough time. Craig takes my hand and suddenly we are alone, facing each other. This feels too intense, so I turn away from Craig and toward the minister, even though I know it’s too early for that. Craig watches me and then he turns, too. I look sideways at Craig’s face and I’m surprised by how young he seems, like a child playing dress-up in his father’s tuxedo. I wonder if Craig is thinking the same about me in my strapless dress, eyelashes, and rhinestones. This possibility brings a wave of embarrassment and again I break eye contact. I notice that his hands are shaking. He is afraid. I am suddenly a pool of tenderness for all of us: Craig, me, my dad, my sister and mother and grandmother and the minister. We might not be ready, but we are here. We have all shown up for each other.
While the minister looks for his notes, I glance over my shoulder at our families sitting silently in the white benches that Craig’s father has collected and painted just for today. They smile at me with faces full of naked hope and fear. I smile back and my breath catches. Something about the mixture of their hope, fear, and fancy shoes strikes me as tragic. I can no longer remember the difference between hope and fear. I cannot tell if anyone is happy. Is this a happy occasion? Are we happy? I feel confused and then ashamed because confused is not something a bride is supposed to be on her wedding day. Nervous seems appropriate, though, so I stay there. I’m nervous that I am unable to make eye contact with anyone at my own wedding. I turn my back toward the minister again. I lift my chin and feel my spine straighten. The sun meets my face and I imagine that its rays are holding me up. I don’t know what to do with my hands so I clasp them together underneath my belly and I hold my own hands.
I am no longer a pool of tenderness. I am a tree. Everyone else can be hopeful and afraid but I am neither. I am resolute, solid, and separate. The world for which I am responsible is inside of me now. I can only save this baby who came and trusted me to come back to life. I cannot be distracted by anyone else’s feelings. I will be fierce and steady, like my mother.
When it’s time for our vows, I tell Craig that he is my proof that God knows me, trusts me, and loves me. I know I’m actually talking about our baby. Our baby is my proof. I don’t know what Craig is to me yet. Craig accepts my vows and then begins his. He’s memorized them, which seems promising. He vows to put me before all others for the rest of his life, and I look into his eyes and accept his promise on behalf of our baby. He can’t be making these promises to me, because we don’t know who I am yet. I have been my sober self for only four months. Maybe this is why everyone looks so afraid and hopeful. I hear the minister say my new name, Mrs. Melton. I decide that it’s just as well that no one knew me before, because now I’m a brand-new person. I am no longer Glennon Doyle. I’m Mrs. Melton.
The ceremony is over and U2’s “Beautiful Day” is playing and we are taking pictures. The whole wedding is now being transported from Craig’s backyard to my parents’ house, six houses away. We are dancing in my parents’ living room to our song, which Craig has chosen. The chorus repeats, You think I’d leave your side, baby? You know me better than that. I wonder if through these lyrics Craig is telling me that he is saving me instead of choosing me. Or if maybe this song is for our baby, too. Maybe our romantic wedding song is actually a lullaby.
We wave good-bye to our parents and drive to a fancy hotel in Washington, D.C., for our twelve-hour honeymoon. When the man at the front desk congratulates us I feel embarrassed, like all three of us know that Craig and I are just pretending to be newlyweds. Our room is lovely but we’re not sure what to do with ourselves there, so I excuse myself to change. I try on three pairs of pants before one of them successfully slides over my belly. Our baby is with us on our wedding night and this makes me feel safe, like the two of us aren’t on our own. Our baby is our buffer, our shield, our reason. We go to dinner and try to talk about things important enough for a day like today. We’re not very good at conversation, so we just hold hands and walk the D.C. sidewalks. I try to think about us and our future but mostly I think about how terribly hard it is to celebrate anything without booze. We head back to the hotel early and snuggle under the covers. I’m wearing the maternity wedding night lingerie my aunt sent me, which is so odd I can’t think about it directly.
As Craig starts kissing me, I feel nervous and reverential because now—since there is paperwork, sobriety, a ring involved—sex will be different. It will be holy and meaningful. I am about to understand what all the fuss is about. But as Craig climbs on top of me, I find myself scanning the room to distract myself, just like I did the first time and just as I’ve done every time since. Then, on cue, I close my eyes and slip out of my body. When it’s over, I feel afraid. It was supposed to be different, and it wasn’t different. To arrive inside the moment in which you are supposed to feel more connected than at any other moment of your life and still feel lonely is utterly terrifying. It is the most lonely you can possibly feel.
I turn away from Craig and hug my belly. Craig wraps his arms around me from behind and tells me he loves me. I say, “I love you, too.” We are both telling the truth. We do love each other. That’s what we are supposed to do. Soon I hear Craig’s breathing change. He is asleep. I’m wide awake and alone. I have just gotten married. I have just had wedding night sex. I am lying next to a man who loves me while his baby grows inside of me. If I am still lonely now, then that is it. I will always be lonely. What if marriage is not a fresh start at all? What if marriage is just a continuing? I’m afraid that today I did not turn into something new after all. What if we didn’t become?
It will be okay, I silently tell all three of us. Maybe becoming happens slowly. We will grow into all of this somehow.
PART TWO
6
WE DO GROW. We grow into a lot of things. Craig and I rent an apartment and I learn domesticity by paying close attention to commercials featuring wives. I follow one TV wife’s lead and buy ten bottles of chicken marinade. Every afternoon I call Craig at work to make my dinner announcement: Tandoori chicken tonight! Southwest Chipotle chicken tomorrow! Never does Craig ask if we will ever eat anything other than marinated chicken. Never do I consider the possibility that there are other dinner options. I pack Craig’s lunch for work and tuck inside string cheeses, juice boxes, and love notes from me and the baby. Never does Craig ask why I pack his lunch like he’s in kindergarten. Never do I consider that the TV moms are packing these lunches for their children,
not their husbands. Every morning Craig gets dressed up in his suit and tie, kisses me good-bye, and grabs his paper bag lunch covered with Magic Marker hearts from the counter. We walk out to his truck together and he climbs in and kisses me good-bye. I watch and wave until his truck turns a corner and disappears. I am so proud of us. We are grown-ups.
We spend our weekends decorating our apartment. We paint one living room wall royal blue. We call it our “accent wall” and feel cultured about it. We spend an entire day at a pet store choosing an aquarium and seven fish, all of which we name. We set up the aquarium in front of our accent wall and the silver fish flash back and forth against the deep blue. When we have visitors, we bring them here first. “This is our accent wall and these are our fish!” On these tours, we always save the nursery for last. As we slowly open the door, we expect everyone to gasp like we do.
The baby’s room makes me want to whisper and tiptoe. Craig’s mom sews us teddy bear curtains, which filter the window light so that it falls onto the crib like a gentle spotlight. Every time I walk in, I obey the spotlight and pause to stare at the crib. I take in the pastel blankets, plush-stuffed lamb, and teddy bear sheets that match the curtains and I think, Yes, this crib is where the baby of a good mother would sleep. Every evening when I get home from teaching, I spend hours on the floor of the nursery. I sit in front of piles of baby pajamas, unfolding them, holding them up to the light, pressing them against my face, inhaling deeply, restacking them into neat piles, and then tucking them into the dresser that Craig has painted baby blue.
One afternoon I realize that I have failed to consider this room from the baby’s perspective. I go to the kitchen for a step stool, place it in front of the crib, and climb over and inside. As my foot hits the tiny mattress, the crib creaks loudly but manages to hold me. I curl up in the fetal position with my cheek on the sheet and I look around the room with a critical eye. I am pleased by the smell of the sheets, but I decide to rearrange the shelf of toys so that more of the brightly colored ones are at the baby’s eye level. I have a very, very difficult time getting out of the crib. I lean too hard on the side and something snaps. I have broken my baby’s bed. I start to cry. Craig hears the crack and the crying and he appears at the door. He freezes for a moment as he tries to understand why his very pregnant wife is hanging precariously over the railing of the crib. He runs to my side and carries me to the floor. We stare at each other for a moment and then I say, “I read that we need to try to see the room from the baby’s point of view.” I did not read this, but I feel confident that someone somewhere must have written it, which makes it true-ish enough. I watch Craig’s face. He’s deciding if he should ask further questions. He says, “You’re such a good mom already. I’ll fix the crib, no problem. So how does everything look from there?”
Love Warrior Page 6