Love Warrior

by Glennon Doyle Melton

  I start to drive. I stop at a red light. I remember where to turn. A couple crosses the street and I smile and wave them on. I am surprised and proud of my smile. Look at me. The worst has happened and here I am, calmly steering my car, smiling at strangers. This smile is how I know I’ve become two people again. I am the one who has just lost her entire life and I am also her representative—driving, smiling, and waving. I have officially become a We again.

  Pain splits us into two. When someone who is suffering says, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” it is not because she is fine, it is because her inner self told her outer self to say the words “I am fine.” Sometimes she will even slip and say, “We’re fine.” Others assume she’s referring to herself and her people, but she is not. She is referring to both of her selves: her hurt self and her representative, the one fit for public consumption. Pain transforms one woman into two so that she has someone to walk with, someone to sit with her in the dark when everyone else leaves. I am not alone. I have my hurt self, but I also have this representative of me. She will continue on. Maybe I can permanently hide my hurt self and send our rep out into the world and she can smile and wave and carry on as if this never happened. We can breathe when we get home. In public, we will just pretend forever.

  I stop at another red light and now my legs begin to shake, gently at first, and then harder until they’re bouncing against the steering wheel. I will them to stop, pressing hard against them with my hands, but they only shake more violently. I wonder if the inside me heard my plan to hide her and now she is refusing to become invisible. I wonder if she controls my body after all. I have lost control of my life, my family, and now my own body. The light is going to change soon and I am panicked. My body is shouting at me to tell someone the truth. I steady myself the only way I know how: I call my sister. She answers on the first ring. “Hi, Sister! What’s up?”

  I say, “Can you sit down? I have to tell you something but don’t worry—the kids are fine. I think.”

  “Wait, what? What’s going on?” She sounds panicked.

  I say, “It’s not just the porn. Craig’s been sleeping with other women. Since the beginning. One-night stands.” My legs stop shaking. The light turns green. I put my foot on the gas and move forward, slowly.

  My sister is silent. Then she says: “Oh my God. Oh my God, Glennon. Where are you? Are you driving? Are you okay?” She waits for an answer. This Are you okay question confuses me. It will be asked of me a thousand times during the coming year and it will mean something different each time. I use my sister’s voice and context to translate Are you okay? to Are you going to drive off the road right now? Are you going to hurt yourself or anybody else? I answer, “Yes. I’m okay. I am calm. I’m going to get my babies and take them home.”

  I hear my sister say, “Get them home and stay there. I’ll be on a plane to you tomorrow morning. I’ll tell Mom and Dad tonight.” Wait. She’s going to tell my mom and dad? If we tell them, we can’t take it back. If they know, this will officially be real. I try to imagine my parents’ faces when they hear the News. They’ve already been through this with my sister. Her first husband wasn’t who we thought he was, either. Craig is the one we trust. How will any of us trust anyone again? How will my dad accept that he can’t protect either of his daughters? How will my parents be able to handle being duped yet again? I’m afraid that if I ask any of these questions, if I try to say too many words, my hurt self will sneak out through my throat, start screaming, and never stop. I swallow hard and say, “Okay. Fine. Do that. I’ll call you later.” I hang up.

  I arrive at school and pull into the carpool line. I look into the vans of the other smiling mothers and I feel jealous of every single one of them. The teachers are outside waving and I wave back and then I see my babies, clutching their artwork from the day. When they see me, their bodies bounce up and down and their faces crack open into huge smiles. Their smiles are real. They are not split into two. I look at them and my heart plunges so low, so deep that I can’t imagine it will ever be recovered. Those faces. One thing. I promised to do this one thing right. To give them a family. Stability. To protect them from pain. I have failed. They will be hurt in ways I’ve never been hurt. Nothing is as they believe it was. How can I avoid all of this being true for them? They bounce into the car and I want to hold them tight, but I smile, make my eyes bright, and I say, “I love you! How was your day?”

  The littlest leans forward to kiss my cheek and she says, “It was great! How was yours?”

  “It was great, honey. Just great.”

  I tell the kids that Daddy had to leave for a last-minute trip. When we arrive home I make a cozy nest for us on the couch and turn on the TV. They are thrilled. TV on a school night! I look at them and marvel that just yesterday, I would have worried about TV on a school night. We were so precious, weren’t we? Now I just feel grateful that we’ve survived the all-out attack the world waged on us today. I feel proud. I have rescued my babies and brought them home and now they are on my couch, safe and sound, and it is only the four of us that matter. The storm can rage on outside, and we will be safe here forever in our bunker. I bring them their chicken nuggets, sit down next to them, and pull Amma onto my lap. I breathe in her hair. I make a silent promise to her and her brother and sister that all will be well. We are fine. We really are. We don’t need Daddy, after all.

  This initial numbness and denial is shock and it is a gift. Shock is a grace period. It gives a woman time to gather what she needs around her, before the exhaustion and panic set in like a heavy snow. Shock allows her time to circle her people so that she can enter the hard work of grief, which will require all of her. Shock is the window offered after the fall so a woman can prepare herself for winter.

  Two hours later, I take the kids to the bathroom and help them brush their teeth. Look at us, brushing our teeth under these circumstances. I am amazed at us. I take them to their rooms and tuck them in one at a time. As I kiss the girls good night, the velvet of their cheeks levels me. They are so young, so new. Their skin is this soft because nothing has toughened it yet. The sun hasn’t blistered it, wind hasn’t hardened it, toxins in the air haven’t gotten inside, and adolescent hormones haven’t seeped out. Nothing has happened to them yet. Their skin is perfect, unspoiled, like their hearts. I have protected their skin and hearts so they have suffered nothing alone. That is over. Soon I will have to tell them things that will send their hearts on journeys I can’t travel with them. Their hearts will crack and harden and toughen before their skin does. This is not the correct order of things.

  I look at them and understand that when they learn that Mommy and Daddy might not stay married, I will lose them a little bit. We were one, but soon shock, grief, and loss will split us. In fact, we are already split—they just don’t know it yet. And I will not even be able to hold them while they cry and say, I know how you feel. I do not know how it feels to be a child whose family shattered overnight. I do not know. My children are nine, six, and four years old. How can I let them suffer something I’ve not suffered myself? I am supposed to walk in front, clearing the path for them. But I can’t lead anymore because I don’t know where we’re going. I begin to feel like I can’t breathe, so I back away and stand in the hall, trying to gather my strength. I hear my girls giggling and whispering. They weren’t asleep after all. I feel shocked by their joy, like I’ve just detected signs of life underneath hopeless rubble. After they hear their news, will my babies ever giggle again? Will I?

  I walk into my bedroom. I stop in front of the bed and stare. My eyes rest on the dent in Craig’s pillow and then on his book, still open on the bedside table. I quickly flip his pillow and shove his book underneath the mattress. I need to unsee his things so I can forget he exists. My breathing is getting shallow again. Shock—my saving grace—is wearing off. Now the room is spinning and I’m becoming frantic. The questions begin grabbing at me like icy fingers: What if we divorce? What if Craig remarries? What if my babies cal
l another woman mother? What if she doesn’t love them? What if she does? What if they don’t love her? What if they do? How do I unknow what I know? How do I make all of this not true?

  My legs have stopped working and I’m on the floor now. I crawl to the wall and pull myself up against it for support. I lean forward and put my head between my knees to quell my nausea. I try to steady my breathing. Concentrate on breathing, Glennon. Just breathe. I look at the door and remember that it’s unlocked and I crawl over toward it, reach up, and lock it. The kids can’t see me like this. I’m all they have. After the door is locked, I prop myself up against the wall again and rest my head against it. I close my eyes for a moment. This feels familiar, this position on the floor. My mind travels back to Mother’s Day, 2001.

  There I am, on the bathroom floor, cold tiles against my thighs, holding a positive pregnancy test. My hands shake so hard I can barely make out the little blue cross, but there it is. I close my eyes tight, trying to unknow what is true: I am pregnant. I open my eyes and see the white, cold toilet I’ve spent half my life kneeling in front of. I’ve returned to it again and again to empty myself, to hide my messy humanness and flush it all away. The bathroom has been my hiding place and the toilet, my altar. This place has been my answer to the question of me for over a decade. But as I look down at that pregnancy test, I realize I’ll need a new answer now, something less deadly to kneel before and hide inside. I’d found those answers in wifehood. In motherhood. These were better altars. Less dangerous. They made everyone I loved so proud and they were closer to the truth of me.

  But maybe not true enough. Because it’s ten years later, my back is against a different wall, and I’m staring at another life-changing truth that has come to take away the new altars I’ve painstakingly built. If the answers to the question of me are not successful wife and mother, then what answers do I have left? None. If I am not Mrs. Melton after all, then who am I? Nobody. The end.

  I remind myself that ten years ago I thought my bathroom floor moment was the end. That little blue cross was my eviction, but it was also my invitation. It was an invitation to create a better life, to discover better answers, to build healthier altars, to find a truer identity. What if this eviction is some sort of invitation, too? But to where? Out of my marriage? To a life alone? Away from my children? No, no, no. I don’t want this invitation. Not this one. The last one was toward Chase, toward Craig, toward Love. This one is an invitation away from what saved me. I don’t want it. I don’t want this beginning. I love my answers. I love my life. I am panicking now.

  I try to remember how I found my breath ten years ago. What did I do first? How did I survive this? I went to a meeting. But I can’t go to a meeting now. My kids are asleep and we’re alone here. I drag myself off the floor and to the computer. Writing will have to be my meeting now. I will have to save myself this time. I start typing a list:

  Questions I Can’t Answer

  1. Will we ever be a family again?

  2. Will I be a single parent?

  3. Will my children be ruined by this?

  4. Will my kids one day have another mother?

  I stop and look at that last question and my soul screams No. No. And then I add:

  5. What am I going to do?

  Then I start a second list:

  Questions I Can Answer

  1. Am I loved? Yes.

  2. Are my children loved? Yes.

  3. Did I survive Rock Bottom before? Yes.

  I stare at the last question and remember something I just read—that the word disaster comes from astro: stars, and dis: without. This will only be a disaster if I lose all awareness of light. There in front of the computer, I feel darkness setting in. I need to find some light.

  Quickly, I make one more list:

  What I Know

  1. What you don’t know, you’re not supposed to know yet.

  2. More will be revealed.

  3. Crisis comes from the word meaning to sift. Let it all fall away and you’ll be left with what matters.

  4. What matters most cannot be taken away.

  5. Just do the next right thing one thing at a time: That’ll take you all the way home.

  I print out my three lists and climb into bed with them. I lie in bed and stare wide-eyed at the ceiling. One of the questions I can’t answer keeps running through my mind: What am I going to do? I force myself to translate that unanswerable into an answerable. I change What am I going to do? to What am I going to do next?

  I make a plan:

  I will go to sleep. The sun will rise. I will make breakfast. I will take the kids to school. I will come home and rest.

  As I repeat my plan again and again, my breathing slows and evens.

  I will go to sleep. The sun will rise. I will make breakfast. I will take the kids to school. I will come home and rest.

  Just the next right thing, one thing at a time.

  I am so tired. I lean over and turn off the lamp, but I continue to clutch my lists like they’re flashlights. I am bringing the light with me into the dark. I fall asleep holding my words. Words are the light I’ll use to light my path. This is no disaster. This is simply a crisis. I will let myself be a child at the beach who digs in the sand and lifts her sieve out in front of her, watching the sand fall away and hoping that treasure will be left. I fall asleep.

  9

  I DO NOT REMEMBER picking my sister up at the airport the next day. I do not remember my parents’ arrival two days later. I do not remember telling the kids that their mom and dad love them very much, but need time apart. I do not remember telling Craig to rent his own apartment, or agreeing to let him take one of our dogs. I do not remember setting up a schedule for him to see the kids. Grief is an eraser. I feel erased of everything but pain and fear.

  My anger is the ocean. There are moments of calm and stillness and then, without warning, the disturbance begins beneath my skin, churning, gathering power until there is nothing I can do but surrender and ride it out. I stand in my driveway and scream into the phone at Craig, wishing him dead. “Dead would be easier than this!” I shout. “Dead would mean I wouldn’t have to deal with you again. I could tell the kids you were a good man and grieve you and start over with someone else. If you were dead, I wouldn’t have to share these kids with you. The kids that I protected and you threw away. It’s selfish for you to even exist anymore!” When the wave of fury subsides I am wiped out, exhausted, spent.

  My imagination is a jack-in-the-box. I’m constantly ambushed by images of Craig with other women and these visions leave me breathless. I picture myself calling Craig on a business trip, his cell phone ringing unanswered on his hotel night stand while a naked woman lies beside him. I imagine my children talking to their friends at school, “So our stepmom’s taking us to Disneyland.…” Often when these ghosts pop up, I’m literally knocked off balance, so I have to grab for the nearest wall to steady myself. I cannot even trust my own mind to be kind to me.

  My depression is a dark, dense fog. When it clears I emerge to engage with the kids, but then it rolls in again without warning and I find myself unable to speak or move. I pass everything off to my parents and get into bed and sleep. This is my parents’ gift to me, the gift of sleep. Sleep is my only escape, and the price of escape is waking up with the fresh awareness that I wasn’t dreaming. This is my life.

  My grief is a solid brick wall in front of me. I want to bulldoze through it, scale it, tear it down a brick at a time. I’m desperate to get to the other side of the wall so I can see what’s waiting for me down the path. But the wall will not budge, or let me climb, or let me remove a single brick. All it will allow me to do is lean against it, exhausted. Grief is nothing but a painful waiting, a horrible patience. Grief cannot be torn down or scaled or overcome or outsmarted. It can only be outlasted. Survival is surrender to the brick wall.

  There is no such thing as progress, or if there is, it’s not linear. Every day, I wake up and march the same lap of gri
ef, rage, and panic. While I’m marching, tender memories sneak up on me. Craig and the kids on my birthday morning—giggling and tiptoeing into my bedroom in T-shirts Craig had made with pictures from our wedding day; Craig’s tears when he holds Tish for the first time; Craig waking me at midnight to show me that all three children and both dogs crept into our bed yet again. We did all of that together. We made a family. We’ve lost so much, and I miss all of it. But do I miss what we made or do I miss the man who helped me make it? I don’t know. Like a pinball, I bounce back and forth between go to hell and please come home.

  * * *

  One day I sit on the beach with my parents, watching the kids play in the surf. I say, “I’m divorcing him.”

  My dad nods and says, “Some people stay their whole lives for their children and then when their partner dies they come alive. And everyone else, including the children, thinks, Why the hell didn’t she do that before? She could have had a whole life. You do what you need to do. We have money saved and time available and we will be here.” I look at my father and feel peace for a moment. I try to hold tight to that peace, but then my eyes wander to my children chasing each other down the beach. My peace falls away. No, no. That plan won’t work. That simply won’t work at all. I can’t lose them. I’ll pretend forever if it means I don’t have to break their hearts.