Two Steps Forward

by Sharon Garlough Brown

  John would be happier if she were rhapsodizing over diagrams and descriptions of each stage of unseen development, the budding ears, the fluttering heartbeats, the formation of tiny limbs, all of which should be inspiring wonder and awe.

  Well, that wasn’t her. He’d have to learn to deal with it.

  The sting of tears surprised her, and she reached into her bag for a tissue. She hated crying, and she’d been crying more frequently lately.

  Blasted, blasted hormones.

  They sat, side-by-side and silent on a sofa in the doctors’ office, Charissa reading an anthology of seventeenth-century poetry and John pretending to read Time Magazine while he eavesdropped on snippets from other couples’ conversations.

  Well, it could be twins because twins run in my family.

  If your mother still wants to come at Christmas, we’re going to need to go to my dad’s place for New Year’s.

  I think we should have Theodore as the middle name. We could still call him Teddie.

  Baby names. That’s something pregnant couples usually talked a lot about, wasn’t it? John had browsed baby name websites for hours, hoping Charissa would show some kind of interest in a conversation. He’d even settle for a spirited negotiation. But at the moment, he was fairly certain he couldn’t interest her in calling the baby anything other than a hassle. In fact, she still didn’t tend to refer to their unborn child as a baby. Usually she talked about it as a pregnancy, as if this were nothing more than an inconvenient and unpleasant medical condition that would eventually go away.

  Sometimes her resentment seemed to yield to ambiguity—or was it resignation?—and she indulged his enthusiasm. But then a few nights ago, he’d made the mistake of providing graphic details about the baby’s development at eight weeks. Her arched eyebrows and pursed lips indicated she really wasn’t captivated by a desire to know what was happening inside her body.

  Maybe an ultrasound would help. Once she saw the heartbeat, once she glimpsed the tiny hands and face, then maybe she’d warm to this little person who would forever change their lives.

  He watched one of the men place his hand on his wife’s abdomen, and they laughed together and joked about their little girl doing somersaults.

  See? That’s what he was looking forward to. It would be a gift to talk about their baby as their son or daughter, to be able to refer by name to the yet unseen miracle.

  The nurse appeared in the doorway with a clipboard. “Charissa?” she said. Except she said the “c-h” like “chair.” Charissa hated it when people mispronounced her name. Predictably, she corrected her.

  The nurse apologized and then smiled at John. “You can come back too.” He rose from the sofa with his magazine and followed them down the hallway, a few paces behind.

  Meg

  The guidebooks were right. Someone could spend weeks in the British Museum without seeing everything. Where did you even begin to explore eight million objects from every culture, every historical era? “Home to some of the world’s most famous antiquities,” Meg’s book informed her.

  She followed the crowd to view the friezes from the Parthenon and spent an hour marveling at the artistry of the carvings: the folds of the garments, the flare of a horse’s nostril, the energy and ferocity of warriors, the repose of figures lounging in conversation. “It’s the ultimate alchemy,” she overheard a tour guide say. “The sculptor takes cold, hard marble and transforms it into warm flesh.”

  Meg derived just as much pleasure from people-watching. School children in matching uniforms clamored and pointed when their teacher invited them to imagine what the various figures were saying to one another; artists with sketch pads captured the intensity of a carved expression with penciled precision; teenage girls struck goofy poses in front of sculptures, then crowded around cell phones to giggle over the photos.

  At noon Meg was standing in the Great Court admiring the undulating latticework of the immense glass-paneled roof when Becca phoned to say that she was “so so so sorry,” but she wasn’t going to make it over to the museum for lunch after all. “Why don’t you head to the Egyptian exhibit this afternoon—make sure you see the Rosetta Stone—and I’ll plan on meeting you there by the gift shop at about five o’clock.”

  It wasn’t what Meg had envisioned for her second day in London. Then again, she knew when she booked the trip that Becca would be very busy and preoccupied with schoolwork, at least for the first week of her visit. This was all part of the adventure, right? Learning to explore new places and situations on her own? Well, not exactly on her own. God was with her. Emmanuel.

  Since she had fallen asleep before praying the examen the night before, she decided to journal her prayer while she ate lunch. She found a semi-secluded table in one of the museum cafés, ordered a cheese sandwich and a pot of tea, and began to write.

  December 3

  Prayer of examen:

  Lord, please show me what You want me to see. Please press a pause button on the moments when I’ve seen You at work over the past few days and the places where I was blinded by my own fear.

  How have I been aware of Your presence with me?

  These are the gifts I see: 1. a wonderful send-off at the airport with new friends, 2. a stranger on the airplane who helped me get here, 3. the Americans who helped carry my suitcases up the stairs when I was worried how I would manage, 4. the taxi driver who took me to the hotel, 5. a good night’s rest and a chance to explore one of the best museums in the world. You gave me the desire to come to London to be with Becca, and You enabled me to get here, despite my fears. Thank You, Lord. I can see some of the ways You have provided for me. Thank You. You took care of me, even when all my plans fell apart.

  When have You seemed hidden or absent?

  I lose sight of You when I focus on my fears. I let my fears get the best of me yesterday, especially when Becca didn’t show up at the hotel right away. I’m sorry, Lord. My imagination runs away with me and carries me places where I lose sight of You. I wish I didn’t have such a strong fear response. I wish I trusted You more. Katherine taught me that what I need to do is offer my fears to You instead of stuffing, fighting, or trying to get rid of them on my own. I wish I had remembered to offer my fears to You and focus on Your love for me right in that moment. Forgive me, Lord. And please help me to trust Your love and care. I know You are with me, even when I can’t see You. Let Your perfect love cast out my fear.

  Here are the moments that have been really hard for me: 1. Becca not being at the airport. I had imagined our reunion for the past several weeks, and it didn’t play out anything like I had hoped. I was really disappointed. 2. Becca not being able to join me for tea. I had imagined sharing that time with her, and I was really disappointed when she called to say she wouldn’t be able to make it. 3. Becca not showing up exactly when she said she would. I spiraled into crazy anxiety, imagining all the worst-case scenarios. I do that all the time. 4. Becca not staying to visit for very long when she finally did show up. When she wasn’t able to come to the airport, I imagined our reunion scene at the hotel. It didn’t play out anything like I had hoped. Maybe we were both just tired.

  5. Worrying about her. I know she’s not a little girl anymore, but this is hard. I’ve had other moments the past few years of feeling like I’ve lost my sense of equilibrium with her, especially when she left for college. But seeing her last night with her nose piercing and trendy clothes really hit me hard. I don’t know how to mother her. Maybe it’s my imagination running away with me again, but something doesn’t seem right. I offer You my fear, Lord. I don’t have the power to make it go away. But I remember that You love me and You love her. Help me trust You to protect her and keep her from harm.

  It’s not really that You’ve seemed absent or hidden, more like I wasn’t watching for You in those moments that were hard for me. When I read my list again, I see all the fear and disappointment. I’m better at fretting than praying. And I have a habit of forming certain pictures in my hea
d. Then I get disappointed when things don’t unfold like I imagined. Teach me to pray about everything, Lord. To cast all my anxieties on You. And teach me about hope. I have a really skewed view of what true hope is. I need to keep reviewing my sermon notes from last Sunday. You are my hope.

  Please deliver me from fear and build my faith in You. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.

  At five-twenty, just before the museum closed, Becca, conservatively dressed in jeans and an oversized sweater, appeared with two other girls, whom she introduced as Pippa and Harriet. “I knew you’d want to meet some of the friends you’ve been hearing about all semester,” Becca said.

  Meg rearranged her face from her reflex response of disappointment to a gracious, pleased-to-meet-you smile, then hugged Becca. Her hair didn’t smell like smoke. Maybe it had all been a false alarm.

  “I hope you don’t mind us coming for dinner,” said Pippa.

  “No, of course not,” Meg lied. “Glad you could join us.”

  Pippa was probably the one who had persuaded Becca to get the nose ring. She was covered, absolutely covered, in colorful body art and piercings.

  When the girls mentioned their collective craving for a good curry, Meg said she would be delighted to try Indian food. And when they finished dinner and Becca said she wouldn’t be available to get together again until Friday evening, Meg insisted she would be fine doing some fun tourist things by herself on Thursday and Friday until Becca was free. Just fine.

  On her way back to the hotel, Meg chewed on cherry-flavored antacids. But heartburn kept her tossing and turning. All night long.

  Mara

  It was dark, and Mara hated driving the boys to school in the dark. She swore under her breath as she swerved to avoid hitting a dog walker. Idiot. He ought to at least wear reflective clothing. She blasted the horn.

  “And you’re always telling me not to cuss!” Brian said.

  She decided not to reply. Too early for an argument.

  “Don’t forget I’m picking you up at two o’clock for your ortho appointment,” she said to Kevin.

  “You’ve told me that three times already.”

  “I’m just sayin,’ don’t make me come in to get you. I’ll pull the car up at the front by the main office. Meet me there.”

  “Whatever.”

  “And Brian, that means you need to ride the bus home.”

  “I’m not riding the bus. The bus is for losers.”

  “Well, I can’t pick you up because I’ll be at the orthodontist with Kevin.”

  “So just leave him there and come and get me.”

  Mara silently counted to ten before she replied. “The orthodontist is clear on the other side of town. I don’t have time to drop him off and come back to get you.”

  “Well, I’m not riding the bus.”

  “Brian, please cooperate with—”

  “I’ll get a ride home with Seth.”

  “I haven’t checked with Seth’s mother to see if—”

  “Chill!” Brian raised his hand toward her face, and for a split second she thought he was going to strike her. He must have seen her flinch, even in the darkness of the car, because his lips curled into a bullying sneer. She’d seen the same look on Tom’s face many times.

  “Fine. I’ll pick you up at 2:40 by the football field.”

  Without saying good-bye, the boys exited the car and slammed the doors.

  What a week. And it was only Thursday. Then again, only one more day until Tom and the boys went out of town on their hunting trip and Mara would stay the weekend with Hannah at Meg’s house. “A slumber party!” Mara said when Hannah invited her. She’d always envied women who went out of town with girlfriends. After years of spending most weekends by herself, it would be a real treat to spend some time with Hannah. Maybe Charissa would also join them for a while.

  Though it would be strange to be in Meg’s house without her, Hannah had insisted that it was Meg’s idea. “She said we should decorate for Christmas,” Hannah said.

  Oooohhh, Mara could have some fun with that, and Tom would never even know.

  The past few days had been relatively quiet, with no mention from Tom about the explosion on Monday. She had left the receipt for the returns on the kitchen counter, just so he would leave her alone, and he did. He spent long hours at the office, leaving early in the morning while it was still dark and coming home after she put dinner away. At least, she assumed he was at the office. He could be anywhere, really, and she wouldn’t know the difference. It was enough for her that he was gone.

  Some days—who was she kidding?—most days she wished she could just be rid of him. Forever. For years she’d wondered if maybe he had a mistress somewhere. With all the traveling he did, it sure would be easy for him to have something going on the side. Maybe one of these weeks he’d come home from a trip and announce that he was leaving her to go off with some bimbo who would make his life miserable. Fine. Go.

  And—could she even admit this part to herself? Her throat burned as the thoughts became fully formed in her mind.

  On a morning like this, she’d say he could go ahead and take the boys with him.

  She was a terrible, awful person for feeling that way. The worst kind of mother. And she called herself a Christian? Some kind of Christian.

  Her counselor, Dawn, had once asked her when she’d lost her ability to connect with them. Hard as it was to admit, she had never bonded well with her youngest. Brian had been a colicky baby, crying for hours and hours at a time for the entire first year of his life. Nothing soothed him. She’d tried everything: bouncy seats, infant swings and slings, white noise, long car rides. The whole experience had left her understanding how some mothers snapped and shook their babies. The only way she’d known how to cope was to put him in his crib while she took long showers so she couldn’t hear the screaming.

  For the most part Tom had managed to dodge the stress. When he wasn’t away on sales trips, he slept with earplugs. On weekends he took their toddler, Kevin, on fun daddy-day excursions to McDonald’s or the zoo. So, while she wasn’t bonding with the colicky Brian, Tom was bonding with the more easy-going Kevin. He’d had an unfair advantage with Kevin from the start.

  Of course, the Dark Years with Jeremy hadn’t helped, either.

  Jeremy was fifteen when Mara, pregnant with Kevin, married Tom. When Jeremy started acting out at school (not turning in homework, occasional truancies, and an incident of vandalizing a classmate’s locker with a can of spray paint), the guidance counselor suggested he was jealous of Mara’s new relationships. So she tried to give him as much undivided attention as possible, a hard enough challenge with a newborn and a new husband. Then, when Jeremy was sixteen, Mara started discovering cigarettes and condoms in his pockets when she did his laundry. One day she found a small plastic bag of marijuana in his room. He insisted a friend had given it to him to hide (“His dad would kill him if he found it!”), and Mara believed him. She knew he didn’t have money to buy drugs.

  The day Jeremy called from Grove’s Electronics to say he’d been caught shoplifting was a particularly dark day. Thankfully, the owner of the store was an old college friend of Tom’s who decided not to prosecute. Tom, however, never stopped prosecuting, which meant that Mara never stopped defending, and Jeremy resented being indebted to a man he despised. By the time Jeremy got his life on track, Kevin and Brian were both in elementary school, and Mara had missed her chance to savor the magical, tender years of playgroups and bedtime stories.

  But, as Dawn often reminded her, she could spend her life trapped in the “If only” cycles of regret, or find a way to lean into the “What now?” opportunities of the present moment.

  That’s why she was going to see Katherine Rhodes. She needed help discerning what could possibly be born in the midst of the chaos and mess and chronic disappointment of her daily life. She needed to learn how to see.

  “Spiritual direction is different from therapy,” Dawn had said at her recent couns
eling session. “Katherine won’t give you any kind of personal growth plan. She won’t help you understand your family dynamics or offer you ways to cope with stress. But she’ll prayerfully listen to you, and she’ll help you notice how God is at work in your life. She’ll provide a safe place where you can encounter God and grow into deeper intimacy with him. You’re ready for that, Mara. I hear the longings in you. We can keep working together on the counseling side of things, but I think spiritual direction would be a great discipline for you right now, in addition to meeting with that group of women. Don’t give that up. That’s already been life-changing for you. I see the fruit of it. Keep going!”

  Keep going, Mara told herself when she pulled into the New Hope parking lot later that morning. Just keep going.

  She had met with Katherine once before in September, after nearly walking away from the sacred journey group because she didn’t think she was fit to continue. Even when she recounted all sorts of lurid and shameful details about her past, Katherine offered tender words of compassion, forgiveness, and hope. That’s when Mara began to see that God wasn’t disappointed in her.

  Yep, Mara thought as she knocked on Katherine’s open office door, that had been a real eye-opener.

  Katherine rose from her desk and extended her hands in welcome. Mara took a deep breath and entered the room.

  Maybe it was the single candle flickering on the coffee table, or maybe it was the simple prayer Katherine offered: “Lord, you have made your home in us; may we make ourselves at home in you.” Whatever it was—or maybe the combination of all of it—Mara found herself relaxing into a palpable Presence. She hardly wanted to break the tranquility of the moment by speaking, so she sat with eyes closed and hands open on her lap, drinking deeply.

  Enfolded. Overwhelmed. Totally submerged in peace. Amazing. “Man! Can I just live here?” Mara said when she finally opened her eyes. “I could sleep on the couch.”