Two Steps Forward

by Sharon Garlough Brown

  It’s a profound image, and I’m so glad she’s meditating on it. But the word “womb” caught me and stirred deep feelings of sadness last night. I started thinking again about my hysterectomy and some of my ungrieved losses. I talked with Katherine about it a couple of months ago, all the stuffing of emotion throughout my life and the “secret hemorrhaging” in my spirit, all the internal bleeding and the toxicity that needed to be cleaned out. But I guess there are more layers of grief to explore.

  For years I repressed all of my longings for a relationship and for children, and it was easy for me to ignore them by hiding behind the busyness of my pastoral role and responsibilities. But now that I’m actually in a relationship with Nate, those longings are being stirred in a very deep way. I know I need to pay attention, hard as it is.

  I hear your “Where are you?” question, Lord, and here’s my answer.

  I’m sad and disappointed that I won’t ever be pregnant. My body will never experience the flutter and wonder of new life. There is no womb to be filled with the physical manifestation of a husband’s love. For a long time I hid and said it was no big deal. But it is a big deal.

  I’ve said it before in these pages. I’ll say it again. It hurts, Lord.

  It hurts in a very deep, empty place.

  And I know that if I don’t keep the wound clean by naming it to you, it will become a nesting place for bitterness and self-pity and resentment and disappointment. I don’t want my wound to become infected.

  Maybe there’s healing just in being honest. This is where I am, Lord. Please meet me here.

  Mara

  Mara finished hanging the last of the burgundy bows on the tree in Meg’s front parlor and stepped back for a good look. “Too bad Meg isn’t gonna be here to see how we’ve decorated her house.”

  “It looks great!” Nathan said. “Let me get a picture.” He motioned to Mara and Hannah to stand next to the tree and held up his phone. “Good one!”

  Mara couldn’t recall many days she had enjoyed as much as this one, with a horse-drawn wagon ride through the woods at the tree farm, hot chocolate in the barn, and an afternoon of laughter and decorating. If only Jeremy could have joined them! She had tried to reach him on his cell phone early that morning to invite him—“The more the merrier!” Hannah had said—but it went straight to voice mail. “You’ve reached Jeremy Payne with Bennett and Diamond Construction, please leave a mes—”

  She’d hung up. Since the cell phone was his work phone, she didn’t want to text him. She wasn’t sure what the rules were about that and didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize his new job. She had debated calling the home phone. She always hesitated calling the home phone because she didn’t want Abby to know how frequently she called. But the prospect of sharing even a couple of hours of fun with her boy far outweighed the risk of irritating her daughter-in-law.

  She called and immediately regretted it. She had awakened him. She had probably awakened Abby too. Chalk one more up in the column of mother-in-law faux pas. And now her invitation sounded so foolish. Either invite your son to leave his very pregnant wife to spend the day with his mother and her new friends, or invite your son and his very pregnant wife to trek through the woods in snow to cut down a Christmas tree to decorate the house of someone they’d never met. She apologized for calling so early on a Saturday morning, gave some excuse about having forgotten to ask how their doctor check-up had gone, and said she would call at another more convenient time.

  Maybe next Christmas they could plan an outing together. She could see the scene now, Jeremy with her granddaughter snugly wrapped in a baby carrier on his back. She would offer to hold her while Jeremy cut down the tree. And then they could all go back to their apartment, and Mara would give them some of the Christmas ornaments Jeremy had collected when he was little. Not all of them, though. Some of them had precious memories attached, and Mara couldn’t bear to part with them yet, like the little trains he had been given their first year in Kingsbury when they were staying at the Crossroads House shelter. She still had a box of the homemade ornaments they had made together over the years: creased snowflakes carefully cut out with blunt scissors, painted dough candy canes he had tried to eat, construction paper wreaths with pasted red dots from a hole punch, encircling elementary school photos. Treasures. Priceless treasures. She ought to laminate the paper ones.

  Mara hung some jingle bells and an evergreen wreath with apples and pine cones on Meg’s front door, then turned her attention toward the winter urns. Hannah had insisted on buying the supplies when Mara described what she’d seen in the magazine. “But you put them together,” Hannah said. “I’m craft-challenged.”

  So while Nathan and Hannah chopped vegetables together at the kitchen counter, thirteen-year-old Jake laid down newspaper on the linoleum and filled peat pots with sand. Mara trimmed the pine and curly willow branches, then twisted bows together with florist wire and added red berries and gold seed pods. “You’ve got a knack!” Nathan said. He and Jake carried the completed urns out to the front porch. “Here—stand next to them, and I’ll take another picture.”

  Talk about having a knack. Nathan had a gift for making people feel special, for listening so attentively that when you spoke with him, it was like you were the only person in the world worth listening to right at that moment. He was a keeper. “I hope you know how lucky you are to be in a relationship with a man like that,” Mara said to Hannah as they sat in the front parlor after Nathan and Jake went home. Now that it had been transformed by color, light, and fragrance, the room was a pleasant place to sit.

  “I’m glad you like him,” Hannah said.

  “Like him? Girlfriend, you’d be crazy not to settle right down here in Kingsbury and marry that man.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. We’ve only been dating for a couple of weeks. A little early to make any long-term predictions.”

  “Don’t be silly! The two of you are meant to be. I can feel it. Besides—it’s not like you only just met each other. You’ve got history together. That’s got to count for something, right? He’s crazy about you. I can tell by the way he looks at you.”

  Even in the dim light, Mara could tell Hannah blushed, and she expected her to try to change the subject. Instead, Hannah said, “We’ve got a lot of stuff we would need to work out before we ever made any kind of long-term commitment. So we’re going to take it slow and see where it goes.”

  “I’m just sayin’, I’m making my prediction here and now about where it’s going. Mark my word. The three of you together, you’re already like a little family, you know? That boy Jake is a sweetheart. Not your typical teenage boy, that’s for sure.”

  That had been the only challenging part of the day—the conflict Mara felt about admiring Nathan for having such a thoughtful, engaged, polite teenager while envying him for the gift. At least she was aware of the wrestling. That was progress, right? When she had moments during the day of feeling shame and condemnation about her own poor parenting, she practiced a strategy Dawn had recently given her. “Whenever you hear the accuser’s voice pointing out your inadequacy, let that thorn be a reminder for how much you need Jesus. Then turn to Jesus in prayer.” She sure was praying a lot more these days, throughout the day. And that was a good thing.

  Her phone buzzed. “Probably Jeremy.” She pointed her finger playfully at Hannah. “Don’t think you’re gonna get out of this conversation.” She pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket and looked at the number. “No—it’s Charissa. Hey, Charissa!”

  “Mara?” Charissa said, and Mara could hear an uncharacteristic tremor in her voice. “I’m bleeding.”

  Charissa

  The doctor who had returned Charissa’s after-hours phone call on Saturday evening informed her that some minimal bleeding could be normal during the first trimester. Was she cramping? No. Any abdominal pain? No. How much blood? Hard to say. He recommended taking it easy and getting some rest. “If you’re having a miscarriage, there�
��s nothing we can do to stop it at this point.” They could run some tests first thing on Monday morning to determine what was going on, but until then, there wasn’t a whole lot for them to do except wait. “Unless you develop severe pain, and then you’ll want to head straight to the emergency room.”

  That scared her.

  While Charissa called Mara with a brief request for prayer, John logged online to research. “You’re not helping!” Charissa exclaimed after he rattled off everything he was reading about hCG levels and fetal heart monitoring and pelvic exams and various kinds of ultrasounds. He thought Tim’s wife, Jenn, had also bled early in her pregnancy. Did Charissa want to call her? No. He could text Tim and find out. Did she want him to do that? No. What she wanted to do was organize cupboards, clean closets, vacuum the carpets, the upholstery—anything to take control of her environment when she had no control over her body.

  John hovered around her, asking for an update every time she went to the bathroom, offering to make her something to eat, pleading with her to lie down and rest. “You’re sure you’re not in pain, right? It’s just like, spotting? ’Cause the message boards talk a lot about that. It’s really common. Nothing to worry about. Tim texted back and said Jenn bled a little when they were pregnant with Zach, and everything was cool. I’m sure everything’s okay.” He chattered on breathlessly, but Charissa stopped listening. The plural pronoun John had used to describe Tim and Jenn had caught her attention. When they were pregnant, John said. She had usually thought about it as her pregnancy. A pregnancy that was disrupting her carefully constructed plans for her life. Her plans. For her life.

  Oh, God.

  Had she brought this on by her ambivalence? By her self-centeredness? Never had it occurred to her that she could have a miscarriage. Much as she’d complained about the poor timing and inconvenience of a pregnancy, much as she’d grieved the death of her plans, she’d never thought that it could all just end and that she could return to life as it was before. Was God giving her what she had thought she wanted? With that possibility now before her, she found herself horrified that she hadn’t been praying the past few weeks for the life of this child, their child. Even her prayer request to Mara had been self-centered: I’m bleeding. Please pray for me, that everything will be okay.

  Oh, God.

  And now it seemed that this life being formed within her, this life that was not her own life, this life that had its own heartbeat, its own unique, God-given imprint, this life was potentially in jeopardy.

  No. Please. No.

  Though the doctor had maintained there was nothing she could do to prevent a miscarriage, there was one thing she could do that might make a difference, one thing she and John could do together. She reached for John’s clammy hand.

  John could tell Charissa was frightened when she called Mara, and her voice sounded thin when she asked if John would pray for her. For their baby. He’d spent the past few weeks wondering if babies could sense whether they were loved and wanted while they were being formed in the womb. Every time Charissa had complained about feeling sick, every time she’d muttered something resentful about how “the pregnancy” was totally messing up her preparation for final papers and presentations, John would silently, almost superstitiously, try to cancel out her negativity by affirming his longing, enthusiasm, and love for their baby.

  And now—now what? What was he supposed to pray? He shut his eyes so tight, spots of light flickered on the inside of his eyelids.

  C’mon, Baby, please. Please, please, please. I love you. Please.

  Live.

  He tried to pray out loud but struggled to find the words. What if God had already decided their baby would die? What if the baby had already died? What if that’s why they had lost the house, because they weren’t going to have a baby? What if the baby died because his prayers were too feeble to make a difference?

  He could feel his heartbeat in his throat, in his ears.

  What was he supposed to pray?

  “Help, God,” he said out loud. “Please let our baby live.” It was the best he could offer. Maybe it would be enough. He opened his eyes.

  Charissa was staring into space, her expression inscrutable. “What if this is my fault?”

  “The Internet says—”

  “I know what the Internet says. I’m saying, what if this is my fault?”

  John hesitated. “I don’t think—” When he couldn’t complete the sentence, she turned and looked at him, a shadow darkening her face.

  She did not arch her eyebrows. She did not stiffen her posture. Her tone was not icy and accusatory when she said, “If we lose this baby, you’ll blame me. I’ll blame myself. I’m not sure I know what to do with that.” She rose from the chair and walked down the hallway to their room. He did not follow her.

  Part Two

  Waiting in the Dark

  We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

  Romans 8:22-25

  five

  Mara

  Mara shuffled into Meg’s kitchen Sunday morning in her red velour robe and moccasin slippers. Hannah was already dressed for worship in charcoal slacks and a beige cowl neck sweater. “How did you sleep?” Hannah asked.

  “Lousy.” Mara grimaced at her reflection on the oven door. She looked even worse than she felt. She combed some fingers through her frizzy hair to try to bring some semblance of order. No use. “I couldn’t stop thinking about Charissa and John,” she said. “I wish Charissa had said yes to us going over there last night. I feel so helpless, you know? I kept trying to pray for them, but I think it was more like worrying out loud. Hope God hears that too, ’cause that’s the best I got.” She took the cup of coffee Hannah poured for her and added some creamer and too much sugar. “How about you? How’d you sleep?”

  “Not great.” Hannah stifled a yawn and sat down at the table. “I ended up calling Nate. I’m not sure what the professor-student boundaries should be, but I figured it was best to get someone else praying. And I knew he’d want to know.”

  “Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. I do it all the time.” Mara eyed the dry toast on the table. “Is that all you’re eating? That’s not enough to keep you going today. How about some eggs or oatmeal or something? What’s Meg got around here?”

  “Not a whole lot. I should’ve thought to buy something more than cereal and bread for our breakfasts. Sorry! I get into ruts, just eating by myself all the time.”

  “And I do lots of cooking and still end up eating by myself a lot of the time,” Mara said. “It’s not much fun cooking for the boys and Tom. They’re not very grateful eaters.” Mara opened the fridge and found some eggs that hadn’t expired, an unopened pack of cheese, and some peppers and onions left over from dinner. “Voilà! Omelets! Still got time before church, right?”

  “Plenty,” Hannah said. “Thanks.”

  Mara rummaged through cupboards and drawers until she found two skillets, a mixing bowl, and a whisk. Then she began preparing breakfast. She was chopping an onion when she heard Hannah clear her throat. “I need to ask you something,” Hannah said, “but you’re free not to answer, okay?”

  “Fire away,” Mara replied. “You know I’m not a closed book.” She kept chopping.

  “Well, before I ask, I want to apologize for something I should have apologized for a long time ago.”

  Mara set the knife down on the counter and turned toward her.

  Hannah pushed the toast around on her plate. “Remember when the four of us went to the cottage for a picnic?” she asked.

  “Yep, I remember.” How could she forget? It was the day Mara had put her foot in her mouth, big time, pressing Hannah fo
r details about her love life, trying to make connections, wanting to belong to a group of friends. In response to her prying questions, Hannah had revealed she’d had a hysterectomy. And in an effort to make amends, Mara had revealed all sorts of details about her own past, even while Charissa sat there scorning and shaming her with critical eyebrows and screaming silence. She and Charissa sure had come a long way since then.

  “I was really unkind to you that day,” Hannah said, “and I’m sorry. I’ve always been a closed book—to use your phrase—and I tried to manipulate the conversation away from my own secrets and sorrows to yours. It was deliberate, Mara. It was very, very wrong. And you ended up suffering because of it. Please forgive me.”

  Mara’s eyes filled with tears that weren’t from the onions. “Oh, honey.” She wiped her hands on her robe and motioned to Hannah. “C’mere.” Hannah rose from the table, and Mara embraced her. “Of course I forgive you. Please forgive me. I don’t have an off switch sometimes. I can’t even remember if I apologized to you for asking all those nosy questions.”

  “You did. But I think I just pretended it was no big deal. All part of my diversion and manipulation tactics. Thank you for forgiving me. I forgive you too.”

  “Good. Thank you. Here,” said Mara, removing another knife from the block beside the sink. “Make yourself useful, Reverend. You can chop the pepper for me.”

  While the skillets sizzled with butter, their knives clicked rhythmically on the cutting boards.

  “Now that we’ve got that sorted,” Mara said, “don’t leave me hanging about what you wanted to ask. And I’ll tell you straight up if you’re being too nosy.”

  Hannah inhaled like she was getting ready to blow on a cake full of candles. “I keep thinking about Tom yelling the other night while I was on the phone with you,” Hannah said. “And I know I already asked you about it, and you said you didn’t feel physically threatened.”