Chapter Three: Composting
As if the gardening analogy wasn’t enough: I am suddenly captured by the idea of a tree as a metaphor for my experience of God’s graciousness. I was afraid: for so long I was afraid of everything, so full of anxiety and distrust and panic and fear. I had thought of myself as walking away from God, incapable of believing he was for me. Instead, I consider the image of myself as a little bird, birthed in a nest high in the branches of a great tree. He is my home, and that is a reality that has never changed over the course of my spiritual journey. When I have wandered, I was but hopping among the branches of his presence. And should I have fluttered to the ground, still, I walked in his expansive shadow. Even this is an imperfect metaphor because he is tree, and earth, and sky, and oxygen. He is all of the world in which I exist. I am reminded of a psalm that has been dear to me over the course of my life: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” (139)
His presence has never depended on my faith in it, any more than one could dispel gravity through unbelief. Yet, I was entrenched in the conclusion that he had abandoned me. It was an interpretation that had developed over many years and painful experiences. I remember with visceral clarity one of the moments in which this idea was introduced to my psyche, perhaps even the first significant moment. It was 2010, I think, and we had gone to the urologist as an early step in investigating infertility. I had sent a pleading email to our community soliciting prayer for that visit. I requested prayer for good news and, “at the very least,” for my husband to feel heard, to be able to ask questions, and to walk away with helpful information for moving forward. I prayed boldly for those things myself. It was a disaster. The doctor was rude, unhelpful, insensitive, and even humiliating to my husband. As we drove away, anger filled my body like a poison. I raged aloud at God. I remember screaming that I had trusted him with the simplest of requests and he “couldn’t even do that.” A belief was planted—“God is impotent”—and it quickly took root.
Again and again, I came to the end of my power and capability and prayed boldly for divine intervention, and again and again things did not progress as I had hoped—dead ends, negative pregnancy tests, watching others receive miracles of which our own lives were bereft. No clear path forward. No rescue. No clarity. No answers for the desperate prayers of my heart. See? A voice would tell me in each new instance. You are alone. You are abandoned. You are not heard. You are not loved. You are on your own.
This was the groundwork laid before I entered that crucible of motherhood. I think of life with my firstborn as relatively joyful and easy, but often when my husband and I recount milestones of that first experience, I am reminded that each new challenge brought panic, uncertainty, fear, and anxiety. Troubles with breastfeeding. Troubles with sleep. Unexplained bouts of screaming, high fevers, terrible diaper rash, teething, more sleep troubles. I was always exhausted, always at the end of my rope or just a length away, and desperate to make room and increase capacity. I was always able to just manage to pull myself back from the edge.
Then came the twins.
The half-life I was living became impossible to maintain. My stratagems and coping mechanisms were utterly inadequate to keep me afloat. I was on the cusp of drowning, treading water with only my nose above the waves. Sometimes I could take a breath, but it would be a quick intake of air before I was pulled below again. Other times, my lungs would burn for oxygen and I wasn’t sure I would be able to kick to the surface before I suffocated. In fact, much of that year, I was sure (how can I convince you, reader, that this is not an exaggeration?) that my life was going to kill me. All of these despairing moments, ruined dreams, and desperate experiences I discarded on a heap at the back of my consciousness. I left them there to rot and be forgotten, discounting the natural process of decomposition and the inevitable turn when dead things begin to fuel new life.
Despite all of my genuine hard work over the previous year, January 2020 was an epic disaster that found me emotionally spiraling out of control. New Years Eve brought a stomach bug to my husband which left me in solo care of the kids for a few days—a far cry from our festive and restful plans for the occasion. The following week, he left on a work trip for about 5 days while my mom came to stay. Just into the week, I found myself up with vomiting kids one after another, sleeping in 15-30 minute increments each night with no respite during the day to make up for it. By the time my husband returned from his trip, we were barely hanging on. My mother was severely ill and unable to help me with the kids; meanwhile, my own body was desperately holding out for his return—almost as soon as he walked through the door, the virus won the war. We were weak from the illness for a long time after and had to cancel the twins’ second birthday party. That same month, my daughter fell from the top of the bunkbed and chipped her tooth and not much later, her twin brother fell from a hammock and pushed back a front tooth, severely splitting his bottom lip—an event that required two urgent care visits, a dental exam, and an appointment with a pediatric dentist for X-rays, all in one day. By the time I met with my mentor at the month’s end, I was beaten black and blue by life. I had been faithfully reading my assignments in our current book, Choosing Rest by Sally Breedlove, and I had reached a chapter proposing that we find “heart rest” in the middle of life’s trials by making Paul our model in living the Christian life. The examples she gave from Paul’s writing showed him submitting his life to God, stepping out of the way in complete surrender and offering all of his life’s expectations and experiences to God as worship. I was deeply angered and disturbed by this exhortation to offer our lives as “a living sacrifice” to God (Romans 12: 1). I tried to explain this logically to my mentor but it was more a matter of emotion than reason for me.
“I don’t like the idea,” I told her, “that it doesn’t matter that I’m me. That I am just some kind of vessel, some kind of non-person, whose whole existence is about channeling glory up to God.” Even as I said the words, I felt that I was raging against one of those fundamental, obvious bits of theology that I was meant, as a Christian, to be on board with. I could see that this was making it challenging for my mentor to know how to respond. She just listened. I was getting more and more worked up as I spoke. “If I am suppose to give everything to him, then how am I going to get what I need? Who is going to give me what I need?”
“Don’t you trust God to give you what you need?” She softly interjected.
“No!” I said incredulously. The word began as a laugh and ended as a sob. “No! I most certainly do not!” I had thought it, whole-heartedly believed it, for a very long time, but I’d never said it aloud so definitively. It turns out, it was important that I say it aloud. It crystalized it, made it a solid thing I could hold in my hand and investigate. It had been elusive before that—a kind of smoke that displaced anytime I tried to grasp and wonder at it. I cried with embarrassing gusto in front of someone who I’d never been nakedly vulnerable with before. That made it even more frightening, but I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. I told her that God had not come through for me. He hadn’t answered my prayers, hadn’t been available to me in my plight, hadn’t taken care of me when I needed him. I couldn’t rely on him to fulfill my needs; I had to do it myself.
She chanced to mention something that I’d wrestled with myself on many occasions: “What about the gift of your adopted children?”
“I prayed for God to give me a baby, and he wouldn’t do it. So I did it myself.” Seething. Certain. Those words had been hidden in my soul for a long time. I’m sure they had ventured to the light of day on rare occasion over the years, but they were a deep and defining secret I held close to my spirit. And here it was, filling the room with its pernicious presence.
That would prove to be a very important sentiment in the coming weeks. And especially important that I had found the voice to unapologetically speak it aloud.
The same day as the fated meeting with my mentor, my husband and I had a scheduled date. I recounted the experience with him, expanding on it using all the depth of feeling, all the available language, savory and unsavory, that I had been inclined to withhold earlier. I yelled. I sobbed. I held my head in my hands as he empathetically looked on. I spoke aloud the recorded beliefs of my heart without reservation. When I was spent, he held me close in silent solidarity. In the days that followed, I felt all joy and color had been drained from my world. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I dragged myself through responsibilities and obligations. My oldest son would approach me lying on the couch and say “Do you want to play?” And I would say “No. I don’t.” I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t enjoy anything. I couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. My whole self was grieving.
The very last day of the month, I took my daughter to a last minute pediatrician appointment on suspicion that she had an ear infection—her twin was on meds to treat a single ear infection, and her symptoms were very similar. I had seen my mentor a few days earlier, who had rejoiced in my son’s improving health. All I could think was “Yeah—I prayed for his healing, but then I went and got him medication.” The doctor confirmed that my daughter had a double ear infection and promptly sent me to the pharmacy to get her started on medication right away. But the script mysteriously never showed up. I called the pediatrician but their office had just closed for the day. I called the nurse hotline about every half hour from that moment until about 9:30 that night, trying to rectify the situation. One thing after another kept happening—they wrote my number down wrong; they didn’t record my call; they thought someone else had responded to me. I called again and again, leaving my name, number, situation. I was livid. My daughter went to bed with a fever and inflamed ears. I remember standing at the kitchen sink filled with such overwhelming rage that I wanted to tear every hair from my head to give the pain somewhere to go. Do you see? I silently screamed—to myself? To God? I don’t know. Why would this happen to us? This freak circumstance—what is the point of it? Where are you, God? If I can’t trust him for the simplest care in daily life, how could I possibly throw the weight of my soul on him?”
There was no answer.
The next day, I got a call that two of my young nephews were being rushed to the hospital with third degree burns after a freak accident. More tragedy to toss on the scrap heap. More refuse to pile up out back.
