The Girl Who Waits

There are sweet words that pour from longing lips. Quiet hands that pound out work and wipe dishes clean. Bodies that come close and pause and drink in lost, in-between moments.

But who ever knew that waiting is actually a love language.

I was never good at it. Simply put, I’m still not.

I remember the words said I would later laugh at: “it’s a shame he’s so handsome. But he lives far away. I could never….”

Like an ellipse, our two points found each other again. I still wasn’t ready.

He came home for two and a half weeks and we fell in love, though we wouldn’t say those words for another month or so. I just knew how, when he left again, there was a hollowness in my chest because everything made a different kind of sense when we were with each other.

It was something new and ferocious, yet it felt the way it was always supposed to be. The way it had always been.

We got engaged way too quickly, but there is no stemming the inevitability of the tide. I didn’t mean to, honestly I didn’t, get married so young. I had no idea. I still have no idea about this deep and wide mystery of how two people become inevitable.

He left less than two months later.

I remember the last phone call – the one you can’t count on.

And less than ten others after that over the course of eight months.

I forget certain memories from high school of late nights with way too little sleep and way too much frolicking. I forget instances during my childhood that my siblings have ingrained in their memories of fights and mischief and pulling the wool over our parents’ eyes.

But I have never forgotten that feeling of hanging up the phone. Of what five thousand miles sound like on the other end of the line. Of the words you speak because you have the chance and who knows if you’ll be fortunate enough to have the chance again.

My drawer is full of letters. My heart swells at the thought of it.

Waiting is a love language.

There was waiting for him to come home.

Waiting for his time in the service to be done.

Waiting for him to learn how to live with a young, naïve twenty year old girl when he had seen the world and felt the weight of burden and the force of violence.

Waiting through the throes of adjusting to life back at home without the steady of rhythm of life in the service.

Waiting to get home. Waiting to build this life together. Waiting to learn how to forgive and remember how we were friends as much as we were lovers in this play.

I have turned back into the girl who waited. And am a woman who still waits.

His uniforms are in the furthest recesses of the closet and those days are faded as are our young, bright eyes and, truthfully, the hair at the crowns of our head. There are parts of him only a very few know and now they are scattered miles apart. Except for he and I. As the world churns and thrums ahead and on and on. Some parts wait, in the quiet, unseen. I see it, though.

Intimacy has been built in a lifetime that bridges in between the beginning and now. There is no wait now. We are home.

And yet, every Veterans Day weekend I become the girl who waited again. It’s my honor. I would wait a thousand times over to see him walk back through those chain-link gates. I would wait a thousand times over if I needed to so we could have the life we have now.

I would honor the wait. The pause. The uncertainty. For the thousands of days that came after.

The universe hangs on the rhythm of waiting. For seasons to recede and fade into the next one. For planets which spin and orbit in the recesses of the unknown and unchartered heavens. For the tides that beat against the shores. The moon which waxes and wanes. The seeds hidden beneath the layers of earth, humming quietly with new life waiting to emerge.

When the spring burst back, I boarded a plane. A few days later, he came back to me.

I thought the wait was over.

I thought waiting meant transition, inconsistency and wanting.

Now I’ve learned the language of waiting can mean consistency. Expectation. Growth. A building and gathering. A longing. It means we are alive.

And that we hope for our tomorrows.

 

 

 

We need moms who talk about it.

I can’t tell you how many mom-related “S.O.S.” signals I’ve sent over the last decade.

Why make one five minute phone call when you can send eight text messages in a row from a Dunkin Donuts parking lot about how you’re going to absolutely lose it on your kids when it’s only 11 a.m. on a Tuesday??

Friends who listen are the lifelines you never realized you couldn’t live without until you wanted to know you aren’t the only mom who has thrown a box of graham crackers across the kitchen because of undiluted frustration and exhaustion.

It’s texts sent at three a.m. even though you know they aren’t awake, or at least they shouldn’t be, but you know they’ll write back at the crack of dawn when their feet hit the floor. It’s conversations spent staring into the rings of your coffee cup as you try to put all the aching you feel into words. It’s having the person whose couch feels so familiar, so safe, you can spill your ugly guts on it and know you’ll be held in quiet confidence.

I’ve tried to funnel my thoughts into words when they feel so tangled it doesn’t seem like they will all come out.

I’ve talked about how scared I was.

How tired I was.

How depressed and anxious I have been.

How unfulfilled I felt.

How detached I felt.

I’ve talked about wanting to cop out of whatever it was I had committed myself to when  I just wanted someone to humor me and tell me it was okay to quit. I’ve lamented over why something happened to me. Why one particular thing or another needs to be my particular burden. I’ve asked a listening ear how exactly does a person parent well while they try to scrape up their shattered dreams and expectations from the pavement?

I’ve talked miles around people’s heads. Sometimes, about the same things over and over again.

And every time I think I’m charting some unknown territory when sharing my fears and failures, I realize I’m surrounded by moms who have walked similar paths to me already. Every time I think, “this conversation, this admission will be the one time someone says they don’t understand. This will be the one that changes how this person sees me,” I’m amazed at how wrong I can be.

I’m amazed at the willingness of some to “go there.” To talk it out. To listen and reserve judgement. To share their own battered hopes and dreams in quiet trust, with the hope of reaffirming someone else’s story that seems to be coming undone at the edges.

I get what it’s like living in this social media saturated world. There are many people out there who are so brave. Who have shared their stories on large platforms, thinking that if it reaches even one person who needs to hear it, then they will have done something akin to moving a mountain: they will have loved someone enough, even a stranger,  to reaffirm to them that they are not alone.

The older I get, the more I write, the more I grasp how much I play things really close to the chest. I realize just how much of myself I don’t share because there’s always the invisible tether of self-consciousness attached to me.

The more the years tick by, the more I work to shed the weight of expectations and decide what I actually really want to care about. Even if I don’t blast every part of me as loudly as I can, I resign myself to thinking that perhaps one day, every secret shame and hurt can be used for something greater than myself. If I can be as brave as the person who reaffirms me, then I’ll be learning how to do something right.

I’ll get there.

So many out there feel the same way. They just might be quieter about it than others. We might just have to look harder to find them, but they’re there.

They might not share every cog in their stories in 800 word posts, or from their seat at Bible study. They might not lay it all out there, at least not right away. They may even seem detached or removed, running cool instead of burning hot. But, oh. Their heart? Their heart beats fast and true and holds an ocean of secrets.

Sometimes, the ones who can change everything with their story are the ones who grasp the hand of some hurting heart sitting across from them, look them in the eye and say, “me, too.” They might just be the ones we never see coming, and sometimes the most common miracle we can experience is the kindness of another.

None of us are perfectly nailing this motherhood thing (or this living life thing.) We are all broken in some way.

For so long, though, many of us have sat longing and lost behind the veneer of motherhood. Wanting just one person who understood the immense sacrifice, the trials, the hurts that come with raising a family to reassure us that we weren’t weak at all. It just really is this hard.

We sat waiting to be understood. Many of us still are. Worried it will cost us something to say, “I didn’t know it was going to be so hard. But I feel alone. I feel scared. I feel detached.”

We need the brave ones, even when they’re quiet, even when they are still a little scared, even when they are the ones you least expect.

Who talk about how they went to counseling. How they take the little white pill every morning.

How they had the most terrifying and vulnerable conversation with their doctor after circling “almost always” on a paper quiz after giving birth just weeks before.

Who drop off casseroles with no expectation of even needing a thank you.

Who answer the phone when it isn’t convenient, and open their doors even when their home is messy, but at least there is a clear path to the sofa.

Who pour cups of coffee or wine and absorb the shock waves of another who is angry, hurting, lost or broken.

Who talk about their child who died.

Who share about their broken marriages.

Who talk about being ashamed.

Who break the silence of infertility.

Who challenge the stigma of miscarriage.

Who open up about their grief.

Who say, sometimes, they think about what might have been if they had made another choice, even if they wouldn’t change anything about their life.

The people who change the world are the people who share the scars of their own world.

And let the light in.

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t be scared when grief settles in.

If there is one piece of advice I can share with someone who is grieving, it’s this:

The worst thing you can do is wait for your grief to pass.

 

Just months after the week I lost both my grandfather and my father, I was careening toward an emotional break. 

Looking back, I’m not sure where I ever came up with the notion that grief is tidy and immediately transcendent. Or that the world was counting on me to just get on with my life.

When the sun would set and my house grew still each evening. When there was finally nothing else to do to avoid reality and nothing to distract myself with, another me would emerge. The me that felt like she was floating because she believed she was filled with nothing. It felt, more than ever, as if the tethers that bound me to this world were thread thin.

Exasperated with my inability to function in any normal capacity, I wondered why, when I was armed with optimism and a faith-centered outlook, my sorrow hadn’t yet turned a corner. I tried to force a peace with what happened. I was lying to myself.

No matter how much I tried, though, my days were spent slogging through silent misery. The more I tried to correct course and steer the ship, the more scattered and chaotic everything felt. 

What I thought I was doing was carrying on. What I was actually doing was trying my hardest not to face my grief. I was hunkering down, waiting for the storm to pass. When in actuality, grief is not a storm. It doesn’t spin and howl, and then move on. 

It settles in.

It’s like a volcanic eruption that changes the course and landscape of everything forever. It’s like a quiet cosmic shift. You have to find a way to live in a world that’s been leveled. In a world that does not entirely, if at all, resemble the one you knew before.

Signs of grief will always be there. You have to find a way to not allow grief and bitterness to have the final say over what really matters. Over what you do next.

Two years later, I still find myself startled from being triggered by seemingly insignificant things. I now live near the hospital my father died in. Most of the time, I drive past that brick and glass building, and don’t think about that day. 

Other times, I remember the sterile hospital smell and cold tile floor like I’m standing in one of the hallways. I remember that day and try not to go crazy. I try not to stay there. 

For so long,  I clung to the memory of my life before. I desperately wanted to stay there, in the place before everything spun out of control. I thought moving on meant I was forgetting and letting go of the people I loved. That I was ceding some ground to tragedy.

I tried to compartmentalize everything. I fought to keep my grief contained so it wouldn’t swallow everything. It felt like a blackness that would taint everything. Grief was the name I wouldn’t dare speak.

And if I could separate everything then I didn’t risk losing everything.

It wasn’t until I realized grief went by other names that my guard could come down. It was another form of love, trapped love, and something I couldn’t avoid or I would lose so much that mattered to me. I realized grief didn’t dwarf any of the joy or diminish the good things I had to hold on to.

If anything, it magnified them.

When I let my walls down and grief enter into my broken parts, when I faced it, I finally realized its true purpose. Because there are some things grief cannot touch. And those happen to be the most important things. Things worth fighting for and savoring. And they stand tall in the face of the bleakest sorrows we can imagine.

 It allows me even now to save myself when my heart breaks over and over again.

If there was one piece of advice I could give to the grieving person, it would be that the worst thing you can do for yourself is to wait for your grief to pass. For you to put your grief away.

Grief is terrifying. It can feel like some unnamed specter that always hovers close. And it does. Grief is now what reminds me of all that I have, all that I once had.

And when I finally asked for its real name, its name wasn’t grief.

It was hope.