Moving On

There is a job I’ve been putting off for months: sorting boxes of old photographs. Moving seems like a great reason to go through all the photos, separating them so that Jessie and Jenn have their own record of their lives. I have avoided this because looking at all those happy times is more pain than I want to face. But I take on this task, flipping through them in five hours one night. There’s a large pile I will send to Jenn, along with all her clothes and books and DVDs she left behind when she moved to her dad’s house.

I hope she may look through these and each image will be a love letter to her from me: We loved each other. We had good times together. Come back.

* * *

Jenn comes silently out of her Dad’s house when Joe rings the doorbell. She doesn’t greet us or speak to us at all, and I don’t know what to say, either. We unload the garbage bags full of clothes and the boxes of papers I’d saved from her school days. It’s good that she was home, because we worried about leaving her custom acoustic guitar out in front of their house.

When we bring the last load to her door, Joe finally speaks. “We’ve been trying to contact you for a while about your things. We didn’t want to just throw your possessions away, and we’re moving in two weeks so we had to do something with it all.”

She thanks us. As we drive away, I realize that she has not asked to see the house that she grew up in, just one last time. And she has not asked where we are going. Once we move, she will never know where to find us.

Joe squeezes my hand and gives me a compassionate smile. “How are you doing?”

I look out the window for a while. “I don’t know how to describe how I feel.” When the writer runs out of words, what is left?

When God Runs

I finally understand the whole story. The bible story they call the prodigal son, the one in which sometimes I have been the kid who took everything God gave him and squandered it, and sometimes I have been the kid who is angry when God welcomes someone who I am certain doesn’t deserve his grace.

Now I am the prodigal’s parent.

At the teen church camp in New York a few weeks ago, we studied the Prodigal Son story – though they called it the Lost Sons. I could feel the pain of each of the sons, but mostly felt the misery and longing of the father that just wanted to love his children and do the best by them.

Earnestly wanting to be a strong, faithful youth group leader, I choked back sobs that felt as if they’d come out vomiting and gagging. I mopped off my face furtively and tried not to sniffle, while I’m sure anyone who looked at me could see my shoulders bouncing up and down from the tears I tried to hold back.

Then our teens talked about their reactions and how the story related to their lives. How sad it is that even though we KNOW God loves us unconditionally, so often the teens said they didn’t feel like they deserved unconditional love. They were afraid to even pray to God because whatever they feel they’d done to separate themselves was enough that he didn’t want to hear their prayers anymore.

So I told them a new prodigal child story.

I told them about a child who left home angry and dropped out of sight. I told them about the parent who called until the child’s phone was disconnected, then started calling friends on the child’s last phone bill. This parent searched the newspapers and hospitals for news about her child, and drove by the places where her teen hung out, just to see if she could get a tiny glimpse and know she was all right. This is a parent who give almost anything to hear her daughter’s voice.

I told the teens that rather than being angry when we pray to him, God is longing with all his being to hear us and be close to us. He is thrilled when we talk to him, even when we are not living a Godly life, even when we have screwed up or gotten angry with God and want to scream at him.

I know that when we take one step towards God, he comes running to us, and loves us as much as we let him. I know he is thrilled just to be close to us again. I know that because I am the prodigal’s mother.

Normal

At night, the normal people of this world have teenagers who are out with friends or watching some TV reality show, eating pizza rolls or Wendy’s, having sleepovers and going to the beach.

My 19-year-old has been missing for ten days.

Her cell phone is disconnected. Her friends, the ones I know about, don’t answer my calls. I’ve checked the hospitals and the police reports, but her name does not show up. I used to see her every day;  I used to share in her life. Now I don’t know which is worse, the not-knowing or the knowing.

My ex-husband talks to me more often than he did when we were married. Day after day he asks me if I’ve heard anything. We go over all the events and try to figure out what we can do, if anything, to fix this broken child.

Her older sister, who responds to pain with anger, sheds her anger on me. She wants Jenn to straighten up, immediately, and stop all this suffering. Underneath her anger I hear the fear…that fear that I feel too, that we are losing our Little One.

I cry every day, and Joe hands me napkin after napkin and tries to comfort me. All these tears have produced a massive sinus and double ear infection. At night I imagine the worst nightmares are happening to my daughter, and maybe if I stay awake and pray, she will be safe. These are desperate thoughts that come at 3 a.m. I know that she is God’s child, but I am starting to think that God needs to step up his game.

—————————————————————————————–

She opens the door casually and I run to her, crying out, “Hi, hi, hi!” like a silly fool. She tries to get away while I embrace her and inhale the scent of my baby.

Jenn finally gets away from my arms. She’s just here for some papers, and she doesn’t want to talk about anything else, even when I get angry and tell her how worried I’ve been.

“I’m an adult,” she says. ”I can live my own life. I can handle it. Why should you worry when I’m fine?”

Then I think, it’s a good thing she’s not dead, because I’m gonna kill her.

We follow her out to her car and there’s a strange guy in the passenger seat, who she doesn’t introduce. I greet him, but Joe just glares at him. Her back and side windows are completely missing. Shards of broken glass line the back window. She doesn’t want to talk about it, she repeats this several times.

I tell her it’s illegal to drive without a rear window and she disagrees with me. She says she has to find a new place to stay and is going to check out those low-budget motels that rent by the week.

Throughout this entire encounter she has been moving smoothly from the front door to her former bedroom to the car, walking right through me and around me. She has planned this, I imagine, to avoid any scenes or long discussions.

She drives away after telling me she loves me. Then I start to wait. Again. This is my normal.

Storms rolling in

That night a big storm was racing in. The sky glared with silent lightning, and I could see the trees outside our apartment window beating each other in the wind. I rubbed my aching belly and paced the living room like a nervous cat. False labor? I thought. Or am I going to have to deliver my baby all alone?

They were out in our car in the storm, maybe, or maybe they had gotten a motel room again.  Ray had gone to “straighten things out” with her. My contractions came and went, and the storm roared inside my mind and outside my creaking walls. Why is he doing this? What’s going to happen to us? How can he hurt me this way?

My three-year-old was sleeping in her room in her new “big girls” bed, and the cradle was ready. I was a mom, but I wanted my mother. She would call a taxi or an ambulance and hold my hand during the hours of labor ahead of me. And indeed, Jenn was born 26 hours later.

Last night was another storm of biblical dimensions. Hard rain smacked our windows like angry little fists, then hail pounded the deck. The lightning turned night into day, momentarily, and we saw the poplar bent almost sideways. The lights dimmed and glowed under the howling wind. I watched the light show and thought of Jenn.

She was out in her car, maybe, looking for a safe place to park for the night. Maybe she was afraid and wishing for her mother. Maybe she was wishing she was dead. Or maybe she was at a friend’s, oblivious to the fear and anger she caused by going missing for days. It’s not that she left home; she simply never came back home one day. And she has ignored our texts and phone calls since then.

This storm reminded me of that storm, the one the night before Jenn’s birth and my divorce. How wonderful that the wind screamed and cursed along with my own heart. I think I would have lost my mind to such internal storms raging on a peaceful night full of the soft chirp of crickets.

The storm is over, but there are raw broken limbs and flipped-over lawn furniture in the aftermath; orange cones mark some sort of disaster in the street. In the night I heard sirens and prayed again for my daughter’s life. She’s not in the news today. But the weather report says that a worse storm is coming tonight.

If love was enough

If love was enough, I would simply wrap my body completely around my daughter and absorb any blows or shocks that life brings her – or the blows that she attracts. I have wanted to do this ever since I held her tiny six-pound body the day she was born.

Our family agonizes over our Little Dark One, who is struggling to find her place in the world and can’t find a firm place to stand. Sometimes it is hard to believe the extent to which one person’s actions can affect so many other people. It’s hard to understand how she, in her own desperation, can claw at the hearts of the people who truly love her.

And now we are faced with a horrible decision. Do we let a little teenager live in her car in some random parking lot, or do we go back on our “tough love” decision and let her come back home?

If  good parenting alone was enough, we would not be in this situation today.