Untold Story #10: The Outer Banks

This story isn't entirely untold, as I shared about the ghost-crab hunting awhile back, but in the wake of Hurricane Matthew, I've been thinking so much about the Outer Banks. In July, we spent a weekend there at the invitation of our friends Rachel and Scott. Rachel was telling me just yesterday that the first floor of the condo where we stayed in Hatteras is flooded. (We also took a ferry to Ocracoke.)

I want to share some of my other photos and say that I remember this trip with tenderness, as it seems to have been a turning point of sorts for us.

I'm thinking of the folks who have rebuilding to do on the Outer Banks. I'm thinking of the scriptures about building a house on sand and how very committed some people are to it, nonetheless. They don't just build but rebuild over and over, and I'm wondering about them: about the resilience they must have...the dedication and wild hope.

Belated 9th Anniversary Post

"Come to Hatteras," they said, and I didn't want to go with you. It had gone bad between us, again. Nine years married, and there's been more bad than good, more hard than easy. We are weary.

I worry about what our children have learned about marriage. We have taught them all we know about it, but our understanding is a bag with holes. We've prayed, read articles and books, watched videos, met with a counselor; yet, we can't seem to get it together.

I've been an excellent learner all my life, but I can't seem to learn this: can't seem to break our painful cycles that are, in many ways, similar to the ones I witnessed, growing up. Sometimes, I'm tempted to blame my parents; other times, I'm tempted to blame yours. I've asked you to imagine throwing my daddy and yours into a sack and shaking it; what would be the outcome? Not good, and I'm not always sure who is who in this scenario; regardless, the truth is that we're the adults (the ones influencing children), now, and aren't we responsible for the choices we make?

It doesn't feel like it; I know. Our behaviors feel innate, primal, beyond the capacity of our excellent brains and kind, Jesus-loving hearts. I live with the fear that, down the pike, our children--our daughters, especially--will choose this: not because it's happy or healthy or normal, but because it's familiar.

We long for respite. We found it, for a few days, in Hatteras. With lights and nets, one night we walked to the sea to hunt ghost crabs.

I'd never hunted ghost crabs, before, and in truth participated this time only through the lens of my old camera, a T3i, which has limited ISO capabilities. It has a flash, but I wanted to see what I could get with ambient lighting. The resulting photos are blurry, but I love them; I think they capture both my wild excitement and my disorientation.

 

They also capture Charleigh's trepidation.

I took many beautiful photos while we were in Hatteras, but these are the ones I've studied over and over. I haven't been able to stop thinking about that night: the dark air so thick with salt that, licking my lips, I could taste it; the beams of the flashlights and lanterns; Charleigh's eyes, wide with concern; the delighted laughter of the other children and shouts of the adults ("We've got one; bring the bucket!"); the surf's occasional lap at my flip-flop-clad feet. Again and again, I have played the movie of this--the ghost-crab hunt--in my mind, until I could not doubt that there was something more I was supposed to see in it, write about it.

So I did the thing I do, sometimes, in which I force my spirit open like a pistachio nut left in the bottom of the bag: one of those we pick out and toss back in because it has an ungenerous gap, because it must be either pried open with something other than our fingers or cracked with a snap between our teeth.

After days and days, this is what I found.

Hunting ghost crabs is a perfect analogy for our marriage. We are haunted people. We are together but alone. We each carry a little light and benefit from the (little) light of others; still, we are severely limited in what we can see. It's dark, here. There are ghosts, here, but good on us if we're committed to capturing them: to seeing and accepting them for what they are and, ultimately, to setting them free.

Your beams illuminate my ghosts; my beams illuminate yours. Our power in one another's life is this and only this: illumination. Not eradication. Eradication is deeply personal. We have long been distracted by one another's ghosts. If there is to be peace and progress, each of us must commit to dealing with his or her own ghosts, also to giving the other space and time to do the same.

May we stumble ever closer to a better and brighter place; may we find one another there. This is nine years married. Hear me when I say: I love you, still.

To Jim on Valentine's Day

Dear Jim,

I'm thinking of February seven years ago. Remember how that guy Tony told you he no longer wanted to be intimate with his wife after watching her give birth? I still have no idea why he told you that, or why you shared the conversation with me. But I was so insecure after Clementine was born--remember?--that I squeezed into your single bed right there in the hospital room. Hold me: tell me you still want me after witnessing that.

I'm so glad to say I know you better, now. I know you, now, as the man who crossed to the nether side of the drape while Dr. Reutinger was performing my c-section to deliver Chip. "Well," you said, watching every bit of the action (and barely raising an eyebrow), "now I can say I've seen parts of you that no one else ever has."

There's been so much blood. No one much talks about the blood inside of a marriage, inside of a family. No one much talks about the snot, the shit...and I'm being literal, here: not figurative in the least (although there's been plenty of figurative shit, too, and someone is even now shaking his or her head over my word choice, but poo doesn't quite cover it).

The puke. Remember the time Cade threw up in his loft bed? Then I--having climbed up to clean up--vomited on top of Cade's vomit. You pulled down the mattress, knelt on the bedroom floor and cleaned it all up.

Something has shifted since Valentine's Day, last. I've shed some paranoia. Just the other day I said of you: "I guess if he were going to leave me, he would've done it, by now." Lesser men are leaving all the time: in search of love, I guess, but love isn't something found; it's something made...and not always (or even often) between the sheets.

What I want to say to you, My Valentine, is thank you. Thank you for staying with me. We've survived so much, including one another, and

I love you.
Brandee

Our Christmas Miracle

In the fall of 1992, I was a freshman at Maryville College and on work-study in the library. My friend Akiko was standing just on the other side of the circulation desk, talking with me, when a security guard approached and said I needed to call home. I hurried with dread to the payphone in the lobby, Akiko on my heels, and learned that my (paternal) grandma had died. I've never forgotten the comfort of my friend: how she walked with me to my dorm room, stayed with me as I packed. I've always believed that God sent her to the library to be with me.

I remembered this at the restaurant, last night, when I was hurrying to leave work and looked up to see Andrea and Vanderhoop just inside the front door. Am I dying? I thought, then: Whatever is happening, God has sent them. I've been here before.

My sister-cousin Andrea is a nurse. When I told her I was leaving work and why (more bleeding than after childbirth or miscarriage), she insisted not only that I go to the ER but also that I allow her to drive me. Jim and the four children had been at the zoo for the live nativity and headed toward the hospital. "Go ahead and check in," he said. "I'll bring the insurance card."

As I left with a nurse for triage, Andrea asked: "How do you want this to go?"

"I want you to take the children home," I told her. "I want Jim to stay with me."

And even as the words left my mouth, I realized: I already have my Christmas miracle.

I've been praying for a different one; Jim had a fourth interview, last week, and whatever the company decided, they decided, yesterday. They told him they would turn yesterday's decision over to HR and contact the candidate of choice early next week. I can't tell you how many times I've thought: Wouldn't it be nice if they called, this week, to say he has the job? 

I've been longing for my parents and brother's family in East Tennessee; I haven't been home for an entire year, and I guess I've never been apart from my mom at Christmastime. I haven't been able to bring myself to ship her a package. She hasn't been able to bring herself to put up a tree. Wouldn't it be nice, I've thought, to know Jim has that job...to just pack up and go home?

Our situation has not yet been resolved; yet, already I can say:

I would not go back.

I would not go back to where we were before Jim lost his job. We were with our third marriage counselor, and while he is incredible!, progress was painfully slow. Jim was so frustrated that he walked out of our last session. He lost his job right after; then, we didn't have the option to return to our (slow) miracle worker. We didn't have the $300/month to spare.

Trust me when I say: after Jim lost his job, things got much worse before they got better. But this situation has been like a jump-start, or defibrillation, to our marriage. I believe we will make it, now. I believe we will be okay. And I'm going to be okay: I was discharged from the hospital with a doctor's note for work and strict instructions to visit my OB/GYN, today. My body is changing. (There's a pill for me.)

My heart is changing, too, and Jim's. We are changing. God is at work, here. There has already been a Christmas miracle.

Belated 8th Anniversary Post

Dear Jim,

Sometimes I like to pretend I made perfect sense before I married you (in all your complications, depth, and passion) and before we brought, in less than four years, three babies into the world.

I am (we are) in a pressure cooker to be sure, but I think it's important that I try to remember who and how I was (really was) before you...and between you and you. I am thinking back to our weekend in South Boston. It had been thirteen years since we'd touched and eleven since we'd looked upon one another's faces.

It's been more than eight years, now, since South Boston: long enough that the brightness and sharpness of those few days are gone. But when I try, really try, to remember the truth about them, I remember first and foremost how much I cried.

I remember how, without my asking, you said everything I wanted you to say. I remember how I couldn't handle it: how I left early, telling you I needed time to process it. I remember how I couldn't, didn't believe it.

But it was all true; wasn't it. I am not asking. You are still here.

For eight years, you have lived out what you said in South Boston; still, I do not always believe you love me. This is rarely your fault. We are so far in; still, I am terrified. Terror does not always look like one might expect. This is not a cheap, horror movie. This is our home, and these are our lives and the lives of our babies.

Somewhere in the middle of a bed in the middle of a log cabin in the middle of the woods, there is a woman crying. She is pinned against her sleeping husband by one of his Paul-Bunyan forearms, but it is not what (it is rarely what) one might think. He scratched her back with his chin before he fell asleep, and before that, they talked in the dark as though it were 1994. Or 2007.

I am that woman. Mostly, I am thinking I want to die your wife.

Brandee

Charleigh's Birthday Weekend

Charleigh turned four over six months ago. I wrote her birthday post but didn't share photos of her birthday weekend, which we celebrated at Jellystone in Natural Bridge. I like to use my blog as a kind of scrapbook and print and bind every so often, but I'm way behind; I'm going to try and catch up.

Charleigh's is our only summer birthday, so we make the most of it. This was our third birthday celebration at Jellystone in Natural Bridge. (We didn't go in 2012, when I was pregnant with Chip.) The first time had been a little rough because Charleigh didn't particularly care for Yogi Bear and his friends (also because 2.5-year-old Clementine had released the parking brake on a golf cart, sending it crashing into a fire pit, but we don't have to talk about that). The second time had been close to perfect, so we tried in many respects to replicate the experience.

This is Cade's our friend Sam, who always takes the seventh seat in our minivan without complaint and makes sure everyone's buckled up for safety, back there. We love him so much.

If I'm being honest, the thirteen-year age span between our oldest and youngest children can make it challenging to entertain them simultaneously. We've found that one easy solution is to include one of Cade's friends as often as possible; they're all such great kids. And certain places--Jellystone, Chuck E. Cheese's, Busch Gardens--are fun for everyone.

My parents have driven from East Tennessee up to Natural Bridge every time we've camped at Jellystone. I'm so thankful for all the memories we've made with them, there.

What with arts n crafts and events in the rec center; the pool, splash park, lake, and river; miniature golf, the arcade, and the jumping pillow, there's plenty to do without ever leaving Jellystone. We're talking about me, though, so in 2011 we visited Natural Bridge, also a toy museum and butterfly exhibit (included, at the time, for the price of admission), and in 2013 we visited Natural Bridge Zoo. In 2014, we decided to visit Virginia Safari Park, where...

...Charleigh lost it. I've been her mother for 4.5 years, now, and I've never seen her so completely and utterly freaked out. Those big animals started sticking their heads into our minivan for food, and she melted down. All the way down. We're talking hyperventilation. ("I was a little freaked out myself," Sam said, "by the emu." Jim--concerned about the paint on the minivan--would've preferred a bit more distance from the elk.) Charleigh survived the drive-thru experience by climbing into Cade's lap in the back seat and smashing her face into his armpit until it was over.

She's still talking about how we tortured her on her birthday. Oh, and I forgot candles for the ice cream cake that Yogi delivered. She's still talking about that, too.

The great news is that Virginia Safari Park includes a walk-thru village, which was much more Charleigh's speed (even if she would take no part in petting the giant snake or feeding a budgie).

Overall, Charleigh's birthday weekend was a fun time. Sam's mama came and picked up the big kids early (Sam had to play soccer; Cade had to march his bass clarinet; and both had to start high school.), but Jim, the little kids, and I were able to watch Mark Cline perform a magic show before heading home. (I didn't take photos.) Oh, and I paid twenty-five cents, that same day, for an old book of children's Bible stories that I love far beyond any other homeschooling resource we have.

I wonder what Charleigh will remember, years from now. Love, I hope.