I scolded myself as I dusted the coffee table and straightened a picture.
Why in the world had I invited Dee Ann to my house?
I’d met her the week before at a women’s meeting where I was the speaker. We sat at tables, eating forbidden desserts, sipping coffee or tea, and delicately wiping our mouths on tiny, flowered paper napkins.
In an effort to exude confidence as I walked to the podium, I swept the audience with a friendly smile. They were splashes of red, green, blue, yellow, orange, and violet, with an occasional brushstroke of black, gray, and white. Some had read my first book, The Greening of Mrs. Duckworth, and wanted to hear more of my story. This was my first opportunity to lay out the transformed rubbish of my life before women in my own city.
My reception after the meeting had been warm; women in sunny pantsuits and sheer flowered dresses hugged me and shook my hand. A young, slender blonde had waited until the last warm word was spoken, then introduced herself. She smiled with her entire face.
“Hi, my name is Dee Ann. I appreciate what you said…” Her smile faded and she looked off into the distance, finally inhaling a fresh dose of courage. “I’d like to talk to you, but it would take time…” She looked like a child waiting to be told whether to stand up, sit down, or go home. I wanted to inhale her fear and make it my own. “Let’s see…what’s your schedule like? I’m sure we can figure out a time to get together.” We set a date for the following week, and I invited her to come to my home.
In a few minutes Dee Ann would be ringing the bell. I stood in the middle of the room eyeing the lime green sofa I once chose in ignorance and now detested. Behind it were two Con-Tact covered bookcases turned backward to separate my husband’s office from our living quarters.
Tables, shelves, and walls in the room where we sprawled to watch TV were covered with knickknacks because I was sure every gift had to be on display. I knew my rental house screamed “cheap” nearly as loudly as the apartment suspected to have been a brothel with its car-seat sofa and cretonne-paneled curtains had years ago.
The bell chimed and the dog barked. Dee Ann was here.
I led her to the green sofa and arranged a tray table in front of her, checking to make sure the sometimes shaky legs were secure. “Would you like tea?”
Seeming grateful for a social amenity that promised friendship and not quiz-time, she accepted. After I poured the tea and settled beside her, I asked, “How can I help you?”
Dee Ann hesitated. “I don’t know where to begin.”
She had an apprehensive look, as though she expected to be shown the door instead of kindness. Dee Ann, I decided, looked like me years ago, although she was wearing another face. Of course, I’d never sat on anyone’s sofa to tell my most secret secrets. That would have required a both-feet-in-the-water trust that I didn’t possess.
I knew I’d understand Dee Ann, because I’d been Dee Ann.
“Begin anywhere.” I leaned back and drank some tea.
She began to speak, starting with events of last week and working backward to childhood. Her voice was low, as though the walls really did have ears.
As I listened, this ordinary moment of tea on the sofa with a new friend began to be transformed. Inwardly I was aware that God was sharpening my senses so I could hear between the lines. He was filling me with sorrowful love for the tiny traumatized child who had grown into a traumatized woman.
It soon became evident that Dee Ann had been abandoned and never recovered. I sensed that God wanted to slip into her crowded, inner back room and begin healing her the way He’d healed me.
My tackily furnished living room no longer mattered. God was going to begin to fill the holes in Dee Ann’s life right here on my ugly lime green sofa.
Dee Ann returned every week for months. The Holy Spirit, a Person of perfect grace, did slip quietly into her inner back room and gently urged a memory forward. Each time, I sensed God bringing ideas for me to speak back.
In the weeks and months that followed, other troubled women phoned me: “I heard from a friend at church that you do counseling. Can you make time for me?” Sometimes a friend asked me to meet with someone who was mired in life’s quicksand. Always, I said yes.
Within months my card file listed dozens of names. Every week, as I scheduled appointments, I felt like falling on my face in wonder. God had chosen me to put Jesus-mud on festering wounds! I didn’t have a single letter after my name to list in the yellow pages or on my business cards. I was an ordinary person who sat with her husband in front of a puttogether chipboard entertainment center in the living room.
Jill came. Young and apologetic, she looked as though she’d rather eat dirt than hurt someone’s feelings. She had a mother who sneered at life because life had sneered at her.
Martha came, fresh from a suicide attempt.
Louise, I met at church. Each evening growing up, she hid in her room and put a pillow over her head to try and drown out the sounds of her drunken parents.
Some had a mentally ill parent as I did. A few mothers and fathers were sober and held good jobs. They kept fully stocked pantries and handed out ample allowances each week and said without saying it, “You’re a big girl, you can take care of yourself. Don’t bother me.” For they had important work to do on the city council or the school board.
Cassie represented girls with parents who didn’t know how to parent. Their fathers were distant or martinets; some mothers were taciturn or flitted and giggled–an embarrassment to their daughters.
The women who came confessed. They numbed themselves with prescription or street drugs. They were secret drinkers or clean and sober women who cranked themselves up every morning so they’d never have to stop and reason why. They were binge shoppers; had eating disorders.
Melanie and her ilk were somber, moved slowly, lay sleepless at night and lethargic during the day because they were depressed. Often, I sent newcomers to a physician for a checkup.
Most had one thing in common: they’d never been Daddy’s little girl or Mother’s precious child and had never stopped aching because of it.
The majority were Christian, but their faith wasn’t working, and that fact made them feel even more guilty. Perhaps their deepest secret–the one they finally whispered to me–was that God might not be good after all. Why else would He have allowed them to suffer such pain?
After I hugged Rosie or Betty good-bye each week, I carried the teapot and cups to the kitchen sink. I stared out the window without seeing the red maple tree or birds on the feeder, as I lay out pieces of women’s lives in my mind. Rosie was unhappy, guilty, and perfectionistic. Cassie was haunted, torn, and addicted.
Every woman had a unique story and set of symptoms. But the cause was the same: she’d been deserted by a parent or parents who ran off or died, or who were mentally incompetent, self-centered, or unequipped to raise a child.
Over and over, as I dried the teapot and cups, I shook my head that there were so many of me. Some stories shoved my own tale to the end of the line. My experience of poverty and discrimination and rejection didn’t compare to desertion without food and shelter.
Tina’s story was one of the worst.
My husband, who could make friends with a doorknob, met her in the office where she worked. He was on his way to have coffee at the restaurant next door and invited her to go along. Afterward he recalled how she absently tore pieces from the edges of her Styrofoam cup as they talked. And the way she laughed, a throaty “har har” followed by a snort. When he teased her about it, she responded with another har har and snort.
John’s new friend soon became my friend too. A frequent visitor, she and I talked about music and sewing and God. The threads holding her latest marriage together were wearing thin. Before long the tie that binds was severed in divorce court.
One day when John visited her at the business she’d opened recently, she couldn’t offer a single har-har snort. My husband came home and got me. With shelves full of merchandise as a backdrop, I offered to help her. Sighing heavily, she agreed.
The following week this tiny, attractive woman who could have been my daughter came not to chat, but to find help.
Tina’s mother had been physically and mentally abusive; she didn’t know her birth father. While she was still playing with dolls, her stepfather began sexually abusing her. She wept, she hid, she prayed, she begged, but he wouldn’t stop. When she grew older and pleaded as hard as she could to be left alone, he made a deal.
“Bring home one of your friends from school, and I’ll stop.” She refused; he continued.
He repeated the abuse as regularly as dawn until her teenage years when she shattered at school. Tina’s mother took her to a doctor who gave her a physical examination. Her stepfather was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned.
The abuse had stopped, but Tina’s soul lay in pieces. Sex was the only intimacy she knew, so she formed relationships. She married. When her mate became abusive, she divorced and tried again. And again. Over and over as we talked, she wept out her guilt, soaking my shoulder, blotting her tears with tissues. Over and over, I soothed her with truth.
“Your stepfather is the guilty one, not you.” As slowly as the change of seasons, she began to believe me.
John and I adopted Tina as our spiritual daughter. He was the first father figure she learned to trust. Once she even stayed alone with him for a whole week when I was away. He fixed Australian toaster biscuits for her each morning and sent her to work with a hug.
People like Tina, who had been treated so severely, forced me to rethink my faith. At night, while John watched TV, I propped myself up on pillows, Bible and notebook in hand, to think and pray and read and pray some more.
Why, God? Where were you all those years Tina was being sexually abused by that lecher? When Rosa and her sisters were abandoned without food and shelter? When Dodie’s father made fun of her, making her feel ugly and stupid?
I listened hard for a one-size-fits-all answer that never came. A familiar thought did brush against my mind, though.
Go back to spiritual kindergarten.
Immediately, I understood. Spiritual kindergarten was the place I returned to when my faith was eroded by tough times. To me, that meant sitting immobilized at the kitchen table watching a bird feed her young. Then a squirrel balancing his way across the power line like a circus performer.
Sometimes it meant a walk through the neighborhood, stopping to examine a tiny crocus. A ladybug on a blade of grass. Hungrily I soaked in the green of a maple, the yellow of forsythia. I saw and sensed evidence on a platter that despite the mystery of suffering, God is and He is good.
Tomorrow morning, Lord. Tomorrow morning, I’ll settle on our ugly green sofa with my Bible and a cup of tea and worship, just like Job.
Continues.
