A Girl and Her God

While in therapy the second time in my life, and after having to share quite a few specifics of the ugliness and dreadfulness of it all, and after being given an especially trying assignment, my therapist, a woman, a Christian whom shared my own religious perspective, ended the session with prayer. I had learned in this 45 minutes that it was God who was the focus of my anger; that I couldn't find it within myself to believe that He could save my soul, but neglected to protect the innocence of my girlhood. I was seething with bitter anger and disappointment. I hadn't taken communion in months, conveniently finding a reason to slip out of the services to stand somewhere in the building and quietly mock the Sacrament of the Body and Blood that had saved that which I couldn't see, had never seen, but could so painfully feel.

Many times when Lindy prayed, I left my eyes open, staring at her, watching her bowed head, amazed at the sincerity of the words falling out of her mouth. Other times, I would look at my hands in my lap, wanting to listen, but still stuck in the summer of 1980, finding reasons to stay away when the contractor, hungry to consume my innocent, pubescent body for himself, would come to texture the walls while listening to Pink Floyd and helping himself to other consumables in the fridge. Like most predators, he could smell the wounded from afar. I still remember the way he eyed me, my mother completely unaware, while explaining what he would with the beams and walls. The amen was a powerful trajectory, throwing me through time to find myself 27, able to defend myself against any antagonist I now faced, but was I finding that I couldn't even see the One whom I felt to be my most avid pursuer.

She started the end of our time just as always with "Well, let's pray." For some reason, maybe tired from the soporific effects of such time travel and epic realization, I closed my eyes, not following any of her words, until I heard her voice stop for a moment, catching the silence, then returning to her conversation with God.

As I so often do when I am contemplative, I stood in the doorway that night and watched my sleeping girls. There was just enough moonlight illuminating their little pajamed bodies entwined with sheets, comforters kicked crookedly to the side. I listened to the softness of their alternating, rhythmic breathing. Here was perfect innocence before me. Each night these girls went to bed with the security of knowing they were loved, cared for, taken care of. The only occupation of their minds was the business of the day's play. I recalled E's first grade teacher sending home a paper my little girl had recently written: "I know my mommy and daddy love me because they play games with me and read to me, and we have fun together."

It wasn't God who had failed me, it was my mother. My young, overwhelmed, single mother who was desperately running from her own suffering and disappointment. Her youth, her stress, and her marital status weren't excuses, but rather clues at helping me understand why she deserted her parenting. I had withheld my anger from her because she was the only tangible, concrete evidence of my miserable existence. Showing ingratitude for all her "sacrifices" would only throw the bolt on the already closed door of her heart. She had subconsciously molded me into the perfect defender of her at-arms-length love.

Here was my opportunity. Here was my choice: to either see my childhood as a sordid mess, and to be destroyed by it, thus ravaging yet more souls, dragging them along with me, and perpetuating the ruin, or to take the painful source of my wisdom, and ensure that it finally ended here. Now.

There wasn't any magical moment where a girl and her God were reconciled. There was; however, a point in time when I recognized that there was still a girl and her God.