Chapter 7

After leaving grad school it was hard to find a job. Even with two solid degrees and the will to learn and apply myself, there were no takers, so I took a job that was in front of me, working in a craft store as the activities specialist, in charge of coordinating classes and events for kids crafting. I also occasionally ran birthday parties, with the mother usually buying all of the materials at the store and bringing a cake from the supermarket. It was a nice job if one didn’t consider the less than stellar pay. It was fun most of the time, and I got to use my art skills and expand others.

It was amazing all of the things that people could invent, “by the grace of God,” my husband would say, but at the time, I wished I had had his glass half-full perspective. Truth is, I was eager to pay off my student loans, my car, my credit cards, and having this job, which because of the schedule prevented me from having a second job, stifled me in ways that were both practical and felt unresolvable. If I stared into the long barrel of this gun, where every car repair put a strain on me, and forced me to make dinners under twenty dollars from the most processed and pseudo-healthy food, I was going to stay this poor for the rest of my life, married or not.

I truly wanted to believe him, but unbidden and unwittingly, pure, cold logic frosted my thoughts and blunted my feelings. Sometimes, very fleetingly, I did believe in the promise of my potential, and that good things would happen for me, to me, but this never lasted because I continued to toil in a space that couldn’t let me breathe.

Monday through Friday, except on holidays, at exactly 6:00 AM, my husband brushed my hair back and kissed my forehead before leaving for work. In those seconds, sometimes shorter than a second, and shorter than a heartbeat, as I hummed, “I love you” with my mouth closed, I did believe it—and all that life promised. On days when he thought of staying a few minutes more to comfort me, he would prolong the moment by kissing me again, pausing for just one more look. But as sleep led me back into unconscious thought, I remembered to forget.

During this time, I consciously longed for the bliss of ignorance–the simple capability of believing in God and good again, but the last few years in graduate school had eroded all of my pronoia, like acid rain erodes limestone, leaving nothing but bedrock—still sturdy, still important, but less imposing; somehow lesser than the sum of its parts. It’s on this icy deadness that I laid my mind and body—like I would on a cold bathroom floor—in a house that was too hot to bear, and waited for the baptism of the rains to come.

I was waiting for relief, but knowing that outside the door I feared—I knew the grass was dead or dying, the sky was bereft of clouds, and the roads were splitting in discomfort. I was waiting to walk again with humanity with an air of greatness—waiting for the gentle breeze of success to stroke my face again, like my husband did after long absences.

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There is wisdom unspoken in the stories that my mother tells me, while I stand with her here sifting the rice—this sacred space where sustenance is trimmed, cleaned, simmered and stirred to create, to sustain, and nourish both body and soul. She is much wiser than I have ever given her credit for. Through nights of relentless toil, I have come to realize the profound privilege of being able to support both my own children and my parents. In ways I could not have fathomed, I have been baptized many times in what has felt like an ocean, receiving blessings brought on by my family’s prayers, not just the sparse rains I once dreamed of for myself in ignorance.

Yet, even here, even now, I tread carefully, maintaining my faith with watchfulness. It is not only suffering that can erode our faith, nor the ceaseless striving that drains our spirit beyond the limits of our own perceived endurance. The absence of effort, the illusion of ease, can also insidiously cause us to take our faith for granted and, eventually, to lose it altogether.