11
Aisle 7 and the Evil Spaghetti

Unemployment, dashed dreams, and suddenly finding yourself at home for ten hours a day with a one-year-old is a recipe for emotional meltdowns. I had them daily. The most spectacular display of my emotional instability happened in the spaghetti aisle at the grocery store as I was attempting to restore my purpose in life by becoming domestic. This was a terrible mistake. Cooking spaghetti can never help you regain your purpose in life, especially if you are me. I am the worst kind of domestic-y woman you will ever meet. And at that point in my life it had been quite some time since I had been in the kitchen.

A decade of bouncing from city to city in vans, RVs, and tour buses will do that to you—make you undomestic-y. While my girlfriends progressed in their homey Pinterest and Pottery Barn skills back in Texas, I progressed in the art of creating tents for my daughter out of hotel-room curtains. We lived like vagabonds. After the fire in the spring of 2010, Addison Road was contracted to be a part of one final fall tour with Tenth Avenue North and Matt Maher, some of our favorite artists. We went in with Matt and his band to rent a bus for the two-month, forty-city excursion. Thirteen of us, including Annie, lived on the bus for over nine weeks straight.

You don’t cook for yourself on tour, because the food is provided. You don’t iron your clothes, because ironing clothes you have worn three days in a row is gross. Plus, where to find an iron? You don’t have bowel movements on the tour bus. Ever. It is the unspoken rule that guides every traveling artist. So each morning after arriving at a new venue, we would all stumble off the bus looking disheveled, but clearly on a mission—the search for a clean sink to brush our teeth in and a private place to poop. Life on a tour bus is just about that glamorous. No cooking, no laundry, no privacy, no cleanliness, no alone time. No life as normal.

By the time we made the decision to come off the road, hopping venues, greenrooms, and time zones on a daily basis with my daughter in tow was normal life. Ryan and I had lived that lifestyle for over ten years. Acclimating back to a bed that didn’t move while you slept in it and pooping whenever you felt like it was cause for severe culture shock. I literally did not know how to operate in this strange other world. I could not have told you the last time I had cooked a proper meal for my family or even gone grocery shopping. But there I was in the neighborhood grocery store, in aisle 7, determined to create a new normal. Determined to piece my life back together. Determined to cook a meal for my family, if only I could pick the right noodle.

But I couldn’t pick the right noodle. Last time I was noodle shopping, circa 1999, there were, like, five noodle options—ramen being, of course, the primary noodle. I mean, it wasn’t that complicated: you had spaghetti, angel hair, rigatoni (if you were high class), and macaroni shells. That plus a few Ragu tomato sauce choices, and life made sense. And I’m not sure what else happened in the world between 1999 and 2011 while I chased my dreams, but my gosh we made advances in our noodle options.

Now we’ve got green noodles, red noodles, purple noodles, whole grain, whole wheat, gluten-free, spelt noodles, kelp noodles, no-yolk noodles, and about a thousand different shapes and sizes to choose from.

As I stood staring at the noodles, they taunted me. What kind of noodle does a Christian woman choose? And what kind of mother doesn’t know which noodle is best for her kid? Shouldn’t a wife be able to grab a box off aisle 7 and keep walking with her head held high to the peanut butter aisle? What kind of future did I have if I couldn’t even conquer the grocery store? The spaghetti sauces echoed my failure; they were all staring at me, I could feel it. Ragu was judging me. What kind of thirty-year-old lives on a bus, eats from other people’s hands, lives by faith, and then goes bankrupt? What do I do now? WHAT? Now that my whole life has failed and I don’t know how to be a stay-at-home mom and I don’t know how to cook and I don’t know what purpose my life holds? Will I fail at this too? Of course I will; I can’t even pick out a FRIGGING NOODLE.

There I was on aisle 7, grieving my entire past and future. I had failed at life, motherhood, wifehood, careerhood—at all the -hoods. I had just failed. I sobbed deep, grievous, ugly girl sobs in the spaghetti aisle. And God promptly sent me a spaghetti angel: a lady in her mid-seventies with a thick Texas accent, twinkly eyes, and strong hands. She pulled her grocery cart next to mine and put her hand firmly in the middle of my back.

“Honey, I don’t know what it is. I don’t. Only the Good Lord knows. But I do know this: some nights we just do takeout.”

She let go of my back and looked deep into my puffy, alien eyes as my lips quivered and the tears continued falling. I attempted to speak.

“I just don’t know what noodle to pick out. You know?” Of course she knows. Certainly she remembers the days when there were only five noodle options.

“Honey, you just leave that buggy right here. Just leave it. Right. Here. It will take care of itself. And you go get in your car and you order a pizza. Understand me? You go order a pizza, honey, and I’m gonna be praying for you tonight.”

And I did just as the spaghetti angel told me. Perishables and all, I left my cart right there in front of the noodles that were taunting me, reminding me that I had failed at life and had no future. I left it all right there and ran to my car, sobbing.

That was the day I began to bury. I began to bury the old life that I knew so well and the good old days when noodles came in five simple varieties. Days when I knew what I was doing and who I was and where I was going. I began to bury. For weeks, months, nearly a year, I grieved my losses.

Some people were quick to hurry me along in my grief. They assumed that God had ordained my suffering for His glory and that my grief should only last for a short time before I was back to normal and back to glory giving. But I don’t believe God ordains pain and chaos; I believe He redeems pain and chaos. And redeeming pain can take awhile. Other people wanted to see the bright side for me way too soon. “Well, at least you got ten good years out of it!” or “You can finally focus on writing now. How wonderful.” Or my favorite: “Now you can really invest in being a mom!”—as if I was not already invested in being a mom. Their intentions were good, but what their positive mantras and personal theologies screamed at me was, There’s no time (or need) for grief; just move on to the next thing. My spaghetti-aisle angel gave me what I truly needed: permission to grieve.

We are a grief-averse culture, which is tragic. And damaging. Grief is a core human emotion; it is the grieving of what we are burying that allows us to fully lay a thing to rest. Once something or someone is laid to rest and we have fully mourned it, which is not the same as forgetting it, there becomes space in our hearts for new life to slowly emerge.

Jesus Himself grieved.

When Jesus gets word that His lifelong best friend, John, has been beheaded and paraded around as a party favor, He immediately gets in a boat by Himself and goes to a solitary place to grieve.1 Perhaps Jesus knew His response in this painful moment might be prescriptive—setting the tone for His disciples on how to process and cope with life’s most painful moments. He doesn’t ignore the pain and He doesn’t tell the disciples that it was just part of God’s divine plan. Despite Jesus essentially being on what would today be called a tour—hopping from village to village, healing the sick, teaching the crowds, living like a vagabond—He withdraws from all of it to be alone in His initial grief. Of course the crowds of curious seekers, new believers, and zealous fans get word that Jesus has gotten away by boat, and they rush to meet Him at His final destination. In His compassion, Jesus pauses from His grieving, teaches the crowd, and feeds them with miraculous fish and bread. But after that? He sends everyone away, even the disciples, and once again retreats to grieve. This time He hikes up a mountain to pray. Other times He goes to a garden, or the Mount of Olives where He grieves for Jerusalem, or the tomb of His beloved friend Lazarus where He openly weeps for His friend. Jesus never dismisses His need for space and time to grieve. And neither should we.

If nothing else, the Christian faith is one masterful story of life emerging from the grave. We are resurrection people who audaciously believe that the ultimate end of our story is life—not death. Because of this, we are free to mourn and bury as people of hope and not desperation. And this is good news since quite a bit of life is spent burying.

Burying children who can’t be and children who are—and are so very broken. Burying marriages, relationships, jobs, and churches. Burying the very things we planned out, pursued, and poured into. Those plans and dreams we thought were squared away. As Daniel Defoe and Benjamin Franklin remind us, death and taxes are life’s only certainties. If death is inevitable, then we should be prepared for our fair share of grieving and burying. But if the words of Jesus ring true for us—blessed are the poor in spirit and those who mourn, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven and the gift of comfort—then grieving becomes bearable.

It is indispensable to grieve as a person of hope. The death of a dream, plan, or person we love dearly is not the end of the story. It is, however, the starting point on our road to becoming. That place where eventually, somehow, someway new life is birthed. Don’t get me wrong, burying doesn’t feel like new life; it feels like meltdowns in the spaghetti aisle; it feels like a desert. But the desert is the gateway to waiting. The waiting is the womb. And out of the womb comes new life.

I don’t usually make friends by inviting them to a funeral, but that is how this road to becoming truly begins. We must be unafraid to grieve and bury.