I’ve had a headache for eight days.” Derek rubbed his temples as he said it. “I’m sure it’s a brain tumor. I’ve been waiting to find out when it would be my turn. I’m genetically predisposed,” he added, referring to his dad’s recent diagnosis of brain cancer. Our life with cancer was causing us to make wildly morbid, inappropriate jokes with increasing frequency.
“Ha-ha” was my sarcastic response.
“No, I’m serious. I think I have a brain tumor.”
Examining his face, I couldn’t see any break of a smirk, and I realized he was serious. He’d convinced himself there was something wrong.
“It’s stress related,” the doctor told Derek when he went in. Not a surprise, since both of his parents had recently been diagnosed with advanced stages of cancer and were undergoing treatment. And Derek was daily going to a job that felt like prison, sitting at a desk and watching the clock as he wondered if this was what the rest of life held. Hospitals. Cubicles. And bills.
“So what are you going to do about it?” I asked Derek when he relayed the doctor’s diagnosis. I was tired. Worn down. Exhausted from the emotional ups and downs of the last cancer-filled year. Emergency hospital visits. Days in waiting rooms with two kids. Hopeful news and then devastating setbacks.
And my husband with his ever-increasing headaches. He couldn’t sleep. He was retreating into himself. Not talking. Not sharing. A wall was slowly building up, invisible brick by invisible brick, between us.
The truth was he had shared in the past and I didn’t respond well. His job was feeling like a slow death. Every day he went to an office and stared at the walls and his clock, watching the minutes and the hours tick away.
“I need something more than this,” he said.
“We have more. We have kids. We have our life.” Why couldn’t he see that sometimes a job is a means to an end? Why couldn’t he see that now was the time to enjoy life, to be happy? From the outside, we were living the life I’d always wanted, and he was ruining it. Yes, I thought that. I thought his poor attitude was ruining everything.
“Looking ahead at my life, I thought I’d love my job. Like when we were at the Dale House. It was hard, but I knew I counted for something. Now I feel replaceable. But maybe that’s what grown-up life is. Maybe this is real life, and we just didn’t know it when we were younger.”
“Sometimes life doesn’t work out the way we want,” I snapped back. “Our response is what matters.”
Even as I said those words, I knew I wasn’t good at putting them into practice. As far back as I can remember, I knew this lesson, but I still wanted life on my terms. Life doesn’t always look like you think it should. Sometimes life isn’t fair. As a girl, I hated when my mom told me that. Probably because it smelled of so much truth. Prayers don’t always get answered the way we want. Dads don’t call. So we have a choice: to move forward and enjoy God’s blessings that are in our midst, or sulk. Why didn’t he see that?
“It’s different for men,” he said. “Our jobs are tied up in our identities differently. In a way, I am what I do.”
I got it. Kind of. I got it in a way that I didn’t feel it but could imagine what he was saying. But I was still mad. Angry that he couldn’t just snap out of it.
I was finding anger was too often my first response.
Six months earlier, my mothering accomplice Jen called to tell me some news. “I’m going to take a temp job as a social worker.” The lilt in her voice indicated she was excited.
I was confused. Why would she want to go back to work?
“I’ve been so restless, like I haven’t been using all of myself, and I want to see if going back to work is what’s missing.”
What’s missing? Using all of yourself? Isn’t part of motherhood dying to self? I could feel myself judging all over the place, but I didn’t care. Going back to work was not what we did, and I felt strangely betrayed. It’s not like we’d made a pact of any kind or even said these things out loud. Still, I felt abandoned.
“I’ll have to work on Fridays, so I’ll miss the last three MOPS meetings, but I’ll get the door covered,” she said, referring to her role as official greeter in the group.
Now it felt legitimately personal, like she was letting me down. She wasn’t following through on her responsibilities. On what she promised me she’d do. I had no awareness that the reason it felt so personal was because it was tapping into all of my childhood issues of desertion. Poor Jen didn’t either. She just wanted to go back to work.
In the weeks that followed, Jen called on her days off. “It’s fun. I’ve missed this, but I miss you,” she reported.
If you weren’t working, you’d see me, I thought. I missed her too, but I couldn’t see past my own disappointment to celebrate with my friend. I let my hurt and newfound insecurity stand in the way. I was still holding on to the idea that there was a right way to mother, and the biggest factor in the way I’d done things up to that point was to stay at home full-time. She was challenging that notion. Implying she might be a better mom if she went back to work. That there was more than one right way.
Spring turned into summer, which turned into fall. The phone rang as I carried my empty suitcases up from the basement.
“I don’t know why you’re treating me this way.” Jen’s familiar voice sounded garbled on the other end of the line.
Standing in my living room, I got the feeling this was going to be a long conversation.
“I feel like you’re making fun of me in front of everyone.”
I was shocked and a little bit annoyed. What was she talking about? I did a quick mental inventory of the last few weeks and all of the places we’d been together. I thought of our last MOPS meeting and remembered making a quick joke from the stage about Jen, but I thought it was in fun.
“I can’t go on the trip with you if you’re going to keep treating me this way.”
I felt it was safe to roll my eyes since she couldn’t see me. We were getting ready to leave in a few days for the MOPS Convention, and I had a thousand things to do to get ready. Gabi was at preschool and Genevieve was taking a nap; this was precious productive time. I didn’t want to use it talking to Jen about her hurt feelings.
“Well, I’m sorry.” I could hear the snap in my voice. I tried to take a deep breath and not feel so defensive. Part of me knew she was right, but the other part wanted to explain it away. I was busy, rushed. I thought we were just playing around. I wasn’t being literal when I made comments.
But I knew it was the pent-up frustration of the spring and summer bubbling up in side comments. The feelings of anger, betrayal, insecurity, and then embarrassment that had snowballed into one big not-such-a-good-friend mess. And the snippy side comments that came out were clothed as jokes but really were intended to hurt, with a bite that she could detect and I didn’t want to own up to.
My pastor, Steve, tells us that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. And when Jesus was asked if he had to pick one thing for us to do, one rule to follow, what it would be, he answered to love God with our everything and to love those around us like we wanted to be loved. I certainly wasn’t following those instructions.
Jen and I talked for an hour. I could hear the hurt in her voice from my comments the week before, and I was truly sorry. I didn’t know why my snippiness was seeping out all over the place. With my kids. With Derek. With her. In all my attempts to live the right way, I wasn’t doing what God called me most to do: to love the people around me.