CHAPTER FIVE: YOUR INNER STORY: Reflecting
I know my gift is limited. I know I cannot stand toe to toe with philosophers or theologians nor solve for myself or anyone else the problems of evil, either natural or moral. But we who are writers can tell a story, or write a poem. Where rational argument will always fail, somehow, miraculously in metaphor and simile and image and simple narrative, there is both healing and illumination. We write stories not because we have answers but because we have questions.
KATHERINE PATERSON, IN SHOUTS AND WHISPERS:
21 WRITERS SPEAK ABOUT THEIR WRITING AND THEIR FAITH
IT’S THE FOURTH WEEK OF CLASS, a yearlong Writing Life Stories class that’s part of a larger university program. I watch everyone drift in, happy, chatting. I smile at Jack, nod at Cherry. “Hey, Russell.” “Come on in, Lisa.” There are fourteen in this evening class. I’m pleased with the community that’s already formed. But I have a small pit of dread in my stomach tonight. Two people submitted their stories for our feedback. One is marvelous. The other is —not.
“Okay, everyone, we’ve got tons to do! I’m going to talk about scenes tonight. We’ll do some writing and sharing. And in the last hour, we’re going to look at two more stories —David’s and Jeanna’s, right?” I smile widely at both as they give me fake terrified smiles back.
At first, the class goes well. I am pleased with everyone’s engagement with scenes. And the LifeStory Circle around David’s story goes beautifully. The piece needs lots of work, but everyone is enthralled with his experience at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Motorcycles always win in a writing class.
Now it’s Jeanna’s turn. She’s somewhere in her fifties, I’m guessing. She’s wearing a denim jacket and hoop earrings tonight. She looks confident.
“Okay, everyone. Let’s take out Jeanna’s piece. What did you like about this story?” I look around, eagerly, hoping someone will help me out here. Jeanna’s story is about three of her ex-husbands and one of her former boyfriends. I don’t think she’s married right now. The story is funny. It is graphic. And it is mean. It would be a perfect contribution to an anthology for man-haters.
I look hopefully at Suzanne and Cathy, my “regulars” who often bail me out when I talk myself into a corner. Their heads are down, looking intently at their copy of the story. I glance around the semicircle. Everyone’s avoiding eye contact.
Finally Jeanna breaks the silence. “Hey, guys, what’s up? I’m just telling the truth about these so-called men,” Jeanna says in a low, husky voice, looking around the room, annoyed now.
“Well, I’ll start!” I blurt. I thought of one thing I can say. “Jeanna, I love that you’re writing about important things. Relationships, of course, are good terrain for exploration.”
“Oh yeah.” She laughs. “I got tons more where that came from.” She reaches under her chair and brings out an inch-thick manuscript and plops it down on her desktop. “This is it, my memoir. I’m just about done. That’s the second chapter I gave you.”
We sit, stunned.
“Wow, that’s impressive,” I finally say.
“How many pages is that?” Cathy asks.
“Two hundred and thirty-eight.”
“How long have you been working on that?” I ask.
“Five years,” she answers, proud. “It’s about growing up in the Deep South during the race riots. And it’s got a bunch more dirt on those fleabag husbands of mine.” She looks delighted.
The class falls silent again. Everyone is looking at me. This is when I wish I were a butterfly scientist or a professional organizer of closets. Or a mortician. Why didn’t I stick to just writing? Why didn’t I listen to that professor who said writing can’t be taught?
“Ummmm, Jeanna, I wonder if I may ask, ummmm, why did you take this class? It looks like you’ve already finished your memoir.” I try to keep my voice light.
“I thought you could help me clean it up. You know, proofreading stuff, better words, more description, whatever. I’m happy with what I wrote. I want people to know about these so-called men.” Her voice drops again on this last phrase.
Everyone is staring at me wide-eyed, wondering what I’m going to say. I’m wondering too.
“Soooooooo, I think this class is more about creating new writing, Jeanna, rather than bringing in what we feel is already finished,” I venture cautiously. “While you’re in this class, I’d really like for you to write some new material. And to practice the things we’ve been learning: scenes, and ummm, especially reflection.” I emphasize this last word. I can’t help it. I add a smile, looking around for backup.
Last week in class, I talked about the importance of reflection, about writing away from what we think we know, toward new understanding. We write not just from who we were then but from who we are now. The chapter she gave us to read was mostly a rant, all set in the past. The whole book sounds like a revenge chronicle.
Will raised his finger tentatively. “I gotta be honest with you, Jeanna. I like you. I think you’ve got a great sense of humor. But I wouldn’t read very far into your book. You’re kinda angry in this story. Are you like that all the way through?”
I am silently thanking God for honest men when Russell, who is in his seventies and rarely speaks, chimes in. “I don’t think you like men very much.”
“Oh, I like ’em, all right. That’s why I keep marrying ’em!” Jeanna cracks, and suddenly we laugh, relieved, all of us falling gratefully into this opening.
This chapter is for Jeanna and all of us who have written our stories already, and for those of us who are still just starting. We’re onto the final and the most ground-shaking element of storytelling: reflection.
You’ve been writing scenes since chapter 3, and I hope you love it. I hope you’ve seen how scene literally lifts memories from the dust, raising them to corporeal life. But there’s always a deeper question beyond the events we’re resuscitating. Scene details the outer story, but there’s an equally fascinating inner story. Sometimes we don’t see it on our own. Often fellow writers in our LifeStory Circles can ask questions and help point us deeper.
I didn’t have a class or any kind of story circle, but I did have Kate. I’m on the phone again with her now, a month after I finished those scenes in the fishing boat.
“Leslie, good scenes here. Graphic. Compelling.” Her voice is clipped, hurried, as usual. “The book feels closer. But there’s something crucial missing.”
I’ve heard those words before. “What is it?” I ask with dread, wondering if she’s going to tell me to scrap the whole thing and start over.
“Why did you stay? With all that happened, why didn’t you jump ship and leave the island? That’s what most people would have done. Why are you still there?”
I am silent. I didn’t expect this. I feel like she’s judging me, calling my whole life into question. I don’t know how to answer. Then Kate breaks the silence.
“Well, the reader has to get it. I understand why you went into the Alaska wilderness, all that. But what kept you? And how were you changed at the end? Without that arc, there’s no story.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say, heart sinking. I know Kate is talking about the inner story. Haven’t I taught this to my students? Every story has at least those two layers: the outer story, what happens in the out-there world; and the inner story, the deeper story, the psychic, emotional, spiritual story. The outer story takes us into the past with scene and summary; the inner story —that searching, reflecting voice —is usually set in the present.
It’s so tempting to stay in the past, to keep events safely distant. I wanted to do that. My students have as well. I had one student, Dan, who persistently wrote from his childhood in a child’s voice. He resisted growing up and adding his adult perspective now. But why are we bothering to turn around and write behind us if not to write ourselves forward?
Yes, we’re writing in pursuit of events and life stories that happened fifty years ago, or thirty years, or seven years. But that story set in the past is not complete without the story of the present. Your story is not just the thing that happened then but how you understand it now. You’re a different person now than you were when your father lost his job and you and your siblings moved to a trailer in the desert. The best life stories, the most powerful memoirs, offer this dual lens: what happened in the past and how our present reckons with that past. The most compelling parts of our story are often this “story of thought.”
No matter what the story is or where it takes place, you can’t end up in the same place you started. A story must move us, both as writer and reader. That is, it must quite literally take us from one place to another: from the past to the present. From event to reflection. From ignorance to wisdom. From innocence to experience. Every story is a quest of sorts, and that quest often begins with a question. It must be a question that matters deeply to the writer, and it’s the writer’s job to make it matter to the reader as well.
If nothing happens or changes, there is no story. Yes, there are exceptions and experiments, such as French absurdist Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, where the characters are trapped in a state of misery and stasis with no possibility of change or resolution. Both plays end as hopelessly as they begin.
Postmodernism has spawned a host of such stories layered with irony: Look, a story told in three voices about an existentialist lying on his futon, smoking cigarettes, ruminating about an existentialist on his futon! These antistories are fascinating at first, revelatory of another worldview and the reality of some people’s lives, but they often do not move or sustain. And ultimately, I believe, they do not tell the whole truth.
And here it is —theology again. Theology and story are never far removed from each other. What we believe about human existence, meaning, and the nature of time is fundamental to our storytelling. I am a hopeless optimist who believes this whole cosmic ball of wax is actually headed somewhere. That events are not random and without meaning or purpose. That there is value in asking questions, in tracing histories, in leaning close to learn from the past.
Writers in my classes have asked and written into all sorts of questions: What happened to my father that night in the coal mine, and how did it affect our family? Why did I give up teaching, the one job I loved? Why did my mother start drinking? Where is home? Why did I leave the church? How did cancer change me?
As we write into these questions, we move. If we’re asking well, we move from ignorance toward understanding. And often, we move from the past into the present.*[27]All of this movement creates the narrative arc.
I knew this before I began the memoir. This was the piece that scared me most about life stories and memoir. I wrote essays for years before attempting my own life stories. Essays could ramble anywhere you wanted. You could write about burning garbage on the beach, cutting up meat, building a house, watching bald eagles. All perfectly safe with no need to reflect and revise my own understanding of my life.
But how could I say no to this? I was committed. I had signed the contract. Somehow I knew that if I was going to grow as a writer and even as a person, I needed to take this next step. I was right. Writing life stories, and this particular piece of story-making —reflection —keeps changing my life. Again and again, with every book I write. And it will change yours.
I know that sounds over-the-top. But why do we write? We write to remember, to pass on some of what we’ve experienced in this life. Our families need to know where we’ve been and who we are. We can pass on hope as we share ways that we survived cancer, divorce, the loss of a spouse. All of this matters. But there is more. We write to find out what we don’t yet know. We write now, from where we are in this stage of life, interrogating past stages. Who were we then? Who are we now? What wisdom have we found along the way? What wisdom might we find now?
There were questions I needed to ask: Who was that twenty-year-old girl, just married, standing in a skiff, trying to keep her balance in the new waters of marriage, living with her in-laws on a remote island in Alaska? Is there something here we all might see about finding and making a home in a strange land? I had written the outer stories of my life for ten years by then. But now, halfway through my life, thanks to a deadline and Kate’s insistence, I wanted more. I wanted the inner story. I knew it didn’t mean the inner story of my entire life. That was too overwhelming and impossible. I was looking for the inner story of my new life in Alaska.
So I did it. I started writing inside each of the significant events: when I got lost, alone, in a boat in a winter squall. When I pried our frozen laundry off the outside clothesline. Whenever I had the chance, I scribbled. I free-associated, digging down layer by layer. Each word, each question felt like a prayer. I felt like Jacob in the Old Testament story, the man who wrestled an angel of God all through the night. Jacob had stolen his twin brother’s inheritance. When Esau, the robbed brother, threatened to kill him, Jacob fled. And now, years later, Jacob stands alone on the banks of a river in the dark as his brother approaches. He’s terrified by the arrival of his past and the sure accounting for his theft of Esau’s blessing. But someone else showed up. (And —take note! —this is all written as a scene!)
That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”
But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
The man asked him, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered.
Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”
Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”
But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.
So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.
GENESIS 32:22-31
This is a conversion story, a turning-point event that changed the course of Jacob’s life. He was met by his past, and though frightened, he didn’t flee. He leaned low and grabbed hold of his opponent however he could through that long night. It changed his future, marking the beginning of the nation of Israel (which means “he wrestles with God”). I wonder how many times, how many hours over the unfolding decades of his life, Jacob pondered the events of that night, rubbing his sore hip.
Jacob’s story is real, I believe, but it’s also a grand metaphor for what we’re doing when we write. We can lay out all the events of our lives and present them in vivid scenes, with summary between to fill in the lesser spots, but our story is so much more than the outer events. We go out onto that white page, like Jacob on the plains beyond the river, to meet our past. And maybe we go with fear, not knowing who will come and what his intentions are. We wrestle with words. We wrestle to understand. To find wisdom. To find out our true name.
One of the biggest misconceptions about writers is that they sit around and think up Important Literary Things and that when they’re done, they sit down to spill out all their genius on paper. The real truth? I know gaggles of writers, and we all write not because we have a grip on our own lives and know Important Things but because we don’t. We write to find out Important Things. We write to fight against forgetting. We write to excavate. We write to discover that inner story, and it comes mostly through wrestling. Sometimes maybe we’re grappling with an angel. Sometimes ourselves. Sometimes maybe even God.
I know this all sounds too mystical and too hard. How do we actually do this? Let me show you a way: through a writing exercise I call WordSeeking. This practice is commonly known as Freewriting, but I’m renaming it to something I believe is more accurate. When we WordSeek, we’re using words in pursuit of words, of course, but we’re not recording thoughts, memories, and images as much as we’re seeking. We’re actively seeking memories, truth, and understanding. Jesus (who is also known as the Word), gives this invitation to all of us:
Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
MATTHEW 7:7; LUKE 11:9
This is just what we’re doing: asking, seeking, knocking —using the tools given to us: words. And when we do this, we’re somehow touching the divine.
When I teach people how to write stories from their lives, this part is always the roughest: convincing them to throw out their inner editor and just write like a river into their questions with no stops, no fixes, no backing up, just flowing wherever the water wants to go. It doesn’t sound quite right, somehow, throwing out all the usual rules like that. It sounds like the start of anarchy, maybe, or like mysticism, or maybe even a little bit of socialism. You know, something threatening.
Jeanna was the most resistant to WordSeeking. A few weeks after our initial kerfuffle, I prepped the class to begin their first attempt. It went like this.
“Okay, I’m going to show you why we need WordSeeking. I’m going to start writing a story.” I’m standing in front of a whiteboard with a blue marker in my hand. I scrawl across the whiteboard,
It was a dark and stormy night.
I stand back, regarding my genius words. “Oh, that’s ridiculous. Such a cliché.” I cross it out. “But wait, it was a dark and stormy night. No . . .” I cross out stormy. I try out a few other adjectives, then reverse the order of the adjectives. Then I realize, out loud, with the marker in my hand as I’m writing, that “Wait, no, it wasn’t actually night. I think it was more like early evening.” I cross out “night.” And on I go for another thirty seconds, writing and rewriting until the whiteboard is filled with indecipherable cross-outs and arrows. I’ve managed to decide on two words: “nasty” and “evening.” And I’m not even sure about those.
“Have you been spying on me?” David asks.
“Oh my gosh. That’s my problem exactly,” Amy says, looking as though I’d slapped her.
“Right!” I say, trying not to sound triumphant. “Do you all see what’s happening? My over-zealous editor keeps shutting me down. I can’t get past the first sentence. If I stayed there, submitting every word to the scrutiny of my hypertensive editor, I’d never finish a chapter, let alone an entire book.”
“I just want to write one story, and I can’t ever get past the first paragraph,” Cathy complains.
“I know. And neither could I. That’s because Mrs. Lynchpin, our seventh-grade English teacher, did her job well! She and her offspring, the Guardians of the English Language, only want authority and perfection. They don’t want to see your ideas. Or brainstorming. Or experiments. Or creativity. Or messy memories. And they certainly don’t want to see any wrestling, holy or unholy, going on in the classroom!”
I know I’m getting a bit overexcited as I survey the faces in front of me. Rick is fixing me with a dubious stare. Shelley is looking at her hands. Cathy has a slight frown. I know they don’t believe me.
“So —we have to trick her. Here’s what we do. We lure her into the library, set out the Oxford English Dictionary in front of her, and lock the door on our way out. We’re not being cruel. She’ll be happily sighing as she pores over the pages with a magnifying glass. Now we’re safe. Now the writer, the remember-er, the creator can move freely through memory, words, ideas, without concern for grammar, sentence structure, diction, or those pesky dangling modifiers. We’re free! None of that matters right now because we’re off WordSeeking.”
“And what are we looking for, again?” asks Jeanna, looking resistant still.
“This leads us into reflection, the inner story, remember? I can’t tell you what your inner story is, or the questions you need to ask. That’s for you to decide. Are you ready to give it a try?” Everyone’s eyes are on mine with varying degrees of doubt. If I were a cheerleader, this is the exact moment I’d leap, kick, and shake my pom-poms.
“Okay, so let’s do this. Last week, we read about the valley of bones. Some of you started some excellent scenes around the word bone. Feel free to WordSeek into that. And today we read about Jacob and his night of fear. So here’s a writing prompt if you want to WordSeek into that: For once, I want to tell the truth about the night I was so scared. Shall we try it? I’m setting the timer. Ten minutes. That’s all we’re going to do. Ready, go!”
And they’re off. Everyone is writing, head down. A few glance nervously up at me, as if I’m going to rap them on their knuckles for pausing for breath. I watch them, I watch the clock, I write a few sentences myself. Then it’s time.
“Okay, that’s it! Ten minutes. Go ahead and finish your sentence or your paragraph. Just come to whatever closure you need.”
Some throw their pens down with relief. Others are reading their words silently. I see surprise on a few faces.
We share our pieces with one another. Some in pairs, others in smaller groups.
Amy Zerger writes this:
Sinewy meat glistened in the moonlight, skulls, raw ribcages, leg bones. The wolves were naked, skinned and stacked on the trail. My trail. The shortcut through the graveyard that lead to one of only two main roads in my village---thick tongues lolling. To my nine year old mind icy bodies threatened supernatural resurrection. Go back? It’s a 10 minute run through the woods to the nearest road. Snow crunches under my shifting feet and somehow this becomes a metaphor for my life. The monster in the trail, that thing that would stop me in my tracks and cause me to go back, running swiftly away from where I am meant to be. I am a middle child, I have never been brave. I have four older siblings for that. But today I am alone, it is decision time. Shoulders high sucking sharp wintery air into my lungs I race on.
Amy grew up in McGrath, Alaska, a remote village. She’s never written like this before. She tells me later what this experience was like for her:
That was hard. That perfectionist was really anchoring me. Once I got past the grip of the editor and allowed myself to tell the story, allowed myself to be imperfect, it was really freeing. I could just throw some words out there and not worry if they were the perfect words, not worry about punctuation, cadence. It was just about getting the story out there. And I realized I can go back later and fix that, perfect that. That’s really freeing. It felt really good.
Now when I’m bogged down, I turn to WordSeeking. In the moment it doesn’t look like much of anything, but I leave it for a day and come back and then ohhhh —there’s a start of an idea.
Even in that first ten-minute WordSeek in class, Amy found an aha moment.
They had bounties out on wolves because there were so many. The hunters would throw the carcass wherever. Running along the trail at night, I would come upon them. I was just writing about that incident. Then I started thinking about this in a larger context. There have been lots of instances of being stopped in my tracks because of a monster in the way. My lack of courage caused me to turn away and run back. I realized that I was listening to voices other than God. I had to really just trust and have faith and believe in God’s provision and courage. He would do it for me. I really just had to follow. This was powerful for me.
You have to get in that cupboard and rattle those pans. You have to go out onto the empty plain, to the white screen. And whoever comes to meet you, you have to lean low, grab hard, and not let go. You have to be willing to question. Write beyond clichés that catch us unaware. Reach for as deep a truth as you can find. Be fearless. What are we creating here? We’re not after good writing right now. We’re after memory, we’re after understanding, we’re after reflection, the inner story.
And understand —we’re not writing to convert anyone to our point of view, whatever it is. We’re after the inner story. We’re after true stories written as deeply and beautifully as we’re able. In my own memoir, it was easy to remember this since I was writing for a general market. This reality released me from the grip of my zealous inner evangelist. She already had her way in my early poetry and in a novel I wrote just out of college, a flimsy allegory meant to drop us all to our knees in repentance. (It was horrendous writing, and no one dropped but me.) Somewhere along the crooked path of my faith, I came to understand that I don’t need to “make” my work Christian. For those of us writing out of our Christian faith, we don’t change an ending or add Bible verses to convert either our art or our readers. It’s not our job to bring about redemption from our stories. We don’t redeem our stories, our lives; God does. Our job is to tell the truth, to simply write from who we are, from where we’ve been, and we trust God for the rest. Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher, said it most clearly:
If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian, and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to “make Christian.” . . .
But apply only the artist to the work; precisely because the artist and the Christian are one, the work will derive wholly from each of them.[28]
As we WordSeek into the past, into our deepest questions, we’ll make noise. We’ll fatigue our muscles. This is what we’ve come to do. Not simply to record the events of our lives: Here’s where we were born, where we grew up. Here’s what happened in school, in my marriage. Here are my jobs, my kids. All of that matters! Time and place and the concrete details of our lives matter. Our outer stories matter, but if we don’t dig into them and do some holy wrestling, we’ll miss the inner story, which is the better story.
WordSeek into as many scenes and moments as you can. If you’re a Christian, peel back those words we use far too often as a kind of shorthand: redemption, grace, community, blessing. Stepping away from our normal way of speaking and processing takes practice. We’re far more practiced using our words to proclaim, to announce, to declare our knowledge and our certainty. Now we’re using words to ask, to question, to excavate, to listen. As seekers of God, isn’t this a worthy use of our words?
Don’t worry about making a mess. In fact, that is your job right now. We’ll clean it up in later chapters, when we find out what we’ve come to say.
As for me and my story, I didn’t know yet what I had come to say, even after so many months of writing.
“Why didn’t you leave the island?” Kate had asked. I did leave. But I hadn’t told that part of the story. I was afraid to. And now I knew I must, that this was key to the inner story of the whole book. I did it. Through WordSeeking, I went back to those days in the skiff, the long hours, the storms, getting sick and still needing to work, to the icy silences between Duncan and me, to the day I jammed clothes and food into a backpack and escaped the only way possible: by marching off the island to an empty shack made of driftwood, four miles down a bouldered beach, gun over my shoulder for bears. I did leave.
It was scary to call all that back. Even writing eighteen years after that difficult summer, I spilled out pages and pages. But in the midst of the mess, I slowly discovered that the story was different from what I thought it was. I began to discover truths I had never spoken. I began to feel less like a victim through some of the events. Somewhere in this process, I knew the old title had to go. Awake on the Island of Listen didn’t work anymore. This was not a story of passive observation: This was a story of agency and survival. The new title had to have that word in it. I didn’t know what else yet, but it was clearly about body-and-soul survival. I still had much to sort through, but I was getting closer.
Ask, seek, and knock —and the door will open to a deeper story than you knew.
Your Turn!
- 1. Read the two essays at the end of this chapter: “When Arms Fail” and “Ow, You’re Hurting Me!” Both work to move past appearances to challenge earlier assumptions. What deeper truths did the writers discover?
- 2. Now you get to do your own WordSeeking, which will lead you into that inner story: the reason you write, and the reason we read. Don’t forget what we’re after. We’re not after good writing right now. We’re after memory, we’re after reflection, we’re after the inner story.
- a. Look at the scenes you wrote from the last chapter. Choose one that pulls at you still. You know there’s more to explore. Use this prompt to WordSeek into the heart of that event:
For once, I want to tell the truth about the day that __________.
Set a timer for twelve minutes. Remember to keep writing, to not stop to edit or change what you’ve written. This helps us learn to write, remember, and seek freely without our editor leaning over our shoulder, shutting us down. It’s going to be messy and fun!
- b. When the WordSeek is done, catch your breath, shake out your hands, and then read it, silently or aloud. Nearly every WordSeek yields at least one reflective “treasure,” which may become the key to your inner story. Underline or circle any word, phrase, sentence, or idea that buzzes, hums, or tinkles like wind chimes as you read it.
- c. Let’s go one more time! You’ve found a treasure. Now let’s open it! Do one more WordSeek into that key idea or phrase, whatever you found in the first WordSeek. Go again for twelve minutes, if you can. These treasures, ideas, will help you form the inner story for each of the stories you write.
- a. Look at the scenes you wrote from the last chapter. Choose one that pulls at you still. You know there’s more to explore. Use this prompt to WordSeek into the heart of that event:
- 3. In your LifeStory Circles, take turns sharing about the experience of WordSeeking. Did you find this exercise easy or difficult? Why? Share some of the insights you gained from the first and second WordSeeks.
Try to do at least one WordSeek every day. Remember to mine the treasure after each one. You might increase the time each day by a minute. You’ll be surprised at how your capacity to remember, to reflect, and to write freely without your inner editor grows each time.
WHEN ARMS FAIL
By Tony Woodlief
It is darkest night, and it is the last night my four children will ever go to sleep thinking their mother and father will always be married. Tomorrow we tell them it’s not to be that way.
My heart quails at the thought of what we have planned, how it would be better to slap each of them full in the face. An unbroken home is something we swore we would give them, no matter the cost, no matter the cost.
Some costs can’t be borne. In bearing them, you inflict pain on the very ones you claim to love. This is what we tell ourselves, at least, and I think sometimes it is true, though I can’t explain, anymore, why we are divorcing.
I know the reasons, the deeply hurtful, personal reasons. But I can’t string them into a narrative that makes sense. When I try to set them down piece by piece, the way a lawyer might forge an argument, say, or a bricklayer might plant his path in scored earth, I lose my way.
I can’t explain why the burdens are too great now. Two years ago, they were not. They were not even too great in the second before we wept and agreed to dissolve what we swore to uphold. Some days, I think we decided to divorce because we must; other days, I think we must divorce because it is what we decided.
Sometimes I think we are doing it because we each of us came to the brink one night, and neither of us blinked. No marriage survives if nobody blinks. Is that all this is? Two souls too weary to fear the abyss?
All I know to tell my children is that sometimes you get a wound, and if you scrape that wound every day, it will never heal. This is your mother’s heart, I will tell them. I’ll insist that they will see me every bit as often as they do now. This is the silver lining in my work commute. We have already lived in quiet separation for a year, disguised by my job. Someone said absence makes the heart grow fonder. Someone said this.
I will explain to those four upturned faces that we love them, that we love them more than ourselves. But already, those unspoken words sound hollow. We are either too stubborn or too weak or too angry to give them this gift we swore to give them. Don’t we love them enough? Don’t we?
I haven’t been able to focus on anything, for very long, in months. The last chapters of a novel remain unedited. I forget, on planes, where it is I am going. I lose entire paragraphs in conversations and can only nod, and smile, and work to keep the tightness in my stomach like stone, because to let in food or air will only soften it and then I will vomit or scream or both.
My babies, I keep thinking to myself. My babies. What will happen to my babies?
I try to remind myself that the messed-up kids of divorce are being raised by messed-up parents who got divorced because they are messed-up. It’s a spurious causation, I insist. But then, I am a lot messed up, and their mother at least a little.
And now they see that a love can dissolve, that people who love each other and live together can undo their bond. What great insecurity will this unleash in their hearts? My babies.
There is no prayer that gives comfort, no bottle that brings enough forgetfulness. I drink too much, and I rage at the night, and still nothing will change the reality that the two of us together cause more harm than good to one another’s souls. What damage does a soul-weary parent do to a child? How much more or less is this damage than the harm of divorce? What dread mathematician knows the answers?
Some people tell us not to do this, and others say they are not surprised, and others look at us like someone they love has died.
I return to math, to statistics, to the consolation that most people who have buried their children don’t last. People will forgive us, I think. They have to forgive us. Even our children have to forgive us, don’t they?
Letting myself be forgiven, feel forgiven —that’s another mystery entirely.
I used to think it was an exaggeration, the depiction of a parent throwing out his arm, in a braking car, to catch his forward-lurching child. Then one day in the rain I hit my brakes and found my arm wrapped across my nine-year old’s chest, because this is what you learn to do, you learn to catch them when they toddle and fall, to put your flesh between them and the hard point of impact.
How are you supposed to protect them when that impact is you?
OW, YOU’RE HURTING ME!
By Arthur Boers
“Ow, you’re hurting me!” Her complaint carries through thin walls between their bedroom and mine.
These are the first words, the first sentence, I remember hearing as a child. I stand on my wobbly mattress, my flannel pyjamas covered with giraffes, dampened from sweaty sleep, my hair mussed. I clamber pudgy legs over the rail, slide my torso across, and lower myself to the hardwood. Then I run, out my room and into my parents’, arms stretched high, crying “Superman!” I leap onto the double bed that almost fills their room, crawl over bunched sheets and rough woolen blankets and squirm between them. I push them apart to break up their grappling.
And they laugh at three-year-old me.
I become Superman over and over again. Years pass before I realize that my parents play me, colluding in my provocation, making early-morning noise to provoke my reaction. They enjoy the pajama-clad toddler coming to the rescue. A great way to start the day.
My father is never gentle. When I or my sister hold a balloon, he touches it with lit cigarette or prods it with a sharp pencil, laughing as bright, flimsy spheres explode and we startle, even cry. I learn to stay away from him, on the far side of the room, especially on rare occasions when I have a balloon.
He wrestles with people weaker or smaller —my mother, younger relatives. Papa favors vice-grip headlocks, ear twisting, grinding knuckles into skulls. Once he scuffles with his cousin Art, five then, my dad twenty years older. He yanks Art’s ear so hard that it partially detaches, begins bleeding, requires stitches. Relatives frequently tell this story, always with a laugh, but now I am horrified. Art, over seventy, still grins at the memory, but winces at the same time, and I feel shame. My father wrestles with me, from when I am a toddler until my adolescence. When I grow muscles enough to compete my father stops, disappointing me, because I want the satisfaction of matching him or even winning at least once.
Over the years when he occasionally goes off course —drinking too much, smashing a car, exploding with expletives, pitching glass across a construction site as employees run for cover —my mother invites other males (her father, your father’s uncle) to “talk to Paul.” Papa straightens out for a time, but eventually another intervention is required. I, too, will be groomed for this role.
Except that now I wonder what this whole routine taught me about marital relations, about men’s power over women, about inappropriate invitations into interventions. I always react, certain I do the right thing. It’s classic: heroic rescuer delivers distressed damsel. King Arthur or shining-armored knight, a cowboy on his steed. I see enough television —Robin Hood, Lone Ranger —to know the scripts. And I keep replaying them in that small two-bedroom apartment.
And then I replay them in other ways in later years, as an activist and protester —against the politics of my father —and, still later, as a pastor who loves to rescue, loves to be needed, not understanding the hazards of such patterns.
Here is another toddler story.
A colorful Indonesian batik —brought back by my father from his overseas military stint, the one whose traumas haunted him with sweaty nightmares for the next four decades —drapes the wall above the gray couch. A wide ashtray collects my father’s Buckingham butts atop a stand. The low pine coffee table bears a plant; greenery sprouts on the windowsills. Everything tickles my nose with faint cigarette staleness.
Then a clay-potted geranium wobbles through the air toward the four-by-four-foot living room window. Dirt drifts down onto the carpet during the flight. I see this without surprise.
As the geranium approaches, I see my mother move aside and duck. The pot passes and strikes the pane. The impact reverberates like a tinkling cymbal, the surface giving a little and then cracking, spidering in all directions. The splinters hail down inside and outside onto the lawn two stories below. Large shards drop from the frame, some impaling themselves into the hardwood and the lawn. Others shatter as they fall against the sill, the floor, the ground. The plant flies on in its alfresco arc, before dropping from sight.
When all the objects stop moving and the glass stops falling, the room is silent. Then I hear robins in trees and cars passing a block away. I’m only three.
Picturing this today, I see my parents as I know them much later, middle-aged and ought-to-know-better. Doing the math, I realize that they are close to thirty. I could be the parent of those troubled, immature youngsters. Yet at half my present age, they already endured more trauma than I will ever know: Depression childhoods; witnessing lives taken during the Nazi Occupation; giving up everything in immigration; uprooting to a foreign country where they could not speak the language. They know about survival, but not the luxury of feelings, their own or others’.
I now try to understand what went before. My father was frequently beaten by his father, assaults that included leather-booted kicking. My grandmother fed my father early suppers and then sent him to bed, before his father came home from work, to preempt abuse. Perpetual fury moved hydraulically down through generations and will focus on me.
He will die thirty years or so after he broke the window. I will think I achieve peace with him. I never figure out how to ask about his anger and realize that some gaps never get crossed. I love him and feel sure he loves me. I need nothing more.
One night early in that last May, my father has not spoken for thirty-six hours, his capacity gone. I insist that my mother, exhausted from caretaking, sleep in the guest room. I lie beside him all night in their bed. I help him to the bathroom and clean him, the first time I see him naked. I speak Dutch, hoping to console him. I expect this caregiving apprenticeship to last months.
But in the morning, my wife, a nurse, unexpectedly declares: “His circulation is shutting down; he’s nearing the end.” I grip his limp right hand, the one that hit me in fury more than once, the one scarred by his work with glass. Within the hour, his breath speeds but with less and less purchase. By lunch, he is gone. I think, hope, he finally has peace.
A few years later, I drive near his last home. I slow down past the place where we lived when I was a teenager. My father let loose there with fists and feet at fourteen-year-old me, knocking me down, and when I rose, knocking me down again, and finally pummeling me with apples that tumbled out of a ceramic fruit bowl that he smashed. I wander over to the red Insulbrick house that my family inhabited before that, the place where he battered seven-year-old me into a blackout.
Over the years, I will shock myself. I twice smash windows in anger, once in our garage and once in a shopping plaza. I will feel the tempting tug to tyrannize my children. I hope that the seeds of his rage no longer grow within me.