Evangelical Therapy, Part 6 - Juniper Street
A serialized memoir about my former life as an Evangelical
After the River Festival at the end of June, the summer passed slowly, days of sitting outside with my girls by our turquoise pool.
At first, there was a pale band on my finger where I’d worn my ring for eleven years. It tanned over fairly quickly, but I was still aware of the empty place, and my finger felt naked and foreign. As my weight dropped, my ring had grown loose. The diamond tended to slide around toward my palm, and I’d developed a habit of checking it with my left thumb, which I still found myself doing, adjusting a ring that was no longer there.
My empty finger felt so conspicuous that I was surprised, in the days following the festival, when Drew didn’t say anything about it. But silence was typical for him, and because we weren’t doing much touching those days, I wasn’t sure if he’d even noticed.
“I took off my ring,” I pointed out to a woman I’d considered a friend, one Wednesday night after church. I felt determined for someone to notice, and in previous months, she’d been sympathetic when we’d talked about my problems. But she was the wife of the music minister, and when I held out my hand, her understanding seemed to have vanished.
“Get that ring back on before something worse happens,” she said, looking me in the eye.
I tried someone else I knew, another woman friend, but she seemed skeptical as well, as if my story was missing some essential element, the part that meant I was right to have taken it off.
That night in the bathroom I got my ring out of the drawer and wore it while I brushed my teeth, noticing in the mirror how it looked on my hand as I combed my hair and put lotion on my face, then found myself feeling panicky and took it off again.
In bed, I pulled the covers up under my chin. “You never apologized for what happened at the River Festival,” I said to Drew in the darkness of the room, where it seemed easier to confront him with the truth.
He flopped one arm over his head. I was aware of the warmth of his skin, and for a second, I remembered the comfort I’d sometimes felt lying on his muscular shoulder.
“At least I’m still wearing my ring.”
I lay frozen, realizing the door to the bathroom had been open a small crack. “Were you watching me just now?”
“No.”
He turned on his side, and I realized that was all he was going to say. Some door closed inside me, and I decided I didn’t want to talk to either of those women at church anymore.
Other than the ring, not much else had changed about my life, at least outwardly. I still had little money of my own (the limited amount Drew gave me for groceries and clothes for the girls), but earlier in the summer, I’d convinced him to let me order a few things from the Spiegel catalog for the vacant formal living room of our colonial-style house: two table lamps with ivy leaves entwined around the bases, blue upholstered wingback chairs, and a couple gold cherubs that perched fetchingly on top of our piano.
And a cherub print, too, the portion of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna I’d started seeing everywhere back then, winged cherubs with chins resting on their palms, who looked to me like they were rolling their eyes at the antics of us humans, from their vantage point in the heavens.
And I got the girls’ their first pets, three kittens, who pounced on insects in the grass, and for some reason which I now can’t remember, a miniature hedgehog, which, because of its spines, we could only hold while wearing gloves.
The girls played and splashed in the pool, shrieking with enthusiastic delight over a new beach ball, the fun of jumping in off our low diving board. Our subdivision was well-developed and nicely kept, except just behind our house where a vacant lot was filled with brambly undergrowth, yellow-blooming forsythia, and a few scraggly trees, a wilderness in which the girls tramped around on adventures that once led to a nail that went through the sole of a sandal and into my youngest daughter’s tender foot.
But mostly we stayed in our yard, or the girls rode their bikes around the neighborhood or played in a small park down the street, and as the weeks wore on, it felt like we were all waiting for something to happen.
I still wasn’t feeling well, and one afternoon I came home after talking to the psychiatrist about my medication, where my mom was helping with my daughters, and collapsed in tears by a pile of clean laundry that was languishing on the carpeted floor near the kitchen table.
My mom told me years later that that moment was when she became convinced I had an emotional problem, not a physical one.
“I need something to do,” I wailed to her, as if the solution to this problem lay in her hands. My father had come in just then as well, and both my parents looked at me in dismay.
“You just went to therapy,” my mom said.
“No, I mean something real,” I said. “Like a job.”
I usually felt a certain relief at the end of an appointment with Dr. Gillam, but he, too, like Dr. M, had been urging me to think about whether I was satisfied with my life as a stay-at-home mom.
Several years before, I’d taken a calligraphy class for a few weeks, in which I learned to pen carefully scripted letters (an appropriate outlet for a conservative Evangelical mom), and had made framed Bible verses for gifts. And even farther back, I’d taken a correspondence course I’d seen advertised in the back of a magazine (“Learn to Write for Children!”) which was mostly a gimmick. These activities were supposed to be enough to satisfy me, I believed, but they mostly left me feeling diminished, like some part of me was shrinking, rather than like someone whose time and abilities mattered.
Having and taking care of children mattered—I felt it as a vast and important responsibility. But I was having a harder time shutting out the idea that I might feel better if I had a paying job.
Except a job—a career—was another thing that seemed taboo. Not long after my oldest daughter’s birth, the chair of the English Department at the local Nazarene college had asked me to teach English Comp. I’d taught the course one semester before Amy was born, wracked by anxiety at the prospect of getting up in front of a class of students who were close to my own age, but afterwards had been glad I’d done it, and a few months later, he thought of me again. I only had a bachelor’s degree, but I’d been an “A” student, graduating from a four-year college in three years, and apparently that was qualification enough.
And teaching one class had been approved of before Amy was born, but after, when she was still a tiny baby and I was asked to consider taking it on, my mother had reacted by saying, “Why would you want to do that?”
Besides being the breadwinner, my dad, as a physics professor, traveled all over the world to study astronomy—during sabbaticals and summers he flew to Germany, Hawaii, West Virginia, and later to South America and Australia, but my mom always stayed home, and I’d gotten the message that it was wrong to leave one’s children for a job or for pretty much any reason. In our church, mothers of small children who worked (often only the rare single moms) were looked at with silent judgment or pity.
No one had an answer for me in my struggle to think of something to do, or whether that would even be possible, and I didn’t have an answer for myself, so instead, I bought a new lime green swimsuit to wear and continued to sit outside and work on my tan. If someone had been peering in at us from the wilderness behind the brown wooden fence that surrounded our back yard, they would have thought I was just a mom enjoying a summer home with her kids.
But the matter of a job had risen to the forefront of my thinking. In a couple years, all three of my daughters would be in school. Was there really any reason I couldn’t do something, too?
“Could I go back to college?” I finally asked Drew, after turning it all over in my mind for several more weeks.
It would be up to him to either let me or not, and I knew he wouldn’t like it. He didn’t like anything that cost extra money, and classes would be expensive. But it was this same issue, money—the thought that I could add to our family’s income, once our youngest turned six—that slowly convinced him.
I decided to get my certificate to teach high school English, a job that would allow me to mostly be at home when my children were, and by fall had enrolled in a couple classes at my alma mater, the Nazarene college in Nampa.
When I walked into my first class, I was so aware of my bare hand, I was sure everyone else noticed it, too. My ring loomed large in my mind as an object that signified I was a desired woman, and also a “taken” one, an idea that had been built up since I was a young girl—and being without it felt like an obvious display to the whole world that I was not taken, that I was open and ready for business, even though that was far from the truth.
I can’t totally explain the unrealistic expectations I had as I sat at my desk. I was sincerely surprised that the young man next to me didn’t seem to notice.
In any case, for the first few weeks of class nothing happened. I went to school and came home again a couple hours later, two evenings a week.
I found it hard to leave my girls with Drew, not trusting him to treat them with the care I would. It was also hard to do something that required me to stretch myself and make a change when I felt dizzy and sick.
And then about halfway through the quarter, the professor put the class in small groups for a project, and something did happen.
“Jeremy,” a young man with blue eyes and wire-rimmed glasses, noticed my ringless hand, or something about me—perhaps some desire that I couldn’t admit yet, pulsating around me like a neon light—and started directing a few comments across the table at me with a quick, flashing smile.
“Hey,” he said, after class one day. “Want to come over to work on this project?”
“Oh—I should get home,” I remember saying.
“Wouldn’t take that long. I live right down the block.”
I felt paralyzed by indecision. Some women in our church had the rule for themselves that they would never be alone in any house with a man other than their husband. My sister-in-law was one of these, and once, when only Drew was home, she waited outside at our house for several hours, refusing to come in until I arrived.
But students in college can hang out to study for a while, I told myself. Most of the students seemed younger than me, and I assumed Jeremy was, too, but maybe by only a few years. Something about him struck me as more experienced than the other students—maybe it was the faint creases that lined his tan forehead. I guessed he was twenty-six or twenty-seven to my thirty-two.
I was so naïve. So, so naïve. He just wants to study, I repeated in my head, and I couldn’t seem to refuse. And I suppose there was part of me that wanted to go, a part that didn’t want to shrink and disappear.
“Sure,” I said, finally, and we walked down the block together to his place, a small house on Juniper Street.
I don't like Drew...just sayin'
So well written how you showed Drew knew you weren't wearing your ring. That gotcha moment worked for me as a reader. And the ending here will bring me back for the next installment. Fascinating.