Wrestle, Wonder, Wander: Writing My Way

When I was a girl, the world appeared to me as a sunny place where wrong was locked away in the stories of the Bible. Adam and Eve. David and Bathsheba. Judas. “Be a good girl,” commanded each story’s moral.

“Honor your father and your mother,” I was reminded as I parroted the ten commandments, which planted me between the corrective signposts of guilt and shame.

I adopted the role of rule-follower. Inspired by the promise of eternal life, I set aside my questions about what I would do to occupy myself after a million years of singing with the angels and visiting with believers from centuries past and appreciating the benefits of never growing old. I never understood the rationale for streets of gold, an ostentatious, un-Jesus-like construction. But I didn’t want to burn in hell forever more than I didn’t want to live stranded in the clouds.

I skipped through my days believing in the goodness of everyone and everything. The content of my course in living was curated from limited sources: the Old and New Testaments, a flimsy news flyer from school, family stories, Mayberry R.F.D., and Miss America pageants. When the teenage boy who lived two houses down from us stood naked in his living room window pumping his arm up and down below his waist as until something creamy exploded onto the glass, his nudity had jarred me as I looked on from my bike on the street. I was a married women when I finally realized that the boy had been masturbating at me, and it was then that the nausea arrived in my belly, and I wretched at the thought of him. I had been only ten.

I mostly lived an oblivious, contented childhood. When confusion crept in from the grown-up conversations that proclaimed the country was going down the tubes and the coloreds were forgetting their place, I escaped to the safety of my bedroom, with its wall of windows, and spent hours shrinking into myself and trying my best to manage the growing mistrust of the bubble that kept me ignorant and small. I played library with my stuffed animals, propping them in a circle on my bed, each with a book to make them bigger, smarter.

Detective-like, I asked questions, albeit silently. What ifs crowded my imagination. All of life was a big game of “Would you rather.”

The memoir I finished during the first months of the pandemic year, one that began around the Ides of March in 2020, is the story of my inquiry. My life mimicked a page torn from a children’s magazine at the doctor’s office. Find the hidden things. Spot the differences. I grew a keen sense of observation for both and delighted in details that let me in on the secrets beyond the apparent.

I kept my discoveries to myself, and in the meantime learned the power of questions. What’s missing? What’s new? What hadn’t I thought to ask yet?

I wondered, not just when I was solving brain teasers, but when I watched my parents, my teachers, my friends. Answers existed beyond what had been staged for me to see. It was up to me to analyze the confusing dramatics of it all.

I settled at the intersection of the godly and the worldly and watched the traffic. Where would I be led and what would lead me there? Whom would I trust and whom would I betray? What would I stand for?

My story is one of losing faith, gaining trust, taking risks, seeking absolution, enduring loss, begging the questions, and Circling Toward Home.