Monday, June 28, 1999

I called the doctor's office this morning, the one Mrs. H. gave me the card for. He is in the same town as she is, forty minutes from here, over the county line, where nobody knows my face. The first appointment they had for a new patient is Monday, August 9th. Six weeks. I almost laughed at the girl on the phone. I've waited sixteen months; I can wait six more weeks.

I wrote it on the kitchen calendar as "dentist." Then I looked at it for a while, and I erased it and wrote "appt." That's not a lie. It's just not the whole truth, which is where I seem to live these days.

VBS was last week. This year I told Opal I would do crafts but not cookies. She looked at me the way you'd look at a dog that stood up and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But the earth did not open, and there were plenty of cookies, and nobody went to the hospital for want of a snickerdoodle.

Tuesday, June 15, 1999
I said it out loud

I told Mrs. H. today, "I think I need to try it." Meaning the medicine. I've been working up to those seven words for six weeks.

She didn't make a fuss. She just nodded and said, "I think that's wise, Leah," and wrote down the name of a doctor she trusts, and then she said, "I want you to hear me. This is not you failing." And I cried, of course, because I cry every Tuesday in that office, it's practically on the bill.

Then I picked Ruthie up at Mother's Day Out and we went through the drive-through for a vanilla cone and split it in the parking lot, and she got it in her eyebrows, and I laughed. Small, but it was a real one.

Friday, May 21, 1999
Arguing with myself

Two weeks ago Mrs. H. asked if I'd ever talked to a doctor about medication. I said no, and I said it fast, the way you'd slap a hand off a hot stove.

I have been arguing with myself ever since. Here is the argument, both sides, because I can't have it with anybody else.

If I take a pill, then what was all the praying for? Mrs. H. said maybe the praying is what got me into her office. She said God works through doctors all the time and nobody at our church turns down an antibiotic.

Christians aren't supposed to need this. She asked me where it says that. I couldn't find it. I looked.

What if somebody finds out? That one she didn't argue with. She just said it's my business and the doctor's and God's, and nobody else is owed it.

She had me read First Kings 19, about Elijah, after he'd run from Jezebel and sat down under the juniper tree and couldn't go on. I have read that chapter a hundred times and I never noticed what God did first. He didn't preach at him. He let him sleep, and then an angel touched him and gave him bread baked on the coals and a jar of water, and said, "Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee."

Bread and a nap before anything else. The journey is too great for thee. I copied it on an index card and stuck it inside the cabinet door over the coffee.

Sunday, May 9, 1999

Mother's Day again. No carnation for me this year; the Pooles' daughter-in-law had twins in March, so she got newest baby, and there were two of them, so it was only fair. I stood up with the other mothers and I didn't think anybody could see through me. I thought: I am going to a counselor on Tuesdays, and I am still standing here. Both things.

Lydia made me a card at school with a picture of me at the piano. I have a big smile and very yellow hair. My hair is brown. She said, "That's how you look when you play."

Thursday, April 22, 1999

Everybody has seen the news from Littleton, Colorado. I don't have anything to add to it. At Wednesday night prayer meeting last night Jonathan prayed for those families, and he had to stop in the middle, and the whole room waited for him. I have never loved him more.

This morning at the bus stop I held Sam's hand a little too long. He's ten and he let me, which tells you he'd heard about it too.

Friday, April 16, 1999

I turned thirty-six yesterday. Jonathan gave me a bread machine, which I asked for, so hush. The children gave me a card signed by all three, Ruthie's name in Sam's handwriting with a scribble underneath that he swears she did herself.

Three sessions with Mrs. H. now. Here's what I've learned so far: the word "should" is not in the Bible nearly as often as it's in my head. I should bake. I should chair. I should smile. I should be over this. She asked me to count them for one day. I stopped at forty-one, around suppertime, because I should have been making supper.

Tuesday, March 30, 1999
The first appointment

I went.

Her office is in a little brick building on a side street over in the county seat, between a title company and a place that does alterations. There's a plaque in the waiting room with Jeremiah 29:11 on it, and a basket of those gospel tracts I have handed out myself at the county fair, and a box of tissues on every flat surface, which told me something about what goes on in there.

I'll call her Mrs. H. She is maybe sixty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a soft voice from somewhere up north that she's been in Georgia long enough to mostly lose. She asked me what brought me in, and I opened my mouth to give her the nice version, and what came out instead was, "I haven't felt God since February of last year."

Then I cried for about forty minutes. She let me. She didn't hurry me and she didn't quote anything at me. At the end she said, "What you're describing has a name, and it's treatable, and you are not the first pastor's wife to sit in that chair."

She charges on a sliding scale. I'm paying out of my piano money, the cash from the four children I teach on Thursday afternoons, which I keep in a coffee can and which has always been mine to spend on nothing in particular. Now it's spent on something. Ruthie goes to Mother's Day Out at the Methodist church over there on Tuesdays, which is true, and which is what I've told everybody.

I drove home by the back road with the windows down. Same Leah. But somebody knows now.

Sunday, March 14, 1999

A pastor's wife in Tennessee wrote to me this week. She found this page through the Wellesley pages, of all things. She said she went through the same thing after her second boy, and that she finally went to a Christian counselor two towns over from her church, and it saved her life, and nobody in her congregation knows to this day. She said, "You are allowed to get help, Leah. Jesus healed people with mud and spit. He is not picky about methods."

I laughed out loud at that. Then I got out the phone book, not ours, the one for the next county, which I happened to have because Jonathan keeps one for hospital visits. There's a listing under Counselors that says "Christian Counseling" with a woman's name after it.

I called Thursday and hung up when she answered. I called Friday and hung up before it rang. I called again this afternoon and got the machine, and I left my first name and the phone number and nothing else, and then I sat on the edge of the bed with my heart going like a rabbit's.

Saturday, February 13, 1999

The Senate acquitted the President yesterday. Harlan Pruitt will have something to say about it in the vestibule tomorrow, I expect.

Ruthie turned one on Wednesday. I made the cake from scratch, the one Mama always made us, yellow with chocolate icing, and I put one candle in it, and she put her whole hand in the icing and then in her mouth and then in Lydia's hair. I smiled for twenty-four exposures. They're at the drugstore now. When they come back I'll look through them and I'll see a woman who looks happy, and I'll know better, and I don't know which one of us is real.

Thursday, February 4, 1999
The parking lot

Last night was Wednesday night supper at church. Spaghetti. I had the children in the van and a pan of garlic bread on the seat, and I pulled into my regular spot, and I could not open the door.

I don't know how to explain it better than that. I sat there. The children went on in, because they know the way, and I told Sam to tell his daddy I had a headache and would be in directly. Then I sat for an hour and watched the fellowship hall windows. Everybody inside was lit up yellow, laughing, passing plates. It looked like a picture of a church in a Sunday school quarterly. I have loved those people for six years. I couldn't walk thirty feet to get to them.

When Jonathan came out he said, "Headache better?" and I said yes. I've never lied to him about anything bigger than what a dress cost.

Sunday the Broncos won the Super Bowl again, and the deacons had their party at the Tatums', and I stayed home in bed and said it was the baby's cold. That makes two.

Sunday, January 17, 1999
New year, new background

I changed the background. The pink hearts were starting to look like a valentine nobody opened.

It has rained for eleven days. Gray on gray. The flu went through this house like Sherman, Lydia first and then Sam and then Jonathan, who is the worst patient God ever made, and then me, and somehow not the baby. I have washed every sheet we own twice.

Stamps went up to thirty-three cents last Sunday, right in the middle of my Christmas thank-you notes. I had to go buy a sheet of one-cent stamps and put two on every envelope, and I stood at the post office counter and it was all I could do not to cry over a penny. It isn't about the penny. It's never about the penny. It's that everything costs one more thing than I have.

I read back over last year tonight. I don't know that woman in March, sitting up with a newborn. I don't know that I'm any better than she is. But I'm still writing. That has to count for something.

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