I started this page in March of 1998, four weeks after our third baby was born, because there was nowhere else to say what I needed to say. It's still here. So am I. If you know me in real life and you've stumbled onto this, I'd ask you to close the window and pray for me instead. That's all.

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Older pages: January to June 1999 · 1998, the first year

Sunday, September 26, 1999
Morning by morning

Jonathan has been hollering at the television all afternoon. It's the golf, of all things. The Americans were behind going into today and came back and won it, and my husband, who says "goodness" when he hits his thumb with a hammer, stood up in the den and yelled "Yes, sir!" loud enough that Ruthie clapped. She claps for everything now. She also says "Mama," "bye-bye," "no," and something that is either "dog" or "God." Jonathan claims it's God. The dog is not so sure.

The offertory this morning was "Great Is Thy Faithfulness." I have played it probably four hundred times in my life. Today, the third time through the chorus, I heard the words while my hands played them. Morning by morning new mercies I see. I don't know how else to say it. I was there. Somebody was home in the room.

I didn't cry. I just played it, and meant it, and went back to the bench.

Miss Bernice caught me after church and looked at my hair for a good long while and said, "Well. It's growing on me." I can't tell if she meant it's growing out or it's growing on her. I've decided to take it both ways.

I read back over this whole page last night, all the way to that first night in March of last year. I want to be careful here. I'm not fixed. There are still mornings I have to talk myself out of bed. But the wax paper is thinner. Some days it's gone for an hour at a time. I'm better, and better is not the same as fixed, and I'm learning to like the difference.

Tuesday, September 21, 1999
Two of us on the loveseat

Jonathan came with me to Mrs. H.'s today. He told the church secretary he had a meeting over in the county seat, which was true, and he wore his good tie, which made me laugh.

He sat on the loveseat next to me with his knees together like a boy in the principal's office. Twelve years of counseling other people's marriages and he'd never once sat on that side of the room. After a while he asked her, "What do I do?" She said, "Mostly, notice. Ask her how she is and then wait through the first answer." He wrote that down on the back of a bulletin. I saw him.

This evening I called Opal Tatum and told her I would not be chairing the ladies' retreat. I said I'd come, and sit in the back, and eat the chicken salad like a regular lady. She was quiet so long I thought the line had gone dead. Then she said, "Leah, are you sick?"

I said, "I have been. I'm getting better."

And Opal, who has run the WMU since the Carter administration, said, "My sister had something like that after her last baby. Nineteen fifty-eight. Nobody called it anything back then. She just stayed in the back bedroom for a year." Then she said she'd find somebody else, and that I was to bring nothing to the retreat but myself. I sat by the phone for a long time after we hung up.

Monday, September 13, 1999

Jonathan preached yesterday on Matthew 11:28. "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He swears he picked that text a month ago. I believe him. But I watched him from the piano bench, and I know how his sermons are supposed to end, and this one didn't end the way he'd written it. At the invitation he said, "Some of you are carrying something that nobody in this room knows about. The Lord knows. That's enough to start with."

Then I played "Just As I Am," every verse, and for the first time in a year and a half I didn't feel like everybody in the sanctuary could see through me. Two people came forward. I don't know what they were carrying. I don't need to.

At lunch he asked me, very plain, "Do you want the church to know?" I said, "Not yet." He said, "Then not yet." And he passed the rolls.

Saturday, September 11, 1999
Late. I told him.

I told him.

The children were asleep. He was at the computer working on tomorrow, this very computer, with his reading glasses down on his nose and a glass of tea sweating a ring on the desk. I sat down on the arm of his chair and said, "I need to tell you some things, and I need you not to say anything until I'm finished."

And I told him everything. Since Ruthie. The kitchen floor. The Wednesday night I sat in the parking lot and the headache that wasn't a headache. The phone book. Mrs. H., every Tuesday since March, paid for out of the piano coffee can. The doctor. The prescription, since August 9th. All of it came out in order, like I'd been rehearsing it for months, which I suppose I had.

He didn't say anything until I was finished, like I asked. Then he took his glasses off and set them on the Bible commentary and asked, "Since Ruthie?"

"Since Ruthie."

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "I'm sorry I didn't see it. I think I didn't want to." And then he said, "Leah, I would have driven you over there myself."

I had braced for a lot of things. I had braced for him being hurt, or scared about the church, or worst of all, for him saying we should pray about it, the way you'd put a lid on a pot. I had not braced for that.

Then he asked why I got the prescription filled all the way over there instead of at our drugstore, and I said, "Jonathan. Wanda sings alto," and he laughed so hard he had to put his head down on the desk, and then he was crying, and then we both were, and it was the best I have felt in nineteen months.

Before we went to bed he prayed. Not a pastor prayer. He put his hand on my head and said, "Lord, thank you for Leah," and then he couldn't say anything else, so that was the whole prayer. It was the best one I've ever heard him pray.

He asked if there was anything else. I said there's a page on the Internet. He said, "A what?" I'll explain it tomorrow. I think someday I'll let him read it.

Tuesday, September 7, 1999

Church Labor Day picnic out at the lake yesterday. Sam cannonballed off the dock in front of all the deacons, came up spluttering, and hollered, "That one's for the Lord!" and I laughed. Not a polite laugh. It came up from my stomach and I had to sit down on the cooler.

Four weeks on the medicine. I don't want to jinx it. But driving home, the radio was playing that Dixie Chicks song about wide open spaces, and Lydia and I sang it at the top of our lungs with the windows down, and I didn't realize until we turned into the driveway that I'd been singing. Don't tell the deacons.

The wax paper is thinner. That's all I'll say.

Sunday, August 22, 1999
Dinner on the grounds

Homecoming today. Every church in the South has one, and ours is the fourth Sunday in August, rain or shine, with the long tables set up under the oaks and old members driving in from Macon and Savannah and everywhere else to eat and cry over the old days.

For six years I have brought chicken and dressing and two pound cakes. The pastor's wife's chicken and dressing. People ask for it by name. Last year I stayed up until two in the morning making it, and I don't remember tasting a bite.

This year I made one pound cake, because I wanted to, and it's a good one. And then I went to the deli at the Piggly Wiggly and bought a twelve-piece bucket of fried chicken and I set it down on the table under the oak tree, bucket and all, right next to Opal's congealed salad.

Miss Bernice noticed. Of course she did. She looked at that bucket like it was a snake in the punch bowl. But nobody said a word to me out loud, and the chicken was gone in twenty minutes, and while I was cutting the pound cake Amber Poole, the young one with the twins, sidled up and whispered, "Thank you. I bought mine too. I thought I was the only one."

We are not the only ones. I keep learning that.

Monday, August 16, 1999

First week on the medicine. A little queasy in the mornings, and three nights I woke up at three o'clock wide awake with my heart thumping like I'd had a pot of coffee. Mrs. H. said to call the doctor if anything worried me, so I did, and his nurse said that's common the first couple of weeks, and to take it with breakfast, and to call back if it didn't settle. It's settling.

I don't feel better. The doctor said I wouldn't yet. Four to six weeks, maybe longer. I am trying to be patient with a capsule, which is a strange thing to be patient with.

School started Thursday. Sam is in fifth grade and too old to be walked to the bus. Lydia is in second and had to be walked to the bus and kissed on both cheeks and on the forehead "for luck."

Monday, August 9, 1999
Appt.

The doctor is young enough to be my little brother, with a tie that had cartoon fish on it, and he listened better than any doctor I've ever been to. He asked a lot of questions, the kind they have to ask, and I answered all of them honestly, and at the end he said, "I'm glad you came in." He said the word "depression" like it was a regular word, like "strep" or "sprain." He said it most likely started after the baby and just never let go, and that happens more often than people think.

He wrote me a prescription for Prozac, one capsule a day. He said it takes four to six weeks to really work and not to judge it before then. He said to keep seeing Mrs. H. He said to call him if anything felt wrong.

I had it filled at the drugstore over there. The girl at the counter didn't even look up. I sat in the van in their parking lot, took the first one with a sweet tea from the drive-through, and zipped the bottle into the inside pocket of my purse, the one where I keep Daddy's funeral card.

Then I drove home by the back road and picked up Ruthie and made tacos for supper. That's the thing nobody tells you. The biggest thing you've done in a year and a half, and then you still have to make supper.

Sunday, July 25, 1999
Let me pray about it

After church Opal Tatum cornered me by the water fountain and asked me to chair the fall ladies' retreat. It's the second weekend in October at the conference center on the lake. The theme is going to be "Becoming a Proverbs 31 Woman."

I said, "Let me pray about it." Every Baptist woman in the South knows what "let me pray about it" means. It means no, but I can't say no to your face. Opal knows it too. She patted my arm and said, "You pray, honey. I'll put you down."

I went home and read Proverbs 31 again. The woman in it is a wonder. She buys a field and plants a vineyard, she makes the linen and sells it, her candle goeth not out by night. "She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household." I have been rising while it is yet night for seventeen months. It hasn't made me virtuous. It has made me tired.

I sat on the edge of the tub and laughed about that, alone, which is progress of a kind, I suppose.

Sunday, July 18, 1999
Her glory

On Tuesday, after my appointment, I walked into a beauty shop over in the county seat where nobody knows me and asked the girl to cut it off. Not all of it. Up to my chin. I have had hair down between my shoulder blades since the tenth grade. She asked me three times if I was sure. I said, "Honey, I have not been sure of anything since February of last year, but I'm sure of this."

It feels wonderful. My neck feels the air. It dries in ten minutes.

Jonathan didn't notice until Thursday.

Miss Bernice Hollis noticed this morning before I got through the double doors. She's seventy-eight and sings in the choir and has worn her own hair in the same silver bun since Eisenhower. She looked at me and said, "Well. It'll grow." Then, at the coffee pot after Sunday school, loud enough for the ladies' class to hear: "You know what Paul says. If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her."

I know what Paul says. I know that verse better than she does; I had to memorize the whole chapter for a Bible drill in 1974. I smiled and said, "Yes, ma'am," and poured her coffee, and my hands were shaking.

Everybody was talking about the Kennedy boy's plane, lost off Martha's Vineyard with his wife and her sister. So at least I was only the second-biggest news in the fellowship hall.

I told Mrs. H. about it. She said, "How did it feel to do one thing just because you wanted to?" I said, "Wonderful, for four days." She said four days was a start.

Monday, July 5, 1999
Three dozen eggs

Fourth of July fell on a Sunday this year, so after the service we had dinner on the grounds and then fireworks out at the ball field. The pastor's wife brings the deviled eggs. Always has. Opal wrote "Leah — eggs" on the sign-up sheet herself back in June, before I'd even seen it.

Every Southern woman knows fresh eggs won't peel. I know it. I bought fresh eggs anyway, and at midnight Saturday I was standing at the sink with thirty-six boiled eggs and the shells coming off in little pieces and taking half the white with them. I cried over torn eggs. Real tears, into the sink, over eggs. Then I made them anyway and covered up the worst ones with extra paprika, and Opal said, "Leah's eggs!" when I set them down, and they were gone in ten minutes.

At the fireworks Ruthie got scared of the booms, so I carried her back to the van and we sat with the doors shut and watched the colors through the windshield with the sound all muffled. She fell asleep on me. It was the most peaceful half hour I've had since spring. I didn't have to smile at anybody.

Mrs. H. says I should notice when I feel peaceful, and what's around me when I do. Tonight's answer: a dark van, a sleeping baby, and nobody needing a thing.

Older pages
January to June 1999 · the bad winter, and finding Mrs. H.
March to December 1998 · the first year

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