NYR

Love That is Lost

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It’s an ugly sweatshirt. When I first found it, damp, lonely, and tucked between a pile of forgotten camping gear, Chase advised against finding a spot for it in our closet. I already knew of a place.
And so it came home with me. Since then it has become my favorite. I wear it in the morning when my little one wants breakfast and there is no time for brushing out hair tangles. It stays as housewear because, of course, I do heed some red flags of fashion.

From upstairs I hear the doorbell that sounds too loud against my minimal hours of sleep. The pilling sleeves of my beloved hoodie are pushed to the crooks of my elbows. I’m not presentable per se, but I’m dressed.
Then I see them, two of them all ties and smiles, and there is no escape. I’ve left the front door open. I have no chance to pretend I’m not home. I adjust, tug at the cuffs and scooch the neck opening to try to make up for no makeup, and greet them with circles under my eyes.  

“Hello Ma’am,” he says.
Ick. Singes the ears every time.
“Hi.” I barely respond when he’s already talking again.
“Do you notice how stress is a big part of life these days?”
There’s a measurable pause as if he’s expecting me to say something. I do not.
“I mean, do you notice that we tend to stress more…”
I think, and I’m just guessing here, he thought my bored face meant I wasn’t listening. Really, I didn’t mean to ignore the prompt to speak but I was seriously debating using sarcasm to lay out the last two decades of my panic disorder symptoms. Stress? Yeah, I’m accustomed to the likes of it.
“…as we get older?”
Now listen here, Sonny Boy who thinks I’m a Ma’am. Just because my sun freckles and grays are showing doesn’t mean you can take that tone with me. Kids these days. (He’s probably a baby, like 28 or something. Still.)
But I reign it all in with an,  “Mm, hmm.”
“If I could read you something,” he says with a Bible open right to the rehearsed page, and proceeds with thy’s and thou’s. “Pretty simple, isn’t it?”
He’s so chipper I want to twist his nose. Instead I nod.
“Now, we’d like to give you these pamphlets and if you have your own Bible (Ha. And ha.) you can look up some verses on the back of them.”

Why don’t you ask me if I have a Bible? Or why at this late hour of the morning I’m in raggedy clothes? If you spent five minutes getting to know me you’d understand the reason I look like I can’t wait for you to leave. It’s because I can’t wait for you to leave so I can go back to my youngest girl who was puking while you were likely sleeping last night. So I can finish shampooing apple chunks out of the carpet and bleaching the toilet where the unspeakable happened.

You’re missing me even while you’re looking right at me.

Oh, how many time I’ve done this. When my stance on abortion sets up a blind around the woman who was gutted and now aches from the decisions she’s made. When theological accuracy replaces a hug and an open ear. When my political affiliation alienates anyone on the other “side.” When being right is more important than being a safe place. When a man with a backpack full of pamphlets makes me roll my eyes because I know just as little about him as he does me.

When the mission becomes more important than the person, love is lost.

“We’d like to stop by the next time we’re in your neighborhood. To see how you’re doing,” he says.
I’ll put on my sweatshirt and try not to shush the kids so you think we’re out of town.   

    

I knew. I didn’t know.

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I knew what I was in for.

Dirt. Lots and lots of dirt. Enough to crest the murky waters of my kid’s baths and stick like a mossy stain on the side of a dock.

Weather. Moody weather. Capricious conditions that drove me to plunge my fingers between the ice in our red cooler just to ease the sweat off my upper lip; then grab my beanie because I start to see my breath, all while I duck from the strikes stabbing the sky and do a quick scan of the woods to make sure my children are not holding their homemade bow and arrow sets into the air like a battle scene from Narnia.    

Walking. Everywhere walking. To eat, to play, to pee; even to drive.

Improvising. Because I always forget something I need to cook or cook with, bathe with, sleep with, or give.

Port-a-potties. Like, more than you’ve ever seen together in one place. Always with a pile on the top unless you were lucky enough to hit them right after cleaning. If you were there, you know what I mean.

Ah, church camp. It’s the same every year. I hit day 5 weary, craving caffeine and fantasizing about the way my kitchen faucet at home can run water for as long as I want it to. I daydream about my family more than 2 inches away while I sprawl on a real mattress, and showering in hot, pummeling streams (as opposed to an ungodly arctic drip) without flip flops. 

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know that when I got home I would miss the smell of bark and sap.

Or the gravelly tone of the band leader while he played white and black keys of hymns that made me think of my husband’s late grandfather, who probably often had a sweaty upper lip too. Not from heat, but from tireless work that grew out of a deep passion for young people he hoped, prayed would come face to face with the One person who could change everything.  

I didn’t know that Facebook would seem, inadequate. 

That as physically spent as I was I would feel an ache for hometown friends, laughs and toddler burns around an old-time lantern, the way my throat burned watching a slideshow reeling before a valley green like watermelon skin, and hot chocolate every morning for 10 impatient kids who want bacon. Yes, 10 kids to 5 adults. Yes.

I didn’t know I needed it. But now I remember why I go back.