It had been a particularly stressful week, early in our marriage, and I couldn‘t sleep. I was still trying to get used to living in a different home, with furniture, dishes, cookware, linens, books, and photographs that had belonged to another woman, a woman who was no longer living. I was still trying to get used to taking care of three kids that were not mine -- a 7 year old, a 16 year old and a 21 year old who had recently dropped out of school and had moved back home, while missing my own daughters who were away at college. I was still trying to get used to living with my new husband, a man I had known for only a year -- different habits, different temperament, different tastes in food, different family members, different friends, different past, different goals for the future. I had just lost my job -- the 3rd one in 3 years -- and I worried about money and the future. I didn’t feel like I was dealing with all my changes and challenges very well and it showed in how I responded to the kids and my husband when any new stress emerged. I worried that I might not be able to fulfill my new roll well, that I might disappoint my new family, or cause them more stress. I was afraid my stress was turning into distress.
So I couldn’t sleep, during a particularly stressful night, during this particularly stressful week. After I tossed and turned for quite a while I worried about waking him, so I went out to sit on the couch, in the family room, in a house which didn’t yet feel like mine. I sat and stared into the dark and felt terribly alone, terribly out of place, missing my girls, missing my cat who would have comforted me if I was living in my old home, missing my things, worrying about the future, and I said out loud “Oh Lord, what do I do? How do I get through this?”
Instantly I felt very thirsty. Not just thirsty -- incredibly thirsty. I got up and went to the kitchen, the kitchen which still felt to me like her kitchen, and reached into the cabinet to get a glass, one of the only glasses there that was mine, and turned to the sink to get water. As I stood there waiting for the water to run cool I noticed something sticking out of a little drawer in the oak roll top breadbox next to the sink. I turned on the light over the sink and saw it was a piece of colored tape from a food package I had opened earlier that day, as I made a meal for her family. It was stuck to the inside of the drawer, sticking up like one of those Post-it tabs you use to mark an important place in a book. As I drank my glass of water I contemplated the tape and was puzzled as to how it came to be sticking out of the drawer. I grabbed it and pulled but it was stuck pretty tight; someone would have had to have opened the drawer and stuck it there intentionally, I thought, but why?
Then all of a sudden I knew I was supposed to open that drawer. There was something there I was meant to see. I had only opened it once or twice since I had lived there, to find birthday candles (that’s another story I will share another time), batteries, or a rubber band, and each time I felt like I was snooping in someone else’s belongings. Feeling like I was opening an old jewelry box in my grandmother’s attic, I slowly opened the drawer and began to look through the contents. Those batteries: were they used or new? Those random birthday candles: I wonder for whose birthday she bought them? A key: was it her key and to what did it belong? A broken piece from a child’s toy: did she put it there with plans to fix the toy on another day? I moved all the odds and ends aside and what I found was a chain attached to a glass cross lying face down, with tiny flowers pressed between the pieces of glass. I picked up the cross, turned it over and read the quote printed in the crux of the cross: “With Faith, Live One Day at a Time”.
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