Walking In Circles

"Cartoon Hand Drawn Girl Holding Mobile Phone Walking Elements" by PngTree is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Excerpt from Dad, Mom, Me, and Jehovah: Part Two - Chapter 1

When I was twenty-four and Keith twenty-five, we received an unexpected gift—a daughter—who late one evening came into the world wanting not to be whisked away by the nurses but to stay by my side.

Swaddled in a white blanket, she was tucked into my hospital bed after Keith left to go home for the night. Outside the door of my room, fluorescent lights glared, and the footsteps of others ticked past, but all I cared about was gazing at my baby’s crinkled face and trying to get used to the feel of the word “daughter” as it rolled off my tongue.

Soon, my days became filled with time spent at La Leche League meetings, with hours playing at the park, with my daughter on my lap turning pages as I read book after book about animals and the ABCs. She was my constant companion, always on my hip, her big eyes and toothless smile a reason to celebrate every waking moment.

And Keith, who had been a reluctant father at first, grew into that role in the ways he knew how. While he never changed a diaper, he worked hard to provide a living and took our daughter along on whatever adventures we embarked upon.  

So, to the outsider looking in, my life probably appeared to be just fine. In fact, when our little girl was four years old, a snapshot of us—the Parker family—would have seemed lovely. That picture would likely have found us at our friends’ house—Norm and Nina—who had three children of their own. On weekends, our habit was to sit at their dining table with a hand-crafted wooden Aggravation board between us, playing games. Nina and I always partnered up, with Norm and Keith as our competitors. Dice in hand, we rolled, time and again, clacking our oversized marbles from space to space. In between turns, we ran to the kitchen, where boxes of fresh donuts sat on the counter—maple bars and cinnamon twists that bolstered us until the wee hours of the morning.

During game time, there was no need to watch the children. They were in and out of the dining room, running down the halls, all four of them high on sugar themselves, playing hide and seek and making up games of their own, never giving in to sleep.

Those were wonderful times, and even then, I saw them as reasons that cemented me to my marriage. Staying married to Keith was necessary, for it kept me from losing what I held dear—my relationships with my Witness friends and my ability to be in my daughter’s life full time, without the back-and-forth custody a divorce would bring.

Yet, as solid as those reasons were, they could not forever counterbalance my unhappiness. In my relationship with Keith, I was an insider looking out, my own snapshot taken from a different vantage point, and it was one that could perhaps be summed up by a memory.

I was pregnant with my daughter, and Keith and I were walking the perimeter of a convention center—a place in southern California where we were attending the summer district assembly of Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was lunchtime, and along with thousands of brothers and sisters from all over the state, we circled the auditorium. It’s what everyone did during the ninety-minute break, an aimless wandering, searching the crowd for a familiar face.

So, the air thick with the heat of bodies, we scanned the passersby—groups of teenage girls prowling for eligible brothers, mothers with strollers heading for changing stations, and brothers with name badges, rushing to backstage meetings. I was hoping to find a friend of mine—a sister from the Palm Springs congregation who had pale blonde hair and kind blue eyes.

For a moment, I felt sure I’d spotted her, and I stepped forward quickly, only to realize I was mistaken. That’s when I fell. One minute, the soles of my shoes were thwapping against the slate-colored floor, the next, my butt was landing hard on concrete. Like a banner, my black-flowered red skirt flew high, then settled around my belly, which was larger than a basketball. At the same time, the impact of the fall traveled up my spine and into my brain, which exploded with worry.

My baby! my mind screamed. Tossed about without warning, I was sure she would kick through the lake of my womb and spill out onto the dirty floor, two months too soon.

One hand against cold concrete, the other on the curve of my stomach, I fretted for a few seconds as the crowd shuffled past. Their glances were sympathetic, but they did not stop, for my husband was there, and like me, they assumed he would rush in and lift me from the ground. When I reached for him, however, my hand, its fingers splayed in midair, hung untouched in the space between us.

Confused, I shifted my gaze to discover his arched eyebrows, his almond shaped eyes, his thin lips twisted, not in an expression of concern but in a grimace of embarrassment. It was a look that confirmed what I already knew—he was unnerved by my pregnancy, by my swollen belly, which he refused to touch, by the baby inside who, with the pushing of her hands, elbows, and feet, contorted my midsection into unnatural shapes.

It was I, his expression seemed to say, who had gotten us into this predicament—his clumsy wife who was unworthy of an extended hand. So, graceless and ungainly, I struggled to my feet, the vibration of Keith’s shame coursing through my body, and brushed myself off. Then, side by side, my husband and I continued our walk, wordlessly—two people with little in common—going around the auditorium, waiting for the next Godly sermon to begin.

It was fitting, I suppose, for I was a master at walking in circles.

According to the Bible, it was necessary that I walk the narrow path—the figurative road that leads to eternal life.[1] I had followed its curves for decades, obeying the Society’s rules as much as I could along the way, and over time, I had succumbed to the repetition of that journey: Dresses and curls for thrice-weekly Kingdom Hall meetings, low-heeled shoes for door-to-door preaching work, and a yearly updated eyeglass prescription to make the text of the Society’s publications crisp and clear. It was a ceaseless roundabout, where all I could do was hope that my faithfulness would move Jehovah to, one day, repair my life.  

When that moment came, in the wake of Armageddon, He would finally straighten my path. Then, with uncontained excitement, I’d quicken my gait: I’d bound over the piles of dead unbelievers whose bodies littered the earth and press on until I reached a grassy meadow, where my parents, newly resurrected, would be gracefully rising from their graves. Donned in fresh linens that had somehow been left near to them on the ground, their bodies, caressed by the restorative air of paradise, would transform into the versions of themselves I’d only seen in colorized snapshots—Mom and Daddy in their early twenties, youthful, healthy, and carefree.

That’s when our eyes would meet, and the three of us would run pell mell toward each other until we collided in a jubilant hug—my father’s throaty laugh infused with elation, my mother’s tears overflowing with happiness—a family reunited, with nothing but blissful eternity ahead.

It was worth the wait.

[1] New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York Inc. International Bible Students Association, 1961. “Matthew 7: 13-14. “Go in through the narrow gate, because broad and spacious is the road leading off into destruction, and many are going in through it; whereas narrow is the gate and cramped the road leading off into life, and few are finding it.”