CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Emulation

EMULATION

My daughter says she wants to be

Just like me.

Nightly as we pray

She bows her head

Beside her bed

And mimics what I say.

Dear God, this is an awesome task

That you have called me for.

She watches everything I do

Though she is only four.

My daughter says she wants to be

Just like me.

She sews a crooked seam

A zigzag trim

On Barbie’s hem

A fashion dolly’s dream.

Dear God, my little ten year old

Will need these wifely arts

So she can one day be a mate

To a Christian husband’s heart.

My daughter says she wants to be

Just like me.

She cuts her corners neat

And turns the wheel

The tires squeal

And I cringe in my seat.

Dear God, my child is seventeen

And has a woman’s face.

So many things still left to teach.

God, grant me the grace.

There’s miles to go

No time to lose

Each day’s a precious jewel,

Of clothes and boys

And late-night talks

And happenings at school.

My daughter wants to be

Just like me.

The years have flown away.

A college degree

A teacher she’ll be

And on her own one day.

Dear God, she has been

My sweet joy

Despite the bumps and hills.

Thank you for

This precious child

Her spirit to instill

With a solid faith

A gentle hand

A strong and loving heart

A ready smile

A freckled nose

A willingness to impart

Her love of God

Through word and song wherever she may go

My greatest gift

In all the world

Has been to see her grow.

My daughter wants to be

Just like me

As much as she possibly can.

But in every way

On every day

She makes me who I am.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

APRIL 12, 2001.

  I have been running from crisis to crisis for eight years, jumping from one to the next like stones across a river. There have been very few places to stop and rest. Another crisis has always loomed on the horizon. A while back, in an undergraduate sociology class, I read that Americans have forgotten the art of “just being.” Have I forgotten it or just never had it? We buy into the good old fashioned work ethic early on. Our nation of type A personalities thinks we need to be in motion twenty-four hours a day.

 I wonder what I would do without a crisis in my life. What will I fill the time with when I am no longer required to save the world? Or do I need to learn now to give up the burdens I carry? Whose shoulders will carry them if mine do not? Or do they need to be carried at all? I take these questions to Margaret, our school psychologist.

  I tell her this story about me:

 When I was a baby, my mother would often leave me in my playpen in the backyard as she went about her chores. One afternoon when I was about two, she completely forgot about me. She took my older brother into the house to start supper preparations while I continued to play contently in my playpen. Supper came and Mom, Dad, and Harvey ate. Perhaps Dad thought I was napping. Eventually as the evening wore on, someone remembered me. My mother rushed out to the backyard and there I was, smiling and happily playing.

It is the point my mother makes of the story that amazes Margaret. “You were always such a capable child,” my mother would tell me. “Even at two, you could take care of yourself.”

   “So when,” asks Margaret, “were you ever a child?” I ponder this. I have been an excellent adult, but somehow I have lost the child I should have been. Everything I do is for someone else.

 “But there are things I want to do for me!” I protest to Margaret. “I’m working on a novel. Finishing my master’s. Writing an article on autism.”
 Margaret smiles. “Those are all achievements. What do you do just for you?”

 I draw a blank. She suggests I make a list of ten things I do just for me. In the span of an afternoon, I can come up with only seven that are no achievement-oriented and not done for someone else. Not only is my list incomplete, but I realize how seldom I allow myself time to do any of the things on my list. So, the question is, what have I been doing with my time? And was it worth it?

APRIL 18, 2001. 9 PM.
  Her name is Peggy but the last time I saw her face it was atop a body a foot shorter. She was a school mate of Dennis’. Many was the afternoon that he would come home with Peggy in tow. She loved to roll down the hill out front and “help” me bake cookies. Her mother worked two jobs to support them and there was no father. She had few friends, but quickly found her way down the two blocks to our house where she would join the gang of kids in the backyard making circus tents out of my bed sheets. She became one of them. Like the rest of them, she piled into the Caravan on Sundays and joined us for church. Whenever I gathered everyone around to read a Bible story, her eyes would sparkle.

Her eyes still sparkled, although they are sometimes obscured by the brown hair she wears long and straight to conceal the scars on the left side of her face. I had almost forgotten about Peggy. So many kids just like her have trooped through my life! But there she was at the video store, tapping me on the shoulder and reminding me of her juxtaposition in our lives.

 She caught me up on her history. She moved away with her mother when she was ten. By fourteen, she was pregnant. By the time she was eighteen, she had married, divorced, and turned to drugs. When she was twenty-two and under the influence, Peggy ran her car into a telephone pole in an attempted suicide. She lived. The scars are a daily reminder of how low she had sunk.

  “And that’s when I thought about God,” said Peggy. “When I was laying in the hospital, wishing I had died and afraid to look in a mirror, I remembered the stories you read, Linda. About how God loves all of us and forgives all of us. That’s when I decided to make something of my life.”

She now lives in upstate Pennsylvania and has custody of her twelve-year old son. She hopes to soon gain custody of her eight-year-old daughter. She works at a steady job, has been sober for four years, and is going to cosmetology school.

 And she knows God loves her.

 Her re-entrance into my life seems fortuitous. It has been a long and difficult week, with the revelations about Bonnie's health issues causing me to question some of the choices I made in my own life. I wondered if I did the right thing by having such an open home, always crowded with neighborhood strays. Had there been enough love for everyone or were my own children stinted?
Then Peggy tapped on my shoulder at the video store.

“You know,” she said as she hugged me with a promise to come visit, “your house was the one place where I felt safe as a kid.”

After all, I guess I did the right thing.