What I Did As A Parent

There is a room she has not stood in for eleven years, and she is in it most nights.

Blue walls, because he chose blue and would not be talked out of it. A lamp shaped like a boat on the shelf by the window. The door with the paint worn off the bottom corner where it dragged on the carpet, so that it always made the same low sound when it shut.

She is not in the room, in fact. She is in the hallway outside it. She is thirty-four in this memory and not forty-five, and she has a plate in her hand, and she is shouting.

She can hear herself. That is the part. Not the shape of it, the actual words, the particular sentence that was never about the spilled thing at all, the one with four years of exhaustion and fear and a marriage coming apart packed into it, which came out of her mouth aimed at a nine year old and landed like a verdict on his whole person.

He is twenty now. He rings on Sundays. He is, by every measure anybody could apply from the outside, fine. He has friends, he has work he likes, he laughs the way he did when he was seven.

And she cannot get out of that hallway.

She has never said the sentence out loud to another living soul. Not to her sister, not to anyone at church, not once in eleven years, and that is deliberate, because she has worked out what would happen. They would be kind. They would say every parent has a moment. They would move the conversation on to something easier, and she would be left holding it, only now with the additional knowledge that she had made someone uncomfortable with it.

So she keeps it. She takes it out at about eleven at night and looks at it, the way you press a bruise to check it is still there.

And underneath all of it is the arithmetic she runs and never wins: that she has had eleven good years since, and none of them count, because the good years came after, and the thing that came first is the thing that is true about her.

Two directions that never meet

I want to give you the whole verse, because the second half of it was written for exactly this and almost nobody hears it.

As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him.Psalm 103:12 and 13

Take the first sentence carefully, because it was built carefully.

He could have said north and south. He did not, and the reason is that north and south have ends. There is a top of the world and a bottom of it, and if you walk north long enough you reach the pole, and the very next step you take is south. North and south meet. They are a finite distance apart and a determined person can close it.

East and west never meet. Walk east for the rest of your life and you never once begin going west. There is no pole, no turning point, no arrival. It is the one distance in creation that cannot be crossed, and that is the distance He chose to describe what He has done with the thing you did in that hallway.

Now the second sentence, and this is the one I want to put in your hands and close your fingers around.

As a father shows compassion to his children.

You have spent eleven years believing that the parent you were is the disqualification. And He reaches for the picture of a parent to explain how He feels about you. The exact role you are ashamed of is the word He picks to describe His own mercy. He is not embarrassed by that comparison. He walked straight into it.

And read on one more line in that psalm, because He does not stop there. He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust.

Remembers. He holds in mind, permanently, what you are actually made of. He knows what four years of fear does to a person. He knows what you had left in you at half past six on that particular evening, and He is the only one in the whole story who knows it exactly, including you, because you have spent a decade judging that woman as though she had reserves she did not have.

Now let me name the pit, because I am not stepping around it and I am not going to make it smaller than it is.

The worst part is not the memory. The worst part is that you cannot say it. You have decided, correctly, that the people who love you would tidy it up too fast, and so you have carried it alone, and carrying a thing alone is what turns an event into an identity. It stopped being something you did somewhere around year three. Now it is something you are, and you have been quietly serving a sentence for it in a hallway nobody else can see.

And I will not tidy it up. What you did happened, and it hurt someone you would have died for, and I am not going to tell you it was small.

I am going to tell you it has been taken east.