Working to Rest

The house we live in is a cold place. It numbs our fingers and makes us shiver.

The upstairs, where we sleep, is colder than the downstairs, where our waking hours are spent. This rule has one exception. The thirteen-year-old daughter spends her nights downstairs with her younger sister, the feeble black lab whom she has known her entire life and who now needs her company, or anyone’s company, at night.

We can only afford to heat the house to where we can tolerate the cold without catching cold. This is the affording that we hadn’t known before we became a family. Then, at the brink of summer, there were fewer mouths to feed and a different season ahead of us. Now, in the icy air, we have trouble huddling up as a family, to keep warm or keep friendly.

The trouble lies as much in our busy-ness as it sits in our temperaments. We are busy with, and we struggle through, so much—the children’s schoolwork, meal preparation, church attendance, the general upkeep of the house—while we also struggle to keep our own hearts and minds.

We each keep our minds filled with the contents of our own worlds, and for a variety of reasons. The kids are in school and the parents are not at work, as it would be with most parents we know. One parent is on disability, after being bed-ridden for more than a year and recovering for about fourteen more, when her spine was injured beyond repair.

The other parent is seeking the same sort of income. For this other, panic attacks have littered his past; he presently faces deficits in memory, focus, and coherency, and the lethargy that brings on a sort of vertigo. These have been major stumbling blocks, of late.

For him, it feels as though the only coherent thoughts that come from him are those that he enters into a Word document, as he writes something to be read by others. There, he can collect his thoughts at his leisure, without the pressure of direct conversation, and then address those prepared thoughts to the reader. Extemporaneous speech is, for him, a dicey exercise fraught with land mines and quicksand.

These are the worlds of the parents. The kids have their own, as well.

Because there is no television in the house, the children focus on books and internet interactions. As they do that, the parents focus on the kids’ school work and the various lessons of life, while somehow pushing through their respective disabilities, to varying degrees of success. The children have one agenda; the parents have another.

With each of us in separate worlds, worlds collide when the sequestered ones mingle about in the house. This is most often seen in the partaking of meals, which aren’t shared together, anyway; they’re only served that way.

One teenager won’t eat downstairs, at the kitchen table, even when special occasions arise and special meals are prepared. As far as the other teen goes, the parents, out of an urge for self-preservation, have partitioned themselves from her, as she swings from pole to pole so quickly that they experience emotional whiplash, disturbing their desire to eat with her, or even at all.

When it comes to the parents, one of them is on a strict diet of watching the other eat, making the other self-conscious while he eats.

This is our current routine. It is the closest we have come to sharing meals together.

We are all so apart, it’s a wonder we’re ever together at all. When we find that we must get together, like to discuss a degree of respect for each others’ things or feelings, the temperature in the room rises quickly and the atmosphere can be likened to a police bust, or a domestic call that’s not easily diffused. The feeling of togetherness that we experience is only one of proximate geography, rather than hearts or minds that might think as one.

But we are raising teenagers, we keep telling ourselves, and the parents are also husband and wife, we tell ourselves, so perhaps things aren’t really as bad as it seems. The children will outgrow their teenage predilections, and may not be so obnoxious one day. The husband and wife, each struggling with their latent psychologies, will look beyond their individual struggles and come together in a place of understanding. This is what we hope for, as each day’s challenges are brought to bed, when all else is said and done.

We’ve got to learn patience, in this cold house without the same luxuries that most of America enjoys. We’ve got to be patient with each other—they with us, us with them, us with each other—lest the house would no longer be a tie that binds, but a snare that entraps.

Here is what we’re told, this time of year: “Chains shall he break / For the slave is our brother / And in his name all oppression shall cease.” We have faith in the chain-breaker; yet, I think we’re not clear on who we have enslaved, nor are we clear on who may have enslaved us. We need some soul-searching, to probe the depths of this question, lest the chains around us and others remain, decomposing at a slower rate than the atrophy in our bones and muscles—the parts of us once used to heal and comfort others.

Perhaps this isn’t exactly what we each had anticipated, when we first got together. Then, we believed that the needs within us couldn’t be met by another until we met each other. Nonetheless, we believe in commitment and are committed to seeing this through, until the end of ourselves, because that is the kind of cloth out of which we’ve been cut.

Second impressions, as we’ve seen, can be vastly different than the first, but where the desire to experience a third or fourth impression may be lacking, we are pulled along no longer by that, but by choice and promise, vows made before witnesses on a glorious spring day, when we were dressed to the nines, where the lake on one side of the bridge drained to the creek on the other.

The cold house will soon no longer be occupied by us four. Soon it will be occupied no more, once the bank contacts the sheriff to remove us, since ours is a home under foreclosure.

This situation is due to circumstances beyond our control, those set in place before we became a household: payments not made by a prior wife in a prior family arrangement, or payments that could not be made, when the house was a rental, for a time. What or who is to blame now matters not.

These things have worked against us staying in this neighborhood where the children feel safer than they once had, when they lived next to the inner-city, with the city’s lawlessness bleeding through. We’ll each be asked to leave in the coming year, making stability for these young ones an impossible dream, but one that they long for, nonetheless. Every kid does, do they not?

We are in poverty, but not like that experienced in third world countries. Ours only feels like it when we compare ourselves to those with substantial income, credit cards, cable bills, cells phones, houses in the mountains and down the shore, houses with multiple pianos, the latest cars and SUVs, vacations and excursions—i.e., our relatives.

What we are in, if it is poverty, is not something we’re desperate to be out of; desperation is no frame of mind to be in. Yet, if the heavens were to open up and provide for us, we’d be happy to receive the blessing and even bless others in turn.

We do this sort of dreaming but it is not with exorbitance in mind. We just wish to build a place for ourselves in the woods, near where we were married—where we had visited, from time to time, before we made our vows. There, we think we can be free of so much of the tension that we absorb from the environment around us—from the state highway to one side, and the county highway to the other, possibly even from each other.

But freedom, as so many have found, is elusive. We may be dreaming, or we may be deluding ourselves. Sometimes, there is very little difference.

We’ve been married for less than a year and have yet to settle down. We’re still handling the remains of the house we had lived in after the wedding and before the move to New Jersey’s east coast. We’re still in that insecure place, but we are comforted knowing it is a temporary place for us, as we search for a dwelling to call our own. All this is unsettling.

What we have now isn’t a settling down. It can’t be; the dust is still flying and we’ve yet to cull the premises of the remains of so many yesterdays with so many connections that we’ve lost count.

We’re connected to the furniture, pictures, books, shelves, clothes, and so many other things that comprise our lives. They are so much a part of us that we hesitate to downsize too quickly. We hope that we may, after all, when the time comes, have room for what we’ve lived with these many decades—more than a century, between the two of us.

These are the things on our minds. Something else is on our hearts.

Day after day, we exercise our faith, believing that tomorrow will be better. One of us was a successful business developer, the other an effective security specialist. Even though we know we can’t be those things again, we believe that what was lost will return, though in another form—because we now find ourselves in another form, and we’re learning the meaning of these new forms.

We know that faith is the evidence of things not seen, and we try to keep the faith. We push through the darkness knowing there is light—either around the corner or down the road. Without us knowing that kind of faith, we can’t comprehend how, or if, we will see tomorrow.

We are in a time of transition, but like the children, we also long for the stability of a place to call our own, without fear of eviction. We long for the income to provide better for the children, in a world that places greater financial demands on parents than when we were growing up. We look for a place that, for all we know, may not even exist.

The stress of all of this makes the soul weary, the mind faulty, and the body weak, yet we know that this is what is called Fighting the good fight. We do not give up, because we have hope in a greater Hope than ourselves. In this, we are content to know that all of our needs will be met, and those that aren’t met may not be needs, after all, but just wants that ought to be pruned from the trees of our lives.

We know our weaknesses. In this, the advice we give ourselves may seem like a paradox, but it is yet effective.

We seek to not fight the weakness, for we know we have not the strength to fight it. Rather, we relax into it, knowing that from that place we can find another launching pad from which we can become stronger, perhaps in a way that we have never known before—in a place that we’ve never seen, until we have reached this very particular, special place in our lives.

We work very hard at not working. Instead, we only seek to settle into a frame of mind that permits us to see all things working together for our good. This is our only striving. In this is the peace that our souls long for.