My Someone’s name is on both of my marriage certificates.  Both times, he is the best man.

This fact we laugh about with our friends two months, two weeks, one week away from the weekend my Someone and I decided to allow the government to acknowledge us as a united, functioning single organism.  But then, when the weekend is beginning, and our best pals from the other town we call home begin to trickle in to the first town we call home, we don’t laugh about my Someone’s promotion from Best Man to best man.  Instead, we laugh for the happiness that tickles our bellies.  We laugh for the bourbon that fills our cups.  We laugh for the secret wedding that will take place on Leap Year Day that will finally set the history books straight.

Those creaky jokes of second husbands, those awkward words of remarriage– we swallow them all weekend.  And then, we forget to say them at all.  I’m not forgetting where the jokes are from.  I am not jumping on board with evangelical ideas of second virginity.  I am just choosing that our story is not built on what I did wrong, but what we are doing right.

The first time I had a conversation with my first husband, I approached him in the dark.

“My last two exes drove Jeeps,” I said, as he loaded his things into the back of his Cherokee.

“Let’s make it a third,” he said back.

And then, in a few long and short years, we did.

And I’ve been chasing everyone to the punchline ever since.

With my Someone, we fell in love loudly, but we kept it to whispers.  We stepped lightly with loud jokes.  And then, as we rolled into one, the jokes became crutches and the crutches became apologies.  I became a hobbling comedian, too happy to keep from going on, too frightened to leave my mistakes.  So when I reworked the punchline to my future mother-in-law, there wasn’t any laughter left.

“I know that I am a hard sell to this family,” I said.  And she nodded.  It wasn’t an agreement.  It was an audience waiting for the laugh track to cue.  But there wasn’t a laugh track, because there was no longer a joke.  There was just a hobbler heaped with a hope that the joke was over.

I spent the next couple months wondering where the laughter turned to a cringe.  Where the funny story became a regret.  Where I had become the sad counterpart to a perfect partner.

On the day after Leap Day, we sat with our remaining friends.  A balloon flower bouquet and a few candles held vigil of the perfect day.  I recounted my apology to my future in-laws, and tried to formulate a new joke of how my Someone was easy to love.

“Compared to who?” Jessica said.

This is why we instinctively held our tongues all weekend.  This is how I stopped hobbling: compared to no one.  My Someone is so easy to love.  And then, as she turned back to the pan on the stove, I heard what I had hoped anyone would say each time the jokes were made–

“I think you are incredibly easy to love.”

I am.

And now, my Someone and I are so free to love and be loved.  And we will choose to refrain from the punchlines lest the punchlines become ourselves.

Except maybe for the funniest jokes.

Together 41 years and married 37 of them.

“I don’t know why anyone would do it more than once,” Carl told me.  And then, with a fresh silence, we stood there looking at one another, the memory of my last song’s introduction sinking in–

“Here’s one I wrote about my first husband.”

“We made a pact,” Carl continued, pushing past it, “that if one of us decided we wanted to leave the other one, we would have to kill ’em before we moved on.”

“Oh. Sounds hard.”

“I can count on one hand the number of times we fought in those years of marriage,” he finished, proudly.

“Thank you for coming tonight,” I said.

My Someone told me later that for 36 of the 37 years, Carl’s now-late-wife was dying.  Something in the kidneys.  So they spent their time never fighting and always loving and, now, on this side of it, can tell a couple of newlyweds that there is a bar, and that bar is themselves.

I told my Someone that it was unfair– that it would be easy to always love and never fight when your partner is dying.

Two beats.

Unison.

“But we are both always dying.”

I am afraid for us.

What if it’s true?

What if, when two people figure it all out–

When no more harsh words are passed,

When no look is without love,

when two become completely and happily one…

the universe can’t bear to be outsmarted,

out wondered–

and then,

you are taken away.

I wonder if it’s an easy go, all of this poor and weary and sick and tired and can’t take it anymore.  I wonder if all this sloshing home in the cold to a warm hearth in the front of the sanctuary is an unkind strategy.  Because who isn’t ready to love and be loved then, when the shit is slung and the head is hung low– anything, anything, I’ll take anything to alleviate this…

Jesus is taking on the sad hearted, again, rubbing mud in their eyes and drawing pictures in their dirt.  The weak have fallen and scraped their knee again, and who should be waiting but their old pal.  And I feel tricked.  Because there is no easier job than being the one to pick a toddler up from under their armpits as they run to you screaming from a recent misadventure.  There is no easier job than consoling the blubbering creature in the crook of your arm while they let it out, let it out, let it out…  and no more powerful feeling than predicting the future antiseptic (This will sting a little) and the Mercy of Acknowledgment with the final Band-aid.

We’ve been set up, again.  We were tossed in here with sharp sticks and tall stairwells, black ice and car accidents, television and beautiful girls who swindle our hearts.  We are walking through the final level of Mario with fire around us and a dinosaur monster ahead, and only the lame promise of a pretty peach princess or a brand new start for winning– a start when everything is the same, but this time black and white.

And we are grateful, grateful, grateful at being gouged again and again.

My friend is suffering from a broken heart.  He is running scenarios and summoning courage, treading dark places and forming new allegiances, stumbling through the Five Stages of Grief, then wandering back to see if Step Two or Three or One still holds any use.  With my Someone, we three watch funny shows and eat spicy curry, take walks and read excerpts from poetry books, drink black coffee and dirty martinis, and blur the lines of what it means to love someone or god or life or ourselves.

My Someone and I tell secrets to each other when we are not with our friend.  We say things like It’s so good to have our pal with us all the time and We hate that he is sad, but we are so happy he is ours.  There is that pull again.  There is that image: sharp sticks, big stones, and a Jesus at the end of the tunnel.  So when our friend says things of gratitude to us, I shirk.  No, no, no, I think, Don’t you see that the sadness is not forever?  That soon you will no longer be this way?  That when at last your sadness is happiness you will go on to love again and we will be your friends for sometimes?  That we will miss cold nights and long talks?

I think I am coming to the reason of it all, now.  For those few adolescent years, I was looking for a way to lose my salvation.  I was not old enough to cash out my virginity, not courageous or stupid enough for drugs and drinking.  But I was searching my tracks for backsliding, narrowing in on the crumbly piece of Heavenly Reassurance until it was dust.  Because then, when a lie about my whereabouts or an impure thought about Tom Hanks wrestled my redeemed self to the ground, I could run headlong to a Savior.  Every week, I found a new reason for Jesus to sop up my fabricated guilt with a hush, hush and five long, peaceful stanzas of How Great Thou Art.

I might blame it on too many Disney movies, or the oppressive gender stereotypes in which I was expected to maintain to keep from emasculating my Lord, or maybe just a classic case of evangelical Christian guilt. Regardless, if there wasn’t a problem, I had no reason to approach the Throne Room.  So I was always having problems.  Black ice.  TV.  Beautiful girls.  Because Jesus was always just a little disappointed in my happiness.  He was always a bit soured by his uselessness in situations of straight A’s and school plays.

It is an easy tactic, these open arms to broken hearts.  Jesus is making bank in love through loss.  But maybe I am sorry for this version of God.  Because I am watching my friend’s heart mend incrementally, and that fear of this time where we all huddled close is feeling less like a place we loved and more like a place we were as we love the place we are in now.  And what Jesus is missing out on here is the chance to teeter at the top of tall staircases with a band of heartsick huddlers below, taking turns falling and catching, falling and catching.  And neither the one falling or the one catching is gaining more– neither is more grateful.  And here, we are always on the brink of happiness.

During the snowstorm a few weeks ago, my Someone and I were charged with keeping a 6 year nephew and his little sister alive for a weekend.  While we fluttered through our last dreams on that Sunday morning, the nephew paced upstairs and searched for ways to not be alone.  When the morning light finally overtook him, he wandered to our dark basement hallway and began wailing outside our door.  His eye!  His eye!  It was swollen and sad and potentially broken!  My Someone jumped from bed to the light to investigate, finding nothing.  I remembered my small Sunday mornings and called the skinny creature into our dark room.  I squinted and got close to his face.  Aha!  There, I see it.  Here in the darkness it is so easy to see– you, little one, have a case of the nightmares.  It is so good that you came here, to someone who knows these things, to someone who has such practice in willing nightmare hangovers away.  Here!  We will go upstairs!  We will push a wet towel to this broken eye!  We will look carefully and say hmmmm in an investigative tone!  We will look astonished as the cold wet cloth seemed to have cured this broken eye!  We will promise pancakes with bananas and brown sugar and talk about how strange that the eye was broken but now fixed, and note never at all that we may have just been lonely and needing to not be lonely anymore!

Yes, it is an easy tactic, these open arms to broken hearts.  It is an easy tactic these wet towels to broken eyes.  But maybe Jesus has it right, too– to make it easy to say what we don’t mean to understand what we do.  My eye is broken (I am lonely).  My heart is broken (I am lonely).  I am lonely (I want banana pancakes).

Bryan tells me our thoughts on God are more like our thoughts on ourselves.

Like, I believe I will be punished in Hell.

That means I believe God to be vengeful.

I don’t think Bryan believes in Hell.

His God is all merciful.

Lucky dog.

August 23, 2015

1.  Am I waiting to reunite with God in hopes of my fattened calf getting fatter?  If so, why?  I’m a vegetarian.

2.  When will I see Kelsey again?

August 27, 2015

3.  Jessica tells me that if a person reads about their craft/field for an hour each day, in only 7 years, they will be an international expert.  I want to begin immediately.  But then, what craft is mine?  It may take 7 years to settle.

4.  How long until my natural inclination is to sweetly & affectionately touch the faces of the people I love and casually call them “my little string bean” again?  Perhaps I need to look more at nature and the one I love and less at myself.

August 28, 2015

5.  Am I a bad songwriter now because I read too many comic books?

August 29, 2015

6.  What age was I when I stopped crying out for my parents in desperation and began calling on God?  Were they proud or disappointed?

In those days, I was afraid of Hell.

Fires licking my feet.

Eternal Pain.

Eternal waking.

What if Hell is a time for us to pay back, piece for piece, every wrong we did to man, animal, insect? Then we will be released to Heaven with confidence and equality.

Then I think:

“Oh, God!–

that June Bug I burned alive for an hour!”

My nephew has been keeping his worries in a bag in the middle of the table.

This isn’t a metaphor for anything.  A clear plastic treat bag freckled with leftover holiday images is filled with small slips of paper and tied loosely with a silver twist tie.  A few of the slips have the nervous markings of a 6-year-old’s biggest fears.  The rest are blank in anticipation of bigger fears.  Lately, he’s been overcome by the fear of accidentally killing the dogs, born from a stern warning to stop dropping his food on the floor.  The eruption is brief but traumatic, as his mom or dad or my Someone or myself explain that, yes, while it’s important to not feed the dogs chocolate, one M&M will not kill them this time.  Other fears include forgetting his snack at day camp and accidentally getting his handicapped classmates sick, for fear that he might worsen their handicap or, well… kill them.

His wall to wall posters of superheroes seem to be no match for the unpredictable casualties the day might bring.  No amount of Batman and Superman pajamas seem to protect his skinny body from super villain Ferocious Fear.  So now, he has been instructed to create a bag to put his worries in so that they are stored in one place, and are only permitted out once a day for 15 minutes of Worry Time.  When Worry Time is over, the worries may not be spoken of again.  And if a new one pops up in his anxious brain, he has to write it down and put it in the bag to be brought up on the next day’s Worry Time.

This is information I didn’t know when I asked him about the bag in the middle of the table.  This is information I wish I had before I opened the bag in the middle of the table.  This is information that became clear enough by the time I calmed him down from his fear of accidentally hurting his friends on the playground and closed the bag, tying it tightly with that silver lasso of truth.

He took a deep breath.  He stared at the closed Worry Bag.  He left the table to go play with his sister– a game of make believe that had nothing to do with the contents of the bag and everything to do with successfully slaying the bad guys.

Today, the doctor called to confirm my blood work.  Negative, she said.  I am not, contrary to my body’s protest, pregnant.  I was relieved.  I was confused.  I was scared.  Because for the last month, I had left my Worry Bag open, and it had been funneling directly into my uterus.

They call it a pseudocyesis, but I am calling it being a crazy person.  It’s a strange condition wherein all symptoms point to pregnancy.  And sparing the more intimate details, by all accounts, the body is pregnant.  Except it’s not.  There are a few speculations on the cause, one being extreme stress.  Due to lack of attention or too much attention, I turned my Worry Bag into a Worry Baby in one month flat.  What they don’t tell you on Wikipedia or the doctor’s office is the amount of embarrassment you will endure immediately after.  My world wasn’t ending, but I had already burdened a few of my closest friends with my confident proclamation and deepest anxiety.  And now, it turns out, my brain tricked my body with the standard tactic of fear.  My Worry Bag was sitting in the middle of the table, clear and untied for everyone to read back to me: my insane projections of the ways in which the world was working against me were up for grabs.

My Someone assures me that I am not yet in need of being committed to professional care, no matter how much I feel like curling into a straight jacket.  Now I begin the waiting for my body to catch up to my brain on the reality of the situation: that I still have my same stressful and worthwhile life that I had before– now with the added benefit of being a little more able to laugh at my biological fragility.  And, fortunately or not, I still have plenty of blank slips of paper left in my Worry Bag of worse-than-this-worst-case-scenario.

I’m not sure what the life lesson is this time.  Maybe investing in stronger twist ties.  Maybe remembering to open my Worry Bag with more frequency and less resignation.  Maybe buying those Wonder Woman pajamas after all.  Or maybe to be less ashamed of the worries so that when it comes occasionally to an embarrassing end, I can leave the table to go on slaying the real bad guys.

My nephew has a new chapter book all about worrying.  He and his dad are reading it each night before bed.  I can hardly wait til tomorrow night.  That’s when we learn all about how to talk back to worry.  Maybe he can give me a few pointers.

It was my first New Year’s Day since I was 22 that I didn’t wake up with at least a twinge of a headache and a wave of wooziness as I surveyed the empty green Adres bottles with one eye closed.  It was my first New Year’s Day in a decade that I didn’t have at least one more cigarette lingering in the pack for me to sit alone and take in the fresh year with the old year’s tainted lungs.  I didn’t feel righteous or unsettled, I didn’t feel different.  I felt like it was time to make New Year’s morning biscuits and spice the black-eyed peas for the early lunch Hoppin’ Johns– a tradition I’ve come to savor in the last few years– while my friends slept in rooms around a house that isn’t mine.  It has been my personal feat of strength to trudge through my hangover from New Year’s Eve’s celebration while everyone else bemoaned their choices.  But without the hangover, without resistance, I found myself a little disappointed.  No adversity.  No proving myself strong.  No outlandish tomato juice-vinegar concoctions to punish myself further for what I wished I hadn’t done.

There’s a mild fear that I am growing up.  And then, a small hope that I am growing young.

Everyone woke and ate, recounting the countdown, gathered their things and left– some through the front door, my Someone back to bed (as is his custom of taking care of himself in less brutal ways than me), and me to the kitchen to pick the smatterings from the bottom of pans and scrape half plates of leftovers from the night before.  I scavenged like a well fed impostor in a soup kitchen line, diligently following my mother’s rule that if it doesn’t touch a plate, it doesn’t count.  I pecked after I was full, and then pecked at my book, and then pecked more at cleaning.  It wasn’t time for anything– not for dinner, not for sleeping, not for working.  So I ran a bath and waited more.

Enough.

I had Enough.  The word has been floating with me to day two of a new year, and I can’t seem to get enough of Enough.  This feeling of time moving not quickly and not slowly was a result of me having had Enough the night before– enough to drink, enough to eat, enough sleep, enough company.  I could have had less.  I could have used more.  But I was in the simple state of Enough, instead.  And that is a state I have rarely visited.

I waited for more clarity while the water dripped and I heard my Someone roll over in the next room.  But there wasn’t more.  There was just Enough.  I tripped over the word as I drained the tub and picked my dirty clothes from the floor.  I hadn’t worn this shirt Enough to put in the washing machine, so I put it back on.  My stomach ached a little as it digested more than Enough food, and my legs started to itch with not Enough exercise.  I got my shoes on.  I went for a long walk.  It was Enough exercise for both me and the dogs.  I decided to stop begrudging my Someone halfway through the afternoon for wasting our day, because I have had Enough begrudging and needing sympathy, instead.  I swished Enough of a small taste of wine around my glass that night when we went out with my sister and brother-in-law, and came home to watch just Enough of a movie to not keep me up too late– so I could have Enough sleep.

When I woke up again, I had Enough of being disrespected by some, and not Enough forgiveness for others, and I noted this.  I remembered I had not made Enough time to play my instruments last year.  I had Enough of a mimosa in the afternoon and decided not to have a second.  I have too much work coming up this week, and– hesitantly but deliberately– delegated some of that work elsewhere.  Last year, I complained about warm clothes while we froze in Wyoming.  This year, I hope I remember to double up those leggings to make enough warmth with what I have instead of wishing for what I don’t.  I will have Enough out of hope instead of regret.  I’ve had Enough regret.

I’m not going to write a book about my Journey through a Year of Enough.  I’m not going to fly overseas to try and find it.  I’m not going to turn a memoir into a workbook full of rigorous schedules and lists to prove the point.  Maybe outside of today, I’ll forget about Enough completely.  Next week, someone may find me face down blitzed on the sidewalk dressed only in my skivvies.  Or maybe starting this year knowing that I have Enough is Enough to make Enough difference.  And maybe when I am not looking for More, I can get to the important work of making sure everyone else around me has Enough, too.

It’s my eyes that never seem to know what to do, darting around the floor and the food, glancing up to see if I’m the only delinquent.  My hands somehow have retained protocol, instantly grasping each other.  Maybe to curb the possibility of having to reach for another’s hand around the table, and therefore being exposed by my shaking and sweating that I don’t belong in this custom.  Maybe to keep from reaching for the nearest doorknob, returning only after the first clink of a spoon on a dish.  But my eyes: I can’t will them to tradition.  And then, taken by some unexpected reflex– like a knock on my adolescent bedroom door– they snap shut at the Amen, and then swivel wide and open and expectant at the others in the room, congratulating everyone on that long and illustrious holy haven of a moment.  Like being surprised by a nap, and waking somewhere new.

Praying makes me squeamish.

Thinking about the pre-dinner Christian tradition at family holiday celebrations makes me feel like I have to simultaneously defecate and push my brains back in through my ears.  This isn’t for my lack of know-how.  Back in my Christian hey-day, I was a world class, state-of-the-art-president-of-my-youth-group master of all manners of evangelical praying.  From the prostrate-unworthy-oh-Lord’s, to the petition-forgiveness-for-someone-else’s-dire-sins, to the round robin classic popcorn-style-speak-when-you-will-and-prepare-to-be-impressed-with-my-thoughtfulness-and-intimacy-with-God.  I grew up and out of “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food…” by the time I reached Junior High.  I was on the advanced track to Holy Roller-my-eyes-at-everyone-else’s-infantile-invocations.

In the last few years, I can count the number of times I’ve prayed.  Always in secret, and always in desperation– for a lost husband, for a lost dog, for a lost baby.  Always, with a bargain to the Almighty: I’ve now divinely quit smoking… three times.  I’ve also quit drinking once, but it was a long time ago, and lasted only until a hallowed glass of wine arrived the next day.  The blood of Christ, right?  God works in mysterious ways.  Prayer changes things.  God never gives more than you can handle…

It isn’t as though I think praying is bad, or even that it’s unwelcome.  In fact, more and more these days, I am finding that I am jealous of other people’s Grandma Prayers.  My own grandparents have been gone for almost two decades, now, and I am often feeling a bit slighted by the celestial due to the lack of petitioning on my behalf.  I am in need of a bug to bend the ear of the Lord, and all kinds of people– including my Someone– have Grandma Prayers on their side, clogging the pious pipeline for themselves while people like me have only the nighttime consistency of parental pleas.  At least I hope my parents still pray for me.  Somehow, even if I don’t know how it works or if it works, I like the idea of someone having a thought or two for me and sending it upward or downward or outward or inward to something they think is bigger than themselves.

Grandma Prayers are a commodity.  These are the prayers of the persistent, the has-time-to-sit-and-keep-praying kind; the I’m-not-budging-til-something-changes kind.  These are the kind of bugs in God’s or the Universe’s ear that I need.  Every Christian I know will try to tell me this isn’t how it works.  Maybe it’s my overactive competitive gene.  But I think there is something to the collection of other people’s prayers.  These are the prayers that separate me from my Someone– why it’s my hand that burns accidentally on the kettle, why it’s my feet that trip on the hike, why it’s my ankle that sprains the same time that I get the flu the same time that someone close to me dies.  I try to tell my Someone this, but he’s on the phone with his Grandma.  Secure it while you’ve got it, bud.  If you don’t got your Grandma Prayers, you don’t got anything.

The prayer my own grandmother left with me had been filed away for years as Prayers That Don’t Count But Are A Nice Try If You Don’t Know Any Better.  My father’s mother, an angry woman with a soft spot for her grandkids, was the first person I can recount for whom I prayed that a Hell didn’t exist.  A racist with a phobia of cats, I knew from the vast spiritual inference and overt pulpit words that this woman had not put in the proper amount of time to have her prayers heard by the Lord.  She hadn’t yet said the right prayer that would make her current prayers come close to even the earlobe of God.  But somehow, the little ditty I spoke only at Grandma’s house as I put my head on the overstuffed pillows, tucked snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug under the heavy, white comforter seem more valuable than the loads of venerated vomit I spiritually spewed in the years to come.

Taking her cue, feeling the enormity of a sacred ritual, I would recall the words from my last overnight stay,

As I lay me down to sleep,

pray the Lord my soul to keep.  

If I die before I wake,

pray the Lord my soul to take.

Maybe I don’t have loads of Grandma Prayers going up to the sky that will keep me from snagging my favorite sweater or breaking my favorite mug, but at least this is the truest prayer I can imagine for me or my dead grandmother or anyone these days.  It’s not new and it’s not original: but at least it’s true.  I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but if there is a God out there and she/he/it has any control over the next thing, it would be nice if we could be part of it, too.  That is, if you’ll have us.