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.

If I turn my head to the left and tilt my chin down– like I’ve just caught sight of a Midwestern field mouse who finds me as interesting as I find myself in this spotlight– my body leans lightly on the door frame in my mud-brown-red dress, then click.  From behind, a perfect A-line silhouette.  From in front, a cross-ankled JCPenny ad, complete with old wooden steps balanced by three orange pumpkins.  And me, a model no one but an imaginary field mouse is here to witness.

I am in picturesque Nebraska: corn fields fading, twilight leaning, train whistle wailing Nebraska and its nighttime splendor.  And all I want is for someone to photograph my perfect moment as my perfect self as I stand at the top of a new stranger-to-be-friend’s back porch with a maglite spotlight glaring onto my face.  And then, I realize I am the most selfie-ish creature alive.

As previous blogs and friends and therapists will attest, while not as far as a Truman Show syndrome, I have a small growth in my outer consciousness that insists that at every moment, I am being watched and processed and delighted in.  For a minute, it was God.  Then Big Brother.  Then the abundance of iPhones.  Then, the Universe.  Now, it’s something like the Big Holy iPhone Brother of the Sky.  Regardless, it is these moments when I am so completely enthralled with how the environment is treating my beauty, that I miss the beauty of my environment.  Crickets.  Stars.  Rugged steps.  Falling leaves.  Click.  And still, only me.

Social media in its wicked and unruly ways reminded me last Friday that five years previous, a hundred witnesses brought a camera to a party to actually document my every subtle move.  White dress.  Brown suits.  Butternut squash ravioli.  Dancing.  Click.  I don’t hate looking at my wedding photos because I’m not married, anymore.  I don’t hate them because they feel gaudy or outdated.  I hate them because my face is not one of someone who is happy.  My face is one of someone who knows she is being photographed for happiness.  Look at the way my chin never doubles and my arms never press flatly and fully to my sides.  Look at how my head tilts just so and my ruffled hoedown petticoat sways correspondingly.  Look at how naturally unnatural I am as I pass from single to married in one perfect, without-a-hitch (except with one unfortunate hitch) day, fully documented, fully celebrated, fully unfeeling.  My perfect moment as my perfect self.  Click.

Maybe this began my obsession with capturing myself– a real moment in back woods Nebraska, maybe.  Or in the middle of the street in the Bricktown of OKC.  Or an abandoned motel off of Route 66 in Midway, Texas.  Or a bathroom in southern California.  I want something genuine from myself.  What did I do before I found these perfect situations for my perfect self to be captured?

This is how it went: too elusive for film.  I let the Universe vibrate and let the feeling of all the feelings rumble my gut and fall out my eyes.  I was still and seeing.  I was captured not for the future, but by the present.  The goddamn Snow White of imaginary field mice, but then with that poison apple lingering under my trigger finger.  Click.

The details are as important as they are unimportant– it’s a familiar story, aligned with human nature and mistrust and volatility making way for more volatility.  It’s the story favored my fables and parables and allegories.  And it begins when Sacha owes Yoga Lady money.

We were gathered in the Carter’s new living room, full on build-your-own spaghetti squash bowls with acorn squash and apples baking for dessert.  It was the last day of the big rain, a holding pattern the most recent hurricane kept in our corner of North Carolina, leaving everything we owned damp.  We meandered through usual topics of missing cigarettes and interpreting dreams, when another story unraveled from small town past.  Sacha owed Yoga Lady money.

Sacha told Yoga Lady, “I owe you money.”

Yoga Lady says, “Please, don’t worry about it.”

Sacha says, “I will pay you.”

Yoga Lady says, “Please, stop bothering me with this, don’t worry about it.”

Sacha says, “I will pay you, anyway.  I will pay you $60.”

These are the interactions of 3 months time.  Sacha agrees that three months is a long time.  I assert that in living and working in Black Mountain, an area comprised half of tourists, three months is a difficult time to conjure $60.  Right out of college, this was my home, sharing rent with three to five other girls in a two bedroom house, working as many jobs as offered.  When winter came, we had to let the oil run out, and dangerously made due with a lit, open oven to keep our teeth from chattering.  We each began separately collecting small items– toilet paper, garbage bags, pieces of bread– from our work place.  We weren’t lying to ourselves: we called it stealing.  We also called it surviving.  It was the recession, and our student loans hit us all faster than we could get jobs to pay them, and thus began the desperate and typical beginning of our generation.  Five dollars toward a pack of cigarettes went further than five dollars of food, and curbed the appetite longer.  We were poor, but we weren’t alone.

The inevitable conflict of the fable occurred when Yoga Lady lost her zen unexpectedly and reamed out Sacha in her place of work.  Then again in the street.  Then again in the grocery store.  All snake eyes and venomous words.  All no-going-backs and tables-have-turned.  All Sacha hurt and wondering what happened between the words, It’s okay and Deadbeat.

The next morning, the marvel of  a golden globe fell across the slowly changing October leaves around the grocery store parking lot we parked our camper in after dinner at the Carter’s.  I squinted at the long gone light and grabbed my yoga mat.  I would downward dog my way out of the Great Sadness that had fallen over the past week.  That’s when I started thinking of the crucifixion.  Classic.

It goes like this: what if the story is more simple than believing?  What if this death we have built thousands of years of argument over isn’t about who gets in and who doesn’t, but a hyperbolic example of not being angry, anymore.  What if Jesus wasn’t coming here to do us a favor by forgiving our sins, but doing us a different kind of favor– the favor of a good example.  Even if none of this business of death and sin is true, even if Hell and Heaven do or don’t exist, the fact still stands that within this Christian narrative, Jesus died so that angry people wouldn’t be angry, anymore.  Jesus paid this debt, real or imaginary, so that we could quit yammering on about holiness and owing.  Less, Now you are free to live eternally and more like Listen, idiots, if I can die for your imaginary standards, you can manage to forgive a few dollars between humans.  

But here is the ending of a fable: the choice.  The moral.  This is how I know this story is real life and not written in a book.  If I were to find Yoga Lady and pay her those $60, would it be enough to stop her being angry?  If I paid her Sacha’s debt double, could Yoga Lady be able to see Sacha without snarling?  This is how I know that I am not the valiant hero in even my own life story: I’m not willing to part with my $60 to find out.  And it seems, as stories of paying up go, for this 7 year debt, if Yoga Lady is not participating in the year of Jubilee, she may be requiring blood.

“So what you’re saying is, you want to cast yourself an idol and worship it,” he said.

That’s my smart, funny, Pastor-Friend-Bryan who was sitting across from me, as I laid out to him two winters ago what it could mean for me to grapple again with the mystery of a god or a universe or a Great Pumpkin.  I was in the habit of using Bryan’s full name, Pastor-Friend-Bryan, to my other not-pastor-friends and my mother so as to feel safe speaking about general heretical epiphanies as they trailed across my otherwise desolate spiritual wasteland.  It assuaged my guilt, maybe to my now just Friend Bryan’s chagrin.

This day, I was confessing a simple plan I had to build a doll or a teddy bear and dress it up and set it in the corner of my room and talk to it.  I insisted it would help me practice praying, coax me back into the habit of speaking into the abyss, except with a little doll shaped antennae with a cute face to funnel these prayers to where they needed to go.  The strenuous, prostrate agony of prayer left me empty and nauseous, even when it was a daily occurrence in high school.

“So what you’re saying is…”

And I was.  And I am.  When I was approached in college by the Greek Orthodox church to convert, I was either too above or too below the acceptance of their ritual of kissing figurines to commence worship.  I knew better.  I was smarter than wooden faces.  I was stronger than the crutch of carved saints.

But maybe not too smart or strong for fluffy stuffed cats and plastic pink elephants.

In hindsight, the desire for a rocking-chair-or-pocket-sized god is not just sprinkled in my history, but flooded.  The trouble is, I am in a habit of giving my god away.  The plastic lizards of my childhood, carried along and talked to through school and solitary playing, stashed in my right hand during Sunday School and squished between the Old and New Testament in grown-up church, all given away to the children I babysat as I got too old to carry miniature iguanas and life-sized geckos everywhere.  Lizards, hear my prayer.  My adolescent god was a smiling blue doll named Brandon, equipped with a giggle box that activated when I squeezed it.  He held the prayers of my scared self as I huddled for a few weeks in the psych ward as the self-inflicted cuts on my arms healed, and then was given away to Goodwill.  Brandon, hear my prayer.

When the early cracks of marital severance emerged, while cleaning my bosses’ house, a small, pink, palm-sized plastic elephant emerged from the bottom of a donation pile.  The little piece found its way onto my desk, then my purse, then came close as Nashville winter swept it right into my winter jacket.  The following winter, when shove came to divorce papers, I found the little elephant ready and waiting in my jacket pocket.  Pink Elephant, hear my prayer.  Then, on a brisk December day, I handed the little god vessel to another in an act of friendship and in a feat of personal strength.  Even my dog, who I suspected as god incarnate and who has listened to an abundance of prayers, is now shared with my Someone.  Butter, hear my prayer.  I can’t seem to hold on to idols.

Maybe it’s my embarrassment– who wants a god who knew me from the beginning?  Who wants a god who is holding my dark things?  Who needs a constant reminder of my failures?  Great Pumpkin, hear my prayer.

These days, I might hold g(G)od to the sunsets and the trees, to the perfect dinner and to a fine glass a whiskey– same places I hold myself.  I haven’t figured out anything more or new on the subject, I haven’t designated a new vessel.  I’m still trying to figure out what sort of g(G?)od prefers to occupy what spaces.  It wouldn’t matter if I did find the perfect idol, I would likely give it away, anyway.  I’m a regular evangelist, a sharer of the good news.  Or at least of some news.

Anybody, hear my prayer.

“We are eating like thieves,” I told him as we polished off the stuffed squash blossoms and began on a spaghetti dinner that smelled like Western Pennsylvania church basement potlucks.  Earlier, we had been given our pick from a Rochester, New York’s church community garden after sleeping in their lot and playing their cool, dimly lit sanctuary the night before.  A bundle of kale and Swiss chard, a warty orange squash, and five delicate yellowy zucchini flowers found their way into our camper.  We made way for them after two rainy days that left everything we owned damp, the thin tapping on our metal walls lifting halfway through the night for a Monday morning cleaning.  The kale made its way to a marinade and has already gone through our systems.  The warty squash rests among the endless supply of cherry tomatoes my mother gave us– which rest among the endless supply of pastas and sauces and oils and vinegars and candies and other foods she gave us that we didn’t know til now that we couldn’t live without.  The chard is slowly wilting itself on our counter, but will be breakfast before noon today.

But something about the squash blossoms, stuffed with the last fresh herbs of summer, fried in corn meal for a glistening golden finish, dipped in a velvet red sauce we didn’t pay for– we are eating like thieves.  We are eating like people who don’t know when delicacy will come again, or even how to define it.  We are eating like people who appreciate it, but appreciate it quickly, because who is to say that a loud bang on the door and a uniformed gentleman won’t take it away before we reach our last critical bite.  We are a queen and a king of alleyways and parking lots, hunched with our smorgasbord of collected crumbles, hissing at the shuffle of footsteps around us– we stole this fair and square.  

This was Monday night in the romantic buzz of the Syracuse Camping World parking lot lights.

Tuesday morning, I woke to find an article in my inbox and a reminder to never check my inbox first thing in the morning.  That little science-fact-spitting-know-it-all-but-everything-could-be-his-if-he-wanted-it-smart-kindly boy I used to baby sit is going to prison.  He is a thief.  The 9-year-old that taught this former 18-year-old robbed himself a bank.

The article sounds just like him, even though I haven’t seen him in years.  He was the son of my former pastor– the pastor who asked me to leave the church after he insisted I was a wolf in sheep’s clothing because the 30-year-old worship pastor took advantage of my 15-year-old body for four formative and long years.  I have been clawing at the accusation since then, wandering into wolf’s den after wolf’s den trying to find my kind and ending up pawed over and partially devoured.  It has taken years to get the wool from my eyes, repeated shearing, and even now, I am more comfortable bleating and grazing in the garden just outside the doors of the sanctuary than among the other sheep inside.

When I re-read the article, I realize that it sounds just like me, too.  I didn’t want to hurt anybody, I said.  The gun wasn’t loaded, he said.  He made off with over $20,000 in an effort to make something of himself– get an apartment, move on– after his father came into his room that morning and yelled at him to make a life for himself.  I picture his scrunched up brow and soap opera-esque stroking of his chin as he works out the problem on his chessboard.  I watch his apologetic conclusion as he moves and looks to me, checkmate.  

I’m giving up looking for wolves, even if they are ex-husbands or ex-pastors.  I think maybe we can assume the others are sheep, even.  Some as they are.  Some in wolves clothing.  Some in bank robbing masks.