Undeserved Love

Dear Old Friend,

I wonder sometimes if you grasp how important you and your family were to me after you entered my life when we were ten.  We were both only children and I felt that you were the closest I would ever get to having a sister.  We both loved to read and write.  We both loved to sing and we listened to the same music.  You taught me to cha-cha.  Regrettably, I was the one who inadvertently informed you that there was no Santa Claus.  We spent most weekends at one or the other’s house because choir practice was on Friday nights, so afterward we would just go home together. When my parents divorced, yours was the ‘unbroken’ family which provided stability for me.  It makes sense, then, that yours was the family my mother asked to take me in when she decided to move to Hawaii. 

When I was lobbying against the move, I had naively assumed that, when my mother saw the lack of wisdom in moving us far away to be with Bill because we would have no one to call for help when we inevitably needed it, it would logically follow that both of us would continue to live with my grandparents.  I was entirely emotionally unprepared for the possibility that she would choose to go without me.  When I was faced with that reality I felt I had no right to complain because I had “won”; so I tried to appear happy in the face of my hollow victory.

Since I had attended a church school up to that point, there was general agreement that I should continue to do so; and, as there was no local church-affiliated high school near my grandparents, the choices were either to send me to a boarding school, or to approach your family about allowing me to live with you.  Your parents were extremely gracious in agreeing to open their home to me.  

Telling my mother goodbye, believing that she was foolishly heading off into danger where there would be no one to protect her, not knowing if I would ever see her again, was the hardest thing I had ever done.  Black is the presence of all colors, and that day I was so full of conflicting emotions that the closest I can come to explaining how I felt is that my mind was black. 

I think all of us—your parents, you and I—had expected that my being in your home wouldn’t be much different than it had been when I spent so many weekends with you before.  And that wasn’t an unrealistic expectation, except for the fact that I was no longer the same person.  The girl I was before had known she was visiting because she wanted to; she knew that she had her own home to which she could return, where she belonged.  The girl you brought home with you knew that she had nowhere else to go, nowhere else she belonged; and that made all the unanticipated difference.

You welcomed me with open arms. Your parents even bought bunk beds so that we could share your room.  Everyone was wonderful to me. Your parents, thinking it would help me feel more like family, asked me to call them Aunt and Uncle, but I couldn’t do it.  I think it hurt them that I didn’t, and I’m sure I wasn’t able to articulate my reason, even to myself back then; but, I now understand that, to me, it would have represented a final surrender of my own family and assimilation into yours.  I may have been a totally separate member, but I still needed to feel like a member of my own family. 

My anger and confusion caused me to act out in other ways, some small, some more significant.  Every home has ways of doing things which differ from others, your mother folded towels differently than my mother.  My family lined up shoes under the bed, yours didn’t.  My family had the toilet paper facing one way on the holder, yours the other.  I refused to conform. 

I couldn’t focus well in school, and for the first time ever, my grades fell.  Because I didn’t feel that I “belonged”, in so many ways, one of the ways I tried to achieve that belonging was by cheating; not by copying the work of others, as you might expect, since my own grades were falling, but by allowing others to copy the work I had done.  I was caught by an understanding teacher because of a spelling error which was duplicated by the person who copied my work, and was simply admonished not to do it again.

As it happened, my "Big Brother", the boy from my grandparents’ home town who was like family to me, ended up attending this same school.  He had Physical Science class a period after I did, so, with no initiation on his part, I decided to copy down the answers to the daily quizzes and pass them to him in the hall as we changed classes.  Ultimately he was confronted for cheating, but he never divulged my name as the person who gave him the answers. 

I spent a lot of my spare time writing.  One piece I still remember was about a person who was initially the sole survivor of a nuclear explosion, and later died from radiation exposure.  I didn’t see then that it was my sub-conscious attempt at being figuratively autobiographical.

It seems strange to me that I have no memory of attending church when I was with you, although I’m sure we must have gone every week.  Up to that time, I had looked to God as my source of protection, comfort and strength.  Although I had always keenly felt guilt whenever I had done something I knew was wrong, I had never doubted that God was with me. 

The only specific memory I have of God during that period involves a guest speaker who came to our school for a week of chapel services.  He was very emotional and at the end of the week he had us all weeping and coming up front to confess our sins.  The peer pressure to go up to the microphone was intense.  The holdouts were viewed as unrepentant sinners and were prayed for.  When it was over and we came back to our senses, I think we all felt sickened, as if we had been sullied by participating in an emotional orgy. 

At some level I understood that what had happened at those chapel services misrepresented God; but there was a residual negative effect for me. For the first time, I began to fear that God would not be available as my source of protection, comfort and strength unless I was doing what he wanted me to do, and I knew that I wasn’t.  I began to wonder if that was the reason he didn’t seem to be answering my prayers.

Because this was still a time when long distance rates, particularly from Hawaii, were prohibitive, my communication with my mother was limited to letters.  Neither of us said much in our correspondence outside of politely reporting the safe news.  I didn’t know how she was really doing, she didn’t really know about me.

When she called me in late November, then, my initial reaction was fear.  I thought that something terrible had happened to her, and it had.  The placenta had prematurely detached from her uterine wall and she hemorrhaged.  The doctors had managed to save her life, but they were unable to save the baby.  It had been a little boy. 

I have no idea what I said to her on the phone.  I just remember going into the bathroom afterward so that none of you could see me, and I cried.  I cried from sadness for my mother’s loss and relief that she was all right.  I cried because I was afraid that Bill had done something to cause what had happened, and I had no way of knowing whether or not she was safe.  And I cried because, in what I knew was my terrible hardheartedness, I was secretly relieved that there would be no baby.  

A few days later, she called again to say that she was coming home at Christmastime, not for a visit, but to stay; and Bill was not coming with her.  My relief was immense. 

So, when Christmas vacation ended, I moved from your home to live with my mother nearby.  I was carrying so much guilt and shame over the behavior and state of my family by then that I know it affected my relationship with you.  I felt embarrassed about how I disrupted the life of your family and then just left.  I felt, in a way, like I abandoned you.  I even felt guilty for being happy to be with my mother.  I, in short, was a conflicted mess!

I’m not sure, dear friend, whether I ever said this to you, so just in case, after all these years, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the love you and your family showed me by being there for me even though I was petulant and ungrateful in the face of that love.  You, unlike that chapel speaker, demonstrated for me what God's grace truly is.  I will be forever grateful.

Love Always,

Bonnie