Front Step Reflections

Note: I wrote the following entry in my paper journal late last night, sitting on the front steps of my home, and scribbling away. I had felt drawn to be outside. Lately, the best times of communion with God at my home have nearly always been outside its walls in my front or back yard, with a book or a Bible or a journal or a pen. The weather here has been rainy, and I was uncertain that it would be warm enough for me to sit on our front steps and just think and write, but I was drawn to that place, to simply write, with no particular agenda or topic to discuss. And, you'll feel the shift partway through the entry as God begins to draw me into a place of memory and woundedness, confirming some things I had rediscovered the previous evening in conversation with a friend. This is perhaps the most blatantly honest and soul revealing thing I have penned in a long time, and I cannot take credit for it. I was simply drawn into it by a loving abba who realized it was long past time for these things to surface.

June 12, 2006 – At home, late evening

It’s a cool evening, after a rainy weekend, and I am sitting here on our front step in the gathering dusk, trying to jot down a few thoughts with no great purpose or depth. Just random observations about an evening that seemed to invite me outside to write.

I can hear the voices of some neighbourhood boys two houses up. They’re engaging in that oh-so-Canadian pastime of street hockey. Occasionally words are spoken, but all in all what I mostly hear is the dull clanking of their sticks against each other’s sticks, and against the asphalt street. Their running footsteps intensify occasionally, and the intensity of their game ebbs and flows. The concrete school across the street picks up and magnifies every sound of their game a hundred fold.

The yards are clothed in dusk, and aside from the hockey game, the streets are relatively quiet. An occasional car drives along the adjoining street, and every so often a bird sings to celebrate the end of the rainstorm.

A cyclist rides by, ringing her bell to alert the hockey players that she’s coming through, and I see the glow out of the corner of my eye as a light flips on in our house behind me.

The air smells fresh – that newly washed, after a rainstorm smell, slightly tinged with the aroma of the last lilacs of the season and the smoky scent of a distant fire.

The air echoes with the cry of “car” as two successive vehicles turn the corner onto our street, slowing as the hockey players make way.

The light in the house behind me has gone off again, and I am studying the shadows cast by the orange glow of the streetlight on the corner.

The air is cool and still. The smoky scent reminds me of childhood camping trips, of late evenings spent curled in lawn chairs in the gathering dark around a campfire as my dad played a guitar and softly sang old folk tunes. “Mr. Bojangles,” “The 59th Street Bridge Song,” “The Boxer,” “Annie’s Song,” and others. These are the soundtrack of my childhood, sung softly to a gently played guitar in my dad’s deep voice.

And suddenly I realize what this melancholy is that has driven me to sit here on our stone front steps and write. Last night I had a conversation with a friend. And he spoke truths that are breaking my heart. I made a decision that I will spend the next months working towards. I need to leave my parents’ home to be able to move deeper in my spiritual walk. I need to create distance to figure out how to move into new relationship with my family – relationship that will hopefully be healthier.

And I am sad at the thought of leaving the only home I’ve ever lived in. I’ve lived on this street I’m looking at tonight since my parents brought me home from the hospital nearly twenty-three years ago. And I’m afraid, a little.

There’s the other thing too. Sitting here, absorbing the evening and being transported back to all those evenings in the mountains as a child, I wonder how such love and such rejection can coexist in one relationship. For I have no doubt of the depth of my dad’s love for me. Although he rarely says it, it has been demonstrated in a thousand different ways over the years. And yet, we have no relationship.

I want so much for my daddy to be proud of me. To support the choices I’m making in life. To tell me that my choices have been wise, and that I have succeeded in following God’s call and my own dreams.

There are tears running down my cheeks now, and my eyes are burning as they pool. My body is trembling in the way it does when intense, unshed emotion is beginning to surface.

And tonight, I miss the little blond girl who wrapped herself in a blanket and curled so joyfully into a lawn chair, unencumbered by adult relationships and the tangled emotions that go with them, and simply looked with adoration as this daddy who she knew was perfect – a true dragon-slaying knight – and asked one more time for her favourite song, listening enraptured as he sang of the man who brought his wife “a daisy a day.”

And I wonder when he stopped slaying dragons and became instead the demanding taskmaster driving me to think about everything deeply. Challenging every thought and position I held. Questioning decisions and asking me to defend my choices. A strong moral force, but one I feared rather than desired.

And so my dragon-slayer was gone, and my mom became my rock, my confidant, at times the only friend that a socially awkward, deep-thinking, old-for-her-years adolescent had.

And that, too, had its own set of pitfalls. I clung to her, needed her desperately at a time when her own wounds were all she could manage. And so I began to bear those wounds as well. I am afraid of strange men, of physical contact with men because my mother was assaulted as a child, and my dragon-slaying knight stopped holding me as I grew older.

And today, when I no longer need my mom in the way I did at thirteen, or sixteen, or even eighteen, today she has found much of her own healing, she is stronger and wants to be involved in my life in much the way she was when I was thirteen and brought every thought, need or decision to her ears. She seeks to be involved in aspects of my life that are not hers to be part of.

The hockey game has finally wound down for the evening, and silence is descending on our street. The remaining light is quickly fading, and my emotions are still raw, but exhausted for this evening. The tears have dried on my cheeks and I am left with very little. I will leave this home as soon as it becomes financially possible.

And I wonder this, as I prepare to re-enter my home. When will the healing come that has been spoken over my relationship with my dad in particular? When will it come? And what will it look like? I had hoped to leave home with this area of my life resolved – on a happy note with adult relationship with my parents and siblings. And yet, it seems that I will leave with this bittersweet lack of resolution.

I’m excited for the new things that I believe God is drawing me out of this home to pursue. And yet, as I begin to prepare myself to leave, I know I am leaving wounded, with regrets that will not be satisfied…

And as I prepare to leave, I continue to beg God to raise up spiritual parents and mentors and friends in my life, to place them in my pathway as I journey.