Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [17]
We saw this as God’s direct provision, and we were so thankful. We had moved into a little townhouse that had an extra room to decorate as a nursery . . . and once the baby arrived I could stay at home, just like I had always wanted. After a bumpy start, I thought that my marriage, and my life, were finally settling down to the orderly plan I’d longed for all along.
On February 24, 1986, Emily Chapman entered the world by emergency C-section.
I had just turned twenty-one. I tried and tried, and Emily wouldn’t, couldn’t, nurse. It hurt, and she seemed mad all the time. I felt like a complete failure. I was constantly on the phone with the pediatrician, my mom, anybody’s mom, even the La Leche League, trying to get nursing advice. I desperately wanted to be a low-key, calm mom, but I was full of anxiety because I was clearly doing something wrong.
Then I gave up, bought some formula, cuddled her, stuck a bottle in her mouth, and all was well.
That was fine for a while, but then Emily hit a stage where she’d scream from about 4:00 p.m. until about 8:00 p.m. every night. I would keep her in her little crank-up swing while I tried to fix dinner so I’d have it hot on the table when Steven got home. Emily would settle down, and then the swing would need to be cranked again. I’d turn the handle, it would make an awful noise, and Emily would startle, her little arms and legs straight out. Then she’d start screaming again, and the cycle would repeat.
My plan of having the peaceful, perfect baby just wasn’t working out.
One spring afternoon when Emily was six weeks old, we went out with a real estate agent looking for an inexpensive house. When we came home there were fire trucks all over our development, and our little townhouse was full of ashes.
The bad news was that everything inside had been burned or scorched. The good news was that we didn’t have much . . . and of course, that the three of us were safe. A neighbor had not seen us leave, and so she had told the firefighters that we were still in the townhouse. In its charred ruins, you could see the black marks of where the firefighter’s hands had felt their way up the wall next to the stairs, through the bedroom, into the baby’s crib, feeling along the surfaces in the heavy smoke, trying to find and rescue us.
As we stared at the ashes of our stuff, seeing those hand marks made me realize how much we could have lost.
Wonderful friends gave us their basement to live in. Our dear friends Geoff and Jan Moore showed up with clothes from their closets. My mom and dad arrived within five hours of when we called them. They had paint buckets, ladders, brushes, and work clothes, ready to help however they could. They weren’t big on discussing life’s deepest feelings, as I’ve said, but they were great at showing up to do whatever needed to be done.
My dad and I took all of Emily’s bedding and blankets and clothes and little stuffed animals to the Laundromat. We couldn’t afford to buy new things, so we had to wash everything over and over to get the smoke smell out. I remember sitting in front of the glass-front washer, watching the little stuffed animal faces going around and around. I felt like one of them, bouncing around in circles, pressed hard against the glass, subject to forces that were stronger than me.
My tidy, forward-motion plans just weren’t coming true.
We were young. We had never heard of renters’ insurance. The man who owned the building had insurance, of course, for the actual building itself, but he decided to sue us for damages to see if he could get anything from us. The fire happened on April 13, and the only money we had, all $2,200 of it, went to the IRS on April 15 to pay our taxes.
So when our landlord sent us a bill for $13,000 in damages, Steven and I just stared at each other, devastated. We had always prided ourselves on living within our means and staying debt free. All we had at this point was Emily and a paid-off Honda Civic. I’m not sure what this man thought he was going to get from us.
Again, friends