Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [18]
My parents were worn out. They were cleaning, painting, repairing, helping to take care of baby Emily, and going the extra mile for us. Unfortunately, I could see their resentment building up. I felt it too: where in the world were Steven’s parents? They knew about our need, of course, but they hadn’t come.
On the Sunday afternoon after the fire, we were at our friends’ house doing more laundry, weary and frazzled. Our friends had gone out of town. We looked out the window to see Steven’s mother and grandmother driving up to the house. They were both dressed up in their Sunday church clothes, while my parents were in work clothes, sweaty from toiling away on yet another fire-related project.
Steven’s mom and grandmother came in, and conversation flowed awkwardly for a little while. There was obvious tension. My mom was exhausted from working so hard and taking care of me. She felt pretty teary and on the verge of a breakdown.
For my part, I was with my mom, feeling tired, teary, and hormonal. I had been letting bad feelings build up in me without talking with Steven about it all. It felt natural to gravitate toward my parents’ side of things rather than my husband’s. It didn’t help that there stood my mother-in-law in her Sunday best like she was out for a Sunday drive – all the way from Paducah – just stopping by to give hugs and see her new grandbaby.
All this came to a head and went from tense to loud when someone asked where Steven’s dad, Herb, was. Steven’s mom, Judy, explained that Herb assumed that “no news was good news,” and because he hadn’t heard from Steven, they thought everything was taken care of. It caught her off guard that my mom, dad, and I might have wondered why they hadn’t been here to help.
My mom was crying and talking, I was “commenting,” Judy felt attacked and got mad at the absent Herb . . . it was a fiasco. My dad stood quietly behind my mom as if to support her, and he definitely didn’t like how the whole thing was coming down. At one point, someone from my side of the family suggested they just take Emily and me and head back to Ohio. It felt as if Steven and I were being split right down the middle.
The Enemy was having a field day.
As the conversation escalated, Judy became more and more angry with her own husband. She began to think that Herb really should be with us all. She called him . . . and he said he’d buy us a new refrigerator! It was crazy.
Suddenly Steven walked into the middle of the room where all the fussing and feuding was spiraling out of control. He flung his hands in the air and shouted at the very top of his lungs, “Satan will not have my family!”
Absolute silence. We all just stopped and stared at him.
Well, we all eventually apologized and set things right. But there were issues at hand that should have served as warning flags for my future. I was having a hard time trusting, really trusting, my husband. I looked more to my dad to ride in on his white horse and save the day. I resented disorder and chaos in my life – and I blamed it on Steven.
Still, we had a lot going for us. We really loved each other, we really wanted Christ at the center of our marriage, and we were young and resilient. So we were able to recover from the fire, though perhaps we didn’t really deal with some of the stuff we discovered in the midst of it. But we moved on to the next thing . . . which, happily, was the opportunity to buy our first home of our own.
It was the very property we had gone to look at on the day of the fire . . . and this princely estate was ours for the sum of $48,000. It was dingy, sort of creepy, had peeling paint, mold, and rot, and needed a huge hug.
I went to Lorenz Creative Services, the publishing company, EMI/ Sparrow Records, the publishing and record company, BMI, the performance royalty company, and had letters written predicting the