Learning to Sing: Part 2

From childhood, God had always drawn me with cords of love, but I didn't really learn to sing (as in Mary's Magnificat and Francis Hymn of Creation) until I was broken down, exhausted, and felt for the first time in my life a failure.  Up until then, the two sustaining pillars of my life had been prayer and sleep, and as a successful high-school teacher for more than 10 years, I felt myself to be a fairly competent person, in control and on top of most situations.

When my first child was born, although he had severe and chronic tonsillitis, I had time to sit and rock him, read to him, care for him night and day.  I nursed him until I became pregnant with my second child, so even though I was not sleeping much during the night, I was still coping fairly well.  With the second child, who had severe and chronic earaches and allergies, things became a lot more difficult.  We took in a hyperactive, hungry 14 - year -old who needed help that he could not get at home.  Since there were never leftovers to pull out of the fridge, I needed to cook on a daily basis---and cook a lot.  As someone who had never learned to cook in the first place and who had no imagination at all when it came to what could be prepared, I was frantic.  I no longer had time to sit and rock and comfort a sick baby, to read to a two-year-old.  I found myself facing failure at every turn:  I was not a good mother; I couldn't keep up with a 14-year-old adolescent appetite; I could not keep diapers washed (we could not afford Pampers); the beds were unmade; the sofa was wet from being peed on (plastic diaper covers caused severe rashes on my children); and I was a crazy person from sleep deprivation. 

And then came the third child, whose chronic strep throat and projectile vomiting meant two or three hospital stays every year.  It seemed that no matter which child I tended to at any moment, I was failing two others.  My husband came home from work each day to chaos; I would hand him a crying baby so I could go into the kitchen and stare at the freezer, wondering what on earth, if anything we could eat that night.  No longer was I a competent person; I could not meet anyone's needs.  I had not slept more than an hour and a half in almost six years, and when I tried to get up early to pray, a baby would wake up crying.  There was nothing I could "fix," least of all myself.  "What do you want from me?" I screamed at God.

When the youngest child was 6 or 7 months old, I called my husband at work one day.  "I don't know what's wrong," I said; "I think I need a psychiatrist.  I can't stop crying, and I don't know why!"  God bless him; he immediately took off three days from work and came home to stay with the children while I went out to the Cenacle, a retreat house in Metairie.  I went there only because I vaguely recalled someone once telling me that one of the sisters there "had glued back the pieces of her life" when she fell apart.  That phrase seemed to be just what I needed at the time, and so I called Sister Geautreaux and asked if I could come to see her.

For the next three days, I slept; I cried; I walked on the lakefront; and I talked in the evenings with Sister Geautreaux, a trained counselor:  "I don't know why I'm crying," I said.  "Nothing is wrong.  When I look at my neighbors and their problems, I know I don't have anything to cry about."

"Who is God to you?" she asked.  I did not know the answer to that, but I thought about it until the next evening.  "He is the God of my past," I said, "and occasionally the God of my present, but He is not the God of my future. I cannot trust Him for tomorrow, or the next day, or the next ten years.  I am afraid for my children; I am afraid of my own failure; I don't think I can manage to fill their needs.  I don't know how to be a good mother."

I had not a clue as to what would be different when I returned home.  I still would not know how to cook, clean, comfort babies, take care of responsibilities, etc.  But the morning I was packing to leave, I heard a bird on the ledge outside my window.  He was singing his little heart out --- singing without stopping, singing, singing, singing.  I walked over to look at the most beautiful cardinal I have ever seen.  He was looking in at me, and singing his most beautiful song.  And suddenly, a moment of pure grace overcame me in his song.  At that moment, I "knew" in the deepest part of my being that I did not have to "fix" anything:  I just had to learn to wake up each morning and sing.

That was the turning point of my life.  Much, much more in the realm of grace was to follow that moment, but until that moment I would not have been receptive to what was still to come.  I first needed to let go of the sense of overwhelming failure and learn to sing a small song of thanksgiving and praise for three perfect and beautiful babies, for a loving husband, for a safe home and for plenty to eat (if I could only learn how to cook it).

To this day, whenever I see a cardinal, I remember the Gift of God and rejoice that in the words of Psalm 40:  ...he turned to me and heard my cry.  He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.  He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.