Mom almost never had time to sit on the yard swing, but one afternoon when I was five she was sitting on it with me.
I had been thinking about something for a while. Heavy thinking for a five-year-old. I had worked something out and had been carrying it around. That day I told her. I said I thought I was going to have to marry Rick, because nobody else would, and he was going to need help.
She answered as though I had asked her something entirely ordinary. She said no, I would not have to marry Rick, but I would need to take care of him.
What a five-year-old knows about love
A five-year-old’s mind has no category for a person who stays with you and looks after you your whole life except a husband or a wife. That was the only shape I knew. Caregiving had already moved into the place where other children keep their ideas about love.
My mother was not going to lie to me, and I would not want a mother who did. He was going to need help as long as he lived, and the people who would be there longest were going to be the two of us. She did not know of any other way.
It was my job
Nobody asked me for a promise and I did not offer one. What happened was smaller and much more permanent: I was told how it was going to be, and I accepted it, the way a child accepts most anything.
It was simply my job, from the time I was five.
The future was decided
It was often discussed as a far in the future time. I would share my children with him. He would get to have a normal life through mine: my family, my holidays, my house. It was said kindly and it was said often. It seemed idyllic.
No other options were ever considered.
No way out
We care for the weak, we look after our own, we put others ahead of ourselves. Those are not distortions of Christianity. They are Christianity, and I still believe them. Which is exactly why this is hard to write.
As a good Christian girl, and as the sibling of someone with a disability, I had no way out of what had been decided.
The duty and the virtue had been fused. Reconsidering was not a question about my life. It was a question about what kind of Christian woman I was.
When it came due
Three decades later, the time came for Rick to move into my home.
I knew before he arrived that it would be very difficult. Some of the reasons were obvious. The only way into our house was up a flight of stairs — not wheelchair accessible at all. I was raising four children, my oldest twelve and my youngest five. And I was in nursing school.
I saw no way out, so I said nothing. Not to my parents, not to my husband, not to friends or family. I needed everyone around me to stay positive, because I knew it was going to be far harder than any of them understood.
At that same time our mother was ill, and my sister Sheryl and her family took both our parents into their home. Our other two siblings were not in a position to help.
Which meant there was nobody to tell. I held it by myself for years, and the five-year-old on the swing would have recognized the reasoning exactly.
Almost none of us were asked
This is not rare. It is nearly universal among glass children.
We carry the questions with us, often from a young age. What happens to him when our parents are gone? How much of my life is already spoken for? Am I allowed to want anything that does not have him in it? Almost none of us were asked whether we wanted to.
Most of us do not talk about, for the same reason I did not.
Surrounded by people I could not tell, there was One who knew. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely.(Psalm 139:4) He did not need me to find the words. He had already heard them.
If you are carrying something that was decided for you before you were old enough to weigh it, you are allowed to look at it now, as an adult, in daylight. Deciding to carry it differently is not the same as failing to love.
Lord, You have heard everything we never managed to say. Where the load was handed to us before we could weigh it, give us the courage to look at it honestly now — and to know that You have never once mistaken our silence for consent. Amen.
Next time: what our playing was actually for.
(Click here to see the 1st in this series.)
