align="center">
Chapter Four
“T he changing table is over there. There’s a rocking chair and baby swing in the corner. There are footstools under most of the chairs to use when you’re nursing. There are some nursing pillows over there,” the deacon’s wife said, pointing to a stack of pillows and blankets in the corner. “If the baby falls asleep, you can walk her down to the nursery and put her in one of the cribs. They’ll call you if she wakes up and starts to cry. The number will flash right out there.”
Sister Hawkins pointed toward the panel of glass running across the front of the room. Beyond it was my new church family, milling about and shaking hands. High above their heads was a black square with blinking red numbers, each one assigned to a different child when they signed in to their classes. I saw a woman duck through the crowd and rush out the side door.
I pushed Lily upright and over my shoulder to keep from showing my disappointment. The woman who’d run out had a three- or four-year-old, so this separation thing wasn’t as temporary as Sister Hawkins made it seem. What if Lily felt the same way about the toddlers’ class as she did the nursery? Would I be stuck in here for the next five years? Maybe I had it all wrong. I hoped so. “It’s very nice. All of it. I was just wondering, though…How long do I have to stay in here?”
Sister Hawkins gave me her signature look of disapproval. Her children probably knew it well. “It’s not a prison sentence, dear. It’s an honor. Being a mother is a beautiful thing. It’s a pity more young women don’t realize that. Again, we ask that you use the Cry Room as long as you’re breast-feeding your baby or whenever your child is crying during the service and not in the nursery. You’ll like it so much, though, you won’t want to leave. I’ve been in here seven years myself, ever since they built the new church.”
“Yeah, this is her own personal pulpit,” someone whispered, followed by a few giggles.
“Hush,” the woman said in the sharpest, sweetest tone I’d ever heard. “Here, honey, sit down.” She offered me a seat between her and another woman, who was the head of the Planning to Homeschool group or the Mothers of Many ministry, one of those women that I found both amazing and intimidating. I considered taking the seat she suggested to try to get to know that woman better. Rainy Styles was her name. I was sure about that. Ryan and I had been reading up on home-schooling and all other aspects of child rearing and I had a ton of questions to ask.
Still, I wasn’t ready to spend my first Sunday that close to Sister Hawkins’s scrutiny. Instead, I smiled at both of them and took a seat on the end of the back row in case Lily started crying and I needed to make a quick exit like that other woman had done. “Thanks, but I’ll sit here for now.”
The deacon’s wife looked a little insulted before fixing her smile, so much like my husband’s a few minutes earlier, firmly in place. The church mask, my old roommate used to call it as we set out on Sunday mornings. She’d tug at her cheeks and forehead, determined to leave all fakeness behind. I had no name for the false Sunday smiles, but I hated them. Church for me was a place to be vulnerable, not a place to cover up and be perfect. There was the rest of the week for that.
Attending the church that Ryan had grown up in, the church where his mother still attended, gave me plenty of opportunities to need Jesus. My old friends had wondered how things would go with me coming to a church where Ryan had a past and I didn’t, but Rochelle had said it best: “Go where your husband goes. God will go with you.”
I had amened the sentiment then, but sometimes now I wondered if God had gotten lost in the move. My mother-in-law didn’t just attend this church. From the way she’d had me kicked out of the sanctuary this morning with my husband’s approval, it seemed as if Liz just about ran the place. Now she’d have a whole team of women trying to whip me into a suitable wife.
Sister Hawkins attempted to whisper to someone about me. She didn’t do very well with it. She needed to take hissing lessons the Queen. “They’re talking about making her husband a minister, but I don’t see how it’s going to work with her acting a fool like that. Talking about her old pastor and such. Doesn’t she know how things work around here?”
Evidently I didn’t know much of anything at all.
The only light in the room came through the glass in front of us, so it was hard to make out who she’d been speaking to, but I knew that the speaker was the woman who’d escorted me in. My jailer. The pastor wanted to make my husband a minister? Surely this lady was confused, or at least I thought so at first, but after recounting Ryan’s nervousness this morning, I quickly realized she might be right. Gossips like that might get the details confused, but they generally got the big things right. Ryan was being considered for something. Why hadn’t Ryan told me anything? Maybe he had….
I’ve got to get back inside….
Hmm…
Dana’s husband, Adrian, was a minister now, though at the Messianic fellowship they attended, it wasn’t necessarily called that. Rochelle’s husband, Shan, was a deacon at his church, too. Still, my friends were real. Honest. Did I have to become some kind of Christian robot in order for my husband to become a leader?
I hugged my baby closer and shut my eyes before they stung with tears. Maybe Sister Hawkins was right. Though I felt I had a point, the sanctuary wasn’t the place to prove it. I should have just come into the Cry Room like I’d been asked and talked to Ryan about it at home. The thing was, we didn’t talk at home. Ryan barely talked to me at all, and when he did, that stupid cell phone seemed attached to the side of his head, or his BlackBerry, laptop or some other piece of equipment was in front of his face.
Lily pushed forward with her feet, digging her heels and toes into the cup of pudding that had once been my abdominals. I’d almost laughed when the woman mentioned nursing pillows. I didn’t need any—I was one. Though I’d stood up at my wedding almost two years ago with a stomach flat enough to cook on, giving birth to a ten-pound baby had stretched me into some kind of rag doll. Body parts had left their original positions and shifted to new locations. Where my six-pack had once lived, there was now an empty Hefty bag, hanging over with just a little bit of trash in it. Or at least that’s the way my husband described it right after the birth. I laughed with him then, but it wasn’t funny anymore. Nothing was, especially not this room.
Lord, I love being a mother, but does this mean I have to stop being a woman? A person?
A pregnant woman on the other side of the glass paused in front of us, checking her hair. She smiled at herself in what she must have thought, as I once did, was a mirror. I bit my lip remembering how my own face had stared back at me from that glass when I was pregnant. I’d finger-combed my little Afro and kissed my lips together thinking how cute I was, just like this woman was doing now. I wondered if she knew what awaited her on the other side of the glass, a life of watching other people worship through a window, of running out of God’s presence when your number blinked red. I wondered if she had any idea what this new motherhood was all about. I certainly didn’t.
“She’s missing the corners,” the woman next to me whispered. “I love when they use it for a mirror, but I always want to turn up the lights real quick and wave so that she can see there’s, like, thirty women in here watching her check her lipstick. We used to have fun in here, but that was before…”
I choked back my brewing tears and smiled, squinting a little to see the woman beside me more clearly. From her voice and sense of humor, I knew she was the one who’d made the crack before about this room being the other woman’s own personal pulpit. I wasn’t quite sure what she’d meant by that, either, but if I got to know this lady better, I’d be sure to ask. With her blond curls clearly in view, I realized with a shock, this must be the model-thin mother all the men spoke about, the one who always wore her old jeans back to church after each baby. The one husbands compared their wives to. Perhaps I should have taken the seat next to the other woman after all.
A friend must show herself friendly.
I sighed. Over and over, I’d prayed for friends at the