A Direction I Did Not Sign For

Alina and her husband have been married twenty-three years and she cannot point at anything.

That is the difficulty. There is nothing to point at. There was no event. Nobody did anything you could name in a sentence, and if you asked her what happened she would give you a long answer that did not add up to a reason, which is why she has stopped giving it.

Something turned, gradually, over about nine years, and the marriage went in a direction she did not agree to go in.

They are still married. He is not a bad man; she would say that in any room and mean it, and she would say it particularly to her sister, who has a view. There is no cruelty in the house. From the outside it is a perfectly reasonable life, and there are photographs from a holiday last year in which everybody, including Alina, is genuinely smiling.

And she is living in a life she did not choose, with somebody she chose, and there is no vocabulary for that.

The thing she has never said, and she has come close twice, is that she does not know when she stopped expecting it to change. There was no evening where she decided. It went from this is a stage to this is how it is without ever crossing a line she could identify, and she only noticed the crossing had happened about two years after the fact.

She prays about it. She would want that said. It has just become a kind of reporting in rather than asking for anything.

And at certain hours, mostly in the car, one sentence arrives.

Nobody asked me whether I wanted this life. And I am inside it on my own.

You may know that car.

Maybe your version is a marriage, or a family that reorganized itself around something, or a house that got quiet in a way that nobody has ever remarked on.

What this article is not going to do

Let me be extremely clear, because this is a subject where people take liberties.

I am not going to tell you what to do about your marriage. Not one word. I do not know you, I do not know him, I have not heard his account of these nine years and he has one, and a stranger who advises from this distance is doing something reckless.

I am not going to tell you God arranged this to develop something in you. I do not believe it and I will not write it, and if somebody has said it, put it down.

I am not going to ask what you are meant to be learning. That question, asked of a woman in a car, is a small cruelty in good clothes.

I am not going to promise you it changes. I do not know. Nobody writing anything anywhere does.

And I am not going to tell you that if you had prayed differently or believed harder it would have gone another way. That is not true and it never has been and I will not put it on you.

One thing. That is what I have.

Somebody is keeping the record

There is a line in a psalm written by a man in genuine danger, and it is one of the tenderest sentences in the whole book.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Tellest there means counts. He counts the wanderings. Not the destinations; the wanderings, the going about without arriving, which is the part nobody else counts because it does not look like anything.

And then the image, which is extraordinary: the tears go into a bottle. Kept. Not wiped away and forgotten about, not dismissed as a phase, not weighed against how good things look from outside.

Collected, deliberately, by somebody who thought they were worth keeping.

And every one of those nights has been counted by somebody. The written word says thou tellest my wanderings and puts the tears in a bottle, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman in a car who has never said any of this out loud.

And nothing about this has gone unnoticed because it does not look like anything. The word counts the wandering rather than the arriving, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about nine years that have no event in them.

The thing with no name

Here is the part I want to sit with, because I think it is the actual weight.

Grief has a name. People know what to do with it. There are casseroles.

This has no name. There is no word for a good enough life you did not choose, inside a marriage nobody would call bad, with a man you do not blame. There is no category for it, which means there is no sympathy for it, which means you have carried nine years plus two more entirely alone, not because people are unkind but because you have not been able to hand them anything to hold.

That is a particular kind of solitude and it is not the same as being lonely.

And the thing with no name is already fully known. The word says thou hast searched me, and known me, thou understandest my thought afar off, and the Spirit is the one who makes understood mean understood rather than merely observed.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that in a woman who has quietly wondered whether some of this is her fault.