Storm Tossed: A troubled woman finds peace with herself and God in the midst of life's storms.

by Beth Jones

  “Hey, it’s going to be okay, Rach! Don’t worry. Might be rough for awhile, but we’re all going to make it! You’ll see.” Ben misunderstood her tears, but she let it go. Let him think she was afraid. Yet wasn’t she, deep down inside? Of everything, despite her best intentions not to be? Her worst fear was of turning into her mother.

  Was she already her? Rachel remembered the quote she’d penned in her journal last week by Mitch Albom: “But behind all your stories is your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.”

  I’m not my mother, Rachel thought with angry disgust and her feelings of revolt surprised her. “Yeah. Thanks, Ben. Y’all ready over there?”

  “Yep, yep. Well, just checking on ya. And if you change your mind about the opportunity of a lifetime Hurricane Ana party, just come on over. Best pizza in town.” They both laughed.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Andy so excited,” Ben said, pausing at the front, blood-red door with the circular, stained glass window and laughing, but this time the laugh was different, uncomfortable almost. Rachel looked quickly into his dark brown eyes, and she saw it. There it was. Fear. Then he shook it off, and she oddly remembered Judges 16:20 when Samson woke up and tried to shake himself free of the Philistines, not realizing that the Spirit of God had left him. Now why did I think that, she thought.

  “Okay, later,” Ben said. Rachel smiled and waved, busying herself with neatly organizing the supplies she’d just bought. A place for everything, and everything in its place, she mused, hearing her mother’s voice again. Before all Hades breaks loose.

  Chapter 2: Colorless

  Most people didn’t want to take the chance to stay behind in East Destin and the surrounding areas. Traffic for people evacuating was backed up for miles, glutted on the Mid-Bay Bridge over Choctawhatchee Bay, who were heading for Highway 20 to get to Highway 85 and the heck out of dodge. The huge jam on the bridge resembled ants stuck in Terro sticky pesticide. When Rachel watched the news on her iPhone, she was so relieved she hadn’t left after all. What a mess!

  She ate her salad hurriedly, just to get it done so she could get to the ice cream. She’d lost 35 pounds since last year, radically changing her diet and exercising, but she still binged at times, especially under stress or when she was depressed, on Ben and Jerry’s Peanut Butter Fudge Core ice cream. Her guilty secret.

  The storm would soon be here. She ate her ice cream slowly, as if to pause time and to keep the devil away as long as possible, savoring every sugary bite, licking the spoon like a lollipop. If she didn’t stop this habit, she would gain all her weight right back. But OMgosh, it was so good.

  She remembered the day that Jackson looked at her, really looked at her, when she walked in their house after running errands. It was like he suddenly realized she’d lost weight. Maybe she should go to the post office more often! He looked her up and down, his eyes caressing her curves mentally. He stared at her stomach. Or rather, the lack of it. She’d had belly fat for years and was finally losing it.

  He was smart enough not to say anything, of course, because she was hypersensitive about her weight anyway, but she could tell he was surprised. And, yes, pleased. Interested. The way he used to look at her when they were first married. Looking at her like he wanted a grilled steak, a devouring, hungry look.

  She had smiled a little at him then, and walked off, feeling happy. Who knew that her husband looking at her with desire could give her such joy? But of course, nothing had happened after that. It hadn’t for a year.

  An entire year. How did they get there? She didn’t know. It didn’t happen fast. Just little compromise by compromise. They stopped talking except small talk about the bills, Faith, the weather, his construction job, how her writing was going. He was exhausted from working a lot, and she was exhausted, from who knows what.

  Stress about finances. Perimenopause. Writing 3 books in six months. Her stepdaughter Autumn, who only visited in the summer when she was growing up, and just occasionally now, but whose visits left her emotions tangled and raw. When she left to go back to her mom’s as she was growing up, Rachel was totally depleted and felt guilty for being relieved for peace and quiet finally.

  Autumn Rain. What a beautiful name. She was beautiful, too. Long silky blonde hair, like Faith’s. A slender French nose (her mother was half-French and had been married six times) and very thin lips which she made Angeline Jolie-full with lip liner and bright, almost purple lipstick. Her eyes were a pale sky blue, and she magnified them and lined them with Goth-black eyeliner and fake, thick, long, black eyelashes. She took them off every night and glued them on every morning. It took her 30 minutes (an hour to put on her whole “face”), but she got so many compliments on the lashes. They were her trademark. She plucked her blonde eyebrows way too thin, and they had a high arch. She had a pierced nose and lip. Her face was arresting; her manner intolerable at times.

  “I don’t have to obey you because you’re not my mother,” she had said to Rachel once. And Jackson had defended her. She’s just a hurting kid, he’d told Rachel. And anyways, Rachel was to blame, he said. If she would just really love her….

  Everything was all her fault. Jackson said she was the problem. Rachel sighed deeply, her heart perplexed. Was it true? Was she the problem in their family?

  And yet there were characteristics about Autumn that Rachel greatly admired and desired to emulate. Her beauty. Her ease with people (except her). Her sparkling personality, emanating a light that couldn’t be denied. Her sudden laugh, freeing like Jackson’s. The way strangers and children were drawn to her like a magnet and trusted her immediately. She had such a heart and love for children.

  Autumn was now attending the University of Colorado, majoring in psychology to become a psychiatrist for troubled children. She was excelling, making Dean’s List each semester, while working full-time as the receptionist at a mental health center and interning at the hospital as a therapist. A very full plate, but it fulfilled her.

  Maybe her college major was her way of figuring out her life. Why her dad was always too freaking busy for her and worked so much. Why her mother had time for everyone but her, but bought her material things to alleviate her guilt and to appease Autumn. Why her stepsister Faith wouldn’t go to college or get a job or do anything but go to her friends’ houses and play stupid video games, wasting her brilliant mind, and never called Autumn.

  Or why she and her stepmother clashed so much. She actually really loved Rachel, and admired her solid faith in Christ and her published books, but she didn’t dare tell her to protect her own heart. She couldn’t take any more rejection. So she painted her feelings with a defensive, defiant attitude and biting remarks, the way she painted her eyeliner, sharp, dark, exactly executed.

  When Jackson was around, she was genuinely sweet, ecstatically happy to have her daddy around, and looked at Rachel out of the side of her eyes, brooding and silently jealous about any affectionate displays between them. Which lately was extremely rare. For the most part, Jackson and Rachel didn’t talk anymore.

  Rachel tried her best to love Autumn unconditionally, like she loved Faith. But Faith—even though she was undemonstrative in her expressions of love toward Rachel—never spoke to Rachel the way Autumn did. It cut her heart deeply.

  Jackson only saw when Rachel ran out of patience and yelled, and said she needed to act like the Christian woman of God she pretended to be to everyone.

  Tears stung her eyes again. She studied the chunk of peanut butter and fudge on her spoon, and it dissolved in her mouth. She closed her eyes, giving into the pleasure and pushing away the memory of Jackson’s angry, hurtful words. This was as near as possible to heaven on earth. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream might not be the answer to life, but it sure was close.

  Why couldn’t she and Autumn just get along? Maybe they were too much alike. At least that is what Jackson had suggested once. Rachel was startled to realize that Autumn’s rejection of her caused her the same pain that she felt
about her father’s rejection. And Jackson’s.

  Why can’t Jackson just love me? Why am I so hard for him to love? What happened to us? Where’s the man I married, who couldn’t get enough of me and talked to me for hours in the night?

  Reading Bring Me a Unicorn by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Rachel wrote in her journal her words that seemed so timely now:

  “It is cold—a penetrating, damp, pervading cold. We stop at little stations; mud-built houses, sticks and stones; standing outside, a man, dark, savage-looking, a blanket around his nose and mouth, showing just those sullen dark eyes…A woman in the door—a great blanket around her, too—her eyes only showing above the rim. It’s so cold. There is nowhere any color. It is all just the same, this dull gray green: the sand, the bushes, the sky even—cold and cloudy—seemed washed with the same color; no reds, no yellows or tans, just this cold enveloping dry gray. It is terribly depressing. We have traveled three days seeing nothing lovely: flat fields first of cornstalks, then of cotton, now today nothing but this gray cactus.”

  Nothing lovely. So cold. No color. It’s all the same. That is how her life felt. Colorless and cold. Empty.

  Unbidden, the memory of Jackson’s texts came in like the surging tide. The wind was picking up, and with it, her anxiety was growing. Maybe she should go next door before it got bad. But resolve like steel rose up within her. No, she rebuked herself, I’m not going to be like mama, afraid. I can do this. It will all be okay.

  She didn’t know what she was trying to prove, being here alone, conquering a hurricane. Maybe she really was insane.

  At least that’s what Jackson tried to tell her when she discovered the texts. She’d known that they were having problems. But…this. This woman, this slutty, ho woman, texting him. And Jackson responding. That is what hurt the most.

  Some “floozy” at his work as her mother would call her, texting him inappropriate things. Sexting, they called it now. Suggesting them meeting for lunch, and then her doing things to him at a hotel that Rachel hadn’t done for years. This floozy knew he was married. She didn’t care.

  And Jackson eating it up, like bacon and eggs on a Sunday morning. Easy like Sunday morning, the Commodores song played in her head. When was the last time she’d fixed Jackson bacon and eggs? When was the last time she’d done anything for him, really?

  Maybe this was her fault, too. This emotional affair that had been going on for months. Yeah, she’d sensed it. She just couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong. Women’s intuition, they say.

  Rachel was devastated. He said he wasn’t in love with the floozy. Yes, they’d kissed once. But that was as far as it went, he swore. They hadn’t acted out on the sexting—yet.

  He’d kissed her in his Silverado pickup truck once after work just to see if he was really in love with Rachel any more. And he realized when he kissed the floozy that he was.

  Rachel was the love of his life. Rachel was the woman for him, ‘til death do us part. In fact, he was planning to tell the floozy next week that he didn’t want her to text him anymore or vice versa, he claimed. But one night Rachel happened to look at his phone before he had the chance to end it, a strong feeling coming over her that he was hiding something. She couldn’t shake it.

  She was in her pink and blue Hello Kitty pj’s, her face washed clean with no makeup, her hair pulled tight in a ponytail and drinking a glass of chocolate milk, and suddenly her world crashed to pieces. She’d never looked at his phone before. It was God prompting her to pick it up and look at it, exposing the sin.

  She gasped when she saw the sensual texts, then furiously confronted him when he walked unsuspectingly into their bedroom in his royal blue briefs and long white, tube socks, taken by surprise like a deer shot on a November snowy morning.

  “Who the heck is Ashley? Ashley, is that her name, really? Is she a 25 year old with big boobs? Let me guess, she was a blonde cheerleader in high school!” she screamed at him, her mouth contorted with rage. How dare he do this to her!

  Rachel thought her mind was going to snap from the truth. She was afraid she was going to lose it, and have a nervous breakdown. Or psychotically kill him.

  “She’s a woman at work! It’s nothing! Nothing’s going on, I swear to God, honey! I’m sorry. I—I guess I just wasn’t thinking. We didn’t have sex! It’s a flirtation, that’s it! She means nothing to me. I won’t do it again.” Jackson said he was sorry. He apologized profusely to her and their pastor.

  But Rachel didn’t feel there was true, deep repentance. Only that he was sorry he had gotten caught. Their pastor told her to just trust him, trust God and to repent for her part in why this may have happened. Implying, subtly, she might be somehow to blame for this. Was she?

  Jackson was true to his word, and broke it off with the floozy. Removed all temptation. Never saw her again. She never texted him again, either. He left the company, quitting without notice for the first time in his life, and he never looked back. Started his own construction business and succeeded. It was like the worst thing that had happened in their marriage was the best thing for him.

  The amount of money he made in his own company was good, and he was pleased. Felt good about himself as a man. Although there never seemed to be enough money and they lived paycheck to paycheck. Now instead of them arguing loudly over the floozy, they fought about money.

  Now that Autumn was in college and rarely visited any more, they didn’t argue about her anymore. When they didn’t fight, their house was quiet. Too quiet. Like the ancient cathedrals in Paris, France that they’d visited on their honeymoon, beautiful, but cold, desolate, lifeless.

  This was probably the main reason Faith was depressed. It was either feast or famine, with them joking around about dumb things or loud screaming matches, ending in stone cold silence and everyone miserable. A dysfunctional cycle they desperately wanted to end, but didn’t know how. They’d been to marriage counselor after counselor, pastor to pastor, to no avail. Faith so desperately wanted her parents to be happy and to laugh together, the way they used to when she was little. It made her happy to see them happy.

  She often withdrew into her turtle shell, drawing on her art pad in her bedroom or going to her friends’ houses to drink too much Pepsi, eat tons of junk food which Rachel forbid in the house, and to play violent video games, shooting bad guys with machine guns.

  When she was home, she practiced playing the piano: Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Chopin. She played the piano violently too at times, as if taking out her anger at her ridiculous parents on the instrument. At other times, she played softly, beautifully, performing magnificently as if channeling Mozart. It was balm to Rachel’s soul, and tears would ooze from her eyes at the beauty and pain of her daughter. Rachel could see Faith’s unhappiness from her parents’ marriage, and it broke her heart.

  “O afflicted one, storm-tossed and not comforted,” she remembered from Isaiah 54:11. Yes, that is how she’d always felt. Storm-tossed. Afflicted. Not comforted.

  Chapter 3: Waiting

  All her life it seemed like God had Rachel waiting.

  Waiting to graduate from high school, which she had hated because she’d never really fit in with the pretty cheerleader types, the brains, the athletes. She was shy then, her nose always in a book, journaling her secret thoughts about boys she liked and writing dark, emo poems.

  Waiting to grow up to get away from her alcoholic father and her physically abusive mom, a woman whose anger and fear were intertwined and which manifested in superstitions and rage taken out on her daughter, of whom she was jealous and seemed to hate.

  Waiting to meet Prince Charming and have lots of babies. All Rachel ever wanted to do when she grew up was to marry and have babies. She wanted 12 kids until she had the one, and went through a high-risk, difficult pregnancy in which she gained 50 pounds, developed pre-eclampsia and was assigned to bed rest for seven months until delivery, and winded up having an emergency C-section, because the baby was lodged up too high in her womb an
d was in distress during labor.

  Very shortly after that, she became pregnant again (so much for breast-feeding being a good form of birth control!) and had a miscarriage at five months pregnant--a perfectly formed, little boy. Jackson seemed to think she’d miscarried on purpose and was bitter toward her, because he’d always wanted a son. He never comforted her for her loss, and she grieved silently for her little boy, whom she would have named Isaac—which means “laughter.” She often thought and dreamed of Isaac—what he would have looked like, what his voice and laugh would have sounded like, what he would have been when he grew up?

  She seemed to be in the waiting room for her marriage to be healed. So much water under the bridge, she thought ironically as the heavy rains began falling and the news reported the beginning of storm surges. The hurricane-proof house, on 10 foot stilts, had two stories and a small attic, and in the event of a storm surge, she’d go up to the second floor or even the attic. She was praying fervently against a storm surge; she’d seen videos of them on YouTube and it terrified her. Her worst fears were of burning and drowning to death.

  She shook her head as if to ward off evil. Her mind wandered to Jackson again. He wanted her to give to him constantly, when she always felt so empty. Jackson often said that he didn’t think Rachel knew how to love, other than their child Faith. She pondered that, as she sipped slowly through a curvy straw on a green smoothie in a clear glass: fresh spinach, blueberries, strawberries, a touch of raw honey, almond milk, chia seeds, blended together and oh, so good.

  If this hurricane was happening several years ago, she knew she would have been stress-eating: finishing off two or three bowls of ice cream, eating half a package of crackers and sliced cheese, binge eating on cokes, chocolate, and Nutter Butter cookies, her fave. Now she made better choices to become fit and healthy—in her diet, as well as in her personal life. Yet the thought of chocolate cake made her mouth water. She loved chocolate.