by Trish Ryan
Copyright © 2008 by Trish Ryan
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Lyrics on page 116 are from “Here and Now” by Christopher Greco. Copyright © 2001 by Christopher Greco. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Lyrics on page 123 are from “Worthy to Be Praised” by Eunice Sim. Copyright © 2001 by Eunice Sim. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Lyrics on page 136 are from “You Have Entered In” by Jordan Seng. Copyright © 2001 by Jordan Seng.
FaithWords
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
First eBook Edition: April 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-53613-4
Contents
Dedication
A Polite, Heartfelt Disclaimer
PART I: Before
Chapter One: The Road to Mr. Right
Chapter Two: Humpty Dumpty Sat on That Wall
Chapter Three: Build a Bridge and Get Over It
Chapter Four: Becoming a Fascinating Woman
Chapter Five: Stars, No Stripes
Chapter Six: Some Who Wander Are Really Lost
Chapter Seven: What About That?
Chapter Eight: Exile
Chapter Nine: My Get-a-Life Coach
Chapter Ten: That’s Me in the Corner
PART II: During
Chapter Eleven: You Can’t Get There from Here
Chapter Twelve: Welcome to Wine Country
Chapter Thirteen: One New Sheep, Grayish Black in Color
Chapter Fourteen: Spiritual Monogamy
Chapter Fifteen: Another Notch in the Bible Belt?
Chapter Sixteen: Weeded and Pruned
Chapter Seventeen: Total Immersion
PART III: Enduring
Chapter Eighteen: Tending the Flock
Chapter Nineteen: Forty Days of Faith
Chapter Twenty: Allegiance Encounters
Chapter Twenty-one: A Knight in a Shining Honda
Chapter Twenty-two: What If Jesus Dated?
Chapter Twenty-three: Good News in the Garden
Chapter Twenty-four: 1+1+1=1
PART IV: Happily Ever After
Chapter Twenty-five: Learning to Roast a Chicken
Acknowledgments
For Steve
A Polite, Heartfelt Disclaimer
There are three things you’re likely to notice before you get too far into this book. First, I refer to God as He and sometimes I even capitalize (as Elizabeth Gilbert points out in her own spiritual memoir, it seems like a nice touch in the presence of the Divine.) The Bible makes it clear, however, that God encompasses all of masculinity and femininity. So if you decide to go through these pages and ink in an S in front of all the divinity-related pronouns, more power to you; I think God can handle it. Second, I have, on occasion, uttered four-letter words, a select few of which made it into this manuscript. Please understand: they are not there to show that I can say them, but rather to admit that I did, and that, on occasion, I do. I’ve sacrificed the chance to clean up my image in exchange for the ability to be honest. And, speaking of honesty—if you’re someone who knows me, or used to know me, or (awkward moment) once dated me and are flipping through these pages in fascinated horror, wondering what I’ll say—chances are I’ve changed your name. This book is a collection of my memories and thus may differ from yours. Some events and people have been combined, and (in an effort to avoid 346-page chapters) some time sequences shifted around. But as with the swearing, I haven’t cleaned anything up; the words you find here are true, and my best effort at an honest account of how A led to B and then swerved around to C, D, and E.
PART I
Before
Chapter One
The Road to Mr. Right
Imagine, if you will, the following:
I am thirty-two, single, and driving through Buffalo, where my large, loving family has gathered for an unexpected funeral. Yesterday morning, my boyfriend, Mark (whom I sometimes refer to as my “life partner” in a pathetic attempt to give our relationship a veneer of permanence), told me that he doesn’t plan to get married—ever. I’ve had a nine-hour drive from Cambridge to western New York to think this over. Now I’m making my way down a nondescript highway trying to find my hotel, passing acres of strip malls, subdivisions, and driving ranges, listening to Sarah McLachlan wail on the radio and watching the minutes tick by. I think about my relatives—my parents and siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins—and their happy marriages, happy children, happy lives. I think about how much I want those things, and small tears roll down my cheeks. Hanging out with these families decimates my carefully crafted story of how lucky I am to be unmarried, unencumbered, free to live a life of change and adventure. I feel like a character in one of those Sex in the City episodes that makes you think, “Wow—thank God I’m not her.”
I’M HER.
YOU SEE, THE pursuit of romantic happiness is (has always been) my secret obsession, the defining focus (and failure) of my first three decades of life. I believe in happy endings; I just can’t seem to get there.
It’s not like I haven’t tried. I’ve spent years amassing a veritable smorgasbord of romantic advice, consulting everything from self-help articles to books on finding my soul mate. I’ve ruined far too many flowers in my lifetime, plucking off petals one by one, trying to figure out if some guy (or God, for that matter) cared about me. I’m “spiritual, but not religious” (as the form at my doctor’s office puts it), drawn to suggestions with a supernatural element. I’m sure God is real, and suspect that the way I interact with Him (Her? It?) affects how things go in my life. At some visceral level, I believe that my search for God and my quest for love are intertwined; I just need to figure out how the whole thing works.
I’ve experimented: I feng shui’d my apartment one year, did miracle meditations the next. I’ve been to Mass, church, service, temple, sacred circle, Dance of the Inner Woman, and a ceremony to mark the movement of Jupiter into my second house. I’ve had my astrological chart done, my palm read, my energy evaluated, and my wristwatch scanned for psychic potential. I’ve kissed a frog, a toad, a snake, and at least three lizards, moving from amphibians to reptiles as if one of them might turn out to be “my type.” I’ve even worked for the author of a best-selling book on spirituality and relationships, hoping to glean some wisdom from her expertise. All of these experiences were interesting, but none of them came through with the results they promised; none of them worked. And yet somehow, my dream of happily ever after lives on. It’s an outlandish, resilient hope that counters my failures and cannot be silenced, asking, But what if it’s true? What might be possible then?
I drive past a video store advertising a new release of Cinderella. “I want my Prince Charming,” I whisper. “I want to get married, I want to build a real life.” This is the first time in years I’ve spoken the truth out loud, even to myself. I pull to a stop at a red light and reach into my bag for a tissue.
That’s when I hear the Voice. It comes out of nowhere and says, in the most matter-of-fact way possible, I have more for you. I want you to want more for yourself. It sounds (don’t laugh) like James Earl Jones, calling from his wireless phone commercial to scold me for not living up to my potential. I have a husband for you, and a family, He says. But you need to take Jesus seriously.
I stare at the car in front of me and wonder what that means.
&nb
sp; The truth is, Jesus baffles me. I can’t figure out who he is or why he matters, or why Wal-Mart is filled with Max Lucado greeting cards embossed with a big cross and the words “He took the nails for you . . .” I can’t think of an occasion where receiving that card would cheer me. All this talk about blood, sacrifice, sin, and death has nothing to do with my sense of a loving God—I don’t understand why God, if He is God, needs this kind of drama. Over the years, even as I’ve charted the stars and moved my furniture to ensure the optimal flow of positive energy, I’ve never considered what it might mean if Jesus is who he says he is (the son of God) and did what he said he did (died, then rose from the dead to save me from my own bad choices).
A WEEK AFTER I return from Buffalo, my friend Maura gives me a little book entitled If the Buddha Dated. The very idea grosses me out—who, I wonder, would date the Buddha? Skimming through the pages, I don’t think much of the big B’s dating advice—I’m just not that transcendent. If a guy tells me he’s going to call, for example, I expect him to call; you can talk to me all day long about nonattachment and emancipation from my desires; in the end, I still want him to call. It makes me tired, all this pretend not-wanting, and cranky. I throw the book away. But as I begin to consider Jesus (a more attractive guy, in my opinion), I can’t help but wonder, what if Jesus dated? At the very least, I think, Jesus would call.
A few days later, I’m home in bed with a cold. My dog, Kylie, is curled up at my feet, and I’m working my way through a towering pile of magazines stacked on my bedside table, reading story after story about women wrestling with life—searching for ways to be happy, or fulfilled, or at the very least enlightened. My heart aches with recognition; each of these women is searching, as I am, for the right higher power, some personal connection to the Divine.
I read about a spiritual seeker just back from a yoga retreat on the West Coast. She’s evolved, and now she can sit still for over an hour in the midst of a swarm of bugs.
I read an interview with a powerhouse feminist playwright who describes how nothing “happened” in her life until she stopped living in her head and started living in her vagina.
I read about the despair of four single women in New York, and a psychologist’s suggestion that they look in the mirror, give themselves a hug, and say, “You are beautiful. You are valuable. You are loved.”
And I sense Jesus looking over my shoulder, asking incredulously: This is my competition?
Chapter Two
Humpty Dumpty Sat on That Wall
From the time I was five years old, there were two things I knew for sure: that God loved me (and not just me, but all of us) and that someday He would send a handsome prince to find and marry me. I was pretty sure my prince and I would have a dog, and perhaps a nice castle by the water.
I’m not sure where I got this idea. I had a rather idyllic childhood, it’s true: I was raised by two parents whose loving marriage was filled with affection, fun, and vague allusions to a secret passionate life we kids weren’t part of. My brothers, Chris and Eric, were just enough older to seem like superheroes to me, and my sister, Meg, was just enough younger to be my willing accomplice in all manner of imaginary fun. (This often meant spending hours dressing up one of our Barbies in elaborate formal attire, as if Ken might arrive at any minute to whisk her away to the opera. We had no Ken doll, so Barbie had lots of time to get ready.) It’s not that the earthquakes of life never rumbled through our home. But when they did, some inexplicable sense of family held us together, so that when the rumbling was done we were all still there, safe and more or less sound. I liked this feeling. So at some point, I guess, I decided that the key to continuing this wonderful life was to find my own happy marriage, and that God was probably the one in charge of making sure this happened. No one told me this. I just knew, the way little girls with big imaginations sometimes do.
My concept of God—who He was, what He thought about—was pretty much self-generated at that point, as our local Catholic Church didn’t offer much in the way of inspiring imagery. To me, Sunday Mass was just a giant blur of dull, beige words blending in with the beige carpet, beige paneling, beige altar posts, and beige pews; on every sensory level, it was like sitting in a giant bowl of oatmeal.
My mother’s diligent efforts on behalf of our young souls ensured that Meg and I made it to church each week. But the truth was, despite years of immersion, I never really got it. I picked up the routine as quickly as any other kid: stand, cross, beg for mercy, bow, sit, stand, kneel . . . shake hands with everyone around you, watch Mom take Communion, put on our coats, go home; I just couldn’t figure out why we were there, standing, kneeling, begging, and crossing ourselves. Perhaps I just wasn’t liturgical—I never connected the dots between all those gestures, never saw the sacred mystery or understood why we called Mass a “celebration.” Try as I might, I couldn’t see how the forty-five minutes we spent shivering in that sanctuary, listening to Father McNamara mumble while we stared at a life-size reproduction of Jesus’ maimed body, had anything to do with, well . . . anything. I couldn’t find the take-home point.
There was one Sunday morning, though, as I sat in the icy classroom with my Sunday school class, all of us rubbing our little hands together trying to stay warm, when I had what you might call a spiritual breakthrough. Our teacher, Mrs. Falcone, in a rare off-script moment, burst into a bubbling description of her prayer life, explaining how her days of dreary housework were lightened and brightened by her conversations with God: “When I get up in the morning, I start talking to God . . . I do my ironing, and I’m talking to God . . .” She sang this in a half rhyme, like a Catholic rendition of “Whistle While You Work,” walking around our table with a bouncy step, making her chats with God sound like the best fun ever.
I chatted at God with some frequency after this, and from time to time He’d answer. Nothing big—it certainly never struck me as anything special—just small conversations about whether He thought I should try the triple-toss turn around at the end of my baton-twirling routine, or if He remembered that I thought Scott Stewart, a boy in my class, was cute. (Yes on both counts.)
FOR A TIME I thought I might be Jewish, spurred by the arrival of a kid named David Goldman in my English class. One day when we were supposed to be copying vocabulary words, he turned to me and said defiantly, “You know what? I’m a Jew. I don’t believe in Jesus.” Like me, I thought. No one had explained Jesus to me—who he was or why he mattered—in a way I could understand, so I proceeded on the assumption that he wasn’t all that important. If God was immortal, my reasoning went, He didn’t need a son to take over the family business. After reading Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (and discovering I wasn’t the only little girl who believed God had a hand in making my love life work), I thought that like Margaret, we all got to choose whether or not we wanted the Jesus part of the story. (I was stripped of my Jewishness fifteen years later by my law school boyfriend’s mother. Within seconds of meeting me, Mrs. Lowenstein stormed off to the kitchen, hissing to her husband, “She looks like a map of Ireland . . .” Apparently, Jon hadn’t mentioned that his new girlfriend was named after St. Patrick.)
Prayer worked for Margaret, so I prayed every night before bed, as she did. The impetus for my prayers was not so much to grow closer to God, but rather to obtain His help: Margaret prayed every night and she got her first bra; I hoped the same formula might work for me. I prayed, for years, varying versions of the same words, strung together by endless series of ellipses so as to not inflate or diminish any one request in relation to the others:
Dear God please bless Mom and Dad and Meg and Chris and Eric and our dog Ginger and Bill and Paul and Bill’s other friend whose name I can’t remember and Susie and Barbie and Timmy and Aunt Janet . . . (deep breath) . . . God, thank you for my cute new belt and pink T-shirt, and that I was picked to be the featured twirler for Homecoming . . . please, please, please, don’t let me drop my batons on the football field, and don�
��t let me look fat in the parade. Please don’t let people make fun of me . . . And please, God, let Mom buy me a bra . . .
I don’t remember much else of the content of my prayers in those days, only the format. I remember viscerally, however, my certainty that omitting anyone from my blessing list somehow left them outside of God’s protection, rendering them vulnerable to bad things. It was a horrible sort of power I possessed, the lives of everyone I knew balanced on the breadth of my young memory. I sensed, even then, that there was spiritual power in the world, and that I needed to make careful choices to negotiate the maze of life in front of me. I just wasn’t sure how.
WHEN MY TEEN years hit, my spiritual searching was quickly replaced by a new object of curiosity and worship: boys. While friends experimented with drinks and drugs and daring each other to jump from high places to ease the dullness and panic of our impending adulthood, I turned to boys to ease whatever ailed me at the moment.
I don’t remember much about the beginning of dating my first boyfriend, Dan, only the kissing. We were in eighth grade, and we made out constantly, everywhere: in the hallway between classes, behind the curtain on the stage in the gym, on the dock overlooking the river, in the hammock in his parents’ backyard. We lived in constant fear of getting caught, of hearing grown-up footsteps closing in on somewhere we’d snuck off to kiss. It was my first experience with requited love, and my first experience of the flip side of romance, jealousy. Dan’s former girlfriend (his love from the year before) was a beautiful girl with long hair who left school early every day to pursue her career in ballet. That’s why they broke up, as I recall, because she didn’t have time to date anyone. Even at thirteen this seemed foolish to me, choosing your career over a man. I worried that she’d see the error of her ways, quit ballet, and want him back.
Dan was a fabulous introduction to coupledom: he held my hand at football games and wrote me romantic notes during study hall. He carved the word “LOVE” into a block of wood and gave it to me on Valentine’s Day. For my birthday he sent me tulips because I’d mentioned once that they were my favorite. With each of these gestures, he shaped my understanding of what true love could look and feel like, neither one of us realizing how impossibly high he was setting the bar for every man I’d date thereafter.
