Unfinished Narratives

This is the second post in a series called Seven Sides. 

Today, you get to hear from my oldest sister Anna.

It won’t take you long to realize that Anna is a writer. I haven’t learned more about finding my voice and using writing as a way to decompress pain as I have from her. She has encouraged and challenged me to work at writing. She was tough and critiqued when it needed to be done and has made me all the better for it. Really, everyone owes her a big thank you because this blog wouldn’t exist if Anna hadn’t shaped my creative writing.

Anna is the most determined person you will meet. She has had all these excuses but never used them. She has a brilliant mind and recently had a book published (you should buy it). Here’s a link so you can: http://www.anothernewcalligraphy.com/2016/12/anc043-into-leftover-blue-by-anna-king.html?m=1

Her role as the oldest of the King children comes with a lot of responsibility and pressure. I’ll never understand what she had to step into but this I know: there was no one better.

Anna, I love you and I’m so proud of you. Thank you for sharing your heart. 

May you be encouraged from Anna that your narrative is not finished. 

Side three: 

On June 6, 1944, the Allied troops swelled onto Normandy Beach in France, launching the largest amphibious attack in history. Thousands of men, many in their teens, never stirred from the sand, riddled by bullets, choking on seawater and sand. On Omaha Beach, the most difficult of all of the invasion points, my grandfather, Lawrence Lloyd, a poor country boy from Virginia who used to kill squirrels so his family could eat, somehow survived this assault. June 6th was the first stride of Operation Overlord, part a tactical move which caused the Axis empire to wage a war on two fronts that eventually they could not sustain. Without June 6th, the Allies would not have won the war. 
                                                                           

                                            ~ 

On June 6, 2005, I was eighteen, soon to turn nineteen the next month. The day was hot and humid, characteristic of a Georgia summer. The air in the South becomes stifling and thick when we move closer towards the sun. My summer Spanish class began at 9:30am, and I was halfway into completing my Bachelor’s degree. Clenching the pregnancy test in my hand, pink lines crisscrossed slowly, indicating I was pregnant.  

Since November 21, 2002, I had been a fill-in parent after my father died. I chose to forfeit moving away to college since my Mom needed help driving the kids, but I suspect she also needed my emotional support. I rose to fill the need, since I had always been a natural leader and thrived on being able to provide stability and security. As a young girl, I remember making schemes preparing what to do if anything happened to my parents. I strategized I’d put all of my siblings into the red Radio Flyer wagon and would pull them myself the three or four miles to a trusted friend’s house. When some of my siblings were really little, they would get up and night and sleep in my room when they were afraid after Dad died. I disciplined. I went to school events. I set schedules. I coordinated pick up and did laundry and simply carried out whatever needed to be done. Even with the turmoil of watching my father shrivel from cancer, I kept good grades, stayed out of trouble, and got a scholarship to a local college, where I continued to excel. I listened to every terror and fear, squabble and delight my beloved brothers and sisters brought to me with a tenderness reserved only for them. 

And then, what I later described in a poem as the “jugular hold on ambition that [hid] the loneliness,” disintegrated when I learned I was going to have a child. 

I would be a liar to say I didn’t consider the “easiest” alternative for an unwed mother with a crisis pregnancy. The Lord fashioned my mind as one that naturally values reason and logic, and nothing about being eighteen and pregnant held any of that, nor any promise of that returning if I kept the baby. In the garage of my family’s home, I clenched my teeth as I said I was going to terminate the pregnancy. My back dripped sweat in the warm air my mother begged me, “I know your heart will break if you do this, Anna. You will not recover. Someday there will be a man who wants you and wants this baby, and he will move heaven and earth to have you both.” 

Because my God is one who replaces hearts of rock with hearts of flesh, I kept my baby. I will never have enough gratitude to my mother for how instrumental she was in that choice. My daughter, Aralyn, was born in February. Her name means with “with song,” and many years later, Louie Giglio said, “God gives us a new song if we let Him,” and I wept as I knew that Aralyn was my Psalms 40:3: “He put a new song in my mouth, praise to our God!” She, my darling girl, was a gift from a Father who knows that children are a blessing, no matter the circumstance. Without Aralyn, nothing else would have grounded me away from more vicious temptations to escape the pain of missing my father, because she needed me. And that was all that mattered.  

Not only was I young parent, but I became a young single parent when her father and I parted ways about a year after Aralyn was born. I finished school, thanks to a kind professor who reached out to a pregnant mother on the verge of quitting. I rented a small, tidy home near my family. Some dear family friends helped me get a job teaching. I chose to stay in education so I could spend time with Aralyn, and since I didn’t have much financially, I wanted to give her my time. I did well teaching. I got promoted and went back to graduate school twice.

All the while, the loneliness creaked in and out. I did the one thing I was good at—write. Writing was my haven, my harbor from the darkness that wove in and out, my reprieve from the excruciating weight of grief and hobbling shame I carried. Like Christian from Pilgrim’s Progress, I had grown so used to the burden on my back that I had no idea I was even holding it. Between the hours of working and running a home alone, I wrote. And every time I did, my heart melted just enough for me to loosen out the honest words I never said out loud: I missed my father. I hated him for leaving me. I was afraid no one would want me. I was broken. All of this mess after Dad left was too ugly, too tangled, to ever be undone. I was abandoned. I was not good enough. That no amount of success would ever eradicate the fear that I would be found out and be a disappointment. 

God has a way of recrafting hearts one well-placed chip at a time. In January of 2012, I met a man who wanted my heart, that amalgamation of stone and flesh, and he did move heaven and earth to be with me and my girl. He held my hand when I looked down at my father’s grave as I said between tears, “Dad, I forgive you now for dying.” He asked me to marry him at the last place my whole family vacationed together, and we married in April of 2014. 

The terror of an unplanned pregnancy was lingering, and despite how much I adored my husband and my girl, I shut down the idea of ever having children, even before I met my husband. Likely because he didn’t suspect I’d agree, my husband didn’t bring it up after we married, though I knew he wished for children. Then that gentle voice began singing again, and the new song now was one for a child. Like an artist at work, in November of 2014 (my father died in November), somehow the words croaked out of me in a rare show of a softened heart: “Don’t you think someone is missing, here?” 

I knew after my father died I’d never call another man “Dad.” As a writer, words are far too sacred to me to use names without purpose. But when the ultrasound screen of asphalt and chalk showed we were having a boy, we chose to give my son the middle name “Gregory.” I didn’t speak my father’s name much for over a decade since he died, but my son today is the promise that death is not the end of the story. 

My husband is the promise that the lies we’ve told ourselves, the falsehoods we’ve accumulated about our worth, are not the same love that our Father has for us. He is my reason to let go of the second skin. 

My daughter is the promise that God wants us to experience joy again, and not live in the bondage and prison of the devices we use to save ourselves. 

My siblings are the promise that my God is a Father to the fatherless. 

                                             ~

My grandfather survived Normandy Beach, but not everyone there did. My father died at 47, and other men are never touched by cancer. Death, who has never respected people, is himself only acog of a larger narrative at work, one put into motion by the God of all the universe who finds value in us that we cannot quantify. Only a God with the vision and imagination that mine has could take the aftermath of the destruction of Death and refuse to let the story end there. 

I wrote to my siblings once that “the ache doesn’t have to silhouette us anymore my dear ones.” No matter the bullets, the sirens, the beepings of cancer-filled rooms, the drugs, the bitterness, the starving loneliness, the fear, the labyrinthine turns we cannot navigate–God has gone before us and it is finished. It is fulfilled. It will all be made whole.