She Is Eighty-One and Perfectly Well

Her mother did the crossword this morning. In pen. She does it in pen.

She drives. She goes to a class on Wednesdays and she is on a committee about a footpath and she has opinions about everybody on it. She reads two books a week and she remembers the plots. Last month she took a train on her own to see a friend and changed at a station she had never been to.

That is the whole difficulty of this article in one paragraph.

Because when a person is unable, the waiting has somewhere to go. It becomes sad and it becomes gentle. When a person is entirely, obviously, demonstrably able, the waiting has nowhere at all to go, and it turns into a question you cannot stop asking: so it is a choice, then. Every day, for twenty-nine years, it has been a choice.

What happened is hers. There was a period of about four years, and there were three specific occasions inside it, and there is nothing about any of them that is unclear to either of them.

She is fifty-four. She calls her mother twice a week and drives her to appointments and stays for lunch, which she mentions because people sometimes assume there is an estrangement. There is no estrangement. There is a warm, functional, twice weekly relationship with a locked room in it, and the room has been locked from one side for twenty-nine years.

And people say the thing. Her sister says it. A woman at church said it last spring: she is eighty-one, you know. You will not have her forever. You need to forgive her.

That last one is the sentence that has done the most damage, and she has never once said out loud why.

Maybe you are waiting on somebody who is right there and perfectly well. And you have been told the clock is running, and nobody has ever asked what it is you are actually waiting for.

Sit down here where the light is. That is exactly where this starts.

What the waiting has actually been for

Let me name it, because nobody has, and it cannot be set down while it has no name.

This was never a wait for an apology. It has been a wait for an acknowledgment.

An apology is about your mother: her regret, her feelings, her standing with you. An acknowledgment is about the record: that the four years happened, that the three occasions were what you remember, that you did not enlarge them, and that somebody with authority in the matter will say so out loud.

And that is precisely why twice a week and lunch and the drive to appointments have never touched it. Warmth is not acknowledgment. She can be lovely on a Tuesday, and is, and the room stays locked, and some part of you has known the difference since you were twenty-five.

You were never unreasonable to want a true record, and Malachi 3 says a book of remembrance was written before Him for those who feared the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you unable to accept a good lunch as a settlement.

It is not coming, and the clock is not the argument

Now the hard part, and I am not going to be gentle with it, because gentleness here has cost you twenty-nine years.

It is not coming. Not this year, not at eighty-five, not if she is ill, not at the end. She has had twenty-nine years and she is sharp enough to change at a station she has never been to.

And I am not going to tell you she probably feels it and cannot say it. Nobody knows that, and being handed a maybe is exactly what keeps a woman driving to appointments and listening for something in the car for another decade.

Now the sentence about the clock, and I want it said plainly because that woman at church did real damage without meaning to. Her being eighty-one is not an argument. It is pressure. If the apology is never coming, then her age changes nothing about whether it is coming, and using it is a way of moving you rather than a way of telling you the truth.

And here is the half nobody says: an apology that never arrives does not make the four years untrue. Warmth is not a correction, and a thing that goes unacknowledged by the person who did it has not thereby been agreed to by anybody.

You are not waiting on the last word about this, and Malachi 3 says a book of remembrance was written before Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman where a record is actually kept.

Where the acknowledgment already is

Here is the turn, and it is not a smaller thing offered in place of a bigger one.

The acknowledgment exists and it has existed for twenty-nine years, and it was never in your mother's gift, because she was never able to give it properly.

God was in that house for the whole four years and on all three occasions. He did not get a summary afterward. He does not hold a version assembled from what anybody said later, and there is not one hour of it that He has quietly filed under a difficult time for everybody.

And one thing before the verse, because the woman at church joined this to something it is not joined to. Releasing her is not reconciling with her, and it is not trusting her, and nothing here asks you to change one thing about Tuesdays or say a single word in that car. You are free to finish the whole of this on your own in a front room, and it is written that so far as it depends on you, you live peaceably with all, which is a phrase with a limit built into it, and the Holy Spirit is what steadies a woman doing this by herself.

Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands.Isaiah 49:15-16

Read what God does in that verse. He raises the possibility of exactly your mother, plainly, without flinching, and He does not tidy it into something softer. Even these may forget. And then He does not offer to change her. He offers Himself instead, and He says where the record is: engraved, on hands, which is not a place a thing gets misplaced.

You are engraved somewhere that does not do forgetting, and Isaiah 49 is where God allows that a mother might, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that mean something at fifty-four.