Untold Stories

It's almost midnight and I have a pounding headache and I'm awake. I'm a chronic insomniac, so that's not surprising, but oh god, it pisses me off. It makes me so mad when all four children are sleeping and my mind races and my heart pounds over little things that never even cross my mind during my busy days. It makes me so mad that I will never get to sleep if I don't let it go and think of something else.

I think of earthquakes. I think of a frail, thin, now twenty-four-year-old woman, a birth mother, and where she is tonight.

Seconds later, selfishly, I think of the church that is paving our back yard. I look out the back windows of our dream house and my heart is a lead fishing weight that sinks to the slimy, heavy metal contaminated bottom of a silty, polluted river and gets eaten by a tumor-ridden catfish. The large church two blocks away, facing away from us, fronting a commercially zoned, arterial street, bought up the properties behind us to expand their parking lot. The two adorable little homes directly behind our house, which had been two homes on a residential street, two homes that backed up to the church parking lot, but buffered us and our neighbors and the whole street. They are gone. Knocked down. Nothing left but a huge hole and an empty fight before the zoning board about whether they really will allow it all to be paved.

They probably will. Most days, we soldier on. It's okay. It's not that bad. Every once in a while, our wide, fear-filled eyes meet and I know we are both thinking it at once. Oh god (aha), we've saved and planned. We poured our heart into it - we poured our money into it. Will our home, this character of a house that we bought when it was falling apart and nursed and patched and remodeled back to health, will it be worth anything? Will it be worth even a fraction of what we've invested in it? It doesn't matter, we tell ourselves. It doesn't matter because we love it and that is what matters. The blood, the sweat, the tears, they are still here, the work is still ours and the result is still beautiful.

It isn't fair! I want to scream it to the congregation on Sundays. I want to scream it to our neighbors and then I laugh. Because yeah. Right. Exactly. Life isn't fair. Ask the people at the bottom of rubble heaps that used to be buildings in Haiti. Life is craggy and complicated and bedazzling and joyful and rich and varied, but it is not fair.

Can we really ever know anyone's story? We judge based on snapshots that we take, moments that we witness out of context of the whole. We never really know what kept them up all night. When you see that tired mother at the grocery store tomorrow with her out of control kids. Or you hear the sharp word that starts the crying that could have been avoided. When we think, I would never, I can't believe, why doesn't she, do we ever pause to consider the story? Maybe her cherished grandfather is dying. Maybe she just lived every mother's worst fear. Maybe her precious baby brother is in a lot of trouble.

Maybe it's trivial. As trivial as an unexpected zoning change.

I trace my finger over the only picture we have of Saige's mother and I wonder if she is in pain. Is she trapped? Is she safe? In shock listening to the pain around her? Does she take any comfort from the fact that her little girl is as far from disaster and aftershocks and UN intervention as a child can possibly be, safely asleep in her own little bed with three blankets in a restored house two blocks from a huge city park on a quiet residential street?

I think, who am I? Who am I to lay here - in my structurally sound, three bedroom, two bathroom house with cupboards full of food and clean running water and the thermostat set at 68 degrees - and cry because a big ass church is paving my backyard.

Who are you to judge me?