Big Girl Panties

The girls have a phrase:  put on your big girl panties and deal with it.  I think it means you don't wear diapers anymore so stop whining.  So, I wallowed in my mother's notecard for a few days, but it is time, as the saying goes, to put on the big girl panties and deal with it.

(Thank you for indulging me though).

So today, as I headed for my office, I was behind a big white pick-up truck.  And I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it, but something was "off".  I was trying to see the driver and passenger, and I was looking all over the truck, and I just couldn't figure out why my alarm bell was going off.  Sometimes that bell goes off just before something awful, so I try to listen to it.  (It evidently does not work for earthquakes). 

Then I realized what it was.  The tag had a diamond in the middle of it.  That's right!  It had Arkansas tags, so I got to feel homesick in a nice little highway way.

And I have been thinking of late about Brian.  I went to school for three years in Arkansas with Brian.  We had a lot in common as we both grew up as Jehovah's Witnesses.  He was no longer interested in being one.  But I could appreciate his poems in a way no one else could. 

I was thinking about Sister Scully and my girls and all of the sisters who have loved ones who have not gotten active in the truth.  Or who are actually disfellowshipped.  The end is approaching and some of us are anxious over where everyone stands now, will stand soon, what the survivor rate will be.

Also, I was considering my own life, how the whole six years I was out of the truth part of it stayed with me.  It might have looked like I was in the world, but in my head, I still used the name Jehovah when I thought about God, still was not afraid of the end of the world or my dying and going to hell.

So I wanted to share this poem (it is a prose poem, does not rhyme, is instead reliant on imagery and language for its poetic elements) for those of you who dare not give up hope.  I did change one word, indicated by the **.

There are days

There are days I want to believe so badly.  The twinge when
news of war in the Holy Land, or famine, or pestilence,
when Revelation 6 comes screaming back into my head
unbidden and I wonder, I wonder if I was wrong to search
elsewhere for that which transcends, if soon the day will
come when my old family will be the only ones left standing
strong for God in the face of the wild beast with seven heads
and ten horns and on those horns ten diadems and on its
heads blasphemous names . . . See what I mean?  Most days I
wonder if I'll ever be free of it, of the songs that insinuate
themselves into rotation on the unconscious jukebox.  It's
just wrong to go from I ain't saying she's a golddigger to We
thank you, Jehovah, especially since I only remember half the
chorus now.  And yet, I never felt more accepted, more part
of a family.  I've never gotten that anywhere else, and really,
I'll never get it again, even if I went back.  You can't pray a
lie, Huck said, and you can only live one for so long.  But
sometimes I still wonder if I've *messed* up, if I'll wave to my
parents as I die at Armageddon and say "you were right."

This is from Brian's collection published by Louisiana University Press entitled "A Witness in Exile."