The Air I Breathed

Someone I love told me I am the worst person they know.

I had done something wrong.

That is the part that matters.

If I had done nothing wrong, I think I would know what to do with the sentence. I could put it somewhere outside of myself. Anger. Cruelty. Something said to hurt me.

But I had done something wrong.

So the sentence found somewhere to land.

There it is.

I know this place. I have been trying to leave it for most of my adult life.

For more than two years, my therapist kept circling back to religion. I kept circling away.

Religious trauma.

I still hate those words. Something in me rises up immediately to correct them.

It wasn’t like that. I had a good childhood. I was loved. Nobody was trying to hurt me.

I have said these things so many times that I know them by heart. I am less certain now what they explain.

The people who raised me believed they were giving me the truth. Their parents believed it. Their parents before them believed it.

As far back as I can see, everyone was breathing the same air.

I was not taught that I was inherently sinful in the way I was taught multiplication. I don’t remember learning it. There was no before.

God was real. The Bible was true. People were sinful. We needed saving. There was something in us that could not make itself right. Any goodness we had came from somewhere outside of us.

I did not think of these as beliefs. They were facts about the world.

The sky was above me. The ground was beneath me. People were born sinful.

So was I.

I spent a long time trying to be good anyway. I don’t remember deciding to do that either.

I just became good at watching myself. Good at apologizing. Good at feeling guilty. Good at noticing the smallest change in somebody’s face and wondering what I had done. Good at taking things apart after everyone else had gone to sleep.

Was I selfish? Was I ungrateful? Had I hurt someone? Had I disappointed them? Was I sorry enough?

There was always another question underneath the first one. I could apologize and then wonder whether I meant it or just wanted the discomfort to stop.

I thought this was conscience. Maybe some of it was.

I also think I was building a case.

I just didn’t know there was a trial.

Then I had Nash.

His birth had been going badly for a long time before anyone said the words that made me understand how badly.

There had been hours of pushing. Monitors. Numbers changing. Faces becoming more serious and then rearranging themselves before anyone looked back at me.

By the time he was born, I was barely inside my own body.

And then he came out blue.

The room moved before I understood why.

People took him across the room. Someone blocked my view. My mother was crying. I remember trying to see around bodies and equipment and not being able to get high enough off the bed.

Nobody handed him to me.

Nobody said what I needed them to say.

There was a stretch of time that could have been thirty seconds or ten minutes when I understood only one thing:

My baby was somewhere across the room and he was not breathing.

I had not done anything to deserve that.

There was no moral equation to solve.

No mistake I could trace backward.

No private thought I needed to confess.

Something terrible was happening because terrible things happen.

And then it stopped happening.

He breathed.

The room softened.

People began speaking in ordinary voices again.

Eventually somebody brought him to me.

He was bundled so tightly I could barely see him.

His face looked nothing like I expected.

I remember staring.

Not thinking.

Just staring.

He was alive.

And there was nothing wrong with him.

Nothing.

I don’t mean he was medically fine. I mean something much older than that.

There was nothing wrong with him.

He had not done one good thing.

He had not been kind.

He had not shared.

He had not obeyed.

He had not believed correctly.

He had not repented.

He had not made himself useful.

He had not earned anybody’s approval.

He had been alive for minutes.

And I knew he was good.

I did not deconstruct my faith in that hospital room.

I wasn’t thinking about original sin.

I had just been terrified that my baby was dead.

And something I had understood as true became impossible to understand in the same way.

It just broke.

Quietly.

For a long time I thought leaving evangelical Christianity had mostly been about changing my mind.

I stopped believing one thing. Then another.

There was a small nature trail in Jacksonville where I took the kids almost every day. While my three-year-old and one-year-old played in the dirt, I sat on a bench with books I never would have touched in my old life.

One afternoon I closed Rob Bell’s Love Wins and said it for the first time. Quietly. Privately. Without fear.

I don’t believe in hell.

I had been terrified of hell my entire childhood. Of the rapture. Of Revelation. Of being left behind.

I found contradictions I could no longer make myself ignore. Eventually there were more things I no longer believed than things I still did.

I thought that was the work.

You can say, with complete sincerity, that you do not believe human beings are born wicked and still spend years treating your own mistakes like evidence.

A friendship ends. A marriage ends. My brother leaves. Someone I love is angry.

Somewhere underneath everything I know, the old question appears.

What could I have done differently?

If I had been easier. Kinder. Less needy. More useful. More patient. If I had understood sooner. If I had been better.

Maybe they would have stayed.

I know better. I know love does not guarantee permanence. I know a relationship can end without one person being pronounced defective.

I know.

And then I am hurt and the knowing becomes very small.

In my marriage, I developed a rule for myself.

Keep your hands clean.

Things were difficult. I was hurt. There were things I could not control. So I controlled what I could.

I would not cheat. I would not retaliate. I would not deliberately hurt him because he had hurt me.

I would keep my hands clean.

For years, I thought this was one of the healthiest things about me.

I needed proof. If my hands were clean, then when something happened to me I could say:

I know I didn’t deserve that.

I thought I was protecting my integrity. Really, I was protecting my ability to believe myself.

I was still in the same courtroom. I had just gotten very good at defending myself.

The problem with building your life around keeping your hands clean is that eventually you won’t. Eventually you will be human in a way that hurts someone. Eventually there will be evidence.

I have done things I regret. Real things. Not the imaginary crimes of being too sensitive or too loud or angry at the wrong time.

I have hurt people I love. I have broken trust. I have made choices I cannot undo.

I know what remorse feels like. It is heavy enough on its own.

You are not telling me anything new.

There is already a voice in here doing that job.

You can tell me what I did.

I can hear that.

You can tell me it hurt you.

I can hear that too.

You can tell me you are angry.

You can tell me you do not trust me.

You can tell me something changed because of what I did.

All of that belongs to me.

But when you tell me what I am, something else happens.

Selfish.
Entitled.
Dishonest.
A bad person.

The words don’t feel like anger.

They feel like confirmation.

There it is. The thing I had always been afraid of.

That one day I would make a mistake big enough to expose me. There would be enough evidence, and everyone would finally see what had been there all along.

There.

See?

We knew what you were.

I am trying to believe that I can do something wrong without becoming wrong. That remorse is not measured by how much I hate myself afterward.

I think about myself as a little girl. Not in any particular memory. Just her.

She is trying to be good. I can see that now. How seriously she takes it. How carefully.

She will exhaust herself with it.

She will be hurt and, before the hurt has even settled, start looking for her part in it.

She will get very good at this.

And still.

People will leave. People she loves will hurt her. She will hurt people she loves. She will have things to apologize for. Things she cannot repair.

And every time, she will turn back toward herself.

What does this say about me?

That is the part I want to save her from.

Not the mistakes. Not the leaving. Not even the hurt.

I can’t. Those things are coming.

I just want to reach her before she learns to use all of them as evidence.

I want to tell her that people will leave and it will hurt and it will not mean she was not worth staying for.

That people will love her and it will not prove she finally got something right.

I want to tell her she is good.

And I want to leave it there.

Good.

Before she has done enough to prove it.

Before she has done enough to disprove it.

I want to tell her what I knew about Nash.

He is nine now. He has had plenty of time to become complicated.

He lies sometimes. He can be selfish. He hurts people’s feelings. He ignores me. He argues. He can make an ordinary morning feel like an endurance sport.

I have been furious with him. I have been disappointed. I have watched him realize that something he did hurt someone. I have made him go back and try again. I have watched him apologize badly and then better.

But I have never looked at him in one of those moments and thought:

There you are.

I have never thought a mistake had pulled back a curtain and shown me who he really was underneath.

There was never a curtain.

There was just Nash.

The same boy. Still himself. Still loved.

I knew something about him before he had language. Before he had beliefs. Before he had ever been good or bad.

I knew it immediately. I knew it without scripture. Without permission. Without anyone telling me what was true.

I don’t know why I think the rules are different for me.

For twenty-three years I had been breathing air I did not know was air.

Then for a few terrible minutes, my son couldn’t breathe at all.

And when he finally did, I looked at him and understood something I had never been able to understand about myself.

He did not have to earn his way into goodness.

I am still trying to believe I didn’t either.