I wanted to say this to someone. I don't think barely anyone reads this, so maybe here is okay. I don't want to hurt anyone.

I wrote a letter to the guy who told me, when I was maybe seven years old, that it was the right thing to kill myself so I couldn't be sexually abused. The guy who went on to make my life terrifying, a nightmare of trying, so hard, to be worthy to be alive when no one else was on my side and I was evil if I argued, evil if I was scared, evil if I wasn't fast enough, evil always.

Twenty years later, he told me of course now I shouldn't die. Now I had a husband. Now I had a child. Now, I should live. It only applied back then. 

And I...

There is always so much noise when you finally have these conversations. So much pounding, unthinking terror and crushing, pulverizing guilt. But more than that, there is so much of my heart that doesn't want to hurt anyone.

But I want to shout into the void anyway, that I was already worth telling it was okay to live. That no one should ever make a little girl's first introduction to "you're a girl" be "kill yourself."

I already should have been worth enough to someone to be told I could live.

Not This Baby

"You'll wait to have a baby though, right?"

The voices were well-meaning, the faces we loved laced with anxiety. "But of course you'll wait to get pregnant." We were a brand-new married couple, living in a house that had wheels and flooded when it rained, and we tried not to answer these people who cared so much. But we'd made that decision lying on our backs on a concrete slab, staring at the stars.

"Collin? Can I ask you something awkward?"

"Joy. You can ask me anything."

"How do you feel about birth control?"

The night was quiet, and I listened to him breathing. "Wow. When you say awkward, you really go for it."

We were a young couple taking German classes just for an excuse to see each other, stalling outside the college, waiting as long as possible to drive home. I spilled my guts, the experiences of people I loved, questions, worries, heartbreaks, dreams. Finally I told him, "I don't think I could feel at peace about saying no to a baby. Like, sure, we could have another baby, but we'd never have the chance to have that baby again."

He was quiet in the darkness. "I always thought, when I married someone- No. I can't say that anymore." I could actually hear him blush, he almost sounded mad. "When I marry you..." the warmth of those words almost overwhelmed me, but he stayed with them. "When I marry you, I want to be ready. I don't want to say no."

The concrete was cold, and the air was cold, and we pulled my shawl closer around us both. "I don't think birth control is wrong for other people," I said. "But I think it's wrong for me."

His hand held mine, warm in the coldness, the kind of warm you only get when you're choosing the hard thing together.

Three months after our wedding, we were expecting Sam.

None of the people who wanted to make sure we waited were unhappy about our baby boy, born in a bathtub and brought into warm arms, carted with adoration from Army-post to Army-post. But the same statements started again, immediately. "But you'll wait before you have another one, right?"

As the sleepless nights and milk-soaked mornings, tiny fingers and tiny teeth blurred together day to day, and my body decided that it really didn't matter if I was sleeping or nursing or any of the things that were supposed to change a cycle, fear poisoned the edges of long days, and those voices kept on, some of them fearful and some of them almost cruel, warning that another child would scar our precious Sam forever, as if my sister wasn't less than 2 years younger than me, as if Collin wasn't hardly a year younger than his brother, as if the existence of so many of my favorite people was somehow wrong. I cried.

There were no stars in the hotel room that had become our home, but he reached across a bed with a sleeping baby, and he held my hand again.

I'm pregnant.

I'm pregnant. 

This tiny little one is smaller than a bean, shaped like a seed, tiny dark eyes and a heart already beating. And it isn't the Most Convenient Time. We're in the military; we're new parents; we're in transition; he's deploying and I'm moving. Our business isn't built and my books aren't written and there are a dozen things I'm supposed to learn. I can't even play guitar. It's silly, but that scares me most. What kind of mother will I be if I can't even play guitar?

And if we had waited, if we'd put up shields, or stuck pills inside me, lied to my cells and tried our darnedest to close my womb against the hope of yet another little person, we would probably still have another baby someday. But it wouldn't be this one. It wouldn't be this Baby of the Hard Times, this Bundle of Joy in Transition, this life that's come to us in the chaos and bids me to build a hidey-hole for just us four. If we chose to wait, so many things would be easier. But we'd miss this. 

I hope we have another baby. I hope when the dust has settled and the deployments have stopped and the business is built that at just the perfect time, if there ever will be a perfect time, another little squirmy bundle drops into my hands. But I don't need perfect. I don't need easy. I just need this. I just need here.

When this baby is hardly dry in my arms and the new-baby cheese has barely been rubbed into its pink little baby-skin, the questions will start again. Maybe then, I'll be so full of peace and love that I'll answer. Because if we "wait," there might be another baby down the line.

But I hope we'll say yes again. I hope our hearts will be open.

As I cuddle my toddler to sleep, his warmth against my stomach where his little brother or sister is growing, this once-in-a-lifetime boy, every bit of me likes our choices.

The Wild Dichotomy of Loving You (a letter to Sam Manly)

It's the most basic of things about humans, but still too large for me to grasp: you are small, but you're going to be big.

Your hands are tiny and pudgy, but someday you'll have long, strong, browned fingers like your dad's.Your face is round and dimpled, but with our lines mixed someday that chin will become strong and your nose will be cartoonishly large and straight. You are a tiny person who will be a big person. You are a baby who will be a man, a warrior, a leader, a laugher, a sufferer, a hero, a friend. I hold these tiny hands and smile into your grinning baby face and I know I have you now, but I won't have you always. 

What does it mean to be the person holding a baby, and with him the promise of all he'll be? To be the one tasked with never forgetting that he must be strong and wise and good?

What will it mean to be the person who waves goodbye to a man, who follows him in newspaper clippings and long-awaited phone calls, who mourns his sufferings in the face of evil and delights in his success and his strength, but always remembers that he was a baby, that his hands were little in mine and I held him and he's gone?

I don't know. I am new, and young, and the bigness of life and the littleness of you tower over me like an anvil cloud, an unscalable mountain, a pillar of fire.

Today you're little. I'll cuddle you to sleep tonight, wash your dimpled hands tomorrow, kiss your tears away the day after that and after that and after that. I will watch you become, step by step, the hero you were made to be. And I will let you go. 

When you can, please, come back. I will be old, and softer still. Let me hug you again, stand on tip-toe to kiss your stubbled cheek, stare again into your eyes, whatever color they grow to be. Let me hold your hand and remember that you are the one who was little. 

Because I will be holding little you in my heart for the rest of my life.

The Person You Can't Save

Dear Sam,

You're sleeping in the bedroom, a blanket thrown across the bare mattress. You're too little to understand anything that I'm going to say; you just know you have new friends, that you scream when they leave our house and go to find them, first thing, when you wake up in the morning.

Sam, I whisper and hum and sing to you every day that you were made a hero.

"Protector of the weak, champion of virtue, knight of the realm..." I sing-song it to you. I remind you that your strength will make you gentle, that your kindness will make you strong. That you'll find in people what is worth fighting for, even when they don't see it.

Someday, you will tell a friend that God put you in this hard place, you just don't know why yet. Someday someone will tell you, "I think it was for me."

Someday, Sam, you're going to meet the person you cannot save.

No reach of love, no word from you, no touch of your arm will bring them back.

They are worth it, and you will not give up, but you will know to the depths of you that you cannot save them. You can't make them want to live. It is their choice, and you can't take it from them. Someday, my Sam, my warrior, you will stand on a hill you cannot win just so there is someone standing on it. Someday you will love with everything you have and when you come up dry you'll stay there from pure, vicious stubbornness because if Satan takes this one, he doesn't do it without someone of heaven contesting the ground.

You'll find this weird, haunting peace that comes when you are not enough. You'll know you are a representative of Heaven, and Heaven weeps.

We can't win this, Sam. But we will stand here till all the hope is gone. She still might.

Keep crawling to doors and knocking on them. Keep screaming when people leave our house. Keep loving, Sam. You're still a baby warrior, but even still, don't give up. We will hold this hill together.

Your Heart is a Kitchen Floor

If you don't clean a floor for long enough, it looks fine. You just think the darker brown is the color of the floor.

But if someone cleans a little piece of it, even a REALLY little piece of it, suddenly you have a problem-- because you see what the floor is supposed to look like. And that little spot makes the whole floor look bad.

And it isn't fun, and it isn't happy, because once you see the difference, you only have one of two options. You can ignore it and hope the clean bit goes away, or you can stop what you're doing and clean everything else.

Contrast forces us to make choices. Difference shows us that the way it always has been isn't the way it has to be. Maybe you'll get walked on today and sloshed with stuff and griped at, but just maybe, for someone out there you are being the clean bit of floor. Maybe your difference is challenging someone to make a change.

Or maybe, like me, you're facing a choice between elbow grease, and ignoring what you've seen that's good.

Happy scrubbing.

Dungeons and Dragons Became my Ministry

Growing up during the Satanic Panic, I knew three things about Dungeons and Dragons: people played it in the dark, there were demons involved, and kids died.

It turns out people play around brightly lit tables, the only demons involved are the ones we defeat, and friends do die...inside the game. Like in checkers. Christians, of all people, should know that facing death, even in stories, can make you better at life.

Dungeons and Dragons has become my ministry.

A typical first session starts with strangers, usually other women from local Army support group Facebook groups, arriving at my apartment door. I greet them with my baby on my hip, welcome them inside, offer them cookies. They're usually nervous, find their seats around my coffee table while I hand out colorful dice in little tupperware with weapons written on the top. "These are the dice for your short sword, these are the dice for your long bow..." Sheets of paper are examined. One new player's character is good at talking to animals; another can heal wounds by laying on hands.

When everyone is comfortable and I've downed a cup of coffee, I pass around a cloth bag and let each woman choose a bracelet from inside. "Congratulations." The girl with the bangle is the much-contested crown princess they've sworn to protect. The two with matching bracelets are twins. Strangers stare at each other.

And I plunge them into the story.

"You've been tracking a monster through the night as it passed through the border of your tribe's lands moving toward the human settlements. As the sun rises, the tracks disappear into a stream."

Within five minutes, strangers are plunging into danger to help each other, laughing at ridiculous choices and silly moments, gasping as they incur imaginary wounds. Within three hours, they're shouting "FOR MY SISTER!", talking to imaginary people without shame and deciding what kind of heroes they'll be in this little world we've made.

When I finish, I ask, "Do you want to do this again?" No one has ever said no.

I believe in the power of stories to give us practice in being brave, to give us chances to make hard decisions while they're a little bit easier. I believe in the power of stories to let us feel who we want to be.

And I believe in the power of adrenaline, of doing something ostensibly silly but doing it together, to teach people they can trust each other. I've gone to coffee, I've gone to lunch, but a DnD circle will randomly switch from fighting a monster to sharing notes about abuse or difficult events in a way coffee dates never did. Hurting people find a sisterhood of women who care and listen and help them fight monsters. 

Not every game I run is going to be a therapy session. Sometimes it's just a story, just a chance for people to get together and laugh and do something hard. But creating that safe space? Creating that chance for people to get out of themselves and into who they want to be? That's worth every hour.

Dungeons and Dragons is the way I have to love people, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Setting Fire to Bridges

My heart was aching. My whole chest hurt. And I seethed with rage and frustration as my mother told me not to burn bridges.

When your heart is broken and a friendship is soaked with gasoline, sending out that spark seems so right. It seems like a conflagration is the thing you need to make you okay. It feels like keeping that connection is keeping an IV drip of pain whether you can see them or not. A "friend" had hurt me, and I wanted her gone.

Have you been here? Have you, like me, seethed in wounded anger and clenched the matches in your fist?

Have you felt like the only way to honor your pain is to set fire to your friendships? Words like my mom's lash like whips, like all the love in the world is just more gasoline. I held back my spark, but I told her she was wrong. I would never want that friend, ever, ever, ever.

Two years later, when I was at my most frightened, I asked that girl to hold my baby. 

I'm not the girl with the matches anymore. I'm the woman who's seen people who called me freak reach out with their hearts. I'm the girl who's seen bullies who broke me become heroes I lean on. I'm the girl who keeps bridges when all the hope seems gone, because with what I've seen, I know I can't make that call.

There are times and places to light the match on a friendship, but they are so much rarer than I thought. And there are people who seemingly drift away forever, but my wizened old-lady 26-year-old self can tell you that many, so many, come back.

So whether you throw the gasoline or disappear without a trace, I hope you know I like you. And when we meet down the road with more adventures and more understanding, I'll be glad to see you again.

I haven't burned our bridges. They're still waiting.

(Except you, creepy jury-duty man. You remain with all the men I've judged unsafe in the "See you in heaven, talk to someone else" zone. Good luck.)