himself. “What, Mom? Tracey nurses Lily in here every Sunday. What’s the big deal?”
Miss Bea started to wail. The organ faltered and someone missed the entrance to the chorus of the song. The Queen took the fan and tried to comfort her friend, still speaking with the vicious whisper that made me want to look behind me to see if there was a sniper in the church balcony, waiting to take me out at any moment.
There wasn’t. I peeked.
“Now, Bea, calm down. I told you. The girl has no mother, no home training. Don’t you get yourself all upset now. I’m going to take care of this, if I have to drag her out of here myself.” She turned and stared at me with the coldest look I’d ever gotten from her (and that’s quite a collection).
Lily burped while her grandmother pushed up the sleeves on her mint-green suit. She meant that thing, as Dana would say. She was going to try to drag me out of here. I had to pray then, because the first thing that came to my mind in that moment was the almost forty pounds separating myself and the good Queen. Every ounce would come in handy if she tried to put her hands on me. Every ounce.
You are in church. That is your mother-in-law. Get up and go—
I was thinking it. I was praying it. But I guess I took too long about it, because the next thing I knew, Lily and I were up on our feet and a diaper bag was shoved onto my shoulder. My husband took my hand and led me out of the pew, providing a clenched smile to the two hundred or so people in our vicinity. This was past embarrassing, it was humiliating. Despite my resolve, a tear tickled my nostril as I stepped onto the carpet covering the aisle.
Ryan walked close behind me as though he had a gun to my back. I thought to myself that it seemed as though his mother had a gun to his. A loud sniff escaped when the pastor’s wife waved and I tried to smile. Ryan’s phone vibrated in his pocket, but he didn’t stop for that, either. He pushed me along with purpose, even when I paused and tried to turn to him and speak, to say that this was insane and that we should just sit in the back of the church together and try to talk some sense into his mother later, there came a gentle pressure of his arm across my shoulders.
His words, hot on my neck, let me know that sitting in the back wasn’t going to happen. “Keep moving, Tracey. For goodness’ sake, just keep moving.”
For goodness’ sake, Ryan? Or for your sake?
Either way, I kept going. Smiling and crying like some sort of Miss Mom USA without her Prozac, I stumbled out of the only place I felt God in my life anymore and into the cold empty hall. Once the doors closed behind us, I turned to my husband and gave him a look worthy of the Queen herself.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Ryan said in a voice too loud for a church hallway but much quieter than his usual tone in such situations. He pointed down the hall at the door I’d passed so many times, but never gone inside. “Come on. You’re going to have to go in there.”
More tugging and pushing. Him trying to take the baby, me taking her back. Him trying to take the diaper bag, me taking it back. Him throwing his head back as if he wanted to scream, me doing the same. Like a bad zit on prom night, things were coming to a head and this wasn’t the place for the mess.
Though we’d both dug in our heels, mine were a little too cute to endure for the long haul. Just as my wedges started to wobble, Ryan took my hand and kissed it before steadying me. “Baby, please. Can you just come on? I need to get back in the service. Pastor asked me to do something special today and I’m going to miss it. I know Mom is out of line. I do. It’s just not the time to deal with it.” He led me down the hall, toward the door I didn’t want to enter.
I followed, thankful that in the midst of the whole mess, Lily had somehow managed to fall asleep. Must be nice. “You always say that, Ryan. ‘I know Mom shouldn’t have said that. I know that hurt you. I’ll talk to her. It’s just not the right time.’ You know what I’m starting to think? It’ll never be the right time. I think you know that your mother will never accept me and you don’t really care. Well, I do—”
“Get over it.” Ryan folded his arms, rolled his eyes and pointed to the door. “You’ve got to go in there, so just do it and be done with it.”
I looked deeply into my husband’s eyes, wondering if he really saw me standing here, if he heard me breathing. It was me, wasn’t it? Tracey Blackman, business owner, graphic designer, new mother, his wife? I’d never had to wonder who I was before, but since marrying him, bearing his child, I found myself searching for identity more than ever. And my husband had just told me to get over it.
Mother Redding, the wife of the former pastor, who also happened to be the mother of the current one, stopped to smile at me on her way into the sanctuary. Liz (the only person people seemed to call Mrs. Blackman these days) said the former first lady was mean, but she’d never been anything but nice to me. I looked for her every week just to see what she was wearing. This morning she wore a bright orange suit with flames going down the back of her skirt. Fire climbed her shoes, too. As she reached the door, she gave me a wink, then straightened her shoulders and went inside the sanctuary. Her son’s booming voice burst through the door as she opened it.
My eyes looked back and forth from the door I’d come out of to the door it seemed I had no choice but to go into. Now I was going somewhere else, somewhere new, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I stared at the mahogany door once more and took a deep breath while reading the words engraved on the brass plate.
The Cry Room.
I remembered again why I’d never wanted to go inside previously. Who would want to spend a church service in a place with that name? Though I’d never been inside, I’d deduced that this was a place for mothers to take their crying babies. Did I mention that Lily wasn’t crying? I was the one about to burst into tears. At the beginning of my pregnancy, I’d enjoyed the way people had offered me a seat or given me special privileges, but even that had gotten old. Being escorted out of church and into a special room by my husband and mother-in-law was just too much.
This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten this kind of reaction to feeding my hungry baby, of course. I’d nursed Lily in hot cars, bathroom stalls and guest bedrooms. Church had been the only place in my life where all of the pieces of me—Christian, wife and mother—could exist at once. And now, even at church there was a special place for me to go, away from my husband, who seemed to be slipping from me by the second, from the pleading look in his tired eyes.
Maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing, this forbidding door in front of me. Maybe it was time for me to find my own place, both in our marriage and in our church. I attempted to square my shoulders like that flaming-hot church mother had done, but I was too weighed down by the diaper bag on my shoulder and the baby in my arms. Instead of standing straight, I almost fell over. Again.
My husband sighed, but reached out to support me again. “What are you doing, Tracey? You’re going to drop the baby on the floor. Look, I’ve got to get back in there before Mom comes back out here and makes a scene, okay? It’s not a big deal to go in the Cry Room. Almost every church in Illinois has one of these now. There’s a window in there where you can see everything. And who knows, maybe you’ll make some friends here. It might be good for you.”
I took a deep breath. “Maybe I should just take Lily to the nursery and stay in the service with you. Maybe she’ll make some friends in there.”
Ryan lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t try to be funny, okay? You know Lily hates it in there. After the diaper rash and the screaming last time, we agreed that she’d stay with you. Since Mom is acting so crazy about
