God Is Not a Boy’s Name. Lyn Brakeman
acceptable, and feelings were less so. We were normal.
I got pregnant while completing my course work at Columbia and we moved back home to Connecticut—to Ridgefield, a town of our own. Bill’s mood began to go haywire. For example, he once couldn’t locate a book he’d been reading. He accused me of losing his book, called me an asshole, and punched through the cheap plasterboard wall with his fist. This kind of thing only had to happen once or twice before I became sure lots of things were my error or fault.
Wrapped in a blanket I piled up notes upon notes to study my compulsive brains out for comprehensive graduate exams, which I took two months before our daughter, Beverley, was born in January 1963. Bill held our baby daughter and gazed into her face with a mixture of fear and adoration. We were parents—normal.
Pregnancy and childbirth put me back in touch with God in new ways. Birthing hurt like hell, but the force of my uterus’s natural push felt downright omnipotent—pushing for life, forcing embodied life into the light. I could imagine God’s laboring to breath life into a hippo, because that’s what eight pounds thirteen ounces of slowly emergent baby girl beauty with heaps of black hair felt like. The body I’d divorced after the old god-man incident did all this. Having children reinforced my own capacity for unfathomable and impossible love, a capacity I’d thought I’d lost.
Another daughter, Jill, was born in fourteen months. In three years a boy, Robert William Brakeman III. Bill’s father, who had been orphaned at a young age, felt relieved. His name would live on. We vetoed Bobbie or Billie and his sisters’ choices, “Skippy” and “Timmy,” and called our son R. B. Then we cast a vote for the American dream and purchased our first home back in Darien, an architectural double of my parents’ house, one street over.
All around me the sixties were exploding. I felt itchy inside. But I was not the decider. Bill had a career opportunity in Anniston, Alabama, and we moved, this time far away and into a foreign land. The children adapted and developed thick drawls. I didn’t do as well. I drank too much, spent too many hours wielding my new floor waxer around the spacious black-and -white–tiled foyer, helplessly watching black flecks spinning off black tiles onto white tiles. I couldn’t remember whether the psalm said you could or could not sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land so I went church shopping and discovered the uptown Episcopal parish was segregated and the downtown one was more Baptist than Episcopal.
Bill’s boss was a tyrannical boozer who called late one night for Bill to come rescue him from a Birmingham hospital where they were “holding” him for unstoppable hiccups.
“Let the asshole hick himself to death,” I said.
“He’s my boss,” Bill said.
“Well, fire him!” I yelled as he left.
Bill imitated hiccups. We laughed and . . .
The failure of birth control for an “old and tired uterus” (quote from the doctor) brought wonders: the feeling of life moving within me once more. Life multiplies life. I am never sure how or why such paradoxical happiness mysteries happen but I suspect it is through some bright combination of divine and human co-creating. In this case, Dad, now retired after a long and successful career, invited Bill to start a business with him—in the Hartford area. We piled into our blue Chevy wagon named Roosevelt Franklin, and headed north—home. I patted my huge belly and told it to wait. John Thomas was born just three days after we arrived—another new town, another new life, another new baby, another new chance.
The 1970s could work.
Chapter 3 It Was a Very Good Year—for Cookies
By 1973, we lived in a four-bedroom colonial in North Canton, Connecticut. I relished my children’s blossoming lives with affection and some uncertainty. Were we settled? Were we normal yet?
Bill and my father had very different ways. Dad, through Mom, complained to me about Bill’s making promises they couldn’t keep—ping!—and Bill complained to me that my father was too damn organized—pong! Dad finally decided he couldn’t afford to continue and wrote Bill a letter. It was cowardly but it gave Bill some dignity space and opened the way for him to do what he’d always wanted: to start a business of his own.
“So this company I want to buy is in Stratford,” he told me.
“Stratford where?” I said.
“Connecticut, Lyn.”
“How far away is it?”
“Oh, maybe a hundred miles or so. I can commute till you find us a house down near there.”
My halfhearted house search bore the same results as any half-hearted activity. It failed. Bill got an apartment in Stratford, and commuted. I stayed home and watched my children grow. I wanted to grow, too. Bill’s energy went into his career, mine into the children. When Bill was home our “mutual affair” with alcohol protected us from ourselves and each other. We drank B & L scotch, a brand we affectionately dubbed “Bill & Lyn’s.”
My prayers had become dusty and dull but the local parish, Trinity in Collinsville, needed volunteers—for everything. Getting involved soothed my longings somewhat. What did I want? I was doing everything expected, I thought, yet I sat in my suburban kitchen baking chocolate chip cookies, a righteous activity that felt clumsy, and dreamed of a job with a paycheck. I reached for the necessary baking ingredients, one by one, from the refrigerator, pantry, and cupboard. In a dreamily narcissistic moment, I noticed my wrist—delicate, lovely, slim. It might, I imagined, have belonged to Princess Grace or a saint or mystic like Dame Julian of Norwich, of whom I’d dimly heard. Just gazing at my wrist caused me to realize—how long had it been, years? —that I scarcely noticed lovely things about myself.
The images of children who would delight in my cookies dashed across my mind’s eye. Bev, ten, a dark beauty who stalked me—her presence closer than my shadow, her gaze intense, seeming to question my right to exist. Jill, nine, also beautiful, with delicate features and an audacious mountain of curls to match her chutzpah. She had issued her declaration of independence at four—“There’s just not enough air in the world for me and Bev!” R. B., six, his face bright, irresistibly pleasing, plaintive, and lightly shadowed with anxious bewilderment. John, maturely handsome for a two-year-old, had a beguiling timidity that camouflaged the inner turmoil of his own miniature life in the shadow of three big siblings.
“Lynnie, the highest destiny for any woman is to be a good mother.” Mom’s fail-safe prescription for happiness sounded to me like a proscription. I had followed her rules but questioned myself mercilessly. Was I a good enough mother? Why didn’t I have orgasms? Very little made me angry. But I went to church. All was well.
All is not well at all. Something is wrong with me.
I had a secret and it wasn’t the old god-man. My secret was a broken heart. It was so broken that half of it fell out that day in my kitchen over cookies.
Why are you doing this?
An inaudible voice inquired, a polite, curious voice of simple candor and blinding clarity. It wasn’t my voice; it was, well, not from my mind. The only thing about this voice that was like me was that it asked a question. I scurried around the kitchen, ordered the utensil drawer, rearranged the canisters on the counter, and was about to go for the vacuum cleaner when I crumpled, sat down, put my head on the kitchen table, and sobbed.
How did you know, God?
The God who had listened to me as a child had found a voice. Jolted out of my spiritual torpor, I followed the cookie voice and waded into the deep turbulent waters of my self—looking for me, looking for God, looking for purpose, life, sex, and meaning beyond motherhood.
Before I embarked on an unknown path, I knew I should have a clean house. I grabbed the vacuum as if to throttle it and buzzed it around. When you’re making a decision you know will go against everything your mother, the church, and the world has set up for you, things get messy. In fact, when you listen to God from your soul’s depths, plan on dissonance. I was scared alive.
I