As Good As It Gets?

by: Elexis Penner

 

Once upon a time, twenty years ago, I was pregnant with my first baby. Everything was going swimmingly – I had no morning sickness and I was living the dream of eating for two – two offensive linemen, that is. But I did run into some complications towards the end. For no apparent reason, one of my lungs collapsed around my 33rd week. And for no other apparent reason, it refused to heal itself.

 

The first time the doctor tried to insert a chest tube was not really fun for either of us. I was wimpering Please don’t let me die!! And the doctor was busy trying to guess high on my weight while calculating the maximum amount of sedatives you can give a pregnant lady.

 

I spent the remaining six weeks in the hospital in Winnipeg, hooked up to a machine, with a chest tube inserted in my side. This tube needed to be replaced every week or so, usually by med students. I knew I wasn’t the best patient, with my constant buzzer buzzing and pain-killer begging and anxiety attacks. I once over-heard one of the nurses say that I had an abnormally low pain threshold. Or maybe it was just abnormally high pain. Oh sure, blame the one strapped in the bed.

 

On my due date, I was induced. By some miracle, chest-tube and all, my beautiful baby boy was born – strong and healthy and mildly ticked off. One week later, I had major surgery to staple the hole in my lung and clear out a serious infection that had set in.

 

A few days in the ICU and another week later, the final chest tube was ready to come out. The doctor came in, took one look at me and proceeded to slosh a bucket of happy juice into my IV. Ten minutes later, he came back and said that I should take a deep breath, and he was going to count to three and that I should blow out the air really fast and he would pull out the tube. I looked him straight-ish in the eyes (all three or four of them) and said, “Is this one of those times where you SAY you’re going to pull on three, but then you pull on two?” I was no sucker.

 

He thought for a moment – judging whether or not I would remember what I’d just said – and then said that he would pull on three. Which he did.

 

So, a broken rib, several months of healing and physio, and a 14-inch scar and away we went. Nary to blow a lung again.

 

During my hospital stay, I wasn’t someone who was positive and brave. I was afraid and miserable ALL the time. I was angry. Some of the people that supported me the most – my husband and parents – I treated the worst. I didn’t pray much, if at all. And thinking back, I’m pretty sure when the nice lady with the gentle voice and the crayons started coming in to see me, that I must have lost hope on some level. The crayons did help, though.

 

The only reason I didn’t go barking mad during this whole thing was because I never knew how bad it was going to get.

 

When I got back into life, I remember telling people how much I had leaned on God during this whole time. I’m not sure why I felt I had to say this. Years later, in a moment of actual honesty, I was telling a friend about how I felt my faith was generally a touch on the fraudulent side. And she said, “But remember when you were in the hospital and how your faith had pulled you through?”

 

To which I responded, “Yeah, I lied about that.”

 

I don’t doubt God was there – He’s there regardless of my faith.

 

I don’t exactly know why I lied. I can’t pinpoint why I was afraid to just say, “It sucked. I sucked. I wasn’t strong. I wasn’t content. I wasn’t at peace. I was scared stupid for me and my baby, and I was mad at everyone.”

 

It just seemed like I couldn’t share a story that didn’t have a triumph of the human spirit vibe. I couldn’t tell a story of failure – if that’s even the right word for it. I couldn’t be honest about how I dropped the ball the whole way through. And that even after the fact, there still did not seem to be a faithful and godly happy ending on the horizon.

 

But this was my take on Christianity – don’t screw up. I don’t know why.

 

Mostly – and what ended up being the biggest problem – was that I couldn’t accept the story of failure in myself – if you can even call that failure. And I sure as heck had no idea of how to take anything usable from it.

 

That’s kind of how things rolled for a long time – until they couldn’t anymore – which wasn’t pretty.

 

And it’s kind of like that famous quote by Anais Nin, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

 

Except it was more like… The effort it took, as Anne Lamott says, to burnish my surfaces and do the right things and constantly be running on this hamster wheel, trying to achieve the gold star of worthiness from myself and from God – well, that effort – and inevitable falling short – finally became more painful than the risk of pulling a Jack Nicholson and asking myself and the heavens, “What if this is as good as it gets?”

 

And I’m not sure if I can describe, or would recommend, what happened in that moment of giving up. Except to say that if this was as good as it gets – that it would somehow be okay – no diminished worth, and probably not even the biggest thing at stake.

 

When I notice myself on the hamster wheel these days (I usually try to put in some time there every day, ha!), I go back to the one thing, which is summed up in one of my favorite Thomas Merton quotes, “The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the belief that one is loved; the belief that one is loved although unworthy, or rather irrespective of one’s worth.”

 

Everything grows out from there.