No Weapon Formed (Boaz Brown) (2 page)

Good morning, God. Jesus.
Holy Spirit.
I prayed silently in
the moments before getting out of bed.
I miss You. I miss how we used to
spend time together in the mornings before I had to face the world.
That
10-second prayer was the only time available to commune with the Lover of my
soul.

Of all the changes in my life
since becoming a mother, the lack of quiet time with God was the one that discouraged
me most. Going to church on Sunday and most Wednesdays was inspiring, yet I
felt like I was running on spiritual fumes most of the week. My relationship
with God seemed like a series of snippets whispered throughout the day. Text
messages. No conversation. No intimacy.

When I was single, living in
my own house, I had an entire bedroom to call my prayer closet. My journal, my
Bible, my music—everything that ushered me into our sweet, daily communion—greeted
me each morning. We curled up together in His Word, He taught me, loved on me,
filled me with fresh grace and mercy each sunrise. Sometimes we disagreed.
Sometimes I got mad or ignored Him because I didn’t like what He’d showed me in
His Word or in prayer. But I couldn’t stay away from Him because everything
fell apart when I tried to go my own way.

The fact that I was still
functioning without a personal prayer life was a testament to His grace.
I’m
tired, Father. So tired. I hope You understand. I still love You. I know You
still love me. Thank You for being faithful even when I’m not.

As much as I
wanted—needed—to curl up in His presence, my life awaited me on the
other side of the bedspread.

Painfully aware of each step,
I showered, dressed, and groomed myself before waking the baby and Seth.
Breakfast. Veggie Tales cartoons to hold one’s attention while I took care of
the other.

Stelson moseyed out of the
bedroom only minutes before it was time for the kids and me to leave. “Babe,
what happened to your foot?”

“I stubbed my toe.” With both
arms at a ninety-degree angle, shuffling around the house on one foot and a
heel to get ready could have been counted as my workout. It would
have
to count, seeing as I’d missed my usual wake-up time.

“Come here. Let me look at
it,” he coaxed while sitting on the counter stool.

“I can’t lift my leg up
there.”

“Well, let’s go to the
couch.”

The thought of having my
husband examine my foot and make a big fuss over my injury was quite romantic,
actually, but I didn’t have time. “I’m already running behind.”

Stelson’s blue eyes sank in
defeat as he sat one elbow on the kitchen island and parked his chin in his
palm. He raised both eyebrows, summoning the wrinkles in his slightly-tanned
forehead, the result of his three-day-long business trip to LA.

Must be nice to attend
conferences at beach-front hotels.

“So you’re just going to hop
around all day with a sock on your foot?” he pressed.

“No. I’ll wear a slipper.
It’ll be fine.”

“Shondra, why don’t you take
off today? Let me drop the kids off at daycare on my way to work, and you can
go get an X-ray,” he offered. Again, a decent gesture. But left up to my
husband, the kids would arrive two hours late.

I packed the last bottle in
Zoe’s bag and zipped it closed. “Can’t. We’re interviewing new teachers today.
And Seth has a field trip. He can’t be late.”

“How can anybody be late to
daycare?” Stelson questioned, which only proved my point.

Seth came barreling into the
kitchen from his bedroom and all I could think was:
Save my foot!
I
snatched my leg and turned my entire body away from him. “Seth, it’s time to
go.”

My husband swooped up our son
and pulled him into a tickle-hug. Seth’s brown locks swayed as he attempted to
break free of Stelson’s grasp. When all else failed, Seth struck back by
tickling my husband, who burst out in contrived laughter. “Oh, you wanna tickle
me back! You wanna tickle me back! Well, I’ll tickle harder!”

Seth’s laughter filled the
room. Even baby girl found their game hilarious. She opened her mouth wide and
let out a wail that Stelson couldn’t ignore. With Seth still in his embrace, my
husband walked toward the deadly high chair and used his other hand to gently
tickle our daughter under her slobbery chin.

Of course, her full cheeks
pushed her eyes closed as she laughed uncontrollably. Zoe’s tighter curls
didn’t whip around like Seth’s. Her features aligned more with her
African-American heritage than our son’s, who could have easily passed as Caucasian
with his blue eyes and fair skin.

God knows I wanted to join in
their game, but the clock was ticking. We were already seven minutes past leaving
time. I placed a hand on Stelson’s arm. “Alright, we gotta skedaddle, honey.”

Stelson set our son on the
floor. “Go get your shoes.”

For some reason, Seth always
obeyed my husband’s orders the first time given. I wished I could record
Stelson saying every command and just play it for Seth.

Still in his bathrobe,
Stelson leaned against the stove. He crossed his arms and eyed me as I stuffed
baby carrots into one of the compartments of my lunch container. Sometimes, he
just watched me. Admired me, he’d say. I’d heard that men were visual, but I
think my husband was even more visual than the average man because he could go
from zero to “let’s go to the bedroom” in ten seconds if I walked past him in a
wraparound dress and a pair of heels.

Well, he used to be able to
turn it on that fast. Lately, though, he wasn’t as excitable. Maybe we were
just getting older. Maybe I was having a hard time shedding the second-baby
weight. Or maybe both.

I continued my routine,
giving him an eyeful of me doing everything possible to keep myself looking
good for him. But when I realized I’d forgotten to pick up another salad mix at
the grocery store, I huffed, “Aww man!”

“What?”

“Forgot to get the salad
mix.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I remembered exactly how I forgot.
I’d caught Seth popping a grape in his mouth and given him a two-minute lecture
on how that was almost like stealing. In response, he started gagging and
hocking, trying to bring the swallowed grape back up, which drove me to the
point where I was almost ready to slap him on the behind and end the whole
scene.

“No! You don’t need to
vomit.”

“But Jesus doesn’t want me to
steal,” Seth had whined sincerely.

“Jesus understands,” I said.
“Just don’t do it again.”

Yep. That’s how I forgot the
salad mix. “Never mind. I’ll order delivery for lunch.”

“You don’t have to do this,
you know,” Stelson said in an I-told-you-so tone.

I shut the refrigerator door
and faced him. “Do what?”

“Work outside the house.”

I rolled my eyes and limped
toward our bedroom. “Let’s not go there this morning, okay?”

He followed, which annoyed me
all the more. “Could you put her in the swing?” I pointed at Zoe to throw him
off.

A minute later, he was beside
me again, watching me dab on lipstick and brush my light brown skin with
powder. Thankfully, my flawless complexion had returned after giving birth to
Zoe. I unwrapped the scarf on my head and brushed my hair out of its sleeping
position and into the chin-length bob style that required almost no
maintenance. Though this style wasn’t its best without bumping the ends with a
flat iron, I had to give myself credit for wrapping it up the previous night so
I wouldn’t have to throw a donut back there.

Stelson started in again.
“This is the kind of morning I want to avoid. You’re rushed, the kids are
rushed. We can’t even enjoy a game of tickling—you won’t even go get your
foot X-rayed because it’s go-go-go.”

“No. It’s go-go-go because I
didn’t have an alarm clock. And the reason I didn’t have an alarm clock is
because
you
were snoring so loud I had to leave the bedroom in a rush,
which is also the reason why I hurt myself.” I knew better than to tell him the
whole truth—that my toe was a bit worse than “hurt”.

“I’m sorry about last night,”
he apologized.

“I know you don’t mean to
keep me up. It’s just…I can’t get any sleep when you snore. That wouldn’t
change if I stopped working.”

“I don’t like sleeping with
the TV on, either, but I’ve learned to work around it.”

“TV is background noise.
Snoring is…invasive.”

My left foot grazed the
bedroom covers, which alarmed me. Maybe Stelson was right.
Maybe I should
stay home, prop my foot up, and protect it from the likes of 700 high school
students who might be roughhousing in the hallways and accidentally step on my
toe, which would cause temporary insanity, thereby making me knock the fire out
of somebody.

Note to self: Stay in the
office today by any means necessary.

I balanced myself on one leg
and bent over in the closet to retrieve the purple foldable slippers I usually
reserved for clean-up after a long day of activities at church. The satin,
barely-there shoes were the only option for my swollen foot. Hopefully. But
seeing as I couldn’t actually put them on in Stelson’s presence without him
inspecting the damage, I crammed them into my Louis Vuitton bag and slung it
over my shoulder.

“My work is part of my
ministry. We’ve already discussed this. ”

“What about your ministry at
home? To me and the kids? ”

“Am I not a great wife and
mother?” I challenged him. “I mean, I’m up sometimes all night with Zoe. If not
with Zoe, with you snoring. And Seth...God knows he drains me to the very last
milligram of my patience sometimes. ”

Stelson eased toward me.

“Watch the foot,” I warned.

He planted a kiss on my nose
as he caged my waist in his arms. “Honey, you’re a great wife. An exceptional
mother. And I know the kids and teachers at Plainview High School are more than
blessed because of your service as an assistant principal. You gotta look
around, though.”  He threw his glance at our unmade bed, at the stack of
clothes on the ottoman, and the shoes strewn across the scraped hardwood floor.

“Hey. You’ve got two hands,
too,” I reminded him.

“It’s not just the mess. It’s
the fast food. It’s you. You’re always stressed. The kids get what’s left of
you after work,” he listed.

“I know. I told you, I’ve got
some people lined up to interview. A personal chef and a housekeeper. I just
have to find someone I trust enough to leave alone in our home,” I reminded
him.

He squeezed my behind. “And I’m
not getting enough of you.”

I pulled back. “Is that what
this is about? Sex?”

An exaggerated frown
appeared. He nodded. “That’s part of it. A BIG part of it.”

“We just did it before you
left. Thursday night,” I refreshed his memory.

“Yeah, and now it’s Monday,”
he said.

“And? Can I help it if you
weren’t actually here?”

“No, but when I come back
from a trip, I would like some time alone with you,” he said with a tad bit too
much machismo for my taste. And yet, his puppy-dog eyes and the soft lines in
his forehead gave him a distinctly desperate expression that outweighed my
annoyance. Can’t blame a man for wanting to have sex with his wife.

“Okay, okay. You win.”

His eyes squinted. “I don’t
want to win, Shondra. I want us both to win—which, coincidentally, is not
what happened Thursday night.”

He had a point. Lord knows I
was tired Thursday night. Just rolled over in bed like “go ahead.” I’d thrown
in a few sound effects, but my mind never veered into the passion lane.

“It’s not that simple for me,
Stelson.”

“We’ve never had this problem
before,” he recalled.

“We’ve never had two
kids—”

Zoe’s cries from her swing
signaled the end of our morning routine, finished or not. “We gotta go.”

Seth was crouched on the
floor in his socked feet with one shoe on his foot, the other on the couch
where his behind should have been.

I checked my phone. We were
now officially twelve minutes behind schedule.

Before he could protest, I
hoisted Seth onto the couch and shoved the other shoe on his foot.

“No!”

“Seth, honey, we’re late.”

He covered his shoe laces
with both hands. He begged, “Mommy, I can do it.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe tomorrow,”
I said, grabbing one set of laces and quickly tying them.

“But Sister Heller said I can
do all things through Christ which strengthens me, Fer-ip-i-gans four and
fifteen,” he cited.

“You’re close. It’s
Philippians
four and
thirteen
,” I corrected him, “and Jesus will help you tie your shoes
faster if you practice more, in the future.”

Because he knew better than
to resist me physically, he threw his head back against the couch and voiced
his objection through cries.