The Letters You Keep in a Drawer

Second drawer down, under the good tablecloth she never uses and a bag of buttons that has been in this family longer than the house has.

There are nineteen of them now. Nineteen envelopes, held together with an elastic band that has gone brittle and will snap one of these days, and she keeps meaning to replace it and keeps not doing it. Each one has the stamp on it. Not a postage stamp. The other one, the one that tells the postman and the neighbor and anyone with eyes exactly where the letter has come from.

She reads them in the afternoon, when the house is empty, standing up, with the drawer still open.

His handwriting has got smaller. She noticed that around the sixth letter. He writes about the weather in the yard and about a man called Dez who is teaching him to play chess and about how the food is fine, honestly, Mum, it is fine. He asks about her hip. Every single letter, he asks about her hip.

And at the end of every one, in the same three words, in slightly larger writing than the rest, as if he presses harder on that line: love you, Mum.

She reads them standing up because sitting down would make it an occasion, and if it became an occasion she would have to feel all of it.

Then she puts the band back on, and the bundle back under the tablecloth, and she closes the drawer, and she goes and puts the kettle on.

Because on Sunday, a woman at church asked after her boys. And she said the older one is doing well, the little girl started school. And then she said her younger son was working away at the minute. Working away. And she smiled, and the woman smiled, and the moment passed, and she carried that lie home in her chest like a stone she had swallowed.

She is not ashamed of him. That is what she cannot make anybody understand, including herself. She is ashamed of the drawer. She is ashamed that she has a child she keeps folded up under a tablecloth.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you know which drawer. You know the sound the elastic makes. You know the three words at the bottom, and you know you would recognize that handwriting on the other side of a burning building.

You have said working away, or living abroad, or it is complicated, and every time you say it a small part of you goes quiet and stays quiet for the rest of the day. You pray for him at night, in your head, never out loud, never in a room with other people in it, because to pray for him out loud you would have to say what he is, and you cannot make your mouth do it.

Come and sit down with me on the end of the bed. Leave the drawer open. There is something God says about this and I do not think anybody has ever said it to you.

You have been obeying a command you never knew you had

Let me say the heavy part first, because it needs saying by somebody who is not going to flinch. None of it is mine. Hebrews 13:3 stands behind every line of this, and the Spirit, not my wording, is what carries a written line as far down as a second drawer.

You are grieving a person who is still alive. There is no service for that, no casserole, no card, no week off work. You do not get to say the sentence out loud, so nobody knows to be gentle with you, and you have been holding it entirely on your own, with a bundle of envelopes and an elastic band, for a long time.

And the shame is not really about him. You worked that out already. It is about the drawer. It is about the fact that your love for your own child has had to go underground, and love that has to go underground starts to feel like something dirty, and it is not dirty, it never was.

Now listen to what God actually asked of His people. Not the mothers of the respectable. His people, all of them, as a standing instruction.

Remember those in prison, as though you were in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.Hebrews 13:3

Remember, in Scripture, is almost never a mental event. It is not thinking fondly. When God remembers, He acts. When His people are told to remember, they are being told to carry, to visit, to attach themselves. And it is the Spirit, moving in a person long before they can name what is moving them, who turns a command like that into the thing you were already doing.

And look at the measure He gives. As though you were in prison with them. That is not an exhortation to feel a bit sorry. That is being told to go inside with them in your own soul.

Which means, my friend, that what you have been doing in secret in an empty house on a weekday afternoon is not weakness, and it is not enabling, and it is not a mother refusing to face facts.

It is obedience. It is the exact thing God told the whole church to do, and you have been doing it alone for nineteen letters without one person ever telling you that Heaven was pleased with it. The Spirit put you inside that cell in your own soul long before you had a name for what you were doing there, and it is written in Hebrews 13:3 in the plainest words the letter owns.

You have been in that cell every day. You know the yard and the food and the chess and a man called Dez. Because you also are in the body, and the body feels what its members feel, and God wrote that down because He designed you to.

Nothing about that requires you to defend what he did. You can hold both. You are already holding both. That is what a parent is. Scripture never once asked you to choose between the two, and the Spirit has been holding you the whole time you were holding them.