Good Enough
I came home to wisps of white paper blowing through the screened-in porch like feathers in a chicken coop. Rosie, the rescue puppy, was sitting on haunches with head bowed and tail wagging sheepishly, white exclamation points in the black spots of her scruffy fur. The trail of paper led from the porch, through the dog door, to the living room floor, to the black leather cover of my grandmother’s Bible, her name in gold on the lower corner.
The hot, heavy feeling of “not good enough” seeped in as I remembered that grandmother. The one who pat the piano bench beside her and fed me the magic words of salvation so that my Daddy could lean me back in the water behind the sliding stained glass windows above the choir loft. I remembered that warm feeling of belonging as I was baptized by my father who was baptized by his father. The feeling of connection to something bigger that made me bigger. I imagined her now, headshaking as she looked at me with stern lips and narrowing eyes. Seeing a sinful woman who plays cards, drinks wine, laughs loudly, dances, married a woman, and let her black leather Bible be shredded. The feeling of not good enough snuck in quickly like an intruder who has a key to your home. It lodged in my heart and began taking stock of my inadequacies. It made me feel small and quiet.
My grandparents were Baptist in a way that bored me and made me feel like breaking rules. Visits to Pana, Illinois meant no cards, no tv, no swimsuits, no dancing, and no pipe-smoking for my father. Everything in me wanted to join the neighborhood kids at the pool, showing them my flips off the diving board and my handstands in the shallow end. I wanted to whip out my deck of cards and play solitaire. I wanted to listen to loud music and watch the Jetsons on tv. Evenings in Pana ended with a family Bible study during which my older sister would pinch my thigh and cross her eyes, making me shake and giggle until I was sent to the basement where I sat with the heavy feeling of “not good enough” until the prayers were over. Oddly, the one game my grandparents allowed was “Sorry!”. I loved shuffling the cards of the Sorry deck using the overhand bridge shuffle I had perfected during long summer days between second and third grade back in Texas. One afternoon on the steamy front porch, my grandmother took note of my talent and asked where I learned to shuffle. I pointed to my older sister so she could have her own moment of “not good enough” as my grandmother stared through her with pursed lips.
When our family of five climbed into our Pontiac Bonneville to head home, I felt the giddiness of escape while stifeling a giggle. Three blocks away, my father pulled his pipe out of the glovebox, my sisters pored through their Seventeen magazines, my mother read her whodunnit, and I shuffled my playing cards. All of us ready to return home, where being a Baptist wasn’t so hard.
My father wore the feeling of “not good enough” like heavy shoes. He was a charismatic preacher with a baritone voice and a strict rule to never preach longer than fifteen minutes. When he stepped away from the pulpit there was a quiet in the sanctuary and a feeling of “more, more, more!” He needed love and appreciation from everyone and was deeply hurt when rejected. If someone left our church for another church, he would tear up and look at the ground as he walked. He had the power to move people to laughter or tears and he used it freely. My mother fed his ego with proclamations of his exceptional talents and disdain for anyone who did not agree. I learned from an early age how to feed his ego to keep him strong and me loved. My mother, sisters, and I rotated around him like moons to Jupiter. One Christmas card photo has him seated in a chair with my mother behind him, hand on his shoulder and the three daughters kneeling and squatting around him in prim dresses. Looking closely at the photo one can see all eyes adoringly on my father except for me, the youngest, whose face is pointed in my father’s direction but eyes are on the photographer.
On the way home from Pana, we spent a few nights at the other Grandfather’s house perched high on a cliff above the Arkansas White River. This grandfather wore Sears and Roebuck coveralls in khaki or dusty blue, smoked cigars, and drove so fast down Arkansas backroads that red dirt flew like a tornado around his Cadillac. His wrinkled face and yellow-toothed grin gave hints of the handsome young man he had been. I bounded through his property like a colt let loose from a stable. I once followed a gopher’s trail through the sandy yard to the edge of the grass under the balcony to find a copperhead curled up with tongue lashing, ready to strike. I yelled to my grandfather who grabbed his rifle, took aim from the balcony, and killed the snake with one bullet. He then lumbered down the steps, hung the dead six-foot snake on his gun, and swung it in front of my face, grinning as he watched my awe. Later in the evening his eyes turned squinty and mean as he leaned forward, raised up from his chair slightly, pointed his finger in my face and called me stupid for playing an errant domino. Protector or enemy? My confusion about this grandfather remained with me for years until I pieced together collected stories. One story I heard several times was of him driving beside my then teenage mother as she walked home from a movie theater, him yelling insults, her crying and fearful. I later learned from an aunt that my mother’s mother often had bruises on her face and that her bright personality faded during her years married to my grandfather. As an adult, I found multiple Dallas area addresses for this grandmother in the months following their divorce, making me imagine her running away from him.
My mother’s feeling of “not good enough” was deep rooted into her soul. She worked hard to cover her shame by trying to be perfect. She dressed impeccably, first in clothes she sewed with patterns out of the Vogue catalog, then in clothes she bought at Frost Brothers Department Store. She vacuumed the green shag carpet every morning and never walked out the door if a single dirty dish was on the kitchen countertop. Despite her best efforts, she still wore her “not good enough” like an apology note pinned to her chest, “Dear World, Please forgive me for being here. Sincerely, Mrs. Donald L. Anderson”. She offered apologies reflexively, “I’m sorry” when someone ran into her. “I’m sorry,” when my father bumped her hand as she served him coffee. “I’m sorry,” when she had a stain on her blouse.
Interwoven through all the judgement and insecurities that ran through my family’s DNA was also a thick thread of humor. My father’s witticisms, delivered with sparkling blue eyes and a lopsided grin, kept us all laughing at ourselves and the world. It was never just chilly outside, it was, “cold as a polar bear’s bottom.” His friend was not just sad, he was, “so low he had to reach up to put his socks on.” My mother’s loud laughter made everyone’s shoulders relax and faces break into a grin as they looked in her direction. Momma’s frequent malapropisms such as, “You can’t pull the sheep over my eyes!” or “That cowboy in the store was like a horse out of water!” would send Dad into headshaking, then eye rubbing, then chuckling, before he laughed in a way that reminded us she was his joy. Her ability to respond to her own foibles with an unapologetic laugh showed me how she survived her, “not good enough.” Humor was the balm for all of us.
After Rosie’s attack on my Grandmother’s King James Version, my wife Jill and I wandered through the screened in porch picking Bible verses off furniture. Weeks later we still found scripture clinging to blades of grass in the back yard. With each find, we giggled as we shared abbreviated nuggets of wisdom or threats of damnation with each other.
“Better is a poor and wise child than an old…”
“Again, if two lie together then they have heat, but…”
“The eyes of the wicked shall fail” “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
Finding the torn pieces of verses was reminiscent of the way I read the Bible as a college student. On a “not good enough” day at Baylor University I sometimes grabbed my green hardback Living Bible that was written without the “haths” and “thee’s” so that a regular person could understand it. As a lazy Bible student, I would flip through the pages then close my eyes while my finger pointed to a verse. After reading the verse I would decide if that particular message was the one for me or if I should reflip. While picking tissue paper off grass blades, I found myself hoping for the same kind of inspiration.
Jill and I have stacks of Bibles in our home. Bibles we were given as children. Bibles with names of parents and grandparents on the cover. Bibles with our names on the cover. Each Bible offering varying versions of scripture as well as the memory of a person. We often pare down belongings, but it is difficult to know what to do with those stacks of Bibles. The worn covers and underlined verses seem like a connection to the souls of our dead relatives. While I don’t have a Bible that belonged to my mean grandfather, I do know that his father was a Baptist preacher who held tight to a Bible and was a comfort to my mother. While Jill does not come from a family of preachers, her grandparents also carried Bibles and attended church. The Bibles represent what was sacred to the people who brought us to this place. We feel stuck with the Bibles like I feel stuck in my heritage; it’s there and I don’t want to change it. I just don’t know what to do with it.
Jill and I attend a church where folks don’t typically carry a leather-bound Bible with their name on it to worship, but Bibles are present and ready in the pews. Thankfully, the wise leaders of our church community do not flip through the Bible and point to verses that are convenient for them. We read the Bible as something that needs to be understood through the lens of culture, both when it was written and today. Jill and I were married in the church courtyard, the first gay wedding at the church. Our female pastor read scripture, reminding us how to love one another and the world.
While I am “Sorry!” I left my grandmother’s Bible on a low shelf within reach of a curious puppy, I am relieved to be free of her interpretation of the words within the sacred text. I am appreciative of wise voices that led me to understand the Bible in ways that allow for more love and less violence, more grace and less judgement, more joy and less drudgery. And maybe that reading of the Bible, along with a good dose of humor, has allowed me to feel “good enough” more days than not.
-MerriLee Anderson
MerriLee Anderson is a psychologist in Dallas, Texas who enjoys writing her stories as well as reading other women's stories. She was married to a kind man for 25 years before marrying the woman of her dreams. She enjoys evening sunsets on the deck with her wife, a cocktail, and her mutt, Rosie at her feet.