The long and the short of it is this: I hammered on God's toes is the best way I can describe my efforts. If memory serves now, I remember after getting the girls tucked in, sweeping a spot away from the heating stove in the cold room by the kitchen. For when the cooking was done we kept the doors all shut but for around the heating stove else the warmth dissipated so that nobody was warm. I remember thinking of the catholic idea of suffering to please God. Just waiting silently for him to notice me. It didn't seem to work. Or else my fervor just wasn't up to the amount of suffering he required. How could I know? He wasn't talking. I was flying blind.. I kept up these efforts and antics until the first slushy part of spring. It was like a dam had burst in me. I wanted God to give me a break, to make just a small allowance for me. But finally one day I realized how infinitely selfish I was to want God's help with MY life, MY marriage, MY little family when I hadn't given two ***** about the family I helped wreck.
I don't have the words at all to say how it felt to think of my wrongs. To admit them to myself. It was beyond shame the way it came to me. And I had no way to undo it. I had to talk to God about it. So I did.
I told him that I would do just what the priest told me to do. every bit of it. By the time my poor husband came up for R&R I was talking to God and determined to sleep in a separate bed.
That evening I remember seeing his face in the lamp light fall in bewilderment when I told him that I could talk to God again--and reminded him of the terms the priest had given me. I told him that I would clean and straighten out the chicken coop for my quarters so that I could still help on the farm and raise the girls with him. Like his sister.
He just looked at me and said it wouldn't work. and what could he possibly say to his first family--notwithstanding his ex had remarried too--how could it be that I was this crazy? To tear things up like that? I was so absolutely peaceful that even with that terrible announcement between us the night was calm. He told me that even though he thought counseling mostly a waste he would take me to a therapist--but he thought me too far gone.
Instead, poor man, he promised to take me to mass the next weekend for our provisioning trip to town. He put his trips and traps together for another stint in the woods before the weekend.
I was in catholic heaven on earth. My plan was to get to church before mass to make a thorough confession so as to receive Holy Communion and thus seal the deal with God as per the formula given by the priest.
I hauled and heated bath water the day before. Made sure everything was ready. Receive ample assurance from My husband that he would have the tire canins on the car to get down the bad patches of winter mountain road. The only logistical problem I failed to successfully plan for was our alarm clock.
As I said, we had no utilities whatsoever making the wind-up alarm clock the only device in the house that moved on its own --but not reliably. Without a radio announcer to call foul on its time keeping, it was something of an art and a math problem rolled into one to wind it each night before bed. There was a certain number of minutes one had to strike off or else add to approximate the hour and minute that the rest of the world kept. So I made plenty of allowance for slippagethat night and went to bed looking forward to my appointment with God in the morning.
To say everything went off like clockwork is to really tell the truth. Breakfast, chores, dress the kids and me. Bundled in the car, down the road on the chained wheels. I was Joan of Arc, St. Bernadette, St. Bridget --on my way to a life with God.