My Story, Part 11

To start at the beginning, click here.
For Part 10, click here.

Perhaps it is due to hindsight and all but I do look back at this next period in my life (December 1989 to December 1992) as one of the best in my life.

For one, we lived with Matt's parents for 8 months, which turned out to be a wonderful experience. And even when we moved, we were only about 10 minutes away. It was so nice to be able to establish a strong relationship with them.

Susannah was born in February 1990 in the Hospital From Hell the same week that Matt got a job at a graphic design studio in Center City Philadelphia. We lived with Matt's parents for another 6 months and bought our first home in the Olney, a section in the north part of Philadelphia north of North Philadelphia (a part of the city known for the worst of urban decay, horrific crime, and abject poverty).

Olney was a working class neighborhood, originally settled in the 1920s by Germans and Irish but by 1990 home to 26 languages. It was a wonderful place for me to be. After my upper middle class upbringing, rubbing shoulders with the upper crust of southern aristocracy, I could not have been more thrilled to be living in a place and among people who did not give one iota of a thought to what I looked like or how I was dressed or who my father was or how thin or tan I was or where I went to school or anything like that. For many of these people, survival was the the goal and I found that I thrived when out from under the social pressure of my childhood.

Our church was the center of our life and such a wonderful picture to me of what the Body of Christ should look like. It was located in Olney as well and the vast majority of those who attended lived in the neighborhood. There was a lack of pretense here that I had never experienced anywhere else. And it seemed like half the congregation was in counseling. I went from being considered a freak of nature by most church standards to being considered actually quite normal. The support was incredible. For the first time, I experience community.

Not that all my struggles vanished. They didn't. I had a decent amount of postpartum depression after Susannah was born. Then, a few months later, my anxiety began to rear its ugly head and a phobia was born that would plague me for the next several years, "What if I die and leave my baby crying for me?" At the time, no MD would prescribe Prozac or any other antidepressant for breastfeeding mothers, so I was on my own, with a prescription for Ativan to take in the event of a major panic episode.

But motherhood, oh how I loved motherhood. It was like God created me to mother babies. I could love and snuggle and nurse my baby til the cows came home. And God was gracious and gave me another one to love, and snuggle and nurse. Elizabeth was born in October 1991, an entirely different, and incredibly wonderful birth experience.

Still, life had its challenges. It was during this time that the Culture War began to rear its ugly head in earnest. We were on the Focus on the Family mailing list and so we could get regular letters telling us just how awful things would be should Bill Clinton be elected president. Some of these mailings were downright propaganda and would conjure up images of social workers showing up at your door, whisking away the babies of Christians. Not exactly the thing a high-anxiety mother of little babies needed to be reading.

Also, things were not going well with Matt's work. By the fall of 1992 it became obvious that he needed to be looking elsewhere for employment. The very day he made his decision that he had to find another job he just happened (in that wonderful way that God orchestrates such happenings) to get a call from an old friend in Asheville who was looking for somebody like Matt, or Matt himself, to come work with him.

With much weeping and gnashing of teeth, we loaded up all our earthly possessions and made the trek south again.

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