The Girlhood I Spent Cooking

From the first week of August until the middle of September the kitchen runs hotter than the rest of the house, and everybody learns to stay out of it. The canner sits on the back burner going all day. Jars stand rim down along the drainboard on a feed sack, waiting their turn. There is a paring knife with a handle worn to the shape of a hand that is not hers.

She is eleven. She stands on a wooden crate to work at the stove, because the shelf over it was set for a tall woman and nobody has thought to lower it since March. March is when they buried her mother. It is August now. There are four brothers, the youngest is three, and somebody has to feed them, and she is the one who is there.

She has the tomatoes scalded and slipping their skins in a dishpan by nine in the morning. She knows to keep a rag between her wrist and the rim of the kettle. She knows the wasps come to the screen door around noon, and that if you leave that door open even once you will be chasing one around the ceiling with a folded newspaper while a pot boils over behind you. She learned every one of these things this summer, alone, by getting them wrong first.

At two her brothers come up from the creek with their hair wet and their shirts balled under their arms, and they eat standing at the counter, and one of them says the beans are salty, and she says then do not eat them, and he eats them. At four her father comes in off second shift, washes to the elbow at the sink, and tells her the kitchen smells like his mother's did, and he means it as the kindest thing he has, and it is. Nobody in this house is cruel. That is the part that is hard to explain to people later. Everybody was grateful. Nobody was sorry.

At night she sits on the step with the light off behind her and listens for the lids. That is how you know a jar has sealed, a small ping out of the dark, and she counts them. Nineteen tonight. She is eleven years old counting seals on a step in the dark, and somewhere down that road there are girls her age doing whatever it is girls her age do, and she does not know what that is, and she never will, because that was the year it stopped being available to her.

You know the crate you stood on. Maybe it was not a canner and it was not August. Maybe it was a load of wash, or a baby on your hip at nine, or a mother who had to be watched, or a house that had to look from the road like nothing had happened inside it. The particulars are yours. What is the same is that somebody handed you the job at the age when a person is supposed to be handed a bicycle, and everybody was thankful, and nobody said they were sorry, and after a while you quit expecting them to. You were eleven years old doing a grown woman's work, and that is a real thing that happened to you and not a story you tell to be interesting. It is written in Isaiah 46:4 that God is the one who carries and the one who bears, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept the record of that kitchen the whole time, down to the count of the lids on the step.

The shelf was set for somebody taller

Here is the verse, and I want you to hear who is doing the work in it.

even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.Isaiah 46:4

Read the verbs. Made. Bear. Carry. Save. Four of them, and every one has God as the subject and a person as the object. Not one is handed to the person being carried. He is not describing an arrangement where He supplies the strength and you supply the lifting. He is naming who does the lifting, and it is not you, and it never was, and it was not you at eleven either.

That matters here more than it matters most places, because you were trained young into the opposite. You learned at an age when a person learns things all the way down that if it gets done, you do it, and if you do not do it, it does not get done. Nobody sat you down and taught you that. It came in through your hands. It came in through nineteen lids on a dark step. And it is still in you, and it is why you are tired in a way that sleeping does not touch.

You have a God who says the carrying is His own work, and He was saying it long before you could lift a full canner off a burner. That is not my sentiment. It is written in Isaiah 46 in four plain verbs, and the same Spirit who moved on the man who wrote them is standing in your kitchen while you read this, saying the same thing in the present tense over a woman who has been doing the carrying since a March she can name.

And I will tell you straight out what I am not going to say to you, because you have heard it your whole life and you have smiled through it every time. I am not going to tell you it made you strong. It may have made you capable. Capable and strong are not the same word, and a girl does not need to be made capable at eleven by burying her mother. Whatever competence came out of those years, you paid for it, and the price was a girlhood, and nobody gets to hand you the receipt and call it a gift.

What restoring actually hands back

Now the honest part, and it stays honest all the way to the bottom of the page.

I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you.Joel 2:25

That is the promise, said exactly the way it was said, and I am not going to swell it into something it does not say. It does not say the summers come back. You cannot rerun an August. There is no version of this where you are eleven and free and the jars can wait, where the crate is not needed and your mother is at the stove and you are down at the creek with your brothers instead of feeding them at two o'clock. Restored is not another word for replaced. Replaced would hand you the summers again and leave you the same woman who lost them. Restored goes after the woman.

You are the one being restored here, and not a copy of the girl who did not get her summers. The word says God restores years, and it also says what He is actually after when He does it, and His Spirit is doing that work in you at a pace that is His, not something you can hurry along the way you hurried everything else in that house.

And if what comes up in you reading this is anger, keep it. I am not going to correct it. Anger at what was taken is not a spiritual problem you have to get past before God will do anything with you. Moses prayed out loud, make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil, and God put that prayer in the book with the count still sitting in it. He did not trim it down. He is not going to trim yours.