Beth Moore - All My Knotted-Up Life

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All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

Copyright 2023 by Beth Moore. All rights reserved.

Cover and interior photographs of author with siblings and family from the personal collection of author and used with permission.

Cover photograph of pine forest copyright praet/Shutterstock. All rights reserved.

Cover photograph of van by Hasse Lossius on Unsplash.com.

Designed by Jacqueline L. Nuez

Edited by Kathryn S. Olson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4964-7267-0

Build: 2022-12-20 10:06:49 EPUB 3.0

To Keith:

Through the fire,

through the flood,

God has been faithful to us.

I love you.

With deep gratitude to my siblings,

in the order of appearance on the cover,

Wayne, Gay, Sandra, and Tony.

I do not take lightly your willingness

to allow me to invite a public view

into my corner of our private lives.

I love you all.

T HE BURDEN IN TELLING OUR INDIVIDUAL STORY is ironically the same thing that made it bearable: we were not alone in it. Perhaps we felt we were, but the truth is, the threads of other peoples lives are inevitably knotted into ours even if only by their conspicuous absence. Who, after all, plays a bigger part in our story than one whowhether by sickness, injury, dozing, distraction, occupation, brokenness, divorce, or deathdidnt show up? Every life story entails a community of individuals who share one precarious common denominator in the narrative: you. Good or bad, you. Right or wrong, you. The responsibility is immense and, to anyone with a whit of sense, terribly intimidating.

I love a story told, and I love the actual storytelling, but I have not been in a hurry to write a memoir. I think Ive been waiting for everything to work out neatly and cleanly. Sensibly. Politely. You hold this book in your hands in large part because I gave up on that. But in a way, the giving up feels more like relief than resignation. I suppose Ive also been scared to see the pieces of my story tied together. Scared to discover that what made the whole of it hardest of all was me.

Ive waited to write a memoir until my reasons to do so finally exceeded my reasons to refrain. Time had to pass. People had to pass. Others had to age enough to no longer care much what people think. Ive worried about hurting people. Ive wondered if the kinder thing to do for those who have known my family might be to leave them with better impressions. I lament that telling my story might imply more about the experiences of my family members than either they or I would wish. Ive asked their permission and received their blessing and tried my best to leave the most vulnerable parts of their stories to them, but Im not blind to the cost of showing up in someone elses book. I wince knowing that a story, once told, cannot be untold.

Ive attempted, by the grace of God, to untie some knots in these pages. Several of these knots Ive kept clenched in a sweaty fist all my life. They needed air and light perhaps even more than understanding. The same distance that can clarify a story can also cloud it. The trick in writing a memoir is knowing which is which. Am I ready to tell it because it is clearer now or because it is less clear? My deep hope, my determined intention, is the former, but the lens of human perception is inevitably impaired.

Few things are more unnerving than writing a memoir of your life with an unknown measure of it yet unlived. For instance, what if the good parts go belly-up before the book even hits a shelf? Publishing a book is always an act of faith. Its a way of saying, Dear Reader, here is what Im thinking right nowwhat I believe to be true and long to be of value to youbut would you forgive me and not hold it against the God of whom I speak if time or divine Providence proves me wrong or woefully deficient?

And now, if youll entrust to me a bit of your time, Ill entrust to you a bit of my story.

D ONT LET GO. Whatever you do, dont let go. I crumpled my eyelids in two tight knots then cracked them open enough to get my bearings. The current was milky with sand like someone had topped off a big glass of water with a splash of buttermilk. A clod of seaweed grazed my forehead then tumbled off my nose, and water shot through my head, foamy and thick with brine, meeting no apparent barrier and whirlpooling between my ringing ears.

Forcing an eyeshot behind me, I caught sight of my dads foot. His skin appeared translucent beneath the water, the noon sun turning his purple veins an anemic lilac. Wed been standing beside one another in the surf seconds earlier. Wed inched further out without even moving somehow. The watermark reached the waist of my red one-piece, but he was little more than knee deep. And he was my dad. Hed know where to stop. I dangled my hands just below the surface, palms forward and fingers outstretched, making rivulets in the curl of the calm waves, dazzled by their constancy. This was my maiden voyage to the sea, the first Id felt the curious tickle of a shifting floor of sand between my toes.

Then, out of nowhere, I was underwater. My arms were instantly taut, elbowless, jerking my shoulders until they swore theyd snap. Grab me, Dad, before I let go. My fingers were laced around his right ankle, knuckles locked. My spine stretched into a thin strip of taffy. At the pull of an unheard trigger, I was a bullet of skin clinging to the end of a barrel, begging not to be shot out to sea.

As swiftly as the undertow had sucked my feet out from under me, the current shifted and I swung around, unbending, like the second hand of a clock dropping from 12 to 6, face planted in the sand. My fathers sudden yank on my arms snapped my hand-lock from his ankle and I swung like a rag doll to my feet, coughing up a salt mine, a mud-pie patch over one eye. I bit my lip to keep from crying.

I dont remember what Dad said. Perhaps something like, Youre okay. Youre okay. It would have been true enough. My arms were limp, but they werent torn away from my shoulders the way Id pictured. No sea monsters had managed to drive me out to the open sea and into the gullets of great fish with ten-inch teeth. But something had happened, and I wanted to know what. I wanted to know what took him so long. I wanted to know if it scared him that the water tried to swallow me. And I wanted him to say he was sorry, even if he couldnt have helped it. He never knew I had any such questions. I couldnt form a word.