Dear friends and readers, the concluding selections to Just like Eve are now back. If you are new to this series, you can get an overview here, or start at the beginning, or start at the recent set of selections between Jasmine and her friends, or click the hyperlinks within the text for the selections referred to.
Saturday, June 30, 2012. Glendale Racquet Club, Colorado Springs, CO.
Mindy
smiles. She knows Jasmine’s news, but
their opponents, Kristin and Gabbie, are waiting in anticipation. Could she be pregnant? Moving?
Splitting up?
At the baseline, Jasmine adds that
she and Tim have been to seven marriage counseling sessions. She positions herself behind the baseline,
bounces the ball three times, says, “We’re getting a divorce,” bounces the ball
one more time, announces the score 5 to 4, tosses up the ball, and serves a
fast spin to Kristin’s backhand. Kristin
can’t reach it with any part of her racquet. An ace.
“What?!”
Kristin shouts. “You can’t say that and
then serve one of those!” Mindy chuckles,
Gabbie smiles, and Kristin groans. “Can
she re-serve that point, Mindy?”
“You could
have returned that serve, Kristin?” Mindy catches the ball Gabbie has just
tossed back to her.
“Too good.” Gabbie shakes her head. “Your point.”
“All
right.” Kristin relents. “A round of daiquiris on me, Jasmine, if you
give us the full scoop at The Alley.”
Perhaps
having thrown off her opponents, Jasmine serves a love game, winning the set
6-4. Kristin has no complaints, just
curiosity.
“Relief, mostly.”
The sweat on Jasmine’s face after playing tennis seems to reflect her relief
after the uphill battle of her marriage.
Kristin enjoys
breaking rules in the religion that raised her but knows that’s not Jasmine’s
habit. “Are there any more surprises? Kristin
asks, “even like you and Davie getting together?”
“I haven’t
seen him since February.” Jasmine reminds her friends that Davie is a youth
pastor, still married, has been ordered out of their mixed doubles group by Quail
Canyon Church, and she’s been ordered out of Quail Canyon altogether for the kiss they shared. “I’d say that adds up to .
. . probably not?” Jasmine looks at each
of her friends, hoping any of them might challenge her “probably not” reply. No. They
each offer an ever-so-slight nod, more with their eyes than with their head.
“How do you
feel about being single?” Gabbie asks.
“If I think
about it too much, I’m terrified.”
Jasmine’s voice is now lower, slower, somber. But when she doesn’t think about it, she
feels peace. Her chest isn’t tight and
her breathing comes easier. “My body is
responding to my relief.”
“I get it.” Kristin replies quietly.
Jasmine can
see in Kristin’s eyes she really does understand, possibly in a way Jasmine has
never really understood. In a way,
Kristin had “divorced” herself from her parents, rebelling against them when
she refused their plans to continue homeschooling her in middle school. Kristin was so young. She must have been terrified. How did she muster the courage?
Gabbie leans into the table and
asks Jasmine what she and Tim learned from marriage counseling.
“That we are two different souls on
two different paths who cannot forge a ‘truly new new.’”
That’s their marriage counselor’s
term for couples with no glaring issues, hurts, or mistakes. He says it’s unusual, but has seen it before,
and has created for a goal for such couples: to forge a “truly new new.”
“Cool.” Gabbie nods. “I like that.”
“Me too,” Jasmine nods with
Gabbie. “Not Tim.”
“Tim the Rock didn’t
want a ‘truly new new’”? Mindy smiles.
“I, the rolling ball, love it, and
he, the rock, hates it.” Jasmine chuckles. She reminds her friends that she was drawn to
Tim’s rock-like nature and his archer qualities. Jasmine’s friends all know that Tim’s training
to her in archery has given her an edge in tennis. She’s told the story often of how he wooed
her with archery, standing behind her so close their entire bodies touched, as
he trained her to position every part of her body to aim for perfect precision,
a skill she has transferred to her own sport of tennis.
“That straight-shooting archer can
hit a bulls-eye on anything. As long as
you don’t make it too complicated for him,” Jasmine chuckles, “like trying to
create a ‘truly new new’.”
“But he stuck
with your marriage counselor?” Gabbie asks.
“Yes,
because I liked him so much.” Jasmine honors
Tim’s willingness to accept a counselor she likes, even if he had to consider
creating something new.
“It was my
mom who really wanted us to get a new counselor, though. A Christian one.” Jasmine tells her friends
her mom reminded her of what Jesus said about divorce. Jasmine smiles and moves in closer to her
friends to tell them how she replied. “’To the male religious leaders in the first
century, Mom? You really think that’s
what he’d say to me?” Jasmine shakes her
head as she recalls the conversation and relays her mom’s reply that Jesus’
words were “timeless.”
“I said, ‘Some
of Jesus’ words were timeless. Some of
his words were cultural.” Leaning
on her right arm on the table, Jasmine tells her friends what she said Jesus did
say that was timeless. “No one can put
new wine into old wine skins.”
Mindy is sitting fully back into
her chair with her arms are folded in front of her chest. She smiles at Jasmine with a single soft
nod. Jasmine can tell her singer-actress
friend is imitating Simon Cowell, with his classic look of “Well done. I didn’t think you could pull it off, but you
did.” Still mimicking Simon Cowell, Mindy
moves forward into the table, rests her crossed arms onto the table, and looks
straight at Jasmine. “Is it actually
‘new wine’ if you’re returning to the person you’ve been all along?”
“The true me,” Jasmine nods. “She’s hard to find beneath all the layers of
what other people say I should be and what I should think.”
“Have you found her?” Kristin asks.
“I haven’t known her since I was in
the fifth grade.” Jasmine shakes her
head. “I let my family, my church, and
my community define who I am, and I married into that definition of me. That’s
who I call ‘old wine. With each layer I
peel off, I find another. It’s just as
Alice says of her Wonderland: ‘curious and curiouser’ this rabbit hole is.”
Mindy nods, soft, quiet nods, all
Mindy. No more Simon Cowell.
“A rabbit’s
hole is windy and unpredictable,” Jasmine continues. That’s a game an archer won’t play.
“The rock archer probably doesn’t
play divorce either,” Gabbie says. “What
made him decide he wants divorce too?”
“He heard
my heresies.”
“Heresies?”
Mindy scrunches her eyes.
“That’s
what he calls them.” Jasmine tells her
friends she decided to be no-holds-bar open with him and told him what she was
learning about Eve, women, the church, what she’s found the Bible to actually
say, and about God, even the sinister way God is portrayed in the Bible. “I told him in fifth grade I wanted to know
why Noah let God drown the world, and that I gave Joshua got an ‘F’ forcommitting genocide.
“How did he take it?” Mindy asks with
sensitivity. Simon Cowell has left the
room.
“He asked
me who I am. Said he doesn’t know
anymore.” Jasmine takes a sip of her daiquiri.
“I asked him if he loves the new me.”
“He took on Rhett Butler’s voice
and said, ‘Frankly, my dear, no.’” Tim shook his head, closed the door, and
went for a walk.
A week later, Jasmine confessed to
Tim that her questions were deep, and to be married, she needs a man who loves her
for asking them and no matter what she finds.
“Then I told Tim I know of one, Davie, and that I’ve fallen in love with
him.”
Jasmine
takes a long sip of her drink. “Tim was hurt
and cynical. He said Davie would never come
back and I need to get over him. I said even
still, he’s sparked something in me that isn’t going away.”
The friends
sit silent. “He went to shoot some
arrows and was gone at the archery field all day. They close it at sundown, and he didn’t make
it home until one in the morning.”
Tim might
be stubborn, but he’s a good guy.
Everyone likes him. Kristin says
quietly, “This must be hard for him.”
Jasmine
nods, feeling grief. She wants him to be
okay, and she wants to be okay too. Could
there be an easier way?
To be with Tim, Jasmine has to stop
caring about what’s deepest in her heart.
Tim thinks he is supposed to be deepest in her heart, but he
isn’t. Even Davie isn’t. She longs for Davie, but there are
passions within her that run deeper than both men.
“Remember my obsession with that
curse to Eve, ‘you will long for your man’?” Jasmine looks Mindy, who
nods. “And I thought the curse is the
woman thinking she needs a man to be complete?” (Explained more in her journal here.) Mindy nods again.
“I know the key now: know myself
and live it.”
“That’s profound,” Kristin nods, “but
I understand. We’re incomplete
when we try to be someone else.”
“We need to quit trying to please
everyone else, like me listening to my mom who wants me married by 30.” Mindy muses. “I wonder if my mom doesn’t feel complete
herself and has never realized that a woman can be complete without a man.”
“Harmonizing our inner masculine and
feminine,” Gabbie nods, reminding her friends of what she’s said about the harmony of the individual human’s inner masculine
part with the inner feminine part. “Our
problem is everyone else keeps telling us who they think we’re supposed
to be, so we can’t merge these two parts of ourselves.”
“If I can do that,” Jasmine muses, “Can I know myself and live it?”
"You sure can," Gabbie nods. "Read Women who Run with the Wolves. You are running, Girl! With the wolves. Keep on running, and don't turn back."
Jasmine opens into a triumphant smile. She hasn't heard of the book Gabbie just mentioned, but she she'll check it, and she knows her friends understand. She can
think at odds with them, discover whatever she does, and they will always be
with her. She might still long for
Davie, but, with or without him, she know herself, live as herself, and be complete.
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