A Story Led Me Home Again by Lara d'Entremont

“Sorry I’m late but I swam into a fishing net. I managed to escape, and I swam away and hid. I was lost, I was scared, but a story led me home again.” — Tiddler: The Story-Telling Fish, by Julia Donaldson

—

I pulled the sheets of my three-year-old’s bed up to the headboard. I yanked too hard and pulled them out from under the mattress. With tears brimming in my eyes, I shoved them back under the foot of the mattress. Deep breath. I didn’t have time to cry—I still had to make my bed and finish boiling eggs for my husband and my son. Then I had to feed babies—again. After that, I’d prepare and clean up from lunch. I’d eat. I might have five minutes before the babies would need to nurse again.

That’s if they slept that entire time. Usually, they slept for twenty minutes on a good day.

I swallowed against the jagged bump in my throat and walked out to the kitchen. I flicked the burner dial off and carried the tiny pot to the sink. I poured out the eggs and bent over the sink to cry.

“What’s wrong, Lara?” my husband asked.

I watched the cracked eggs roll and wobble into the drain as steam escaped past them. “I want to be human,” I murmured. “I don’t want to be a milk machine anymore.”

—

I crossed the threshold of my office. A thin layer of dust coated my laptop, desk, and bookshelf. I lowered myself down into my chair in front of the antique desk.

My husband and mother-in-law agreed to get me a sixty-minute break every day to do whatever I wanted. My husband often suggested I sleep, and my basket of laundry and dirt-sprinkled floors bellowed to me, but I sat down to write as my eyelids drooped. Whatever the cost, I had to write, because I didn’t know what to think or how to function otherwise.

I gently lifted the top. I squinted at the brightly lit screen. I opened Google Docs and poised my fingers above the keyboard as an infant screeched in the background. 

For an entire hour, I stared at the blinking cursor. It demanded words. It threatened me. Finally, it resolved to mock me.

I had no words in me. 

My husband promised ideas for my Christian-living articles would return, that I was just tired and out of practice. 

But every day, I sat before the white screen and fought back tears as the cursor laughed at me.

—

Five years prior, I walked from my home to my pastor’s house to help his wife with her newborn twins and two toddlers. They had hired me to help around the house on the weekdays. Each week, my own belly had grown a little more as my firstborn wiggled inside. 

With my jacket pulled taut around my swollen stomach, I waddled alongside the road as cars slowed past me. Each day that I walked, images swirled in my head of a story. The paved road and litter-speckled ditch morphed into a thick forest of towering trees. I imagined elvish creatures and whimsical castles.

I smiled as I kicked stones in front of myself. It was fun to think about, but I knew I couldn’t afford to think about it anymore than on this walk. I had “real” work to do, which was caring for other people’s kids while trying to make a side career in freelance writing Christian living articles. Storytelling was simply a piece of my past, a piece I no longer had time for.

—

Ten years old, I ducked under the weathered wooden fence above and lifted my feet over the fraying silver rope below. The horses barely lifted their heads from the grass to take note of me, and then resumed their grazing. I followed the causeway my parents had made between the pond and the river, crossing to the small path between the briar patches. All the while, I weaved stories in my mind and imagined them in front of me, talking to characters and leaping over puddles that I pretended were rushing rapids. When I returned inside hours later, I scribbled them down in notebooks or typed on the yellowed, family desktop computer. 

This was my daily habit—whether it rained, snowed, or the sun scorched my neck. I even chose it over horseback riding sometimes. It’s how I faced gossip from the mean girls, recovered from punches to the nose, and pulled the knives out of my back from my friend’s betrayal. 

At ten years old, I dreamed of being an author, and nothing else.

—

I sat in front of the computer in my office again, an exhausted mom of a toddler and twin infants, the cursor blinking. Everything I had worked for, I had poured myself into these past six years, gone. All of it. Drained from me. The articles had left me like the breast milk that had dried up in my chest weeks prior.

The cursor laughed. I steeled my gaze.

What if I wrote about that Elven girl? What if I wrote myself out of this like I did in every other painful time in my childhood?

I smiled at the cursor. And I typed. 

—

“It’s just for fun,” I said. I walked alongside my husband as I pushed our four-year-old on his trike. He pushed the stroller with the twins alongside me.

“Do you don’t know what’s going to happen?”

I laughed. “No. And I’m okay with that. I don’t even care if I finish it. I just want to write and see where the characters take me.”

—

I finished the story. And in the process, I learned to write about theology and ordinary faith again. 

I don’t know if anything will come of this manuscript, if it will ever be bound and sit on my bookcase. But I do know this: I lost my way, and a story brought me home again. 

Lara d’Entremont is a wife and mom to three from Nova Scotia, Canada. Lara is a writer and learner at heart—always trying to find time to scribble down some words or read a book. Her desire in writing is to help women develop solid theology they can put into practice—in the mundane, the rugged terrain, and joyful moments. You can find more of her writing at https://laradentremont.com