There are two shifts to my strength. Nobody sees both.
The day shift is twenty-six ten-year-olds. It’s Jaylen, who needs me to notice his new shoes because nobody at home did. It’s the reading groups and the fire drill and DeShawn’s mother on the phone during my lunch, crying about things a fourth-grade teacher cannot fix but apparently must hold. It’s forty-five minutes of small hands raised, all of them needing, none of them wrong for needing. I love them. I want that written down where I can see it: I love them. The needing is not the problem.
The night shift started at 9:40, when my phone lit up.
My best friend. The one everybody thinks is bulletproof — quick with a laugh, always fine, the one her whole family dials first ⟡. She doesn’t call to fall apart. She calls to almost fall apart, which is more tiring, honestly, because I have to listen for the collapse underneath the comedy. Tonight it was a story about her mother and a doctor’s appointment and who was going to drive, told funny, told fast, and I did what I do: I caught what she was actually throwing.
We talked until 11:15. She said, “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mel.”
I said, “You’d be fine.”
She laughed. We both let it be a joke.
Here is what I did after we hung up. I want to write it exactly, because I think it might be the truest thing about my life right now:
I sat on the edge of my bed and I tried to pray. And what came out was the teacher voice — the calm, organizing, capable voice. Lord, thank you for this day. Be with her mom. Be with Jaylen. Be with —
And then nothing. The list ran out and I sat there in the dark with my hands open on my knees like two empty dishes, and the honest prayer — the one that’s been standing outside the door of me for months — knocked again.
I know what it wants to say. It wants to say: I teach Your love all day and hold it up all night and I cannot feel it anywhere. Where did You go? Or where did I?
I didn’t pray it. I couldn’t. I’m the one people bring their doubts TO. Sunday before last, a woman from my small group cried in my car about her prodigal son and said “you’re the strongest believer I know,” and I held her hand and prayed a beautiful prayer over her, and it was — this is the confession — it was craft. I know how the words go. I have been fluent in comfort so long that I can speak it without feeling a thing.
The faithful one, running on fumes and vocabulary.
Here’s the question I couldn’t finish tonight, left here in ink because it has to go somewhere:
If I’m strong twice a day for everyone else — who is strong for me at midnight?
I fell asleep before I could not answer it.
Strong Friends Diaries is a storytelling series from Made in the Image Projects. If her unfinished prayer lives in your chest too — you’re not faithless. You’re tired. There’s a difference, and we’re going to keep writing about it. The Strong Friends Letter goes out Tuesdays — link in bio. 🤍