Go as a River

by Shelley Read

But I came to understand that she, like I, like women throughout the ages, knew the value of employing silence as a guard dog to her truth.

Whenever I heard Mother reference God’s will—and I heard it plenty—I thought of it this way: God will or He won’t. God will let a young soldier die in his older brother’s arms. God will make war and bitterness and an alien of a man. God won’t explain.

God will take a life, God will give a life, and God will make a life unrecognizable. God won’t warn you what’s coming next.

For in those eyes, I had seen not only an unexpected kind of man, but some new part of myself that I didn’t want to let go.

“I’ll go as a river,” said Wil. “My grandfather always told me that it’s the only way.”

Just as a single rainstorm can erode the banks and change the course of a river, so can a single circumstance of a girl’s life erase who she was before.

“Go as a river,” I whispered to her, as Wil might have done, and, I swear, I felt her spirit rise.

Women endure. That’s what we do.” “That’s nonsense,” she replied more harshly than I expected. “A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”

Every day of her loving him was her love in place of mine.