The Story Hour In My Front Room

I did not fight for it

Here is the part people argue with me about, so let me say it plain.

I could have fought for the nursery. I thought about it that first night. I knew the deacons. I knew Gary would have heard me out. Half the mothers in that church would have stood in the aisle for me if I had asked, and some of them wanted to, I found out later.

I did not want it that way.

I will not make a war inside a church over who gets to hold the babies. I have watched churches split over the carpet color and the color of the new hymnals, and I have watched good people stop speaking over a committee, and I was not going to be the reason the thing I loved turned mean.

That is the first reason, and it is a church reason, and Ruth would understand it.

But there is a second reason and it is a plainer one. A job you have to fight to keep is a job somebody can take again next year. I did not want to keep a room. I wanted to keep the children. And it came to me, standing at my own kitchen window with the kettle going, that nobody on this earth could vote on what happened in my own front room.

So I called Faye back the next morning, which was a Sunday, and I said, “Come over here Saturday. Bring Kayla’s two. Nine o’clock. Tell anybody you want.”

“What are we doing.”

“Story hour,” I said. The words came out before I had decided on them. “I’m going to read to the little ones. Saturday mornings. In my front room. Won’t cost a soul a dime.”

Faye was quiet a second. “You sure?”

“I have about four hundred books,” I said. “And a rug my mother made. And nowhere I have to be on a Saturday for the rest of my life. Yes. I’m sure.”