“We and the world, my children, will always be at war. Retreat is impossible. Arm yourselves.” Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

I was born into a world at war. No one told me. No one around me seemed to know.

But it didn’t take long for me to understand that it was so, and I joined in with enthusiasm. At times it seemed as though it was all a game. I was at war with my brother, three years my senior, continually. It was a physical war that left bruises on us both. That made my grandmother cry. That bewildered me and made me feel an unwelcome thing – guilt.

I was at war with my sister too, though it was a much different kind. It was not the knock-down, fist in the gut kind of war with her. She, the first born, warred with steely looks and sighs that said I was merely a nuisance, barely worthy of a mention. But under the fake indifference was a seething anger, because she believed I was the cherished one. She, so much my elder, had to be responsible and take consequences while I “got off scot-free” too many times.

The only sibling I did not seem to be at war with was my other brother, the second born. He waged his war on other fields, a war of constant pressure to raise himself to an unattainable standard. I watched and listened and secretly cheered him on.

I was the brunt of another’s war, often, and to my great frustration. His name was Bruce and he lived two doors down on our street. He was the only son of a brutal man who beat him with a belt. Bruce raged against everything and everyone. I was an easy target, being much smaller, and a girl. My brothers didn’t provide any protection, the one being too weak, the other being too old to notice.

So I was left as a lone sentinel, without a weapon, to try and guard the fortress of my well-being. I was knocked down a lot, but occasionally I won, in a manner of speaking, by discovering that if I could draw attention to the damage Bruce caused me, he’d get a beating far worse than any I could give him. His father became my secret, fearsome ally.

I waged war in forts built of cardboard and rock. I waged war in gardens owned by neighbours and on the school grounds in games of chance and learned skill. I was only about seven or eight years old when I learned that the games could be deadly.

Her name was Stephanie. She was very blonde and very blue-eyed and my mother said that was the problem. “It seems to strike the little blonde, blue-eyed angels,” she said when she told me Stephanie was dying. That day I learned a new word in the vocabulary of the war – leukemia. I remember staring at Stephanie on a swing in the playground the day after I learned that children could die. She was laughing as she pumped higher and higher. I remember hearing rumours of her funeral later and ever since I have turned away from empty swings hanging still in a playground.

Three years later the deadly seriousness of the war struck again. My grandmother disappeared.

I knew she had been waging war for a long time. She argued with my mother daily, in bitter words that made no sense but felt like stones being pelted in my direction. I felt the hatred in her for my father and knew the bile she poured out on my brother came from that same place.

I knew she didn’t like most people, especially the “gypsies,” the dark-eyed children who came to ask if I could play. They weren’t gypsies, but Italians, but to my Grandmother, they were ‘other’ and therefore suspect. I remember a day when a boy I secretly liked came with his little sister and asked if they could use our bathroom. My grandmother’s nose wrinkled and her lips clamped tight and she closed the door without answering. I felt that unwelcome guilt again, and could not look into that boy’s dark eyes at school the next day.

But Grandma made good cookies and let me knead the margarine bag until the red button bled, and made peanut butter toast for breakfast, with tea she sipped first to make sure it wasn’t too hot. When I sneaked into her room late at night, she would get out a large tin box full of buttons and let me sew them together or let me leaf through magazines or watch her small television, until I fell asleep. She must have carried me into my own room each night, because I always woke up there.

And she told me stories, sometimes about the war and the bombs that fell in England, the place where she was born, and the way men are. “Like animals,” she said. “Gorillas. You can’t trust a gorilla.” She told me about working, at the age of eleven, as a maid in a big house near Buckingham Palace, how the liquor bottles were marked so the maids couldn’t drink from them and how they all would rush to the balconies and wave their dusters as the King and Queen rode out in their carriage. She said looking at the Queen’s daughter was like looking in a mirror and she always wondered why she was the maid and the other child a princess.

She disappeared in the fall, on a day that smelled of snow. They found her jacket then, but not her body, until the spring. She had jumped into the tail race that flooded the locks for the huge freighters that passed from Lake Huron into Lake Superior. I remembered she had talked about drowning, said it was a pleasant way to die. When the police came with her jacket, I listened from the stairs high above and knew that a battle had been lost. My father identified her body, but I heard him say it was hard to recognize her. She had been in the water for a long time. My mother didn’t cry until the day of the funeral. I was deemed too young to attend it. I wondered what they had done, what they had said, if they felt guilty about being relieved of her. As I did.

That’s when I armed myself with numbness. I learned a war could be silent, a necessity now that the source of conflict was gone from our home. Don’t do anything to cause it to come back again. Keep the peace at all costs, even if you have to lie. Those were the unwritten rules. I became very good at keeping them. Too good. I spoke little. I made friends only if it was to my benefit.

It was many years later when that curse was broken, and my personal war came to an end. Death had been all around me and at last I sought a way out, a way to know the depth of peace that can only come from one source. I at last acknowledged the shape of the hole in the core of my being that groaned to be filled. It was the shape of a man, a God-man whose name is Jesus.

When He came to me, He lifted my head and opened my eyes and the world became beautiful again, shimmering with an innocence I had thought long gone, long defiled. It beamed from the face of an infant. The world shone with colours I had not noticed, rang with songs I did not know I knew. Though the war still raged around me from every quarter, I now stood protected, armed with truth, able to recognize the lies hissing in my ears, able to rebuff them, able to smile and mean it, able to love with a genuine love that flowed through me but was not of my own instigating. And though the mystery of it all is too deep to understand, when I acknowledge my weakness, I am not beaten down, but comforted, because I believe there is One who fights the battles for me.

And He never loses.

My only sorrow now comes from knowing some I love have not yet recognized their need nor looked into His face and said, “yes.” But even in that sorrow I am not left alone.

Yes, the war rages. But now I am armed.

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This piece was recently the first place winner in the Personal Essay category in InScribe’s Fall Contest