No One Is Coming: A Love Lost and Found in IKEA
This is a story about Ikea.
Of course it is, I hear you say. Here she goes again, someone in the back shouts. But the story is never really about Ikea, is it? The story is never just about the story. The emotional meltdown is never about the subject that causes the meltdown.
I’m aware this will come as no surprise to some of you, but I love Ikea. Not in a what a lovely day out, twice a year, to get a few items we really need kind of way. This is a deep primal love, conceived and born in the grueling labours of young motherhood. In the eyes of my soul, Ikea is below Jesus and just above my children. Okay, it’s below my children, but it’s above any other human to whom I do not share a birth or marriage certificate with.
This isn’t just bargain meatballs and cutesy storage baskets and gloriously toxic candles and plasticy hipster plants. This is where we go went on first dates, on special occasions like birthdays and Valentines day, and this is where we go on the opposite-of-special occasions when I need everyone out of the house. This is our haven when I can’t face cooking and I need to feed everyone for the humble price of a crisp £5 note (Ikea hacks coming in a different post). This is where a certain single mum sought refuge on rainy Saturday mornings for the best part of three years at University. The rest is history.
I know not all Ikeas are made equal. I know not everyone here lives in Belfast. I’m sure your Ikea restaurant also has free tea and coffee (with a family card) and 50p cinnamon buns, but our Ikea restaurant has huge walled windows overlooking the airport AND the harbor. By the time we tuck into our 90p fries and the first plane lands 100 yards away from our table, all's right with the world. If I’m not okay at Ikea, then I’m not okay.
Alas, I want to tell you this is an unbreakable love affair. Solid and dependable, like an Ikea Kallax. I want to say you can be sure of two things in this life: Jesus’ love for you and my love for Ikea. And sure, my love has been tested in recent Pandemic years, with a gut-wrenching goodbye to the Ikea pic n mix, and a joy-sucking price inflation (I believe those 90p fries are now £1.10). But I am as surprised as you to find this love of mine could be broken in one swift, fell swoop. Smashed to smithereens like a rogue carrot puff under my heel.
On this particular occasion, I’m leaving Ikea in a hurry. Satisfied and at peace. But not wasting time. One doesn’t leave Ikea until one’s child is on the brink of naptime, so let’s just say we may be sprinting from that precious blue and yellow building to the carpark. And let’s say one child may or may not be screaming while the other shovels 90p (yes still actually 90p) biscuits into his mouth.
When everyone is bundled into the car, I can’t find my keys at the bottom of the changing bag. Or at the bottom of the pram. Or in the boot, under the seats, in everyone’s pockets, on the ground surrounding the car, or in the ignition.
Did I use them to unlock the car? Did I leave it unlocked? Have I seen them since we arrived? I genuinely don’t remember. The keys are a black hole in my brain.
The biscuit-shoveling child, bless him, is extremely gracious, when I heap everyone back out of the car and head for the revolving door we thought we’d left behind. But by this stage the over-tired nap-needer is hysterical, and a member of staff reads the blind-panic in my eyes when I approach him for help. For a split second I think he’s going to pretend he didn’t see me, and I don’t blame him, but in this moment my knight in shining yellow chooses compassion.
My voice is breathless as I ask if any keys have been handed in and he calls who I assume to be the lost property department. We are, uh, on familiar terms with said department. They really came through for our family when they found my phone on a bed (I was testing mattresses) and on another trip, when Paddy’s phone was found on a wireless charger, which was part of an office display he was playing in.
On this occasion, however, it seems Ikea has run out of grace for us. There are no keys to be found.
And even after we retrace our steps the whole way through the cafe and the marketplace, still no keys.
There are worse places to be stranded, I console myself. But we are thoroughly done with this excursion and suddenly I’d give up a million Ikea trips to be sitting down in our humble home. At least we can sit inside the car, even if I have no recollection of how that small mercy came to be. And even if my children reject this mercy and prefer to crawl around on the ground in the car park. The baby is being appeased with his first taste of chocolate biscuits.
I sit at the steering wheel and let the weight of my head fall back on the seat. I rub my temples and notice the pleasant breeze attempting to breathe life through the open doors of this catastrophic vehicle. It would almost be a perfect day. Almost.
I’m irrationally jealous of the other cars driving in and out of the car park, clearly rubbing their retained keys in my face. A sheet of cold sweat blankets my body and a ghostly familiar fear rears its ugly head. It’s the same dread that has taken hold many times, but not as often in recent years. Not since my relationship status moved to ‘married’.
My life can be categorised in two stages: before I met Paddy, and after. Let’s call it B.P. and A.P.
B.P. God provided a village of people who carried me along in the task of raising Reuben alone. A church family who adopted me; friends who came for dinner and bath time; others who caught my tears; my own mother who helped me survive pregnancy and birth; good men who collected me and my car from the side of the motorway. Generally, I had someone to call. But every so often there would be an adulting responsibility or a parenting issue or a minor car accident (I hope you’re catching the pattern of car concerns here), and I would come face to face with an awareness of my own aloneness. My heart would momentarily wake up to the reality of my ‘situation’. My family lived an hour away; no one was waiting for me at home; no one was coming in the door at 5pm; and the responsibility of raising this child, and leading this family, was solely on me. The buck stopped with me. And the weight of it extinguished every last ounce of my mustered-up, fabricated strength.
No one was coming.
After sitting in a pool of helplessness, after letting the grief engulf me, the anxiety rose up in my chest. But my cries rose up higher. I grasped for The Helper, only to find he’d been there all along. No one was coming, but someone had never left. I didn’t have to reach the end of myself to reach him, but sometimes he was clouded by the fog of my own self-help and synthetic strength. His peace saturated my body.
In the present, I brush arms with that old familiar fear.
No one is coming.
Paddy is working late and we only have one key for the car and one key for our house. Of course, eventually, I will realise Paddy can leave work in a true emergency, and Asher will crash and nap in my arms, and I have access to a phone and money and a building full of Swedish meatballs. My husband can sort something out, as he always does. I will be okay. But at this moment, rational resolutions are a distant dream and I’m back to being the young girl with no one to turn to.
Except there was always someone.
So, I ask God for help.
No, I beg him for help.
Please, I whisper.
And like a lightning bolt to my memory, I suddenly know the keys are under Asher’s bum in the car seat. I can’t remember if I mindlessly dropped them there when we first arrived or when we first returned to the car. I can’t remember if I locked or unlocked the car. I can’t remember if I had the keys in Ikea. But I know they’re in the car seat. A deranged cackle escapes my mouth as I run around the back of the car to check. And there they are. Of course. Ikea has run out of grace for us, but it seems Jesus hasn’t.
Somewhere along the way I have stopped relying on my own strength and started relying on my husband’s. The buck moved from me to him. And there are lots of bucks that should stop with him. There are lots of things he can do for me and our family. There are lots of burdens he can share and relieve. And there are lots of good gifts he can give.
But he can’t give me my peace. He can’t hear my silent pleading prayers at every hour of the day. He can’t be my saviour and the upholder of my soul (Psalm 54:4).
I can’t fully enjoy and appreciate the place God has given my husband in my life, until I let God take his rightful place first.
Later, I lay flopped out like a salmon on my bed, catching my breath before bedtime and listening to Paddy give me the lowdown of his day.
“I got stranded at Ikea today, by the way,” I casually tell him, after letting him talk for a very long time.
“What?! How? Why didn’t you ring me? Why are you only telling me this now?” He berates me in exasperation.
“You’ll see in the blog post,” I tease.
He laughs with a knowing eye roll.
“I think I’m finally over Ikea, though.”