Author: Becca Whitham

How do you pray when a 200+ mile-long tornado is headed straight at you? This isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s the one I wrestled with on December 11 as my husband and I huddled in our basement bathroom waiting on the deadliest tornado in Kentucky history to arrive.

We already knew about tornadoes from our time in Oklahoma. We knew that a “watch” is different than a “warning” and that a “warning” is very, very different than an “emergency.” Watches and warning mean conditions are ripe for tornadic activity. An emergency means there’s one on the ground. So when the sirens go off, stop whatever you’re doing. Find an interior room with no windows. Get low. Cover your head. And then pray.

I’m an army wife. I’m used to having no control over my future. Or so I thought. There’s nothing like a tornado emergency to clarify just how out of control you are.

Tornadoes are fickle monsters. They head straight then veer left. They lift off the ground for a moment then slam back down with deadly force. If you’ve seen pictures from Mayfield and Bowling Green, KY, or from other areas where the tornadoes ripped through towns, you’ve seen one house standing twenty feet from one reduced to rubble.

Like I said, fickle monsters.

So how do you pray when it’s a tornado emergency, it’s been on the ground for a long time with no information about whether it’s breaking up, and it’s on a path headed straight at you? Of course you pray for it to break up–for it to retract into the angry thunderstorm lighting its path. But what if God says no to that? Do you ask Him to send it somewhere else knowing the destruction it will wreak on your neighbors? Or do you ask for it to hit you instead? Do you pray for death rather than injury–because although you’d like to see your grandkids grow up, at least you know where you’re going when you die. But to be trapped alive or horribly injured…

There are times when having an author’s imagination is NOT good!

In the end, I prayed for God’s will to be done and for the strength to handle whatever He allowed to come my way. And to be frank, it didn’t come from some super spiritual place. It came from my helplessness.

I mean, really. What else was I supposed to pray?

Well…it happened this morning. Nathan James Whitham joined the world, weighing in at a healthy 7lbs, 13oz. Kim and I are officially grandmas together.

Our kids, Nathan’s parents, have asked that we not post pictures on social media, but trust me. He’s perfect. He has sweet little cheeks and his mouth was “going” within minutes of his birth. Yep! That’s a Whitham boy for ya! It won’t be long before their food budget has doubled just to feed him. (Fun side note: If you’ve purchased Kim’s latest book, Bridge of Gold, you’ll see in the dedication that she included some true stories of Steven and Kayla. One of them is that, after making his first grocery shopping run for himself, Steven called to apologize for how much food he ate.)

Which leads into why Nathan James’ nickname is CJ. It’s food related.

My last name is Whitham. Not Whitman or Wittum or any of the other ways people have mispronounced or misprinted it. It was quite an adjustment for a girl who grew up as a Smith. One of the ways we try–TRY–to get people to understand that it’s not Whitman is to say, “It’s sortof like With Ham.” Really, it’s pronounced WIT-um, but whatever. At least we can get our legal documents in the right name.

Anyway, months before we knew whether Baby Whitham was a girl or a boy, we had a family text string that was suggesting names. My husband mentioned something about a new generation having to deal with a mispronounced/misspelled name, and suddenly we were off on cheese names because they went with ham.

Brie. Monty Rey. Grey Ted. Rick Otto. You get the idea.

I’m betting many of you have already figured out CJ, but just in case, the big winner was Colby Jack. And then to have his delivery scheduled on National Cheese Day? Way too funny! We told Steven and Kayla it wasn’t too late to change the baby’s name.

Really, it’s only Kim’s husband who calls the baby CJ, claiming it as his grandpa privilege. And to reinforce it, he brought a brick of Colby Jack cheese to the hospital this morning.

I’m pretty sure that will make it into a book someday, too.

Kim and I have been sitting on some news! It’s been shared on other platforms, so some of you might already be aware of this…

We’re going to be grandparents!!

This will be our second – our daughter had a daughter about a year ago – but our first grandson. Yep. It’s a BOY! So, at least for now, I get to have a favorite granddaughter and a favorite grandson, while Kim can have a favorite grandchild. We are over the moon excited for Steven and Kayla and for us!

One of my favorite stories about Kim has always been her love of Dr. Pepper, which meant she made sure I visited the Dr. Pepper Museum almost as soon as we became friends. By the way, drinking Dr. Pepper on tap is way better than in the cans. Kim also introduced me to moon pies while we were there. Can you say sugar overload?

• 

But back to Dr. Pepper…

When Kim was pregnant, she had terrible morning sickness. Dr. Pepper was the only thing she could keep down. This is a funny story when you’re twelve years down the road with two, beautiful, healthy, smart kids. It’s not so fun when your daughter-in-love gets pregnant and has icky morning sickness. Fortunately, hers hasn’t been as bad as Kim’s was.

I was much luckier in that department. I had a few days of ickiness but it cleared up within a couple weeks. My best nauseous story was when Steven was just over a year old. I was pregnant with his sister and we were traveling to see my sister in New York for Christmas. My husband didn’t have enough time off, so I was travelling alone.

I should NEVER travel alone.

My plane got stuck in Denver when a blizzard blew in. I was there for 68 hours, had to beg the airline folks to get my suitcase so I had enough diapers, held my 1 yr. old while he slept and I stayed up all night sitting on those wavy chairs. By the third morning, I was nauseous and tired and ready to cry. I walked into the bathroom to change Steven’s diaper, and a woman was smoking–the sign saying smoking was prohibited in the bathroom right behind her! I asked her to put out the cigarette as I’m allergic to the smoke. She fired back, “Well, I’m allergic to baby’s butts!”

Now…here’s the thing…I’m about the most passive person on the planet. I hate confrontation, but that lit my fuse! I looked at that woman and shouted–SHOUTED–“Maybe, but baby’s butts aren’t prohibited by law in a bathroom!”

She left. I breathed easier. But my heart was pounding for a full five minutes.

I don’t know if it was the Mama Bear coming out to roar, the exhaustion, or the fact that I was trying not to puke, but I’ve never gotten that angry in public. Never before and never since (so far, at least).

What about you? Have you ever lost it in public?

We finally made it to New York where my sister pampered me and let me throw up in her bathroom. It was not my favorite trip, so if you ever see me, just ask about my time in the Denver airport. But only if you have a good half hour to hear the whole story!

Do you wonder how two friends, fellow authors, crit partners, and now in-laws are going to survive all this closeness? I’m not and here’s the backstory of why.

It begins with how Kim and I met. In case you haven’t already heard it, my husband joined the military at 46. Our son had just graduated from West Point, our daughter got married six weeks later, my in-laws went into assisted living three weeks after that, and my husband left for the chaplain corp equivalent of basic training five weeks after that. Yeah…the summer of 2009 was busy!

Nine months later, after he’d completed his training and we’d moved from Oregon to Colorado, he deployed for a year. It was the first time in our nearly twenty-six years of marriage we’d been apart for that long. On his way out the door to Afghanistan, Nathan took my face in his hands and said, “This is not going to be a wasted year for either of us. You will–do you hear me, you will–do something about all those stories you’ve written over the years.”

Three months later, I met Kim at a writer’s group. She invited me over to her house and asked me to bring my WIP (or Work In Progress) for a quick critique to judge my skill level. She took about five minutes, made probably twenty red-marks, and utterly destroyed my entire story with one question… “Is this historically accurate?”

It wasn’t. And there went ten years of my life. Not full-time, but ten years of on-and-off writing. I took about five seconds to swallow down my disappointed ego and put the entire 369 page manuscript on a bench before saying, “Okay. Teach me how to write.”

That was the beginning of our friendship.

Fast forward to today. My husband and I are reading “Sacred Marriage” by Gary Thomas. His premise is that marriage is a great place to refine your character, including learning the skill of forgiveness. What Kim did to my manuscript required forgiveness–not in the traditional manner, but it was a variation on that theme. She destroyed something dear to my heart. I know…I know…I asked her to, but still.

So what does that have to do with the picture of Steven’s hands on Kayla’s back. Do you see that big, honkin’ ring on his right hand. It’s a size twelve. Steven assumed that meant his wedding ring would need to be the same size, so that’s what he told the jeweler who melted Kayla’s promise ring into a gold band we had to create his wedding ring. It was waaaaaay too big, which is why he has that black silicone band holding his gold band in place.

Now if Kayla had been in New York with Steven when the discussion of what size ring he wore was taking place, she would have gotten him out to a jeweler to measure his ring size (like his mother–a.k.a. ME–told him to do). Turns out he was off by almost three full ring sizes. Did Kayla throw a fit and give Steven a hard time about not taking care of something so important?

Nope. She shrugged it off and the two of them figured out a temporary solution.

And that’s how I know Kim and I are going to be just fine. (Steven and Kayla are going to be just fine, too.) Because of forgiveness.

Kim and I are coming up on ten years of friendship this fall. In that time, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to correct one another both professionally and personally. We’re still great friends because Kim and Jeremy figured out how to forgive one another, Nathan and I figured out how to forgive one another, and learning how to forgive in marriage has carried over into other relationships–namely the one between Kim and me. We’ve taught it to our children. All of us are going to have plenty more opportunities to exercise that forgiveness muscle in the years to come.

But given our history together, I’m confident we’ll continue to work long into our future.