Eve's Memoir
What do Odessa Settles, Taylor Leonhardt, Leslie Greathouse, and I have in common? We'll all be on stage at Analog at Hutton Hotel on May 11, 7:30 pm. Ticket link below.
In my last post, I told you I’d be taking a break from posting chapters of my book as I take my last heroic strides toward completing my manuscript.
It’s almost finished.
(With her fist raised in the air, she exclaimed victoriously, “Huzzah!”)
As promised, here is a glimpse into a new project I’m working on with a handful of powerhouse women.
It’s a one-night-only show, a thoughtfully curated and (slightly) irreverent reimagining of what it might have been like as the first woman to experience life on earth.
Eve.
She was the only woman to experience perfect communion with God.
She was the only woman to experience perfect romance, perfect sex, and perfect marital oneness with her husband.
She was the first woman to experience guilt and shame, and the reality of relational rift between God and man.
She was the first woman to experience self-consciousness and insecurity.
The first woman to grapple with an aging body.
She was the first woman to experience pregnancy; the first to give birth to a child; the first to experience the loss of a child.
Eve was without mother. Without sisters. Without a roadmap, she navigated all of life’s firsts without the benefit of another woman’s story to compare with her own.
We can only imagine what it might have been like to sit at Eve’s feet as she told her story.
It might have sounded a little bit like this…
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One afternoon, it was two, maybe three months after Adam and I were exiled from our home. I was out toiling. Again.
Digging, sweating, hoeing in that measly, miserable scrap of a garden we’d scratched into the ground.
It was hot, boy, was it hot. I’d tied my hair back to get it off my face, but the sweat just kept coming. I was soaked down to my woolen skivvies, and they were not breathing like I thought they would, no sir.
Adam and I had been out here since daybreak, tending this soil. About midday, he dropped his hoe, grabbed his club, and said he’d spend the rest of the afternoon hunting if I didn’t mind finishing up these last few dozen rows without him.
Oh, I minded.
I was hot and sweaty, peckish with an empty belly. I’ve noticed there’s a certain churlishness that comes over me when I’m surviving on nothing but thistles and roots and woe.
So, yes, I minded a great deal.
But another thing I’ve noticed is that ever since the day we lost our home, ever since I gave Adam that fruit, I’ve been living with the uneasy sense I need to make amends.
I could never tell Adam about this, of course. I know what he’d say. He’d look me square in the eyes and say we’d both made the decision to take that bite. He’d say he won’t let me keep carrying all the blame.
I know what Adam would say, because he’s said this same thing a number of times before. He’s said it so many times now it makes me think he’s making amends for something, too.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. We both acted like jackasses that night. Pointing and blaming and stammering. As if we could hide it. As if God wouldn’t know exactly what we’d been up to.
Even now, I cringe remembering how Adam and I must have seemed, crouching in the bushes, thinking we could hide ourselves with a handful of leaves. Ridiculous.
We knew right off we’d done something worth being ashamed of, certainly. But we didn’t have the faintest clue how bad it was, how far-reaching the consequences would be. Not the faintest clue.
I decide to call it for the day.
When I reach home, I find Adam sitting on a rock near our shelter. Next to him is the biggest pile of dead squirrels I’ve ever seen. I prop my hoe against a tree, and eyeing the pile of squirrels, I ask, “What are you doing?”
Adam replies, “Sewing some pants.”
“Pants?” I ask.
“Yep,” he says.
Clearly, Adam has been naming things again.
I want to ask him what pants are, but I feel ignorant asking. Instead, I say, “That’s a lot of squirrels. How’d you catch so many?”
He says, “I covered my body with peanut butter and laid on the ground. When a squirrel got close enough, I hit it with my club.”
Huh.
“How long did it take you?” I ask.
“Couple hours,” he says.
My husband has been laying on the ground covered in peanut butter while I’ve been working my hands to blistery, bloody nubs in the heat of the day.
I want to remind him that the blisters, the sweat of the brow, the toiling, all that was supposed to be his part of the curse, not mine.
Instead, I say, “All that work just to make pants?”
He looks at me blankly, not reading between the lines.
Adam is really good at some stuff. Like naming things. Show him something, anything, and he’ll name it. But he’s really not good at reading between lines.
He looks like an animal who smells a trap, though.
“I can make you a pair, too,” he offers in a conciliatory tone.
In this moment, I have a choice to make.
I could choose in this moment to be grateful, thankful for this man, so innovative.
I could choose to be grateful for this man who has taken the initiative to make a pair pants, and to that end has spent a whole day luring small woodland mammals to their collective doom.
But I don’t choose gratitude.
No, I don’t choose it at all.
I choose instead, like Adam, to create something entirely new: passive aggression.
“Sure, hon, that’d be swell, I’d love some pants,” I say, grinning tightly at Adam with deadly sweetness.
I make a fire, prepare dinner. I am scrupulously polite.
Any moment, he’ll crack, I think to myself. He’ll realize his mistake. He’ll apologize for letting me do all the grunt work while he dawdled the day away murdering squirrels.
Turns out, Adam’s not good at picking up on passive aggression either.
He just sits there on his rock, shucking squirrels like corn.
I sigh, and dice some of the fresh rodent into my stew. I set the table.
We eat. The squirrel tastes divine. After dinner, Adam volunteers to do the clean-up.
With a full belly, I realize I’m not as angry as I was. I decide to forgive Adam for the thing he doesn’t know he did.
A few days pass. Though I don’t see Adam working on his pants, I’m sure he is. He’s being secretive about it, because he’s wearing that little smirk he puts on when he’s proud of himself about something.
And then one afternoon, I hear Adam give a groan, followed by a sigh of deep disappointment. He emerges from the bushes, and he’s wearing a garment which covers his legs from the waist to the ankles.
Oh, so these must be pants, I think.
The pants are stitched together with a disconcerting number of squirrel-shaped patches.
Adam is standing in front of me, head hanging in dejection.
“Your pants look fantastic,” I tell him.
Sheepishly, he says, “No, they don’t.”
“Babe, seriously, they look great,” I say.
“No, Eve, they don’t. Because these aren’t pants,” he says.
“They aren’t? Oh. What are they, then?” I ask.
At this, he turns around.
From this posterior perspective, I have a full view of Adam’s buttocks shining in the sun.
“Oh,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says, “Turns out it takes a lot of squirrels to make pants.”
It would be another couple of months before the squirrel population replenished enough for Adam to finish sewing his pants. It didn’t stop him from wearing what he’d already made. Assless chaps, he named them.
The day finally came when he put the final touches on his pants, and he pulled them on with a satisfied grunt.
I’ve got to admit, I missed what they’d been before.
I missed that lovely view. Adam looked magnificent from behind. But more, it dawned on me the pants represented yet another layer of separation between us. A separation which grew wider with every stitch, with every sharp word, every angry intake of breath.
Between Adam and me, there now existed an ever-broadening gap. From the moment we left the garden, I’d felt each schism as the chasm rifted wider.
Layer by layer, we clothed ourselves, covered ourselves, hid ourselves from the other’s view. We covered our bodies as our only protection against this deeper exposure. Ours was a nakedness which proved impossible to cover, impossible to hide.
Though eventually we would learn to exist within this tension of what once was and what now is, Adam and I would spend many long years hiding our hurting places from each other.
Sure, I wish we’d never taken that bite in the first place. But if I couldn’t undo that choice, I wish, at least, we’d seen how unnecessary it was to hide from each other. I wish we’d known how much more strength we had together, even with our wounds.
Wishful thinking won’t pay, I know. But the knowing doesn’t stop me from spending a quiet moment, here and there, remembering what we had.
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Event Details:
An evening of captivating storytelling, thought-provoking perspectives, and humorous musings. Celebrate womanhood alongside...
Writers: Kate Gaston & Leslie Greathouse
Musical Guests: Taylor Leonhardt & Odessa Settles
Grab some friends, and join us for an evening pondering, commiserating, and celebrating all it means to be a woman from the viewpoint of Eve, the mother of civilization.
The evening will include the thoughtful, poignant, and (slightly) irreverent reimagining of what it might have been like as the first woman to experience life on earth. Through original writings and live music, we’ll glimpse into the heart and mind of the first woman as she tastes marriage, encounters mansplaining, and experiences motherhood for the first time. We’ll walk alongside Eve—the crown of creation—as she grapples with the reality of aging and death, and as she looks back over her years and asks the same questions her children still ask today.
**Food and beverage will be available for purchase**
Date: Saturday, May 11
Early Entry Doors @ 6:30pm
General Admission Doors @ 7:00pm
Event Begins @ 7:30pm
Location: Analog at Hutton Hotel
1808 West End Ave 2nd Floor, Nashville, TN 37203, USA
Ticket Link:
https://www.universe.com/events/eves-memoir-a-slightly-irreverent-celebration-of-womanhood-tickets-KG2ZSF?fbclid=IwAR3v4MB9T95x4fDz8EnaaXenccjO5k24M-TNQsLCdoPtdotrGBdM-QHtwRI
Now that I’ve heard you read in person, I read all of this in your voice — and it came through so clearly and powerfully. I tend to write about sad things, so I’m always intrigued by people who can write with your prowess for humor. I’m especially impressed by what you sifted from a story as familiar as Eve’s. This sounds like it will be an unforgettable night.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻