Storm Tossed: A troubled woman finds peace with herself and God in the midst of life's storms. Read Free Page A

“face”), but she got so many compliments on the lashes. They were her trademark. She plucked her blonde eyebrows way too thin, and they had a high arch. She had a pierced nose and lip. Her face was arresting; her manner intolerable at times.
    “I don’t have to obey you because you’re not my mother,” she had said to Rachel once. And Jackson had defended her. She’s just a hurting kid, he’d told Rachel. And anyways, Rachel was to blame, he said. If she would just really love her….
    Everything was all her fault. Jackson said she was the problem. Rachel sighed deeply, her heart perplexed. Was it true? Was she the problem in their family?
    And yet there were characteristics about Autumn that Rachel greatly admired and desired to emulate. Her beauty. Her ease with people (except her). Her sparkling personality, emanating a light that couldn’t be denied. Her sudden laugh, freeing like Jackson’s. The way strangers and children were drawn to her like a magnet and trusted her immediately. She had such a heart and love for children.
    Autumn was now attending the University of Colorado, majoring in psychology to become a psychiatrist for troubled children. She was excelling, making Dean’s List each semester, while working full-time as the receptionist at a mental health center and interning at the hospital as a therapist. A very full plate, but it fulfilled her.
    Maybe her college major was her way of figuring out her life. Why her dad was always too freaking busy for her and worked so much. Why her mother had time for everyone but her, but bought her material things to alleviate her guilt and to appease Autumn. Why her stepsister Faith wouldn’t go to college or get a job or do anything but go to her friends’ houses and play stupid video games, wasting her brilliant mind, and never called Autumn.
    Or why she and her stepmother clashed so much. She actually really loved Rachel, and admired her solid faith in Christ and her published books, but she didn’t dare tell her to protect her own heart. She couldn’t take any more rejection. So she painted her feelings with a defensive, defiant attitude and biting remarks, the way she painted her eyeliner, sharp, dark, exactly executed.
    When Jackson was around, she was genuinely sweet, ecstatically happy to have her daddy around, and looked at Rachel out of the side of her eyes, brooding and silently jealous about any affectionate displays between them. Which lately was extremely rare. For the most part, Jackson and Rachel didn’t talk anymore.
    Rachel tried her best to love Autumn unconditionally, like she loved Faith. But Faith—even though she was undemonstrative in her expressions of love toward Rachel—never spoke to Rachel the way Autumn did. It cut her heart deeply.
    Jackson only saw when Rachel ran out of patience and yelled, and said she needed to act like the Christian woman of God she pretended to be to everyone.
    Tears stung her eyes again. She studied the chunk of peanut butter and fudge on her spoon, and it dissolved in her mouth. She closed her eyes, giving into the pleasure and pushing away the memory of Jackson’s angry, hurtful words. This was as near as possible to heaven on earth. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream might not be the answer to life, but it sure was close.
    Why couldn’t she and Autumn just get along? Maybe they were too much alike. At least that is what Jackson had suggested once. Rachel was startled to realize that Autumn’s rejection of her caused her the same pain that she felt about her father’s rejection. And Jackson’s.
    Why can’t Jackson just love me? Why am I so hard for him to love? What happened to us? Where’s the man I married, who couldn’t get enough of me and talked to me for hours in the night?
    Reading Bring Me a Unicorn by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Rachel wrote in her journal her words that seemed so timely now:
    “It is cold—a penetrating, damp, pervading cold. We stop at little stations; mud-built houses, sticks