▸ Column · Contemporary Midgard — present-day, MCU-adjacent
HELA replies.
The letter
My husband Theodore and I have been married six years. When we got together we were both just "spiritual, not religious" — the kind of thing you say at parties like it makes you interesting. Two years ago he got baptized at this big evangelical church, and now Sundays aren't optional anymore: full worship band, everyone singing with their hands raised, Wednesday small group without fail. I drifted back, meanwhile, to the quiet Episcopal parish where I grew up. Hymns, incense, candlelight. I didn't plan it — it just sort of happened.
I don't actually think we believe such different things. But last week he said he feels "spiritually alone" sitting next to me. (I didn't know what to say. I still don't.) Now I'm up early for my service and home before he's even left for his, and we circle around each other in the kitchen like we're sharing a lease, not a life. Our daughter Aurora is four and keeps asking which church is the "real" one, and I honestly don't know how to answer her. I miss Theodore. I just don't know how to say that without it turning into a fight about whose faith counts.
— Between Services in Midgard
Hela replies
"Spiritually alone sitting next to you." Write that down. Look at it. Your husband stood beside you and declared that your faith — your inherited, ancient, deliberately quiet faith — does not register for him as presence. He did not say he misses closeness. He said that you are, as he has now reconfigured things, insufficient.
I know what it is to be edited out. My father built an empire with me as his instrument, then rewrote the record so thoroughly that my brothers were raised without knowing I had ever existed. I was not destroyed. I was simply removed from the authorized version. I recognize the sting of being told you are there and somehow not there at all.
Your daughter asks which church is real because she is four years old and she is watching you not answer. Children are historians. They record what the adults in the room will not say aloud. The answer is both. Both are real. Say it plainly, before someone else plants their flag in that silence.
And when you speak to Theodore — do not begin from apology. Do not miss him from a crouch. Tell him what he said was not a small thing. That your God being quieter does not make your presence less. That he married you when neither of you was making noise about it, and the noise is new — not the marriage.
Stop performing smallness. Your faith is your inheritance. It does not require his benediction to be real.
— Hela
Thanos weighs in
How generous of Hela to make this a question of power and narrative. How like her.
Little one, your marriage is not suffering from a failure of authority. It is suffering from two people who have spent two years choosing the easier day over the necessary conversation. That calcification is cruelty — it simply arrives in portions small enough to call keeping the peace.
The fight you have been avoiding is not the problem. It is the correction. You have been rationing the discomfort in small daily doses rather than facing one honest reckoning. The daily doses are crueler. And Aurora is four, already asking questions you are too comfortable to answer. The longer you postpone, the more the avoidance answers her for you.
Make the conversation. Not to claim anything — that is Hela's vanity, not yours. But because your daughter is waiting for someone in this family to have the resolve to actually answer her.
— Thanos
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