Tuesday, May 22, 2018

This Broken Road...




3 years ago, give or take a couple of weeks, my life imploded. It was scary and dark and frightening. All the words in the world that mean, something happened that I didn’t want to happen, and all I wanted ever was for life to just go back to what it had been before.

In truth, I know now that life could never have returned to what it was. No matter what course you ultimately choose to take, life is forever altered. It’s something that I honestly thought that I understood-after all, if you read this blog at all regularly you know that I call Nick leaving the third big terrible precisely because two other big (huge) terribles had preceded it. I know what it’s like to endure a huge hardship, something that could end a marriage, something that could haunt you for years to come, and choose to remain married and to forgive and forget and move along to the next phase of your life. My point is, I thought I was all knowing and wise because I had endured these two huge betrayals in the past, and I had swallowed hard and gone on with life. It’s what you do.

So, along comes betrayal number three, and everything crumbles. I didn’t want it to-obviously-but it did, it crumbled right to my feet and nothing that anyone could say or do could fix the fact that my marriage had ended. Hope, you see, had died. Hope had lied.


Three years later, life is of course gloriously different. If you had told me then-if you had taken that girl that I was in 2015 who was just barely functioning-if you had said, in three years, you will be going about life as if it’s always been this way, as if Nick is just sort of your goofy brother-I might have wanted to believe you, but I would have thought, three years? Why can’t we just fix things now? Give me some little shred of hope, just so that I can get up and function through the day. That’s not how it worked, though.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when hope showed back up, but I do know that it was long after I had learned to get through the day. My days were rote, muscle memory of how to exist in the world and breathe in and out. The one thing that I wish that I had understood, that I didn’t understand until much, much later is this-because I stayed in my house, because my outer life really did not change at all except that now I didn’t have a husband anymore, my experience of my divorce was completely different than Nick’s experience of the exact same thing.

Granted, no two people experience the same thing, right? But I hated myself for how sad the simplest, most routine bits of life made me. I found that I missed things about my old life that I never even thought about before. I rarely found myself crying over the big things, the thing that you would imagine you would remember-vacations and holidays and such. But I can remember of standing in Imlay’s, buying a pair of scrubs, and being overcome with sadness remembering that the last time I had done that, we had gone as a family and the girls had picked out silly shirts for me and Betsy had asked for a real stethoscope for Christmas. And I had this lovely meltdown in the middle of a store, buying scrubs that I wouldn’t need in just a few months time.

All of that is just to say, I never knew when I would fall to bits, I never knew what weird memory would rise to the surface and just undo me. Accepting that this was life now-memories of memories-I fought against it, and then gave into it, and basically wallowed for what surely seemed like much too long (but felt like just the only thing to do), and eventually life actually moved on.

Last night, the girls and I put the flags out at the cemetery, which is something that we have done as a family for years. (This is hard to put into words-I know, why do I struggle to do it? A good question for a different post.) In the past few years, this has made me feel a sadness, because it was something that we did together-it felt like someone was missing. Which makes sense, I think. But last night, I didn’t feel that at all. I still remember, of course, but the feeling that I am pretending at being this single mom, who doesn’t feel abandoned and left to do all of these “family” things alone-that feeling is gone. The girls and I are a family, as we are. No one is missing.

If I had known three years ago that we would get to a place of solace, I would have felt relief. But I also suppose that I would have felt three years a terribly long time. It really hasn’t been at all. In the grand scheme of life, these years, these years where all of life changed and turned me into this completely different person, they are just barely a moment in time. And before I realize it, my girls will be grown up and gone and life will shift again.

Life lately just has me remembering that panic, that sadness, that fear. I suppose that the return of June will always make me remember, in the same way that March reminds me of what it felt like to be the wife of a soldier deployed overseas. Heavens, that was years ago, and still the chill of the beginning of March brings it back to me.

All I know for certain is that life has changed all for the better, and I wouldn’t trade where I am for where I was. Letting go (truly letting go) of my old life led into this new life of complete and unabandoned joy. And it took years to do, but there the hope lies.


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