How Do You Do It? (October 2015)

People ask me “how do you do it?”. Its the same question I ask when I see women living my nightmare. I look at these ladies who have lost their children and husbands and parents and I ask “how do they do it?’

There were two tragedies in life that I was always convinced I would never survive, and yet I see people surviving them everyday.  Then it occurred to me, the life I am living is a nightmare, one I never thought I would live, and one that others are convinced they would never survive.  My nightmare?  My only son, my youngest child, was violently taken from me by his father with the help of people who I never would have guessed in a millions years could turn against me and go to court against me. They lied about me, and helped my ex husband take my boy away from me.  After 14 years of being with my child every day of his life, he is now gone. I only see him once in awhile. He lives with his father and step mother. Another woman is the mother of my child.  She cooks for him, makes his lunch, comforts him when he is sad. I have been all but completely cut out of my sons life. Just the thought of my son being so far away from me is killing me. I ask myself  “how do I do it”? How do I get out of bed every day?  Put my feet on the floor? Get dressed? Move thru my day and go to work? How am I doing this? How am I surviving living my nightmare?

Truth is,

I’M NOT!

Everything in me wants to lay down and cover my head until the pain and torture is all gone.

But Love wont let me.

Love lifts me to my feet every day. Love whispers to my heart and takes my hand. Love opens my eyes so I can see colors again. Love gives me hope.  And every day, like a parent tending to their sick and broken child, Love lifts me up by it’s own gentle aching heart and empties its self of strength so that I , Loves sick and broken child, may take one more step, one more breath, and endure one more day.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is Love.                                                 1Corinthianans 13:13

HOPE: Pending

I have heard it said so many times and I even asked myself. I wrote about it earlier.”How do you do it?”  My answer to everyone was so simple, so sincere. Of course it was. It was the truth. It still is. “Because God said I could do all things thru Christ. God said I can do this.”

Before I understood myself why I could handle all the devastation in my life, I was actually worried that it wasn’t affecting  me the way I thought it should be. I thought, maybe something was wrong with me. Then a peace was put in my heart that the Lord had built a hedge around me to shield me from the impact of the shock wave that had actually hit me.   Until recently.

I had always imagined that loosing a parent was life altering in ways that words alone could not describe. However, I had no idea the depth and breath of that change. That is until my own parent died.

At first I wasn’t sure what was going on inside of me. I was trying to come to grips with the reality that my daddy was dead. I would be going thru the motions of my day, what ever they may be, and a screaming in my head would come out of nowhere. 

“OH MY GOD! MY DADDY IS DEAD!!” 

And right behind that, without fail, the memories in vivid detail of my last moments with daddy and his funeral would blanket my mind and my heart and my soul like a lava flow from a volcano that was believed to be dormant.

I don’t know what  I was expecting. I know a parent dying is hard. Did I expect it wasn’t going to be hard on me? Seriously, it was only July,  Daddy died in April. That’s no time at all to recover. Maybe I thought since I surfed the past pretty good, I could get thru this too. I did not take into consideration the dose of pure evil I would be forced to ingest along with my dad’s passing.  Nor did I give space to the fierce loneliness I would encounter in the days weeks and months to follow.  It had never occurred to me that I would be mourning my daddy alone, without my family to comfort me. I had no one who really knew what I was feeling about my daddy dying,  to help me navigate this indescribably dark and sad landscape that I was suddenly thrown into.  I was supposed to weep with my family. We were supposed to laugh thru those tears remembering all the funny moments daddy added to our lives. WE were supposed to help each other on our better days, and have each other to cry to on our sadder days. That’s how it was supposed to be. But it was none of that for me. I was carved out in the most hateful and heart crushing way.  For reasons that were never given. And in the sight of all who were in attendance at daddy’s farewell.

For me, this was the one thing I was convinced of that I could not get through. It didn’t matter what God said. It didn’t matter what I got through before. But the realization of that didn’t come all at once. It didn’t even come right away.  I realized this was the promise breaker after I returned home from daddy’s funeral with my daughters and husband and not a day later I had an argument with my husband that resulted in his daughter leaving the house and me in a rage throwing her belongings into the yard, in the rain. I had reached a point that I could not bare one more ounce of spite or hate from another person after what I went through with in the days that surrounded my dads death. I heard myself say out loud,    “No! I haven’t been through SO much! I’ve been through 
"TOO MUCH”!   At that moment I knew I was changed. At that moment I realized  I was someone I didn’t recognize. And it has been that way ever since.

So here I am, 9 months later. I made it through Christmas but not without sever rifts in my relationship with my husband. The family he and I dreamed of and worked so hard to create is all but a lost shadow of a memory. The resentment that has found harbor in our relationship daily chips away at the ‘wonderful’ that once described our reunion and marriage.  We struggle to get through a day without a fight or a bitter word. We crawl on our hands and knees over jagged rocks and through fire seeking help, guidance, peace, wisdom, DIRECTION, from the Lord. We cry silently alone, to ourselves, mourning the loss of the amazing love we once had. And we pray.  We pray. And we pray. And we pray, for life to let up just enough to give us a glimpse of what we know is not all gone, but so well buried under  the sackcloth and ashes of the past year or so. And every now and again, we get that brief glimpse. It is not much, and it doesn’t stay long. But it gives us a grain of hope. And that is what I am living for right now.  If my eyes were a computer screen, when you look into them the message would read 
“HOPE: Pending.”  And as long as it is ‘pending‘, I will continue to crawl across these rocks and through this fire, because I will not give up on the beauty I have witnessed and the love I have not only felt but also have been able to give. As long as Hope is pending, there is still HOPE.  And I can do that, because God not only said I could, He can.