Musings from the Trenches: Feeling, Dealing and Healing from the Pain of Divorce

  Lately I have been thinking about all of the different and new feelings and cruelties assaulting my brain. These thoughts have been attacking me since May 2nd. I've never had these feelings before. I don't like them living in my head and I wonder how to get rid of them completely, so that I can heal. I can easily let these feelings take over and become part of my reality if I'm not extremely diligent about assessing why they're there, who put them there and how I can make them go away. Abandonment: Truly one of the hardest, if not the hardest reality of my situation. I was abandoned by the one person who I thought would never abandon me. When I was a little girl, I dreamed of the husband I would have and how we would be together until we died. This person was going to be the person who I could count on above all others. He would be my rock, my soft place to fall, the man I loved forever and my best friend. That dream came crashing down. To be abandoned feels horr...

  I spent today at a funeral home with my best friend, Donna. Donna and I met, along with our husbands, when we were young and in love. We met at our apartment Christmas party in Columbia, Maryland. We had just moved a couple of months before and hadn't yet met anyone. We met Dan and Donna and very quickly became close friends. They were our only hospital visitors when our oldest, now 28, was born. We soon moved back to Wisconsin and they to California and our visits became cross country ones. We took turns traveling back and forth between Wisconsin and California; and then Indiana and New Jersey. Something horrible happened in their marriage and it ended. That changed things for sure in terms of our foursome. Except for 1 brief period of time, Donna and I never missed a beat. Today I am with her because she is burying her 2nd husband, a man who worshiped the ground she walked on. They only had 3 years of marriage and only 1 before he got sick. My long marriage ended this ...

  Tonight I am getting ready for an impromptu visit to New Jersey, to be with one of my oldest and dearest friends. She lost her husband to cancer this morning, esophageal cancer. He worked at ground zero and all of those people breathed in so much poison. Many of those workers have died of one kind of cancer or another and many are still battling the disease. During these past 5 months, Donna and I have talked about how there are many parallels in the circumstances of our lives at this time. Every morning I get an email from the DivorceCare team. Today's email, more than any other day, draws from a pain that we are both feeling right now. A person's heart is broken when the bonds of a relationship are broken. "A broken heart," explains Dr. Myles Munroe, "is actually the tearing of those bonds; it's like ripping a part of your life away and leaving these webs hanging and bleeding. A broken heart is so terrible that, according to the Word of God, Jesu...

  Truthfully, I have been so sad lately that I don't even know what to post. I don't want to be a drag, but sometimes trying to be "up" and "positive" seems like too big a burden. Deep sadness feels like a weight that's way too heavy to carry. Add loneliness to the equation and then imagine 50 pounds added to the weight that's already too heavy to carry. It's crushing. Nights are really hard for me. I try to numb my mind by watching stupid tv and then go to bed when my eyes are already half closed. That way, I don't have to lay in bed thinking about the fact that I'm going to bed alone. It's not like I want to be around other people though, I want to be with him . I want to know that I am still valued, loved and honored as his wife. But that will never happen. That is over. I know that in all of the rational parts of my brain but my heart doesn't want to let go. Even though I hear about things he's done or is doing and ...

Today was a wonderful day spent with my granddaughter. Her parents are on vacation and her other grandparents and I are splitting the time we get to spend with her. The joy was tempered just a bit with sadness because her poppy and I should have been doing this together. That got me to thinking: Lyla will never know her grammy and poppy as a team. How sad that is. Divorce steals so much from everyone involved. Even little Lyla has been robbed of knowing her momma's parents as a couple. She is too young and will not remember her first year of life, when we doted over her equally and together. Today, I pulled a book from her shelf and we settled into a chair to read. The inscription said "To Lyla. I used to read a book similar to this, to your momma when she was little. Love, Poppy." It was a book he had recently given her, apart from me. Truthfully, that made me angry as well as sad. To give up and throw the towel in on a 32 year relationship for a little bit of ...

 My daughter and son-in-law are studying a book in their small group entitled: Half Truths: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves and Other Things the Bible Doesn't Say by Adam Hamilton. I haven't read the book but I'm going to. Too many times, well-meaning people throw out these phrases without even thinking. They think just because the word "God" is in the titles these phrases are true.  I think these phrases are religious catch-alls. The half truth I want to talk about today is the "God doesn't give you more than you can handle" one. I have always felt this was bunk. To believe that, one would have to believe that God gives us bad things. That is most certainly not true. God only wants good for us. Bad things happen, yes, but those bad things aren't from God. (The promise in 1 Corinthians 10:13 is not about God not giving us more than we can handle it is about God not allowing temptation to overwhelm us without Him providing a way of escap...

I just got back from watching a movie, Year by the Sea. There were so many great quotes in it but perhaps my favorite one for today: "Emotions are like the tide - you just gotta ride 'em out." I wish someone would tell me how long this emotional sinkhole I'm in is going to last. Last night, I realized that I hadn't cried once all day long! This is seriously a HUGE thing for me. Even the days I think I might make it, something always happens or some memory overtakes me and I am a puddle all over again. But yesterday was a good day. Today I didn't make it. Aside from the part of the day where I said goodbye to some work colleagues I just met 8 weeks ago , (eye-roll - told you I was emotional) I returned a call from my mother ex-law. We both cried like babies. Well, she's tough and I could barely tell she was crying but I cried like a baby. She seems to think this might all pass and we will be back together again. I didn't tell her that it wou...

I really hate being single. Before now, I had never lived alone. I went from living with family to college roommates to post college roommates and then to married. For 56 years, I have never lived alone. The strangest and saddest part about being divorced for me is being alone. And lonely. Sometimes while I'm sleeping I'll wake up just enough to reach my arm out next to me and expect him to be there. Or, when I wake up in the morning I'll turn over thinking he'll be there, lying next to me. It is just plain lonely and sad and tragic and horrible and I feel like I'll never get used to it. When he was traveling, I was alone and it was getting to be more and more often that he was traveling. I now realize that I was very lonely before I was divorced. In fact, I was lonely for a long time. He had been pulling away, creating a separate life from mine and I didn't want to face that. Is it better to be lonely and alone when part of a couple or now that I'm di...

  It's finally October and it finally feels like autumn...a different season than summer and I'm so relieved. Summer is supposed to be a time of light, happy sun-shiny days. Summer is the animated sounds of children playing outside, the sound the water in a pool makes when kids jump in, the dinner time smell of things cooking on the grill and the days long with light; summer is the time when everyone heaves a big sigh of relief that the school year is over, many commitments are finished and it's time for vacation and fun. For me and for my children, the summer of 2017 was a horrible one. It was filled with disbelief, sadness and anger. It was filled with nonsensical happenings and I think we all felt like we were stumbling in the dark, no sense of up or down. I felt rudderless and even worse than that, I felt lost. Summer was stolen from my children and me. Somehow, summer has turned to autumn and I feel a little bit of relief. Relief that I've made it this far w...