Okay – so it’s been a while. I know. I’m sorry. And not sorry. Life is crazy, as I’m sure you know; but being faithful to a blog is important if you want to have any kind of consistency, and I appreciate your grace for my hiatus. My first little girl is now 2 and 1/2 and we have another little princess on the way! I cannot say that much has happened and yet, everything has happened. And for tonight, I just want to write a little reflection.
No marriage is perfect. We have aspirations and ideals and wonder and amazement about the unknown. In prepping for our first little girl’s entrance into the world, I read books, I asked moms all kinds of questions, I went to every class the birth center offered, exercised and ate everything healthy to the tee. I was in good shape – and despite my post in July 2015, by July of 2016, my body was more than back….and then I got preggers again 🙂 My point, however, is that I had an expectation of how it should all go – and for someone who likes to plan – the advice we were given in one of our Bradley courses to surrender, should something happen and your ideal plan could not for whatever reason happen, be ready to Surrender. This is tough. This is SO tough for me. After all, as I have shared in this space before – I had plans for my first marriage – it was supposed to be a certain way…. I didn’t expect perfection; in fact, I expected imperfection; but there was a perfect ideal that in some ways, I knew was a fantasy. We all do…. but surrender means giving up the dream we have and letting Gd do his work. This is hard for anybody, but especially post-life ladies. Our dreams are shattered. Our ideals, challenged. Our hearts, forever changed by the ultimate rejection. Divorce, for women who have felt this, runs deep in to our hearts and can leave deep scars if we are unwilling to surrender.
After many years of lost contact with a friend with whom I was very close, I reconnected with her on Facebook (despite my loathe of social media – this was a welcomed surprise!). I reached out because I felt that nudge that I should – and wow! Was I blessed in having done so. It turns out, this friend of mine, I shall call, “A” married about seven years ago, at the age of 27. She was (and still is!) beautiful, inside and out. She’s a wee younger than me and I always had the kind of relationship with her that was like a big-sister. We shared a lot in common – both bubbly, outgoing, extroverted and idealists. The major differences between us were our upbringings – I came from a mixed home that was for the most part, liberal and free – to a fault at times – and she came from a very conservative, more controlled sort of home. While both our homes had their disfunctions, they both had a lot of love. A, had wanted to meet Mr. Wonderful for as long as I can remember. Since she was a teenager (when I first met her) she was boy-crazy. She was beautiful; had an incredible voice; loved to love; and longed to be loved! She was, sadly as many young, beautiful, and talented girls in our culture are, terribly insecure. Having unsettled demons of her own and having never been on her own before, she was married to the first man who asked, despite her inner feeling and nudging from others not to so. Now, it had been some time since we’d been in close contact and I didn’t know any of this until just last week. A, having saved herself physically for Mr. Wonderful, following G-d’s ideals for marriage, and desiring not just a Christian marriage but a holy, glory-to-Gd-sort-of-marriage; she married this man that I will call “O.” O seemed wonderful – he said he loved Jesus, he lived across the globe, he was exotic and adorable and fun – and they’d only dated a few months before taking the plunge into marriage. And A uprooted her life, moved halfway across the globe, and married Mr. O. Six years later, after suffering from verbal and emotional abuse, several miscarriages, and seeing the real “O” in his element – as a product of his own parents’ disfunctional marriage, A and O were divorced. A was crushed – she tried all that she could to keep it together….and here she was, 34 and “starting over.” What really caught my attention on her Facebook page was her incredible, renewed sense of faith and surrender. Funny, I had been learning a lot about surrender recently – and maybe that’s what’s pulled my heartstrings to reach out. Turns out, it was the perfect timing to do so.
A is in surrender. She had such an expectation of what marriage would be; dreams and hopes of a life with Mr. Wonderful-Foreign-Exotic that when it fell apart, so did she. I have said it before – no one; and I mean no one expects to get divorced when they walk down that aisle; and especially as believers. It’s no wonder really – when we have given up on Gd’s design for marriage almost entirely in our culture. We tend to give marriage to the cultural church but divorce is handled by the state. We are accountable to a million on-lookers when we say, “I do,” but the church has no idea what to do with us when we’re going through divorce. And once we’ve done the deed, the church doesn’t really know where to put us; how to behave; how to support us. It’s a very lonely feeling, being displaced. In her displacement, A had to surrender.
I have talked about my postlife besties a few times in this Blog over the past five years (wow! five years!) and we are all still learning to surrender. Remember my friends? Well, their stories continue and I will elaborate in my next post, but for now, the theme is surrender. All three of my girls are still looking for redemption in some way…one for her children to be restored and healed from the abuse of their father with whom she is having to fight all sorts of legal battles and work out “co parenting” which is is really more like “co-fighting-for-my-kids-so-he-doesn’t-continue-to-abuse-them.” One is still looking for financial restoration and her own Mr. Wonderful. The loneliness has become unbearable at times and right when things seem to be finally mellowing out, another bill comes down the pipe. It’s horrendous. And the the third, well, she may have a renewal when it comes to looking for love – and has grown in many ways. Still in love with love, she lost her mother last year and has been picking up the pieces of her own life while having been the strongest support for her sister who has gone through her own he** and she has been taking care of her father in the wake of the loss.
We are all still broken; our lives are still connected to the past…and yet, we all are learning to surrender. #1 has done everything she can for her children to protect them; it’s up to the courts now; #2 has paid every dime she can muster and works incredibly hard to earn her financial independence (not to mention she is so generous and has a heart of gold); and #3 has to surrender her heart’s longing to Gd, rather than pouring into so many people – which seems to fulfill but can actually rob her of receiving true love. And me? I am learning to surrender the expectations – to be super wife, and super mom, super professor, and super student….I want to do it all – and do it well; but something has to give. I surrender perfection. And the expectation that I can (or even should) be perfect at anything.
Look, give it up. We are strongest in our weakness. When we are real people, that’s when we can be used the most. That is when our real strength emerges. We can either hold tight to our expectations of an “ideal” or trust that our ideals are exactly that – and when they don’t come to fruition, we can trust that this is exactly why we cannot boast in our strength, but our weakness. It here we are really, truly humbled out and lay it on the line – we give it up.
Surrender friends. Start small – but be strong. Be brave and surrender.
mypostlife 