A single mom to three boys working hard to live my truest life. I hope as I share the beauty, the gratitude, the grief, the hard…you find inspiration + hope to show up to your life as honestly as possible.
All in Divorce
“…a broken family..” i don’t remember the words surrounding what this pastor said, but I sure as hell remember him referring to any “non-2-parent-heterosexual family” as broken.
Divorced parents? Broken.
Single parent by choice? Broken.
Queer parents? Broken.
Non-traditional? Broken.
If you would have told me
my marriage would end in divorce,
I would have laughed in your face.
Or that
on my ten year wedding anniversary
I’d be working from home
alone
no husband coming home
my children in his separate home,
I would have probably called you a liar.
You hear this all the time once you’ve become single: “Just date yourself!” Or someone asks a single person, “are you dating?” And she says “Myself!”
I don’t know if anyone else has sat down & dissected what this truly can be and mean to ourselves, but I sure have.
Reframes can sound cliche, but the ✨power✨ of actually creating + speaking specific reframes to yourself is immeasurable.
Much of my own healing has happened through the long-game work of finding the deeply seeded HARMFUL and untrue beliefs (lies) in my mind, body, heart and then creating reframes specific to those lies.
To raise boys into men feels sacred & important. Maybe I overthink everything (I do), but maybe it’s because I feel the way society has (quite poorly) raised men so far is due to not thinking enough.
Im not a man-hater. I don’t think alllll men suck. Im aware there are plenty of women who kinda suck too.
I sincerely believe books are the #1 tool we have access to as parents to help form + shape the way our children view the world.
My boys have had peers question the validity of their brotherhood / family, because we don’t all look the same or come from the same gene pool or live together as one big family.
Empathy + compassion come through understanding. We have to start helping our kids know there isn’t shame in living a different story than the next kid.
We change the world by changing how we raise kids.
HERE IS A THING:
A very real and present fear I have (too consistently) is that as my kids grow older, they’ll realize what a loser mom they have.
Like… he has a REAL job and got a REAL BIG DEGREE with income coming in no matter what during coronapocalypse. He OWNS his house. Do I have a degree? Noooope. What about a “REAL” job? Well not one I clock in and out of from 8 am to 4 pm Monday through Friday. I make coffee for people, I write, I photograph, I speak, I build websites, and whatever else in between. I definitely don’t own our house.
I have decided to simply show up here in my little corner of the internet world again. As I am. Today. Right now.
When I was newly married, I blogged A LOT.
I just sifted through many different posts and archived/hid them from those years because it feels too raw to keep them available — I have lots of complex feelings about it all. Tears welled up and memories coursed through my head.
Dear Former Husband:
I assume the title of this blog post makes your stomach flip a bit; its probably flipping as much —if not more— than mine is. Maybe not though, maybe you didn’t notice the date…I don’t know.
This isn’t a public post to shame you or tell you off or be disrespectful towards you. It’s not me airing out all of our stuff. It’s not me sharing the details of our mess.
“Never in my wildest imagination did I think I’d be taking family photos without a husband, my children’s father.
The 4 — and then 6… and then 7 — of us looked so good in photos together, we fooled even ourselves. Until one day I was brave enough to stare our marriage’s reality in the face and ask for help. We had 5 kids at the time and had just celebrated 6 years of marriage. The walls of our entire life crashed, the walls built with facades and fantasies I had construed to survive, because silently dying inside felt more livable than looking at the truth and what would come next.
When I was staring separation and divorce in the face, I was sure I was going to die of shame. So much shame wrapped up in the dissolution of a marriage — in my family and community and online and as a faith-based person.
I was confident divorce would make me Not Good Enough.
But one day He spoke so clearly into my shattered soul, saying “When you say you aren’t good enough, you are inherently denying My Truth. I say you are a glorious work of Myself, I say you are My masterpiece. …
Monday evening I laid on my bedroom floor’s white rug in a pile of pathetic-feeling-pity and stared at the empty suitcase that was originally my friend Kat’s. How was I supposed to pack for a trip I didn’t even have plans for? What kinds of things do I take to wear? What will I even do on this trip? Was this a mistake? Should I just not go? That’s a lot of days in a row without Sage and Ira. How will I survive this grief?
When I looked ahead at the Californian days in front of me, they were so empty and ready to swallow me up whole.
I was sure that all the space the coming days held might kill me because I would have to sit in all of my pain.
I have started and drafted dozens of blog posts since August 2018.
They’ve been about motherhood, about race and racism, about marriage and divorce, about healing and wholeness, about self-love, about foster care and the perils of working with DHS…
But only a small few have made it to the published side of this little space I call mine.
2018 exploded a whole world of pain that was hidden from even myself…or at least I was working extremely hard to keep it hidden from myself. Because what happens when we stare unspeakable damage in its face?
How do we rise from such depths of brokenness?
Here it is
…. I am in the middle of a divorce.
I feel like I can finally breathe putting this out here in my small corner of the internet…. while at the same time I feel suffocated from what I expect to be some people’s reactions, assumptions, criticism, and responses.
In the grand scheme of life, it hasn’t been very long since the abruption of my marriage, though it feels like it’s been ages.
It is a nice idea to not say anything at all — on the internet anyways — and let the fact that I was married for six years just kind of slip quietly away into the archives of the internet.
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