FREE WILL

I feel like I came here to California and have been on this crazy journey that began in 2016 when my life was turned upside down just to learn a lesson about free will. No matter what we do, how much we sacrifice or how deeply we love another, they may never love us back. Sometimes the ones that love us the most are the very ones that persecute us, betray us, lie to us, take from us and leave us for dead without blinking an eye. And we have to love them as they are and walk away wounded without knowing why.

I’ve hurt so badly the last many years. I’ve felt I had no one to turn to, no one to talk to and no one who cares that I even exist. By God’s grace alone I’m here today writing this entry tonight.

So much has changed and happened. My life has been a constant roller coaster ride of hope elevated and falling again many times each day. I leap for joy each day and I cry and mourn too. It’s a strange thing – the human emotions.

Yesterday my daughter messaged me and inquired about moving in together again. She said if I can’t leave she’ll come here. And then today she informed me that her father told her he’s getting a one bedroom next month and kicking my son out. There was a day that i had prayed for that to happen; for my son to be removed from the situation he’s been deteriorating in for 7 years now. But it was a shock when it came today. And then I felt the tug-o-war within my own heart in the reality that settled in. I will be a mother living with her two adult kids. This is the very thing my mother ran away from in pursuit of finding love again after her second divorce. I see many women doing it; my roomate too. They say, “I’ve raised my kids, now it’s my time to live.” And maybe that was their path and journey, considering they found knights in shining armor to rescue them from their prisons of motherhood. But it’s not my story. It never has been on the inside as my constant prayer and deep heart anchor is in the vision of a happy family I’ve always sought. Maybe it’s because I never had one – a house full of brothers and sisters and cousins and grandparents and uncles and aunts. Today the only living relative I have other than my kids is my mom and she doesn’t even speak to me.

As I think about this all tonight there’s a voice of truth that washes over me saying, “You’d never have been happy with him if it means living far from your children.” And that brought up more truth, like the fact that in 7 years he’s never once asked to meet anyone in my life. He’s not met a friend or my kids. He’s only met my dog. If he loved me he’d want to be part of my life and he’d want to intertwine me in his too. I’ve never met a single friend of his either.

I left everything behind and he’s left nothing. And neither of us should ever have to. Love is a foundation that builds like a tree that starts with one branch and sprouts out to become more beautiful and bare more fruit. I’ve watched my aunt attacked by her own daughter in her time of need as a newly widowed woman; thrown in a nursing home where she died less than a year later. i would imagine she died of loneliness and a broken heart as the daughter didn’t even allow a single person to see her, didn’t have a funeral for her, didn’t even call to let us know she’d passed on the week of Christmas.

And even as i think about my kids coming to live with me I know that there are no guarantees that our outcome will be any different. We love because it’s what we are. And we can’t have any expectations. We love because what other choice is there? Death. That’s it. If a live is lived without love it’s not lived at all.

So I don’t know what God has planned for me now. I’m scared of them coming back because there was so much hurt but I can’t imagine a future without them in the closest crevices of my heart. And as far as a man is concerned.. I have no choice but to let him go, he was never mine in the first place. And if this was to be my fairytale love story then I would not be the one chasing and hoping for a future with him anyway. He’d have chased me back.

Tomorrow I’m going to look at a 2 bedroom and then maybe find some 3 bedrooms also. If we’re to be a family again I pray that God blesses us all with forgiveness compassion and love greater than we’ve known before.

I miss my kids. I miss them so much.

Goodnight.

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Sadness

I’ve been sad for so long now. I wear a smile and disguise my voice like I’m a cartoon character sent to spread joy into the world. I pass out prayer candles and inside I feel like a fraud as I repeat the same stories. I tell others about the miracles I witnessed in an ICU room and man who escaped death by the power of prayer. I’ve even allowed myself to get puffed up with pride as if I was the one who was responsible for these powerful prayers.

I remember when we returned from the hospital back into our home and the support staff wasn’t around and there were no more nurses, doctors, therapists or other patients to brag about God’s miracles to when the miracles seemed to slow. Or maybe it was just the solitude that kicked in and made me take an honest look around at my life at the sobering reality that it was a trainwreck. I wrote scriptures on sticky notes all over the house to keep us all optimistic; or so I explained it that way to myself. Then I bought every book I get hold of about miracles and prayer and I read them front to back implementing each ritual as if somehow the right visualization or perfect word sequence would somehow click into place perfectly and unlock the spell that had placed us in the predicament we were in.

When I finally fell exhausted and defeated, I sat on the couch one night in my own thoughts and tears as a Title popped up on my screen sent as a gift from my daughter’s church where she volunteered. The title read, “To Live is Christ. To Die is Gain.” The morbid words sounded like music to my ears as I whispered the text out loud to myself. That’s how I felt – like dying. I thought about such an experience could at last take me out of my suffering, my struggle and to a place of peace and rest for my soul.

When I watched the 12-part Bible study something broke open with me. I understood for the first time the phrase I’d heard, “The Power of the Gospel.” And for a moment, I was utterly and completely set free. In that moment God spoke to the deepest depths of my soul an earth shattering conviction that had power over me; the spirit of pride. And I was shown that pride in this sense isn’t at all like I’d once thought it was to be defined. Pride wasn’t about boasting in your skills or your material possessions or even your looks or accomplishments. Pride was a desire to control what only God can control; the path, protection and provisions of one’s life. I saw it in the way I’d mothered my children; working non-stop to keep them safe from harm as a “Helicopter Mom” that worried always and said “no” often to all the joys they wanted to partake in. I saw myself on the family trip to the Bahamas we’d taken a year before, pacing and panting over every move they made. I worried they’d get bitten by a shark and nearly ruined their snorkelling experience. I worried they’d get kidnapped and therefore wouldn’t let them go ride water slides without me hovering along behind them. I wouldn’t hardly let them ride bikes because I was too terrified they might get struck by a car.

When my husband served me divorce papers on the third anniversary of his tragic brain injury, he took my son with him and I worried I’d die of a heart attack without the ability to tuck him in each night and track his phone 24/7 to keep him on a curfew and safe from doing the wrong things with the wrong people.

Fast forward nearly 7 years later I have found myself in the same cycle, doing the same things but only with new characters along for the ride. With new layers of pain, betrayal and abandonment tied to new layers of trauma and disappointments I have blamed myself every step of the way. And I’ve had a lot of help in doing so.

My mother blames me for marrying a bad guy. My “bad guy” blames me for leaving my son, (the son he viscously took from me in proceedings of bullying and threats through a court system. My son blames me for giving him bad genes, marrying the wrong guy and selfishly leaving him behind. My daughter blames me for being sad. I have blamed myself for all of the above and even a book I wrote back in 2015.

It was a fiction novel about a woman who lost her husband and wrote a book about her life. Then the book was made to film, she plotted her own suicide and considered the production her last mission completed inside of a world that had nothing left for her to hold and then to her surprise, she fell in love with the actor who played the role of her husband from the film, was left after love’s sting and then led to a place through a game of clues that landed her on the top of a staircase in an old abandoned mansion where the guy was there awaiting to surprise her with a newly written chapter to her sad and depressing life. It was the typical tragedy to pain that led to purpose with a plot twist spark of love and a mystery that ended with a happily ever after.

I never believed in fiction and fantasy fables like this and quite honestly I hated movie scripts because they had led me to such heartbreak and disappointment as a child. Believing in a God that answered prayers, a handsome prince that rescues a slave girl from the basement where she’d been prisoned by her wicked stepsisters and believing in a world where daddy’s don’t leave and mothers don’t lie had led me to my first taste of death at age 17 when I tried to take my own life in suicide. The fall from grace for me was a fall from believing that anything could ever be better. The world was broken, cruel, manipulative and mean. I wanted out. I thought if God was real he needed to see that he’d made a grave mistake in sending me to this planet.

In 2022, six years after the tragic night that turned my world upside down and 3 years after I’d been left in divorce, I first remembered the book of Skyla that I’d written and intended to one day publish as a creative writing piece. It was long buried from the rubble in a home remodeling project I’d contracted years before and I found it odd that the memory of the book would hit me with such meaning after so much time had passed without a single thought of it all. But in the midst of remembering a new hope was born and a fear greater than anything I’d ever before faced all in the same package.

I realized that some of the events from the fiction novel looked very similar to my real life. And in realizing this strange phenomenon I lost my grip on reality in a single day. I wondered if the book was a prophecy over my life i’d somehow downloaded in some sort of psychic other-wordly spark of creativity. I wondered if my imagination had tapped into something of divine wisdom. Or, if the book represented something dark; a desire inside of me to see such a tragic story play out and if so; could I have somehow been responsible for what happened to the father of my children?

I had a great life. Why would I write such a strange plot? And why was I so drawn to the character of a movie to make him the lead role in the visions I had in my head about this book back then?

Over the last 4 years I’ve prayed more prayers to Heaven then I could ever attempt to quantify. I’ve suffered deep anguish, pain so intense I’ve trembled like a child in convulsions, I’ve had nightmares, unceasing thoughts of suicide and I’ve pushed away everyone I love in terror of what I was becomming.

TBC……

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