the problem with pain

My son just left with his father to spend the summer away with him.  

He drove up here with his girlfriend. I met her. We had a nice visit. And then they were gone. 

This is something I never talk about on my blog, mostly out of respect for my son's Dad. I don't even know if he knows I have a blog. But the last thing I would want is for me to have written something about our past and have him read it and feel dishonored. It was a very tumultuous and painful time for many years for both of us. The outcome was that we divorced. It has not been easy but we're better now and treat each other with respect and honor and that is all I am going to say about that. I will always care for him and want the best for him in life.

Preceding any time away from my son are days filled with anxiety and self-reflection. Most of the time we (my family - Jason and I and all three of our children) go on with our day to day lives and I don't think about Dakota's dad. Since he lives in another state he doesn't really see him too often, so I don't have to pack him a bag every other weekend. But when he does go, it's usually for a couple of weeks or more at a time. As a mother, this is such an unnatural thing - to send your young child away for any period of time. For anyone it would stir up emotion, but for me it stirs up emotions that are usually dormant that are charged with the overwhelming awareness of why things are the way they are. 

It's at these times that my past intersects with the present and takes me over. I become aware that no matter how thankful I am for the life I have, with how hard I had to work to get to where I am now, however unconventional it may have been; no matter how much joy my children bring me and how much I love my husband, all of those good things don't make what I had to get through to get here any better. Nothing makes it better. Nothing makes the pain of what my son has to go through okay. Nothing makes that time of my life better. It - in and of itself - is a painful time, a pain that really nothing can assuage. It's the pain that wells up in the pit of my stomach when I am packing his bags, realizing the hole that will be left in our home in his absence. It is the grief that resurfaces to linger until tears and admission of it's existence can wash it back down again. 

I was laying in bed with Shiloh the other night, as I usually do to put her to bed. And it hit me. Shiloh is precisely the same age Dakota was when his father and I split up. Actually, she is one month older than Dakota was when the papers were filed, and one month younger than he was when the divorce was final. I was overcome. I love and adore my sweet daughter so much. The tenderness I feel towards her is not distracted by the process of a marriage being dissolved. I couldn't even remember having these feelings towards Dakota during that time, and I felt so awful. Where was I and what was I doing? I was caught up in myself at the expense of my precious child. These are the types of regrets that you deal with that teach you how to live. 

The greatest revelation of my life is that God wasn't telling us not to sin because he wanted to keep us from having fun, he was trying to save us from pain.

As I've processed all of this over the last few days I've had to revisit the process of learning how to accept myself, my life as it is, the pain that remains and the hope that I have. It is this duality I have to live with. It is a brokenness that remains, that still stings, but that thrusts me into the arms of Jesus. When I talk about the arms of Jesus, I mean literally, his arms to me are a warm snuggly blanket where I find rest, love, acceptance, comfort. When I fall apart, somehow I manage to call out his name, and somehow he answers. Somehow, he is enough, his love and the story he has given me provides me with enough to continue, enough to live and breathe, and pull myself back up and keep walking. Somehow, he makes it all beautiful. He makes the ashes into beauty. Somehow life with him is better than life without him. 

‘Cause I am a sinner 

If its not one thing its another

Caught up in words 

Tangled in lies 

You are a Savior 

And you take brokenness aside

And make it beautiful