This Is My Story

I’ve been writing a lot about things that happen behind our closed doors primarily because I felt God nudging me to tell the truth. The last year has been an enlightening one as I opened up to more and more people about the state of this marriage, and as God began to open my eyes to the truth. Some days, I still want to believe that I am – as my husband says – exaggerating. Or being dramatic. Or perhaps this is how everyone lives and I’m just ultra-sensitive. Often, I want to pull back on all this sharing and go back to pretending. I can’t, though. God has changed me.

I don’t want my story to be one of emotional, verbal and spiritual abuse. I want it to be the story of what God can do, how he met me in a deep, dark time and oh, so, slowly opened my eyes and began to reveal himself to me. Looking back to December 2017 and the original job loss (number 8, for the record…but the first in several years), I can honestly say I wasn’t ready to think and feel the things God has me thinking and feeling now. God has placed teachers and friends in my life. He’s given me small commands that seemed big and proven Himself faithful. He’s revealed Himself in scripture again and again, even though the heavens never opened up and angels never sang. The unfolding was so slow I missed it happening, but standing here today, it has surely happened. It's an unfolding I thought was impossible.

We’re a week out from another job loss. My husband has nothing lined up. He had an interview today that he was sure he’d nail and now he doesn’t think he did. He’s been home nearly all week (bless my patience), and yet hasn’t put out any other feelers. This is par for the course with him, and usually I’d be in full-blown panic mode, trying not to spend a cent while taking any and every gig that I could get to cover us.

This time, my heart has shifted from a posture of hoping desperately that my husband will provide to expecting that God will. I know my marriage is broken – that it really never was a marriage in the sense that God intended marriage to be. I don’t know if God plans to work miracles and heal it or work miracles and set us free. I do know that he sees what has happened. He hears what is said. He does not turn a blind eye to what the kids and I have endured. And God promises to both avenge and provide.

Faced with the likelihood of yet more disappointment from my husband, I’m choosing to put my faith in God. He is working, even if my husband isn’t.

I also know that time and time again, I’ve picked up my husband’s burden of provision when he refused to carry it…and I don’t have to do that anymore. I’m doing what God places in front of me, but I won’t be the man and the woman in this marriage anymore. If James steps out, God will step in.

I listened to the post-interview play-by-play tonight and didn’t work myself into a panic. I just let the words pass in one ear and out the other. What God wants, will be. I don’t even know what to ask for or what I want, so I can honestly say, I just want His will. In years past, I spent interviews anxiously playing out all scenarios in my mind. I coached and coaxed and begged. This time, I did nothing. I worked on things I had to work on. I played with the kids at the pool. I hope this is what it means to come to God with open hands. Open to let the unnecessary pass out and open to let the good pour in.

If I had to guess, I’d say my husband is feeling pretty rattled. This is not the Laura he is used to, and he can't figure out how to get me to step in and handle things.

This is not my burden, though. It is not my kids’ burden. We will NOT pick it up ever again. He can either work with God to carry it, or God will take it away.

Several times since that December job loss, I’ve stumbled across Psalm 90:15, where the writer begs God to “Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble.” When it popped up again a few days ago, just after our 14-year anniversary, it became my new prayer. It’s been 14 years, God. Please restore my joy. Teach me how to feel it. Let me live 14 years of peace and joy instead of fear and worry. Whether that’s with my husband or as a single woman is entirely up to God. The other burden I’ve put down is the burden to figure out it. That…belongs to God.

I don’t want my story – my life - to be a story of abuse. I want my story to show what God can do in the darkest of places because he’s done it in mine. I want to show how he can change a mind and a heart without changing circumstances. I want to show that he sets us free in this world and the next, and that His plan is bigger than mine could ever be.

Sleep...or Lack Thereof

My husband didn’t go to work yesterday.

No idea why. His job doesn’t officially end until the end of the month. But for the last few months, he’s been doing around 4 hours in the office and spending the rest of the day resting at home, watching You Tube videos about conspiracy theories and food fads. But yesterday he didn’t go at all.

He was home when we left for swim team, home when we came back, home we went to the team movie outing…and blessedly, not home when we returned. I thought for a minute he went to work, but he actually went shopping. For leisure clothes, of course, which tells me a lot about his future plans.

My heart and stomach actually turn over when the garage door crests a foot and I can see the undercarriage of his car. I never know what I’m going to get, but it definitely means there won’t be peace.

When my husband is home, I can’t exhale. If I need to go to the bathroom, I have to explain why I’m not working. He wants things. Wants to know why I’m not doing more. Creates drama with the kids that I have to reign in so they can get their work done. Creates drama with me. Heaven forbid I decide to lie down and shut my eyes because I’m exhausted…he immediately wakes me up. I’m literally not allowed to rest.

I probably don’t have to tell you what he’s doing. It certainly isn’t laundry, dishes, parenting, or lawn work.

It just recently occurred to me that sleep has become a form of psychological torture for me. I currently have bursitis in my right hip from sleeping exclusively on that side. I’m not allowed to sleep on the other side because I’m not allowed to “breathe” on James. And I can’t sleep on my back because I might snore or gurgle or make some other undesireable noise.  That was my mistake last night. I have no idea what I did, but I woke up at 5am to James yelling at me, “Would you stop doing that? You’re a fucking horse.”

I fled to the couch, which is where I spend roughly half my nights. I get criticized for that, too. For avoiding the marriage bed. Can you blame me?

Yesterday, while my husband didn’t work, I logged several hours at swim team practice, parented, cajoled, put out fires, shuttled kids to activities, made three meals and two snacks, did several loads of laundry, made another impromptu trip to the pool in the evening (his decision), put kids in bed, and finally made myself popcorn and headed upstairs to work for a few more hours. My husband watched a movie and went to bed.

An hour later, I crept into the room, shut the bathroom door before turning on the light, brushed my teeth, turned the bathroom light off before opening the door, found my way to the bed in the dark, removed the pillow sham and turned back the quilt, plugged in my phone and crawled in bed. My husband informed me that I was “just going to have to start going to bed when he does or start sleeping somewhere else because he can’t be having his sleep bothered like this.”

Now, it’s rare that I go to bed before him or get up after him (he hasn’t set an alarm in months), but guess what he does when he comes to bed or gets up? Turns on the overhead light, comments about why the hell I’m in bed (4:15 running wake up call, maybe?), and berates me. Of course, then I’m angry and can’t sleep, so I wind up stewing on the couch for two hours before I finally calm down enough to sleep. If he gets up before me and leaves, he makes sure to leave the overhead light on just to spite. And also to mention how lazy I am, still in bed and all.

I got up before him for a decade, and actually set out my clothes the night before so I wouldn’t disturb him. When I run, I leave my clothes in the laundry room the night before and get dressed down there. I’ve thought about giving him a taste of his own medicine, but it won’t help. It’ll just give him more ammunition to use against me.

I tried to take a nap a few weeks ago, and he came into the room and set off a musical greeting card and then walked away. We’ve quarreled about his excessive sleeping and napping, so sometimes he walks in and says, “Oh…and I’m the one who naps all the time, huh?”  At this point, I’m struggling with severe depression, and I literally need to lie down and close my eyes just to cope. But I can’t do that. It’s taken me until now to realize the toll that the constant sleep interruptions have taken on me. When he leaves for Reserve weekends, the very first thing I do is put on a TV show for the kids and go lie down for 30 minutes. It’s amazing to lie down without feeling the need to defend yourself.

He got up this morning somewhere around 8. I’d already fed all three kids, showered, and gotten the crew ready for swim team. He happily hummed “This Is the Day” as he got ready to go for a leisurely run. He sees no dichotomy between the way he treats me that the way God says to treat people. I was nursing a sleep hangover from the fury the night before.

Just as it took me time to figure out how damaging the sleep torture was, it took me a long time to realized I didn’t deserve it. When you’re told repeatedly how homely you are (remember the fucking horse comment? Not the first time…) you start to think your only choice is accepting that type of behavior or never being married.

I do have to say...the one change over the past year is that I’ve learned to go immediately to God when it happens. “God, do you see this? Do you see how this hurts me? God, please take the burden of my anger. Please defend me, because defending myself gets my nowhere against his lies. How long, God? How long?” I literally envision myself taking off a backpack labeled "Revenge" and handing it to God. I have to trust that He does a better job of this than I do. I haven’t quite learned not to stew about it, but I’m getting better. When I choose to trust that God is acting on my behalf – even though I can’t see evidence of it – I can fall back to sleep faster. I might salvage some joy in the day after. I can find a few glimmers of hope. And I can call my husband's behavior what it is without welling up with hatred. There's growth there, for sure, but I can't help but wonder how much I have to grow before God says "enough" and acts on my behalf. Maybe he already is...

I'm Not Enough (And That's OK)

The meme shows up in my Instagram feed at least three times a day. “You are enough,” it tells the exhausted mom of littles, torn between the demands of her kids, her husband, and her job. “You are enough,” it tells the driven woman who just keeps banging at the glass ceiling that won’t seem to shatter. “You are enough,” it promises the discouraged, the failures.

It’s well-intentioned, designed to be encouraging. It offers the weary an opportunity to rest. It helps us understand that it’s OK to go to bed and try again in the morning.

But it’s wrong. Or maybe it’s just incomplete.

See, I’m not enough. I don’t want the responsibility of being enough. I’m a fallible human in a shell of a body that betrays me. I start with the best of intentions, and some days my anxiety wins. Some days, I watch my children embrace the broken world view that I’ve fought so hard not to pass down. I see my oldest worry whether his body is big enough…good enough…and I realize that he grasped my own insecurities, the ones I tried so hard to hide. I go for a run – the race I trained for months to run – and my body gets sick. I’m twenty minutes slower than I hoped, and I can barely will myself to the finish line. I go to bed without cleaning the dishes in the sink. I put off the work project because I’m so frightened of failing that I can’t find a way to get started. On the 22^nd hour of trying to soothe the colicky baby, I put him in his crib, lock myself in the bathroom, and join him in screaming.

I am well-intentioned and hard-working, but I am not – and never will be – enough. I am, as Paul puts it, a “jar of clay”, prone to cracking, breaking, and crumbling.

Fortunately, my story doesn’t end there. And neither does yours.

I am not enough. You are not enough. But God? God is absolutely enough.

He has a way of taking the shattered remains of my striving and binding them together into something more beautiful than I imagined. He takes my halting first steps and multiplies them into a marathon. He stretches my “not enough” into more than enough. He makes all things beautiful in His time. His power is made perfect in weakness.

It takes a great deal of faith to relinquish control of our outcome to an unseen God, but the freedom I find there is indescribable. When I accept that God uses – and welcomes – my weakness, I find the freedom to start the scary project because I don’t have to control the outcome. I can trust it to God. When I trust God to order my steps, I can make my best decisions with confidence. I can relinquish the pressure of raising perfect children, choosing instead to point my children toward Him and letting Him complete the process.

When I leave the “enough-ness” to God, I can finally take the scary first steps.

Forgiving

This post - originally written in December 2018 - was a pretty significant realization for me. The idea that my God will fight for me, and that he might have a different end goal than my own, was life-changing. I wish I'd understood forgiveness from this standpoint sooner.

It doesn't mean that I'm going to stick around a tolerate the behavior that's become the norm, but it has changed my perspective on justice and my relationship to a God who promises to fight my battles.
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I have three children, and I’m constantly amazed by how much they fight.

As an only child, I suppose I knew in theory that siblings fight, but I was quite unprepared for the theory to become practical. Not only are the battles/squabbles/world wars constant, but the cruelty my babies are capable of came as a complete shock.

When I formed my opinions of parenting – long before I had children myself – I assumed that the parent’s role in these squabbles was cut and dry. I imagined I would intervene, punish the guilty party, and comfort the innocent.

Those of you who are parents are laughing because you know it’s rarely that simple. Simply establishing who started it – whatever “it” is – can take the better part of the day. And punishment isn’t so simple. Often, the motivation for meanness is rooted in deeper hurts and fears. The child who smashed her brother’s lego creation, for example, feels left out and is afraid she’ll never be a part of her big brother’s world. As a mama who wants, first and foremost, for my children to know they are precious and beloved, I can’t just punish the crime. I need to change behavior in such a way that restores the offending party to the fold.

Of course, this type of parenting takes time and wisdom, and unfortunately, I’m only human. Often, while I’m comforting and restoring, the offended party takes matters into its own hands. For example, the builder of the now smashed legos might get tired of mommy talking and decide to establish justice by punching his sister in the gut. Now, as a parent, I have an even larger job. There are now two guilty parties: the one that was mean in the first place, and the one that didn’t trust me to finish the job correctly.

This past year, my own life was turned upside down. A betrayal, either by someone close to me or another person I don’t even know, destroyed everything I’d worked on for years. Worse, I don’t know -and probably never will – anything near the whole story. In the very real grief that followed, I found myself fantasizing revenge, but I could never figure out where that revenge should be directed. Was the person I don’t even know the liar? Or the person I know and want to believe, but who has shown me that honesty isn’t a priority. I would go out for mental health runs, and as I replayed possible revenge scenarios in my mind, it would literally feel like someone kicked me in the chest. Four or five mile runs became one or two. My fight for my own justice was literally draining the strength from my body.

One night, as I dug into a book outlining the impact of our thought lives on our bodies, a single truth jumped off the page. “Maybe your prayers aren’t being answered because the sin of unforgiveness is separating you from God.”

The sin of unforgiveness.

It feels unfair, almost. To be a victim first, and then condemned because you’re angry about it.

But the more I read about unforgiveness and how it sabotages our minds and bodies, the more I realized that forgiveness wasn’t what I thought it was. It wasn’t, for example, hunkering down to let people walk all over me. And it wasn’t pretending that what other people did wasn’t right.

Rather, forgiveness means handing over my right to fight for justice – literally handing off that burden that had been crushing me everywhere I went – and letting God pick it up. As I sat there – in the tub, no less – I could hear a voice say, “How’s the revenge thing working out for you? Have you managed to get any justice? Why don’t you let me fight for you instead?”

Forgiveness means acknowledging that we mess up, big time, and we want that grace and mercy. We want to be restored. God is asking me to hand over my right to fitting revenge so that He can seek restoration of all parties. I don’t know what that will look like, or if I’ll even see evidence of it this side of heaven, but I do not that the battle is not mine to fight. The burden was simply too heavy.

When I made that decision to hand my unforgiveness over to God, I felt literal, immediate peace. I did feel lighter. Of course, very quickly I found myself presented with another situation where I had to forgive…and another…and another. I’ve become quite the regular in my war room, handing over my hurts and my battles again and again.

I don’t have the big picture. I can’t say that God swooped down and struck down my enemies. Of course, His goal for them is restoration, too. His timing is not my own.

What I can tell you is that the peace of stepping into God’s obedience was worth it. I wasn’t getting anywhere on my own. It’s time to let him fight these battles for me.

On Force

Over the past few years, I've written quite a bit about my marriage. I never published most of it, in part because of the fury I knew it would draw from my husband. The first rule of marriage, which I learned about a month before I married him, is that you must keep secrets. Everyone has secrets.

Certainly I also feared the affect it would have on his employment status, and our ability to make ends meet each month. Slowly but surely, however, I'm learning that keeping his secrets doesn't guarantee an income...it only enables behavior that must be confronted and ended.

Since I've taken the step to share the truth with some trusted people in my circle, I've decided to post some of those old blog posts here, on my personal and mostly unread blog. There's something about having them "out there" that feels freeing. The two previous posts fall into that category; they sat as "drafts" for several years. The post that follows is the same. I was shocked to realize Violet was only two when I wrote this. It has been TWO YEARS, yet nothing has changed.

Nothing.

I suppose part of telling this story is reminding myself that it's true. There are times when our lives aren't terrible. Times when he is engaging and fun. Times when he emerges from the closed office door and reads a story or wrestles. Those times play tricks on my mind, but at the end of the day they fail to atone for the consistent cruelty that's always just around the corner.

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I was working my way through a yoga workout after a week of intense weight-lifting and soreness. I’m never flexible, and on Sunday morning, I was struggling with severe pain in my back. I also had to go to the bathroom, but there were only ten minutes left. I decided to push through.

I sat on the ground, leaning into a stretch, straining with both hands down toward my left foot. I’m sure it was laughable, but I felt the stretch in that sore – maybe injured – back. And my stomach gurgled.

My husband said something about me not being flexible, walked over, and pressed down on my back. The sore spot between my shoulder blades screamed. My stomach screamed. Just because your body can bend under pressure doesn’t mean it should. I asked him to let go.

He didn’t.

He pressed harder. I started to panic. I don’t know that anyone else has ever forcefully touched me…refusing to release when asked. I felt trapped. I raised my voice. “Get off me.”

Until this point, I felt like it was a fair mistake. He likely thought he was helping me become more limber. Maybe he thought he needed to push me further than I thought I could be pushed. Perhaps he was thinking like a coach, trying to get me to the next level.

I do think good people make mistakes with boundaries.

But when I yelled, he didn’t apologize. He did let go, thank goodness. But he screamed at me. Swore. “You are such a bitch. Such a miserable bitch.” There was more. I rarely remember exact words anymore because the soundtrack has been the same, with increasing intensity, for twelve years now. But something to the effect that I have ruined his life, and I am worthless and miserable…a ruiner of life for everyone.

Then he left the room.

My two-year-old daughter, who was “helping” me with my workout (read: sitting on my lap while I tried to do the moves around her), stared in shock, then burst into tears.

Because I didn’t know what else to say, I told her, “Don’t ever let anyone touch you without permission. Your body is yours. Anyone who can’t respect that doesn’t deserve to be in your life.” She cried harder.

Even at two, she knew it was wrong. Even at two.

What can I tell her when she’s older? That our family court system will surely assign split custody? That letting her and her brothers navigate their father’s moods unsupervised is unconscionable to me? That I stay because I can’t let them fend for themselves?

Life seems cut and dry until you find yourself – and your children – in the mess. There’s no good option in this …just pushing forward and hoping for a breakthrough. Or at least limitations on the collateral damage.