The Beginning of The New Normal

I am about three years into this separation/divorce thing. Three years from the point when I realized my marriage may not make it - that, despite my best efforts, my husband may actually decide to leave. That option had never occured to me, despite years of struggle and pain. I had assumed that, no matter how bad things got, eventually God would come through with flying colors, healing our marriage and knitting us together in the way he'd always intended.

It was three years ago that I started to awaken to the fact that one of us was not interested in God's plan for our marriage.

The first year was a wild roller-coaster ride, filled with unfathomable lows of heartbreak, fear, and rage - as well as spectacular highs of seeing God come through for me and my kids, using the very circumstances meant for our destruction to bring us closer to him. The second year involved lots of change - moving to a new city, my kids attending school outside our home for the first time, my return to college. It was a year of finalizing my divorce, embracing my singleness, building a new life.

Things have calmed down quite a bit as we approach the end of our third year. My kids are old hands at school, and so am I. Crises are few and far between. We have routine and schedule in our family. It is our New Normal, and I thought I'd be happy and content by this stage of the game. After all, we've come through a traumatic experience and have, I think, done more than survive. I guess I'd hoped that, after the initial trauma was over, there would be nothing left to grieve.

But as the need to put out daily fires all but disappears, there is nothing to distract me from the fact that all of us are living with some serious wounds - wounds of rejection, of fear. Living with the knowledge that the pits God will allow you to fall into can be horrifyingly deep.

Our nuclear family was torn apart. We survived the nuclear explosion. But I'm realizing that we'll be dealing with the fallout for years to come.