How do you follow a post like yesterday’s?

I don’t know.

I guess the same way you follow a day like last Thursday and a year like last year, you just do.

And, in so many giant and in so many tiny ways, last Thursday was a day not unlike any other day.  It was a legal end of a nearly twenty year marriage but the real death of the marriage had happened long before Thursday.

I’m certain I’ll write more about this topic in the future – there’s a whole lotta processing and shifting and working through going on in my heart and in my life and I’m pretty sure I don’t know how to get from Point A to Point B without recording it and seeing it all in words.   It’s what I do. It’s who I am.

This blog will still be full of the regular posts – that ping pong back and forth between topics of kid raising and heart sharing and silly story offering and heavy thoughts and travel stories.

But I couldn’t jump right back on the bandwagon without a gigantic acknowledgment of this community.

It’s an incredible gift in my life.

You guys are a literal and tangible kindness to my soul.

I don’t enjoy talking on the phone.  ( I haven’t enjoyed it since about tenth grade, back when my family first purchased a cordless phone and I would hide the phone upstairs in my room with the ringer turned off sometimes for when my friends would call me after my parents had gone to bed.)

I don’t have an A game when it comes to returning texts in a timely manner.

Even my own daughter complains that my ringer is permanently set to silent and I miss phone calls.

Facebook messages slip by unreturned on occasion.

(I’m working on it, guys.)

But I read every single one of them.

And they almost always seem to appear exactly when I need a little lift, a little hope, a little reminder of what’s been and what’s to come.

Your kind and thoughtful, generous and heartfelt, words to me have never gone unnoticed.

You who have taken the time to remind me that I am loved, that I am more than this season of my life, that my children are not damaged goods, your words have been balm and solace.

Thank you.

I know we are all rolling around in the story of own lives, the busy of jobs and kids and car pool and summer and not enough sleep and not enough money and a gigantic to do list so whenever you stop what is spinning your world and you take a minute to enter into my world, pause in prayer or kind thoughts for me and mine – it is a genuine gift.

This entire past year and a half there has been nothing more evident to the kids and I than the fact that people care about us.  They love us.  They lift us up when we fall down and they carry us when we can’t walk.  There is nothing we have done to deserve this outpouring of love and yet, it has never failed to support and uplift, to encourage us and light our dark days.

This is blanket sort of thanks, I know, and it’s mostly inadequate. But I need to say it anyway.

Because there are days – there have been and there will be – that are just simply difficult to live through.

For me, for my kids, for you, for your kids.

But when we all hold hands, virtually and for real in our kitchens and in parking lots, we gather up just enough courage, just enough strength, just enough uuumph to move ourselves in the right direction for that moment.

And you guys have absolutely been doing that for me.

Providing the just enough.

Thank you.

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