I don’t really have a gauge for how to write about my husband leaving our family.

Is there a code for what to include and what to leave out?

I hate divorce.

It’s easy to hate that.

Has God used this evil for good in the lives of my children and myself?

Absolutely and already.

Is divorce good?

Absolutely not.

The sadness for me personally is a bit removed, a little in the past.  I mean, the consequences feel never ending and there is no sentence I could ever write to encompass all of what I would like to say about those feelings and that pain.

But the feelings are very different for my children.

They reside in a neighborhood where I have never been.  An address that was never mine.

I cannot say I understand what it is like for my parents to be divorced.

I do not understand.

My father was married to my mother until the moment he and I sat in a small stale hospital room one cold Montana day in December, where his bride was painfully and slowly greeting the next life.

I grew up in some sort of magic rural bubble and I can remember exactly only one single high school friend whose parents were divorced.  Even in college, my closest friends somehow magically grew up in the same bubbles and all had families with both mom and dad still married to one another.

I never sat in a room and listened to my dad tell me he wasn’t coming home.

It isn’t a concept I can understand or imagine.

So I cannot fully understand my own children.  They speak a language foreign to me.

But a universal one as well.

The language of loss.

Of misplaced hope.

Of expectations severed.

Of failure and fear and heartache.

That’s a language we all know.

We want “this” but we get “that” instead.

It’s a language we all hope our children do not become well versed in until adulthood – right?

It’s not like Spanish – there are no bonus points for early sign ups and we are not excited to hear our toddlers becoming bilingual.

Instead, it’s a foreign language credit we’d rather put off.  One that can wait until the years of higher education, not the primary grades.

And yet.  Here we are, my kids and I.

Speaking and muddling through in the dark.  Words tainting their tongues like bitter berries.

Once they’ve heard the language, I can’t take it back from them.  I’ve looked for a rewind, but I’ve had no luck.

This language of loss.

But God.

Of course, I cannot complete this post without redirecting – my heart, maybe yours, definitely the hearts of the children I love – to the only safe place for their hearts to process these new words, this thrust-upon-them language.

God.  The healer of all wounds.  The One To Make Right All Wrongs.

The bridge builder.  The peacemaker.

The speaker of every language we will ever struggle to accept.

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