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Crushed
It was early in the morning. Light had yet to glow through the curtains when I heard Levi crying in his crib in the next room. Not just any cry; it was the sound of distress with a hint of fear. He is long passed waking up in the middle of the night, so I rolled out of bed, somewhat alarmed by the tone of his voice, and walked quickly down the dimly lit hallway to his room.
I opened the door slowly and greeted him with the softest voice so I didn’t scare him. He immediately sat up crying and said, “Me scared,” so I picked him up, sat in the worn recliner in his room, pressed him against my chest, and began to rock.
Usually, he calms down right away, but not that morning. He just kept sobbing against my chest with his eyes closed, holding on to me tightly.
I was starting to become a little concerned that he was SO upset, so as I was running my fingers through his hair, half convinced he might be having a night terror, I asked the question – “Levi, what’s wrong, Buddy? Why are you so sad?”His response was something I wasn’t even remotely prepared for.
He got quiet for a moment, and then across his sweet little lips came a forceful blow to my soul – “No Daddy?” he said, or asked rather, with the obvious inflection at the end of his sentence.
I couldn’t respond. I wasn’t prepared to respond. I – I hadn’t thought this scenario through yet.
And in response to my silence, he repeated himself with the same question. “No Daddy?”
I just kept rocking and silently let the tears drop from my chin onto the mounds of thick blonde curls atop his head, unable to say anything.
No Son, you don’t have a Daddy.
_________
A few nights later, this exact same scene repeated itself. I was awakened by a fearful cry. I went to comfort him. I was rocking him in the chair when he suddenly stopped crying and said, “Daddy died.”
No question this time. Just a statement; a fact that he somehow knew.
I just responded, “Yes, Daddy died,” like I had to the other kids a million times over the last two years, but never to him.
Then he went back to crying, as though my confirmation was justification for the mysterious anguish he was feeling; emotions he didn’t quite understand, and words he understood even less.
Holding him in the dark, I could imagine what these questions looked like bouncing around behind his beautiful blue eyes – “Who is this person I’m missing? What even is a Daddy? What is died?” – big concepts for 2 years and 7 months.
2 years and 7 months… the exact age that Lilly was when her beloved Daddy suddenly died, and this realization felt like a sucker-punch at 4 am.
“How could she have been this small when he died? She seems so much bigger in my memories.
“How could she have processed any of this at 2 years and 7 months old?” No wonder she was a mess for a solid year.
“How has she already lived more than half her life without her Father?” That’s so brutally unfair.
The questions kept rolling through my mind as my heart broke for my daughter all over again, and truly shattered for my youngest son for the first time. My sweet miracle boy, born a mere 8 days after his father died, who, until this week, had given no indication that he was aware he was lacking anything. But now he knew, in the simplest terms, that someone should be here, but isn’t, and it crushed me.
________________
Two days ago, I was lying in bed trying to will myself to get up and get ready for church when I looked over at my now 5 year old daughter lying on the pillow next to me, face up toward the ceiling, with this frown on her beautiful little face; eyes closed and eyebrows furrowed.
I asked her, “Lilly, what are you thinking about, Sweetheart? Why are you frowning?”
And she so easily said, “My Dad building stuff with me. I miss my Dad. Do you think I’ll ever have another Dad?”
“I don’t know, Baby,” I began, but before I could even say something to the affect of “I sure hope so”, my oldest son popped his head up on the other side of the bed and assertively blurted,” I don’t EVER want another Dad!!”
Then he crawled over on top of me and started telling me all the things he missed about his Dad. I just laid there paralyzed by emotion, with tears sliding down the sides of my face soaking my hair, wondering just how long this season of my life is going to last. Crushed.
_______________
Grief is deceiving.
The early months after a loss are a time-warp of shock and disillusionment. After 2-3 months the shock wears off, and you begin to realize just how painfully different your existence will be as you experience life without your person. But something strange happened to me around the 3-month mark too, and that was when my “I’ve got this” mentality kicked into overdrive.
I’ve always been a doer; a go-getter; an achiever. My dad always told me growing up – “There are people who make excuses, and there are people who make things happen,” – and I’ve always tried to be the latter, sometimes to my detriment.
This mindset has pushed me to set high standards for myself. It’s been a big reason I’ve accomplished most of the major milestones that I have in my life, but it’s also become the reason I don’t do well mentally when I know I’m not measuring up. But instead of making excuses, I’ve always tried to own my failures and push harder.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work so well with grief.
After the fog of shock lifted, I felt that familiar unction to win at life compel me forward. I was determined that my kids would lack nothing, and that I’d take back every ounce of happiness that had been stolen from me. So I took off, sprinting ahead at full speed, convinced if I just ran harder and faster, maybe I’d get to the end of awful journey sooner.
But grief is deceiving, because what you envisioned as a 5K fun-run morphed into a 50k Ultramarathon where, shortly into your run, you have the sickening realization that you grossly underestimated the amount of endurance this would require.
You haven’t trained for this. How could you? It’s like having the course map and distance changed on you mid-race. Of course you didn’t train for this. You didn’t sign up for this.
You realize the finish line, if it does even exist, isn’t just around the next turn; it’s an infinite number of hills and valleys away; like chasing that elusive pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
“I’ve got this” only got me about 12 months into my grief journey before I realized I really didn’t “have it” at all.
I spent the next 6 months dialing back my speed, decommitting myself, reigning in my impulses to go and do and be apart of anything that might make me feel valued, and trying to find myself again, this time as a single 30-something with 3 small kids.
The second year of grief seemed even more deceptive than the first, because you automatically expect the first year after death to absolutely suck, which leads to a false conclusion that the next year will be easier, so then you’re even more surprised by how difficult the anniversaries and birthdays and family gatherings are the second time around. You’re surprised by your lack of anticipation of the pain in the second year, and the surprise leads to more pain.
“Why didn’t I see this coming?”
Year 2 was worse than Year 1 in a lot of ways, for that reason.
Now, I’m 7 months into Year 3, and quite honestly, I’m completely exhausted.
Utterly depleted.
Trampled on by life; demoralized by my inability to excel at anything because, out of necessity, I’m doing too much of everything; and crushed by the weight of what feels like failure in so many areas of life.
I’m desperately clinging to the dwindling hope I have that someday our lives will consist of more than this – more than endless hours ignoring my kids while I work on my computer to provide for us; more than being cranky and completely stressed out 24/7 from all the responsibility and no one to share it with; more than a level of loneliness I didn’t know was possible before now – more than just barely existing from one day to the next, praying for something to change, but having no idea what would actually make this situation any less difficult.
I feel like I’m literally being crushed by life.
I’ve found myself using the tactics of surviving early loss, and telling myself, “You just have to make it through this hour… this afternoon… this day.” I can barely even think about tomorrow or the next day. I’m a planner by nature, and I can’t even plan because the thought of more days like today is overwhelming. It’s all I can do to get through today with enough hope to get out of bed tomorrow and tackle the unrealistic list of obligations I have.
I heard a snippet of a Christine Caine sermon once where she referenced an oil-press, and said that crushing must take place to bring forth new oil – a representation for anointing – and how most people aren’t willing to be crushed, for a lot of reasons, which mostly go back to the fact that we value ourselves, our identity, our security more than the calling or anointing that God wants to bring out of us.
We worship our giftings and the platforms our natural talents bring us and are unwilling to go into the dark place, the secret place, where the real anointing is crushed out of us; the place where the pure is separated from the impure and the holy from the worldly, because it’s painful.
The first evening after my husband died, I went to my bedroom, closed the door, and knelt down by my bedside to pray. There had been dozens of people in my house since 10:00 am that morning when I found him dead, and I just wanted to have a moment alone with God.
I leaned forward over my 9-month pregnant belly and pressed my forehead against the side of the bed and just began to weep in exhaustion and desperation. I couldn’t think of anything to say in that moment except this – “Use this, Lord. Do something with it. Make something good come of this. If this is my lot, then use this for your glory somehow.”
I thought I could easily throw bitter olives on the crushing stone and see pure oil flow from them. Little did I know, I’d have to lay myself down under the millstone with them.
The truth is that I have no idea what is going to come from this tragedy. I’m honestly weary in waiting to see change. I’m wondering what is left that hasn’t already been crushed to smithereens, and why God would leave me in what feels like the useless state between smashed olive paste and the pure oil that gets pressed out of it?At what point does something good begin to flow out of this? I wish I knew.
What I do know is that I’m tired. I’m more tired than I’ve ever been in my entire life. But I’m reminded of another sermon I heard recently where the Pastor pointed out that even Jesus himself got tired. He sat down by the well outside of Samaria because he was tired. (John 4:6)
In his words, “Perfection got tired,” and something in that acknowledgement makes me feel less horrible, less of an excuse-maker, for wanting to stop running this race and sit down.
The Son of God got tired, and maybe I’m not failing God or losing my faith by needing to take a temporary seat and drink some water from the well of life.
The video clip ended with these words, and I think it’s a good place to end this too, because I don’t have a proverbial bow to tie on this post
. I’m emotionally crushed. I’m spiritually exhausted. I’m physically fatigued, but “faith doesn’t prevent fatigue. It just gives you a place to sit when you’re tired.” If you’re tired, Friends, come have a seat at the well. I’ll draw you some water… and buy you a coffee ❤️
Shannon 
Vacation Blues
“Every child has three core needs that must be met in order to develop into an emotionally healthy adult. They need to feel unconditionally loved, ultimately secure, and deeply significant. Of those three things, which do you feel like you lacked the most as a child?”
That felt like a heavy question for a first session with a new counselor. “I’ve only been here for thirty minutes, but I guess we’re just going to dive right in, aren’t we?” I thought to myself. “I am here for help though, so why not just rip the Band-aid off?”
I sat there on her comfy couch, leaned forward over my knees, staring at the handout explaining each of these emotional needs, pretending like I had to think really hard about it. I didn’t. I knew immediately which one of the three was my long-standing Achilles’ heel…
“Significance,” I replied. “I’ve always felt so utterly insignificant.”
The frustrating thing about that is I don’t even know why I’ve always felt so insignificant. I knew my parents loved me. They supported me in whatever endeavors I wanted to pursue, even from a young age. They did their best to help me achieve all the things I wanted to achieve. They were and still are great cheerleaders, but yet, something inside me has always screamed “You don’t matter!”
This belief has manifested itself in different ways throughout the course of my life. It was reinforced by bad relationships in early adulthood when boyfriends were unfaithful or when seemingly good friends just disappeared from my life like we were never even friends at all; when I didn’t get invited to the luncheon or to the girls’ night; or worse yet, when I did get invited and then people forgot I was even there; when I was once part of “the group” but then suddenly not part of the group anymore. All of these things and so many more just reiterating the belief that I don’t really matter.
Even being aware of this tendency after spending a lot of hours in counseling, I still have to fight this feeling today.
Just last month when I was checking into the gym, I walked up to the instructor to get my station assignment. He was looking at me waiting for me to tell him which station number; I thought he’d forgotten my name, so I said, “Shannon.”
He looked at me and smirked with his eyes, because his face was covered with his mask, and said, “I know your name, Shannon. You’ve been in three or four of my classes,” as he kind of chuckled.
And without even knowing what was really coming out of my mouth, I tried to recover and said, “Oh! I didn’t know. I’m super forgettable,” with an awkward laugh.
He gave me those crazy, confused eyes you make when you’re literally trying to process what was just said and replied, “You are not forgettable!”
And of instead of laughing it off, I countered back with, “Yes I am! Totally forgettable.”
*Insert Facepalm*
I finally got my station assignment and walked off super embarrassed, thinking, “What is wrong with you? Who argues with someone over how forgettable they are? I bet he remembers you now, you IDIOT!”
Your heart will tattle on itself, if you’re paying attention. My self-talk clearly needs work. And so does my real-talk, apparently. I probably need more counseling. Sigh…
Two and a half years into the loss of my husband and feeling “insignificant” is probably one of the most persistent emotions that I currently struggle with. I’m past the point of crying for hours on end or being stuck in a trance reminiscing about us. I don’t cry very much at all anymore, and it’s not that I’m no longer sad, but more that grief changes as you grow, and it manifests itself in other ways besides extreme sadness.
On the days when I feel the most grief-stricken, it’s usually because, in all honesty, I am so incredibly lonely.
I deeply miss sharing my life with someone and feeling important to someone; and not just “important” but being one of the most important people in their life. My husband would have moved heaven and earth for me, and I knew it. He was my biggest fan. I so completely knew that our kids and I were his entire world, and that’s a void that even the dearest friendships just can’t fill.
A couple of weeks ago, our Pastor preached an awesome sermon about the value of staying connected in biblical community. It was so great. You can watch it Here. But one of the things he said struck me in a different way than he probably intended. He was referencing the Creation story in Genesis when he pointed out that the first time God declared something “not good” was when he said it was not good for Adam to be alone.
Light – Good
Land and Seas – Good
Vegetation – Good
Sun, Moon, and Stars – Good
Sea Creatures – Good
Land Creatures – Good
Man – Good
Man Being Alone – NOT GOOD
Did celestial sirens start to wail in Eden when God declared this ‘not good’? Because I feel like they should have. I mean, this was such a big deal to God that he stopped whatever else he was doing and immediately started hunting for a partner for Adam, and he couldn’t find one, so he made one. Man being alone was so ‘not good’ that God created an addendum to his Creation Plan. Let that sink in for a minute.
I felt the sting of hot tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat as I choked back my emotion at this revelation. Not because this idea was hurtful, but because it was validating. It was a scriptural confirmation of all the feelings I’ve been having for months.
Raising kids by myself – Not Good
Working on life by myself – Not Good
Juggling all the things by myself – Not Good
Not having a helper – NOT GOOD
A verse I’ve read dozens of times suddenly jumped off the page and seemed to clearly explain the animosity and dissatisfaction I have with my current situation. Simply put – it’s just not the way God intended it to be. My entire existence feels counter to the perfect design of partnership that God established in the Garden, and I feel every single ounce of the daily struggle to keep moving forward alone.
This confirmation hit me extra hard, because I was watching this sermon online from a resort in Florida, on a mini, CHILD FREE, vacay with my Bestie, and two days prior, I attended a time-share presentation where the sales associate (who I’ll leave unnamed) and I had a really great connection. I’d spent the better part of 3 hours engaged in discussions about my life, things I like to do, adventures I’d been on, places I want to travel to, memories I want to make, all mixed with some friendly bantering, and toward the end of the conversation, which felt so genuine and unsales-y, he smiled at me from behind his mask and said, “You have to be the coolest girl I’ve ever met. If I wasn’t in a relationship, I’d so be taking you out tonight.”
I sort of giggled, and then he complimented my laugh, which no one has ever done before, and reiterated his comment, making me promise that if I come back to Destin next summer, I’ll look him up so we can have dinner.
I walked out of that building with an extra pep in my step, reeling off the excitement that someone thought I was interesting and funny, and dare I say… attractive? I basked in the warmth of that satisfaction like the Destin sun, remembering what it felt like to have someone’s undivided attention and experience the adrenaline rush of a new interest. For the rest of the day, my mind was saturated with mushy thoughts of what it would feel like to be in love again someday.
I creeped on his Fb a few hours later, and realistically, we probably wouldn’t be a good match, just based on the sole fact that his current girlfriend has a Jolly Roger tattooed on her arm and more cleavage than a Hooter’s girl peddling lust with a side of hot wings.
We had a great conversation, but beyond that, it looks like he’d probably prefer the 21 year old version of me who was all taking shot and shaking tail-feathers on Friday nights. Even as hard loneliness tries to convince me otherwise, I’m just not that girl anymore. I haven’t been in a long time, and I know that road only leads to emptiness and more loneliness.
Was he a good Dad? I don’t know. Was he financially responsible? No clue. Did he love the Lord like I do? Doubtful, since he didn’t mention it. But he was easy to talk to, he made me laugh, and he had that reckless abandon in his eyes that made me wonder if we’d end up slow-dancing to Brett Eldridge in a parking lot at midnight or laughing hysterically at bad jokes all night long.
For three hours, I didn’t know what was happening in Portland, how many children had been sold into sex-trafficking, how many new cases of Coronavirus there were, what the stock market was doing, how many jobs had been lost, or what Congress was (not) doing to save our country imploding. For three carefree hours, all I knew was that someone found me significant. And it was glorious.
So I’ve had a bit of the vacation blues since I got home from Destin.
Not to mention, I lost my coveted Kate Spade frames on the way to the airport… and that more than doubled the cost of this little weekend getaway.
And then a varicose vein in my leg swelled up so badly from the cabin pressure on the flight back that I was sure I had a blood clot in my leg for the next 3 days.
And then I realized I accidentally let the hosting on my original blog site expire, dumping 3 years of posts and over 500 subscribers into the abyss of the interwebs. (All. The. Tears.)
And then our church temporarily closed for in-person services, because people who I love dearly have tested positive for Coronavirus.
And I’m going for an MRI of my abdomen today to figure out this unexplained pain in my liver that just won’t go away – cue my anxiety – all within ten days of being home.
There is nothing quite like a relaxing vacation to illuminate how stressful reality is.
So I’ve just been here, in a house I can’t seem to keep picked up, worried about people I love who are sick, mad about the money it cost to replace my glasses, devastated about my blog, concerned about my own health, ignoring the list of things I need to do to send my kids back to school next month, struggling to juggle all the emotions and responsibilities, and I’ve never been more aware of just how alone I am.
Now, before you come at me with your “Jesus is your husband” babble, let me just kindly say: Can it, Karen.
Last I checked, Jesus isn’t going to take the boys for haircuts, help me brush teeth 8… EIGHT… literal times a day, vacuum out my van that has enough crumbs in the floorboard to feed starving children in India, cook dinner, make money to pay these bills, fold the mountains of laundry that keep accumulating, and juggle putting all these kids to bed.
You get the point. At least, I hope you do. My hope in Christ keeps me sane, for the most part, and empowers me to do these things, but there are very real physical demands of being a single parent of three kids. Please don’t downplay them with some cliché.
If Adam had physical access to God himself in the Garden of Eden, and God still deemed Adam’s lack of a helpmate as “not good”, I feel like I’m well within my scriptural rights to complain here… and pray here.
Don’t get me wrong, I have amazing people who help me. I don’t know what I’d do without them. My yard wouldn’t get mowed and my trash would probably never make it to the curb on Friday mornings if it wasn’t for my Dad, and I’d probably never get a night away from all these children without my in-laws.
What I’m saying doesn’t downplay their sacrifice to keep us going, but even they know their contribution isn’t the same as having someone in the trenches of daily life raising a family. It’s not the same.
And this is the part where I get easily discouraged, because as fun as laughing until my face hurt with some cute guy was, I know I’m not looking for a Good-time Charlie. I don’t want a project; I want a partner, because being 100% responsible for 3 tiny people’s financial, spiritual, social, emotional, nutritional, educational (thanks Rona!) and health needs is the most mentally taxing thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.
And the reality is, being single in your mid-30s is a super hard place to be…
It feels like the pond has done and dried up, because all the great Jesus-loving people you knew in your 20s are happily married with seventeen kids of their own. So your options are 1) people who’ve never been married with no kids, which just the thought of dating someone with no parenting experience sounds like more extra work than I could handle at this point, aside from the obvious question of ‘Why have you never been married?’ or 2) people who are divorced, which begs the question of ‘Why didn’t it work?… and more importantly – ‘On a scale of 1-10, how psycho is your ex-baby mama?’ or 3) people who’ve also been through something traumatic like spousal death.
Being single in your 30s is coming to the realization that just having basic criteria like mutual attraction, generally healthy, responsible, fun, loves God and is open to ministry, and wants to raise 3 young kids he didn’t create equates to a seemingly mathematical impossibility.
This is the point in my actuarial analysis where I’d like to just resign to soaking in my single misery by turning on some country music, gorging myself with cheesecake, and daydreaming about the time in my life where I felt like I had options and opportunities for love.
But here’s the thing – what you feed, grows.
When you feed your hatred, it grows.
When you feed your anxiety, it grows.
When you feed your loneliness, it grows.
You have to be mindful of and get tactical about controlling your thoughts and how you let the thoughts of others influence you. I know that feeding my dissatisfaction will only enable it to demand a greater presence in my mind, so (for the most part) I just don’t. I indulged it a little bit to write this post, and I’ll let it out of its box every now and then just to reprocess my feelings about it, but otherwise, I consciously try to feed my faith and my hope instead.
When you see me jamming hard to Hillsong, just know I’m feeding my faith. I might even be fighting a mental battle for contentment right then. If you call me and hear Chris Young playing in the background, you might need to stage a Friendervention.
What you feed, grows.
Shortly after my husband died, I met a lady whose husband had also died when she was in her mid-30s, leaving her with 5 small children. The circumstances of our encounter were just a total God-thing, but I’ll leave that for another post. Anyhow, I was messaging with her in the week after his death, and she sent me this scripture as an encouragement. She said someone had given it to her after her husband died, and it was “her verse” that she leaned on during her darkest days, and she was passing it on to me. So here it is:
In simple terms – “I would have given up if I didn’t believe I would see God do good things again in my lifetime. But I do, so I’m going to be brave, and I’m going to keep waiting for God to answer.”
For two and a half years now, this verse has been my go-to word for a quick infusion of hope when I’m feeling downcast. In it, I find the challenge I need to reset my frame of mind around what I truly believe: that ultimately God is good; that God has good things planned for my life; and that He loves me enough to bring about that goodness in my life, even in the midst of what has felt like destruction.
And here’s where I hit my turn-around, because when I begin to meditate on this verse, I feel my spirit swell with hope, because I know I serve the God who specializes in making the impossible, possible; the God who, like the song says, turns ‘graves into gardens’; the God who, like Isaiah 61:3 says and this blog is named after, gives a crown of beauty in exchange for your ashes of despair.
Listen Friends, you don’t have to try hard to sell your situation to God like it’s on the discount rack at Dollar General. If you will humbly surrender it to him, He will literally just hand you something beautiful in exchange for it… because He loves you unconditionally… He wants you to feel ultimately secure in Him… and He finds you deeply significant.
Whatever mess you’re standing in the middle of today, whether it’s an unexpected season of chaos and loneliness like me, health challenges, financial hardship, extreme grief, whatever it may be, I pray you take courage; I pray you keep going; and I pray you wait for the Lord.
Blessings!
Shannon