It's been a few years since I've shared, so in honor of my 15 year wedding anniversary today, I thought I would break the silence and share a little story. (I apologize for the length... it's been a while.)
Once
upon a time, there was a girl and a boy.
As the story goes, they fell in love and got married. This girl thought the boy would be the answer
to all of her problems. When she needed
peace, she attempted to create peace with the boy. She needed joy, and couldn’t always find it
with him. She desperately needed love,
and although the boy loved her very much, it was never enough to fill up the
hole in her heart. She continued to try
to make herself happy, to fill that void in her life. She was determined to make their marriage
work because divorce had become the new cool, and for once, she didn’t want to
fit in.
To fill the void in her life,
the girl often found herself turning to shopping, to social media, and to food. She hoped that the things she bought would
bring her true happiness, but they did not.
Social media was a temporary and
false fix for the loneliness she felt inside, and control became like a drug for the girl.
When she felt completely empty, the girl tried to control- anyone and
anything. She became the resident
know-it-all, and ultimately began to push the boy away. Because she couldn’t “feel” his love the way
she wanted to, she reasoned (based on life experiences) that she must not be ‘enough’
in some way. She tried to change
herself. She dieted. She changed the way she dressed, the way she
acted, the way she looked. She changed
the way their house looked and the way they did life at home. She was convinced that if she somehow changed
just enough, she could finally fill the void inside, and feel like she was
finally ‘enough’ to deserve the love she desperately desired.
But these changes did not impact the boy the
way she had hoped. You see, while the
girl was trying to change herself to be what society says the boy should want,
the boy was convinced that, based on her words and actions, he must somehow not
be ‘enough’ for her. The boy convinced
himself that if he could just work harder, do more, somehow BE more, then he
could finally show her how loved she really was. The boy worked, and worked, and worked as
hard as he could. He was the hardest working man the girl had ever
met. She admired his ability to get up
day after day, no matter how tired he was, and go to work to support their
family. The boy worked two jobs, and in
an attempt to find fulfillment, even volunteered regularly at their
church. He was determined to show the
girl how much he loved her, but the girl was blinded by her own emptiness.
Although she loved this boy, she felt like
she just couldn’t ever be enough for him.
She had convinced herself that if she were enough, he might be more
eager to help out when he got home. He
might see her, exhausted and weary, and step in to help out. Likewise, the boy worked so much at his jobs and
at his church that he thought surely the girl would notice, appreciate all of
his efforts, and suggest that he should rest while she took care of the kids
and the household.
Instead, the girl complained. She had been running on fumes for what seemed
like years, and could no longer manage to continue trying to make the boy
happy. She had convinced herself that
she could not ever make him happy, and she grew depressed. Anger grew out of this depression, and began
to consume their house. The boy continued to work, in hopes that his
efforts would be noticed and the girl would finally be satisfied. For if
the girl could be satisfied, then he, too, would be satisfied and the two could
finally be at peace.
However, when the
girl saw the boy, she felt rejected, hurt, frustrated, sad, lonely, and mostly
like she had failed at marriage. The way
she looked at him changed from admiration to frustration, and she found it easy
to take her frustrations for herself out on him. She would often give in to the temptation to
control and criticize or micro-manage him just to make herself temporarily feel
better about her own shortcomings. The
boy felt badly that he could not do more to help, to change the situation, and
he began to beat himself up. While listening
to her constant criticism he now believed that he, too, was a failure, and
would never be able to satisfy the girl’s need for love. He had pursued her so passionately, so
lovingly in the beginning, but now he had nothing left to give. The boy, too, eventually began to be consumed
by this depression.
But
God.
The
entire time that they were suffering in their struggles, God saw them, and He
never left them. He knew the girl had
been looking for His love all along, but God is a patient God, and He would not
force the girl to receive His love.
Instead, he drew her in with His loving kindness. He wooed her by loving her (even when she
felt the least lovable) and He spoke truth where she had previously been
wounded by lies. He began to open the
eyes of the girl so that He could show her how loved she truly was. Days, weeks, and months passed. The depression started melting away. At last, the girl began to see the truths
about how loved she really is and about how incredible her husband really
is.
Time with the Lord turned from a
chore in to a necessity for the girl- she found that if she missed time sitting
in the presence of The Lord, that she was short-tempered, impatient, rude,
selfish, and judgmental. Likewise, she
discovered that when she made time to open her Bible (not just the app, but the
actual paper pages), the words of God jumped off of the page and became like a
soothing balm, offering peace for her mind, body, and spirit. When she asked The Lord a question, she
discovered that He really was answering all along. She discovered that she wasn’t alone (and had
not been, not ever- in spite of the lies that Satan had thrown her way). This truth brought a deep-seeded peace to her
soul.
Over time, the girl noticed that
the hole she had grown so accustomed to, had been lovingly filled. The girl could see that their time together
had begun to heal her, but her husband was still hurting. The girl asked The Lord to heal her
husband. She watched and waited, but the
healing didn’t happen right away (even though the movies suggest that it
should.) The girl became frustrated and
in attempts to help her husband experience what she had been blessed to
experience, she picked back up that false sense of control, abandoning her time
with God. The impatience kicked back
in. The nagging started again. The well-intentioned wife-preaching started again. Convinced that he was a complete failure, the boy remained depressed.
And
then one night when the girl was closest to rock bottom, she opened her mouth
the say the unthinkable, but God stepped in.
It was as if God, himself, placed His Almighty hand over her great big mouth and
turned everything horrible that she was about to say in to soothing words for
her husband’s soul. The girl stopped
speaking. Unable to continue with the
horrible thoughts (lies) she had been thinking, she asked God to show her how
He saw her husband in that moment. The
picture that came to her mind was a great big man completely hunched over-
defeated and discouraged. In the
picture, he lacked the confidence to look into his wife’s face, so instead he
kept his head down and continued to beat himself up over all of his perceived
failures.
The girl was immediately heartbroken for
the boy. She could finally see how her
words had affected him, and so through her beautiful-ugly cry, she confessed
her thoughts, her attempts to control, and her lack of faith in The Lord’s
timing. And then God spoke to the boy
that day. He told the boy some things
that the girl could never have known on her own. He began to lift the head of the boy,
offering hope, truth, love, and freedom.
During this season, the boy started to walk a little taller. God continued to bring about much-needed
peace and healing. It was during this
season that God united the couple with an unshakable bond.
Don’t misunderstand- that one experience didn’t
mean that they would never argue or that they would magically live “happily ever after”,
but it did teach them both that the voids in their lives were placed there by
God, so that He could gently draw the boy and the girl to Himself and so that He could fill each of them with what they needed most. Knowing this, the burden
of filling that void was lifted from each of them, and they were free to laugh
again- free to just “be”.
And when the time came that the boy
and the girl were finally free, each naturally began to fill up the proverbial “love tank” of the other. It happened
out of an overflow of what God had been doing in their lives. Sometimes it happened in the little things- God might remind the boy that the girl was
parched, and the boy might bring the girl a drink, exactly when she needed
it. This might make the girl feel loved,
and on the cycle went.
The girl now knew
that she was no longer enslaved to the prison of working to become enough, or
working to earn love, and finally felt free to give love. Through time spent listening to God, the girl
came to understand that she was fully loved, flaws and all, because of who she
was, not because of anything she had (or had not) done. She was set free by the truth that she was
already (and always had been) enough- no hair dye needed.
And that, my friends, is the story of how we survived these first fifteen years.
Thank you for reading and following our story. I have a feeling there is much, much more to come!
No longer enslaved,
No longer I,
The Real Life Mom.
