Doom's Day.......Thursday Dec 7th 2007

Not so funny to compare my first marriage to the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. If you think about how silently the attack came and the air was clear and the sun was shining, all the while there was an attack under way. My first marriage was exactly like that. The silence was there and all the while the doom was right around the corner. You would not have been able to convince us of it then in that moment, but I am sure if you had checked in with us just a few short weeks down the road we would have weighed in on just how big of a mess we had gotten ourselves into. Is there any way around it, I mean it's just so humbling to hear the words aloud in my head. I was only 24 years old and thought the whole world around me was caving in. Everyone was miserable (still is) and I WASN'T GOING TO BE LIKE THEM. I thought if I just found someone who could see the good in me and we could work and make a life, everything would fall into place. I couldn't have been more wrong. I didn't have the tools in my head to deal with the stress that life dishes out. That's not to say that all of us have that issue, but once again you don't always have the same luck when picking out spouses!! I was so angry in a silent but deadly way back then that my life wasn't what I wanted and I wasn't going to let anymore time go by without trying to make it what I wanted. I never saw the "Doom" until it was too late. If you would have told me I was going to keep an engagement for 2 months before I secretly got married on a random Thursday at what time in the afternoon? 2ish? I mean you've got to be kidding me. I've always appeared high maintenance while really being laid back. I didn't ever think it added up to getting married in secret on a Thursday. I have nothing against the oddest day of the week. I just never expected that at a poignant point in my career, I'd be marrying someone literally twice my age only to find out that I was against all odds from the very start because I didn't have the relationship with myself that is required to be in a "marriage". I NEEDED A STRONGER WALK WITH THE LORD. A lot of people remember that very odd time in my life. Thank goodness I didn't go through the weird eyeliner phase! It's definitely weird to hear this girl is engaged and before you know it I'm married before Christmas of the same year. I should have known things weren't going to work out the way I had planned them because you drag the whole family through something like that. We don't all go through in a healthy understanding way. Oh no, that would be too easy! Let's go back to late September when my then husband was asking for my hand in marriage from my father at the Warwick Hotel (a well known town restaurant), my mother wasn't there (she was on a trip). I knew that, and told my husband that my mother was a totally different woman when she is with my father then when she is alone. If we involved her in the process of asking for permission, we would end up bringing things up from the 3rd grade unresolved and totally pointless. So I told him we should just talk to my father and get this over with because even though we weren't going to get the blessing from him, we weren't going to hide either. Or so I thought. That was a night to remember. Not in a good way, of course. You always want to believe the best in your parents. I really believe until you realize your parents aren't perfect or know everything, you're left thinking they are. I don't think I was ever fully convinced of how horrible my parent's relationship was until the night my father told me all of the secrets he'd been hiding for so many years. Try to picture me sitting at the table with my soon to be husband (who's my fathers age) and listening to how my father is not happy in his marriage and all of the secrets he's been hiding come out to scare us both away from getting married. GEESH.....it sounds just like what it was.....the biggest surreal nightmare of my life. How is it the words I was hearing come out of my father's mouth were so much harsher than the same words I had heard inside my own head for decades?! Well, THAT'S EXACTLY MY POINT. It does change things when we speak the words out loud rather than just inside our own heads. The truth takes on a totally different feeling when it's out in the open for everyone to chew on. I knew the tactic to scare me out of marriage wasn't going to work. He hadn't thought through what he was really revealing. My father's marriage had and still doesn't have accountability to get help when needed. I wanted more out of life and thought I had covered my bases by finding someone who had gone through it before. On many levels divorce can truly heal old wounds in people. My soon to be husband seemed less bitter than my father so my assumption was that he had worked out all the kinks from his past to lead him straight to me where the rest was going to be history! Ummmm...no, not so much. Instead I realized that both men were lying about who they really were. They got away with it for so long because so many marriages (and people in marriages) are lying about who they are. They easily blended into society along with everyone else by displaying only the outward appearance of having it all together. Before you jump to the conclusion that I believe people actually reach the level of "having it all together", I don't. I do believe we can always be aware to be better tomorrow than we were today. It's just a mindset to be involved with ourselves in a goal oriented mentality. Too often we find people are only allowing you to see the person they think you want them to be or a more acceptable version of themselves. RIDICULOUS. It doesn't help any of us to put ourselves on the back burner out of what we are to afraid to face in ourselves. I learned very quickly that my soon to be husband and father had been hiding how they truly felt about themselves for a long time and it was beginning to catch up with them. It isn't easy when your daughter and soon to be wife is much younger than you but continually asking questions as to why things are not being dealt with. Often the answer is that you can't do anything about it. I disagree. I think the hardest part about confrontation is that it is done out of anger instead of love for all people- to empower humans all over the planet to see community. If we had been a unified family and a team, things may never have gotten out of hand that lone Thursday......who's to say it wasn't the most amazing day of my life. I couldn't go back. I had begun a journey so grueling and wretched to reveal my true self and to smooth out the rough edges I had acquired along the way. After 3 verrry long years, this very same day would be the day I invited Joshua to meet my friends for much needed encouragement and conversation. The man God brought to me to see me through the rest....Two days later on a Thursday he took me on our first date!!! You never know what can happen on a Thursday, the oddest day out of the week.