hope blooms amidst the dreams unfulfilled |
The process of grieving in an estranged relationship has
so many levels and variables to come to terms with.
Your child, the one you loved and nurtured from the
moment they were conceived and born, until the moment they told you they wanted
nothing more to do with you has cast you out of their present and their
future.
This child, now an adult, has chosen to withhold their
time, their energy their affection and love and even their offspring from
you. You still love them. They are still
a part of your heart, after all once a parent always a parent, but you are also
very much alone. You suffer rejection.
You face abandonment. Your worst fear
faces you, loneliness in old age.
Gone are the hopes and the ideals of what you though
would be. Replaced with the irrefutable
knowledge that it can never go back to what it was.
So you grieve the loss of relationship,
You grieve the loss of innocent belief in the future.
You grieve the words spoken and the words unsaid.
You grieve for the stranger who now inhabits your child’s
mind and body and spirit.
You grieve the loss of your hopes and dreams.
Your child lives but so much else has died.
Some days you even fear that love itself has also died,
especially on those days when your heart is numb because it can’t bear any more
pain.
Inevitably in the process of grieving you grow and you
change.
Change at first was forced upon you by your
offspring. The lonely days filled with
unanswered questions, the self-examination and guilt and self-recrimination
inevitably they change you. They leave
you feeling vulnerable, exposed raw and unsure.
These changes force you to take action lest they destroy your spirit and
will to live.
Then in the course of healing you address and face
unresolved issues from your own past.
You heal your own inner child that you shut the door on as you yourself
became an adult. You face those
unresolved fears and self-doubts that lingered in the dark recesses of your
mind. You face abandonment and rejection
issues, confidence issues, fear of doing wrong or not doing good enough and you
even learn to face your own mortality.
And everything you learn deepens your appreciation of
life and the precious nature of those days that are given to us.
Then to try to make sense of it all you learn about
psychology and character traits and personality quirks that make people do
things the way they do. And in the
process of learning things you never thought you needed to know you start to
understand things that you never expected needing to understand.
You start to see your child through the eyes of this
knowledge and you start to feel sorry for them and that in some way they have
become stunted in their growth toward maturity.
Somewhere within all the hurt you feel, a compassion
starts to blossom. Not an excusing of
inexcusable behaviour, but rather a feeling that they have somehow lost their
way.
Whether or not they will ever learn or find a way back is
not the point, rather the point is that you let them go, you give them their
own future and their own regrets that will come as life teaches them lessons
they never thought they needed to learn.
All of this happens slowly and gradually amidst tears and
grief and anger and sorrow and desperation and all the other emotions that grab
you on any given day as you struggle to come to terms with the loss.
In between you start to build new aspirations. You start to awaken old dreams that were put
away so you could devote more of yourself to you children. You start to dream again of a different
future and you find a new purpose in life.
As you fill each day with these new experiences you start
to experience joy and happiness again.
You start to feel content that even though you don’t have what you had
hoped for, what you do have is, while not perfect, not bad either.
Then one day you awake to realized that you have put the
dreams of what could have been aside.
Your grief for what you don’t have diminishes. You realize that those dreams are not a part
of your future and that holding on to them would be holding you back from
healing and moving forward. You realize
that while they were good dreams, they were only your dreams and not your
reality.
And that day you realize that you have healed a lot more
than you ever hoped could be possible on that long ago day when your world
disintegrated around you, when you first looked despair in the face and said “I
don’t think I can make it through another day”
I had such a day recently, when I woke up and felt joy at
being alive, and gratitude that I can do the things that I now love to do.
Will I still regret the loss of all that could have
been? Without a doubt.
Will I still sorrow for the relationship that was
broken? Indubitably.
Will I still wish things could have been different? Most definitely.
Will I continue to miss my old dreams? Assuredly.
Will grief linger in the recesses of my heart? Oh yes!
Will I miss what could have been? Always.
But regret is not a place to live. In that direction lies the lingering death of
waiting for the shell of a body to die while life passes you by.
Life is embracing what is and making the most of it.
Life is reaching out and touching and growing and
learning.
Life is going beyond sorrow to learn to love and trust
again.
Life is letting go of the past a creating a different
future.
Life is connecting with joy and contentment and gratitude
and a different kind of happiness.
I find that I have reached that turning point.
I choose life.
Renate Dundys
Marrello
2015 – 07 - 09
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You always put my feelings into words so eloquently. I too have been at this point for awhile. I feel for my daughter also for all she has lost. Thanks again.
ReplyDeleteI am with you in heart and soul. I am at peace and that is where you are as well.
ReplyDeleteSometime you have to finally come to the knowledge it really is their choice, accept it and move on. Maybe someday they'll look back and grieve their loss.
ReplyDeleteIt's as if you are in my head...and in my heart...thank you...
ReplyDelete"Life is going beyond sorrow to learn to love and trust again."
ReplyDeleteThat is what I would love to learn again... it seems to have all died inside, ever since this tsunami tore my world apart. Thanks for reminding me "love and trust and joy" do exist in the world, and perhaps one day I will again be able to find it.
I needed to read this today. Thank you for sharing your words with us.
ReplyDeleteRebate, you said it so well. I still feel like I can never live again, but feeling the pain must mean I am no longer numb. That must be a good thing, even if it doesn’t feel that way now. Gracias, amiga.
ReplyDeleteCorrection, to Renate (not rebate!)
ReplyDeleteThe only solace I have found is realizing how much easier, calmer, tranquil and just plain easier it is to have my own personal “hater” gone from my life. Oh, the anger, drama and conflict he brought to everything in my life! Constant chaos, conflict, anger, name calling and more, not to mention the money he got from me while attacking me behind my back. Looking at it this, how much better it is to hsve him gone out of my life, forever. And he divorced me, cut me off, which was really a favor since I could never have abandoned my only child. But he could reject me. I just pray he does not have children of his own, so he can’t destroy them like he tried to destroy me. God works in mysterious ways, as does the devil. I hesitate to think what I would do if he came back, even though I know he would try to kill me all over again. Better to leave sleeping dogs and monsters alone.
ReplyDelete