At this time of year, when we, in the Northern Hemisphere experience the shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice, the beginning of winter, I’m often reminded of one of the first lessons I learned about myself from the worst experience of my life. On the day when we experience the most darkness, we also recognize that we’ve turned a corner, so to speak. The days begin to get longer. Every day, we get a little bit more daylight, imperceptibly at first, but by February, it’s noticeable. One day in February, we wake up and realize it doesn’t feel like we’re living in darkness all the time anymore. And we realize the long sunny summer days are coming again and will be here soon enough.
The months that followed my first husband’s abandonment of myself and my children were dark days. I remember the fear and hopelessness I felt. The loss of identify, the loss of my story, my past, my future, my present. What did anything mean? I couldn’t get out of bed some mornings, but most days, I did. I plodded along, trying to make sense of the bomb that had hit my life. Mostly I stayed in the game and kept getting up and going through the daily motions of life, formulating and working a plan to deal with all the fallout that kept revealing itself. I carried on for my children. My four innocent children who needed me. They needed me to figure things out, to stay strong and to be brave. Things were grim. There were financial concerns; I had a house to sell and it wasn’t going well. My soon-to-be ex-husband wanted to make some money off the house even though we had barely moved in before he ran off with the other woman. He refused to lower the price so that it would just sell, and I could see into the future; I could see that if I couldn’t sell it by the time I moved to another city to take the engineering job waiting for me at the end of the children’s school year, we were going to lose the house altogether. This was only one of many problems.
I felt mostly dead inside for those months. I never clearly formulated the thought, but deep down, I wasn’t sure if I believed I would ever have a reason to feel joy again; I didn’t know when or if I would laugh again – I mean really laugh because of the lighter side of life. I wasn’t sure if I would ever know that again, or feel that again. Ease, peace, a sense of calm and surety about my life. Were those things available to me anymore? I didn’t even know. I had never been in such a dark place or for so long. I didn’t know if a light at the end of the tunnel even existed for a tunnel this deep, dark and long.
Then, one day, I was in the kitchen with my four year old girl. She was so cute and little and I tried every day just to try to be the relaxed easy going reassuring mom I knew she would need. I tried to make things as normal for my kids as I could. We kept on with the visits to the park, walking the dog together on Sundays, making crafts and cookies, music lessons and sports activities. I was really trying to keep things normal for all my children. So, this one afternoon, my littlest came into the kitchen while I was working in there, and I had just dried my hands. And out of the blue, I grabbed her and just started a tickle fight with her right there on the kitchen floor. It was unexpected, unplanned, spontaneous and so “normal”. I did it hoping to make her smile, to make her giggle and to bring a bit of enjoyment into her young life. I did it so she could feel her mom’s attention and interest in playing with her, being with her, getting on her level. But something amazing happened to me in that moment, as I was on the floor with her, listening to her little peels of laughter rising like weightless, shiny bubbles, floating on the air. I had this intense moment of joy course through me, caught up with her in the fun of the moment. I felt a hope, a glimmer, really, that a light somewhere at the end of the dark tunnel I felt myself in could exist. For the first time since my husband had left and I had discovered the heart wrenching emails between him and his affair partner and felt the sting of the de-humanizing ways they talked about me to justify their actions, I considered and even believed that I would find joy again. In that moment, I learned the first and most important lesson about myself of many that would follow – I understood that no matter how dark things felt, I was going to find myself and my joy again someday; that I was capable of finding joy and love again. I believed for the first time that I wasn’t going to have to spend the rest of my life in that dark place. The sun was returning.
And just like that day in February, that first day each winter after driving to work and home in the pitch dark every day for months, when suddenly it seems, the sun lasts long enough to see the sun go down on the way home, and you remember that summer and sunshine are not too far off.
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