January is a great month to purge. Purge closets. Purge drawers. Purge the papers under the bed. That’s where I keep my divorce papers. For legal purposes, those will have to stay. But I still have drawers full of journals. Interspersed with joyful reflections on homemaking and childrearing are lamentations over a failing marriage. Trying to purge, but how do I skim off the fat (broken marriage and betrayal) and keep the healthy minerals (memories of motherhood)? It should be as easy as soup. But the skimming process forces me to read them. To shred or not to shred. That is the question. Yet I must purge. I sure could use the drawer space for more fuzzy sox.
So I’ve been caught up in this for several days. It plunged me into melancholy. I started rehashing stuff in my mind. I’m grieving again, with Natalie Merchant moaning in the background. It doesn’t help that this month marks the 10th Anniversary of my divorce being final.
I failed to heed wisdom I wrote about before in my post The Second Time Around: Yours, Mine and Ours, Yes! – don’t look back. The holidays always cause nostalgia to flare up, so I need to cut myself some slack. There’s nothing wrong with remembering precious moments with my children. But to relive the death of a marriage is for naught. I will skim through my journal pages with a discriminating eye. I will treasure the good and destroy the evil.
Though this blog says ‘divorced’, I don’t want to focus on that. The title remains as is, but only so I can help others, perhaps, heal from divorce. I will never bash my ex or rehash. I’d like to emphasize marriage – having a God-glorifying one at that.
Maybe I should have made two posts out of this one, but I think it will be okay to segue into: Continue reading
Divorced, Reformed and Remarried 