I worked so hard during the divorce to defy the severing. Refusing to accept the trajectory of anger and brokenness that is presumed when a marriage breaks down, I chose words thoughtfully, managed timings carefully, not wanting either of my children or my then husband to be left with the memory of him walking away from them with his back turned and bags in hand. I did not want him to feel the pain of leaving his children and I did not want them to feel this happening in any part of their small bodies or minds.
I insistently believed that we could end a 24 year marriage without defacing all the years gone before, that this might be a crisis but it need not be an emergency. That despite the desperate place that we had fallen into, that we could still work to love each other well for this final part. So our son joined his dad enthusiastically looking at apartments, we went on family shopping trips to fill it with toys and onesies and slippers to make it the children’s home right from the start too. They all drove to the new apartment together on that first day, putting up beds, decorating it with pictures and belongings, we ate a meal together there and then he brought them home and settled them to sleep in their beds, so that they never had to say goodbye and leave him at the door. We even have a family photo of us all sitting on the apartment sofa together, smiling brightly at the camera as if this was a happy new start rather than the painful ending that I was feeling with every bruised and winded part of me.
We were very lucky not to have major betrayal or bad behaviour to figure a way through, so that the challenges of our divorce were far from as difficult and complicated as they are for many. I know that it can be too viscerally painful and impossible to do any of the above, after all that can take place as a marriage ends.
But even with the comparable ease, I was still distressed, crying on the inside without any visible trace on my face. My children were with me most of the time and needing me to make this ok. The incongruence of my feelings with my behaviour left me with a dull headache by the end of most days. It was strict lockdown, no contact with other people, though I would go and have a doorstep hug with one friend on occasion. We would barely speak, she would hold me firmly, holding me up at points, pray quietly in my ear and I would silently cry, tears slowly rolling down my cheeks as my children sat waiting quietly in the car.
Equally as heavy as the distress of that time was the weight of my Father’s presence, of His gaze. Only once before in my life had I known it like this, like a feeling of electricity constantly all over me that made my hands tremble for no reason when I lifted them. It wasn’t anxiety or fear – that I would have understood and expected – but it was anticipation and a pull of urgency towards Him. I know from times past that He responds to desperation and my position was desperate and I could easily have fallen off the edge. He came tangibly close and I knew that He saw what I was doing, as I chose to keep speaking life, speaking life and new ways over my freshly fallen-apart family. When others didn’t notice, or when judgement and misunderstanding about divorce came, when I could have been thrown by all the voices in the malay, His sure and steady words kept coming as a blanket, an overlay, quietening the noise, smoothing over and over the harried creases of my mind, ‘I see you…I see what you are doing…I see you’. Comfort seeped from my mind into the deep places, calm settling into the aching hole of grief; knowing above all else that He is intimate with me and doesn’t miss a thing.
A roar of spiritual authority rose up in me at that time; a fierce conviction that this is where resurrection happens, that the old boxes were no longer working, but beauty can still come in new ways because nothing can hem Him in. He can always find another way. He can always find another way. And I felt His pleasure, His pride and delight in me, seeing me as beautiful when everyone else saw brokenness, as I still tried to honour Him and my then husband, despite it being from my fractured knees.
It was particularly tough then, sometime later when circumstances began to evolve that I had no ability to influence, where my authority held no sway at all. Knowing that my children were carrying the cost of family breakdown, through no fault or choice of their own, was hard enough and I could only just reconcile it, if the adults around them kept working to protect them from the fallout wherever possible. But events started to happen that eroded the emotional stability protecting them, that I could not prevent and which they began to notice and no amount of reasoning or explaining or rationalising from me made any difference.
Anxiety and upset came quickly spiralling over me, where I had felt that my children would be ok if only I could hold back the tide: the tide of research and evidence and statistics of the cost of divorce to children; the cost to their self esteem, their mental health, their resilience, their life chances, for their own happy marriages, more and more and more, unending facts of doom stretching through their entire lives ahead. The odds stacking up against them and fear stacking up its own breath-taking prison inside of me. Knowledge isn’t always a good thing when you are powerless to make use of it. Knowledge can just become oxygen for fear to thrive.
I stood in my kitchen crying at the hopeless, helplessness of it all. The grief and remorse that I’d been barely holding at bay for my children’s present, for their future, for all of it, gave way and just came flooding forwards; flowing from my eyes, spilling from my mouth; tears and spit in all of it. The stark reality of the situation and of my own powerlessness left me totally unable to use any of that authority that had been my gift at the start. The facade that I could hold myself or my children together in any way beyond the small island of the three of us, in any meaningful way beyond that, fell away, leaving room for despair to move in.
In the middle of the tears and sadness and desolation crashing over me, He spoke the following words as clear as day:
‘Who do you think you are? Nothing touches your children without My say so’.
Normally Jesus comes to me as gentle as a Lamb. He knows what I have come from and He often wraps around me like a coat with compassion and tenderness, winning my trust over time so that I don’t hide from Him, I never lower my head with Him. He has kept lifting my chin to look full in His face, asking me to remember who I am to Him, to never let anything come between this, between me and Him. But this wasn’t like that.
This was strong and indignant. No soothing acknowledgement or coming alongside me, moving close in the struggle. Instead, He was calling my free-running fear to a halt; asking me who I was to play God, to predict my children’s future. Reminding me that just because He comes as a gentle Lamb, to not dare forget that He is also a powerful Lion. Powerful, irrepressible and glorious; laughing away anything seeking to stand in the way of His steadfast intention for my children. Nothing can touch them, harm them, not even a hair on their head, without His allowance and say so.
Because there are the facts and then there’s the truth and they are not the same thing. The facts might be that my small family holds labels such as single parent, divorced, broken, low income and a bunch more. But the truth is that He calls us chosen, He calls us beloved, and He calls us His own. And He’s busy creating a fulfilling future, tailor-made with wild love for each of us, never stopping, never ceasing until it comes to joyful fruition. The truth is that we are never alone. There is never a gap at our kitchen table because the King has made Himself at home there. He sits as my husband, as our Father and the sense of His presence and delight is all that we need, it fills up all the empty spaces. These are the places that He loves to be, these circumstances are what He came for, there is no other place He chooses. And it no longer remains as loss, it becomes our gain because of the way He comes close and speaks into all the tender places, making us alive with strength and beauty, better than we ever were before.
The relief of all of this washing over me was palpable. The weight of truth so clear in that moment that nothing, nothing, can get in the way of His fierce love for my children. Sinking through me, slowing me down, giving me my breath back. This is real. This is real. As real as the cup I’m holding, as visible as the words I’m typing, as active and alive as the children racing around, shrieking, full pelt on the field in front of me. That I can relax and get back in my place as their mum because He takes His role as God and their Protector extremely seriously and will neither sleep nor falter at the task.
Proverbs 31:25 says “She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come”. And this is what He is somehow leading me into, without me even realising how. He is tending to my heart, my mind, my wellbeing, because He made me for joy, created me for love, intentioned me for peace. He’s kind and faithful and He’s patiently leading me to rest in all of it.
No shame with Him, only love. Only love.