Walking With Trees

4 little words.  4 little words changed my life.  Silly.  I guess I knew it was possible.  We have always been bad choice-makers.  Not like life-ending or extreme danger kind of choice-makers.  Just stupid.  Uncommunicative.  Assuming.   I thought we were safe.  Why?  Too afraid to think any other way?  I just didn't want to let myself go there.

But April came.  Toward the end of that beautiful, frilly, pink laced month I found a text message on my phone.  I had to read it again, and again, and again.  It just didn't make sense.  It wasn't provocative.  It wasn't overtly sexual.  But it was intimate.  It was not meant for me.  I was never supposed to see it.  It was meant to be sent to one of my closest friends at that time.  Someone I trusted implicitly.  Someone I adored.  Someone he very obviously had romantic feelings for.  There was, again at that time,  no denying he had feelings for her.  And she was too afraid to tell me how she actually felt about him.  Didn't really matter after all.  The damage for me was done.  I was devastated.


The 4 little words came later on that night in the midst of a horrible argument.  To say I fell apart is a gross understatement.  My little world, everything I had known for the past 17 1/2 years, was gone.  Someone told me at that time I was absolutely dis- regulated.  A bit of an understatement now that I look back.  But my unraveling didn't end there.  Basically I spent the entire summer acting like a lunatic trying desperately to save what was and is unsaveable.   Breaking my heart again and again and dragging my beloved children along with me.  I did these things.  My anxious nature didn't want me to see or accept responsibility for my life collapsing the way I allowed it to.  And those 4 little words just bounced around inside my head.  I prayed,  bargained, pleaded, but nothing could save me from myself.  No one but me.

This is not a happy re-entry to my blog.  But it will get better.  There are things that ARE better.  Despite having one very bad friend, I have many, many wonderful, supportive, funny friends.  Friends that make me laugh.  Friends that pray for me.  Friends that listen or take my mind off things.  And in the past several weeks I have been able to set myself free some.  I haven't catapulted myself yet........but someday I will.  This situation is a long way from being settled.  Everyday.....like 100's of thousands of other women (and men) I fumble along in my new founded state of no longer being founded.  And every night...EVERY NIGHT....I am BETTER for it.   Every morning I am better.  I am sad.  My heart hurts.  I am mourning something precious.  But I am also recognizing the precious in many other things.  There is power in taking care of yourself.  There is power in music.  There is power in my children.  Mostly there is power in my friendships........(family included.)  No one may be as lucky as I am to have such amazing friends.  New ones.  Old ones.  You are floating me along and I will never forget it. 

Oh....those 4 little words......."My feelings have changed" still hurt.  But I am working on letting them go.  Looking forward to the day that those words float away like butterflies and never, ever return.