This post is for Wednesday after Memorial day in the "One Year Ago Today" series depicting our experience in May-June of 2010. Remember, I had a severely injured ankle, my best friend and husband's grandfather died the same day, our car broke down, and we had received a call telling us our foster kids were going home. We were broken...
By Wednesday I was pretty much a zombie. We had 3 kids depending on us but I was broken physically, emotionally, and though my faith wasn't damaged my spirit was tired. Wednesday brought mixed feelings.
First, nothing like kicking you while you're down - we knew immediately through this situation that it was as much a spiritual attack as a series of unfortunate events that we were involved in. We didn't know why we were being allowed to go through all of this, certainly there were other people affected by some of the events we were experiencing, particularly the deaths, and I'm not sure we will ever truly know why it all went down the way it did. But in the world of spiritual attack we were broken and the next thing on the list was to cause physical separation between my husband and I in a time where we needed to be able to lean on each other the most.
My husband's grandfather lived near our hometown, 1500 miles away from where we live now. Most of our families still live in that general area, so understandably the funeral was there. My husband thought it would be best to attend that funeral and be with his family, which meant Wednesday (the first reasonable flight he could make without taking much more time off work) he was flying out of town. In terms of our immediate family I was now on my own to take are of the 3 kids (1.5, 2.5, 3.5) with my brokenness. Of course I wasn't alone spiritually and my family nearby and friends were so nice to help, but still - the leader of our family, my spouse, was not nearby. No spouse-ly hugs. No rest in each other. I know this affected him too as travel "home" meant he would be away from us and he would be missing the funeral of our dear friend, something I know he didn't want to do. So with our 1 car we made a trip to the airport (though honestly I don't remember doing that at all).
The good news was that my mom passed him in the air. She had already planned a trip to visit us for 10 days or so scheduled to arrive this day. Of course, we hadn't planned that she'd be coming to visit during this time - surely we would have preferred a happier time - but it worked out well to have my mom there to help. She helped with the kids, she helped with food, and just by having her around helped us all try to do some fun things and get our minds off of what was taking place.
So my sister and I left mid-morning with her daughter and spent some time at the mall, shopping at Victoria's Secret for a little while before heading to the airport to pick up my mom. That was a nice treat. While my sister tried things on, I played with my niece in the cosmetics place, trying on makeup and sampling fragrances. It wasn't enough to take the weight off my chest, but it did help us have some fun. I ended up buying this, which I love. Good or bad it reminds me of this time, which I look back on simultaneously with horror and relief. We made it through and it reminds me of all that good that stemmed from bad.
Though the bad wasn't done yet.
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