A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE
One friend who always makes her laugh & one who lets her cry
EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW
How to fall in love Without losing herself
EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW
When to try harder and when to walk away
EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW
That her childhood may not have been Perfect ... but Its over
EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW
How to live alone even if she doesn't like it
EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW
Whom she can trust, whom she can't, and why she shouldn't
Take it personally
EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW
Where to go
Be it to her best friend's kitchen table or a charming inn in the woods
When her soul needs soothing
EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW
What she can and can't accomplish in a day ... a month ... and a year ...
I wish I could give you a Christmas gift ... the gift of HOPE!
Gifts! Do you remember the old Sears Catalogues? As a child, we thought Santa printed the catalogues! We would spend hours over the pictures and descriptions! Us kids would write loooooooooooooong lists, with page numbers from the Sears Catalogue. You would have thought that SEARS stood for Santa's Everything and Anything Recording System!
Sears had everything!
Sears even used to sell houses! Really! They sold real life houses, unassembled, of course, like a GIANT lego set with all the boards and planks numbered and ready to be added according to the detailed set of instructions that accompanied each house. Buyers would select the house by choosing finished pictures of the house and floor-plans from the catalogue.
They were small little cottages by today's standards but many of them still standing, once again proving that some of the old ways were the best ways simply by standing the test of time.
I woke up thinking about those houses, with all their parts ... If we took a tour of the house in the beginning of construction, the prospective owner would be able to show you the numbered parts and the plans and diagrams of the dream ... If we took a tour of the same house today, the owner would show us a home that had sheltered more than one family ... rooms and amenities ... modifications that he/she might have added ... and maybe, if there was time, they might even drag us to the attic where we could still see the numbers on the bare wood ...
Telling a story about recovery is like building a house because in recovery, we are very much "under construction" and "a work in progress"!
In the beginning, there is a numbered progression ... a chronological story ... In the middle of construction, things are not quite so organized. Some of the pieces are sorted out, but everyone sorts things out differently, even if you and I are building the very same house. We each follow the plan, of course, but the way we get from point A to point B can be quite different.
In the same way, if a storm came through and blew offmy roof while the same storm flooded your wood floors ... you and I may be at the same home center, looking to make repairs, but I will be in the roofing section and you will be shopping in the flooring section. Same purpose ... different focus.
Things that are important to me in my recovery may not be important to you in your journey ... We are both in the process of rebuilding but none of us works from the same set of plans ...
We all do have the potential to get there though. It will be easier for some of us than it is for others. We will get stopped by different things. We will have different triggers and different set-backs. In the end, we each decide how far we go in construction.
I promised you the gift of hope ...
The gift came to me in the words of Nicholas Sparks in a book I was reading just for fun. The character was describing himself and how much he had grown:
"The events of the past year have taught me much about myself, and a few universal truths. I learned, for instance, that while wounds can be inflicted easily upon those we love, it's often much more difficult to heal them. Yet the process of healing those wounds provided the richest experience of my life, leading me to believe that while I've often overestimated what I could accomplish in a day, I had underestimated what I could do in a year. But most of all, I learned that it is possible ... to fall in love again ... even when there's been a lifetime of disappointment ..."
We don't all get our pretty little Sears Catalogue Cottage on the first try. We might have to back up and redo something. We might have to walk away from the whole thing for a day to regroup and come back fresh, but we all have within us the ability to turn a pile of bits and pieces into a nice, cozy place for ourselves and generations to come.
We all have been wounded in some way, some more than others. Being a victim of domestic violence can be like having your heart, mind, body and soul all boiled in oil at the same time, with every cell exploding at once or it can be very slow, over a long period of time, where he steals a little piece of your heart, mind, body and soul every day until one day, you realize that most of you is gone ... Whether it was fast or slow, you are wounded on so many levels, there's no way to rebuild everything all at once ...
BUT
"the process of healing those wounds provided the richest experience of my life"
I haven't got it all figured out by any means. I haven't totally healed on every level, but the past few years have been the richest in my life. I would never have believed it in the beginning. I doubted myself many times. I felt fear. I felt anger. I felt sadness. Eventually, I felt gladness too.
I was glad to be safe.
I was glad to have survived.
I was glad when I began to recover parts of me I thought I had lost forever!
Eventually, I was even glad for the very things that forced me into recovery in the first place, because without those things, I'm not sure I would be in recovery yet!
I am glad that God can heal even the deepest wounds.
"the process of healing those wounds providedthe richest experience of my life"
No matter where you are or what you have been through, you have made it this far and there is HOPE that you will make it the rest of the way. It's up to you!
I believe in you! If I could do it, so can you!
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