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Mom, The Mute and Whole with Hope

“It’s like you were there, but mute.”

This is how my daughter explained what she knew of me, my role and my existence during my 18 years of marriage. I’m still trying to process it. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It sort of makes sense to me, I guess. I mean, I can totally see why she would say that. It’s exactly how I felt during most of that time … almost invisible. But it brings so many different emotions to the surface.

It makes me cry with a deep sadness that I can’t really explain. I don’t know if it’s pain, if it’s guilt, if it’s trauma, if it’s failure, if it’s gratitude, if it’s exhaustion, if it’s fear that I feel? I don’t know. I can’t really identify it. I just know that it’s accurate.

I can’t believe that I could have gone my entire life with my children not really knowing who I was. That is a bone-chilling thought. How unfair to them! This is the fear in it. And it’s so devastating that I had to get divorced to be able to do it. I think that is the sadness in it for me. The gratitude in it is that I do get to be me now and am able to feel so much hope for my life and that of my children and our futures and that same daughter tells me she feels closer to me now than she ever has. The failure in it is watching my children struggle to find ground again after their lives have been suddenly uprooted. Kids are tough and resilient, but for sure, it has required all of us to dig deep. The guilt in it is running all of the ways I should have changed it or not allowed it in the first place through my head over and over again. Why didn’t I do something sooner? How could I let it go for so long? The exhaustion in it is the work it takes to rebuild that stability and structure for my kids and me. The work is real and it is nonstop, but worth it. The trauma in it is remembering why I was like that in the first place, mute.

“It’s like you were there, but mute.”

Divorce isn’t easy. Not for a second has it been easy. In fact, it is a lot more work than not. There are holes in my life that I don’t know how will ever be filled. There are pieces of my family structure that I don’t know how to put back together. But something that I have now that I didn’t have before . . . hope. My heart can radiate God’s love and light. It can be whole with hope. I can find happiness and peace in hope.

President Uchtdorf gave a talk called, “The Infinite Power of Hope.” He opposes hope against despair:

“The adversary uses despair to bind hearts and minds in suffocating darkness. Despair drains from us all that is vibrant and joyful and leaves behind the empty remnants of what life was meant to be. Despair kills ambition, advances sickness, pollutes the soul, and deadens the heart. Despair can seem like a staircase that leads only and forever downward. Hope, on the other hand, is like the beam of sunlight rising up and above the horizon of our present circumstances. It pierces the darkness with brilliant dawn. It encourages and inspires us to place our trust in the loving care of an eternal Heavenly Father, who has prepared a way for those who seek for eternal truth in a world of relativism, confusion, and of fear.”

He later continues, “Hope is not knowledge, but rather the abiding trust that the Lord will fulfill His promise to us. It is manifest in confidence, optimism, enthusiasm, and patient perseverance… No matter how bleak the chapter of our lives may look today, because of the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, we may hope and be assured that the ending of the book of our lives will exceed our grandest expectations. ‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.'”

Now, I have hope.

Forever grateful.

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