Living Happily Ever After

test123

Blog Articles

Never Suppress A Generous Thought

To live, and how to live, every day, is a choice.

Last spring, in the middle of my nightmare, I was driving up my driveway and saw several neighbors gathered at the top. It seemed like everyone had been so mean and nasty to me, that just the sight of them gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.  I had a moment of panic.

I knew I had a choice to make.

I felt my choice was to emulate their choices OR to continue to be myself.

I decided I didn’t ever want to make anyone feel the way some of my neighbors had made me feel, so I chose to be myself.  I drove up the driveway and waved as I passed them.  I figured they could look at me with hate in their eyes, but I was going to do the right thing anyway.

One neighbor in the group watched me wave, but continued to stare. However, after a few seconds of me waving, she lifted her arm and waved back! My initial thought was, “Oh! Maybe she didn’t know it was me!” But we had waved at each other for years.  She couldn’t have been mistaken.  She chose in that moment to be kind, and I was so thankful. One year later, I still remember that.

As I continued to drive away I realized that had I responded in an “eye for an eye” fashion (as many tangled in the web of my spouse’s crimes had) I would have glared instead of waved, and I would have missed out on that tiny slice of friendliness that was in such short supply at that time and during the whole nightmare experience.

I read, once, that we should “never suppress a generous thought.”  I have always believed that and have tried, in my own small ways, to live life like that.  That day showed me, again, what a blessing even the simple act of a smile or wave, generously shared even in trying circumstances, can be.

Never suppress a generous thought. Or a smile. Or a wave.

I Never Knew

“I never knew until that moment how bad it could hurt to lose something you never really had.” (From the television show, The Wonder Years)

In 2009, I lived that line for real.  I felt like the life I thought I had, the life I had lived, had never really been real. I didn’t even trust my memories of my “former life” for a long time; everything seemed so tainted by the crime, the lies, and the betrayal. The pain of losing something I’d never really had hurt more than I imagined.

The spring of 2009 can best be described as the season my heart hurt.  It literally hurt ALL of the time.  It ached all day, every day, every moment, and I didn’t know if it hurt because it was broken or if I was actually physically in trouble due to the stress I lived under! Can healthy women have heart attacks at 41?  I wondered…

Here’s how “optimistic” and hopeful I felt sometimes.  Last April, one year ago, I wrote, “I’m looking at an eternity alone, people hating me the rest of my life, latch-key kids, if you name it and it’s miserable it’s my lot in life! I wonder how will I make it three months, much less the rest of my life? How can one man destroy so much? I deserved better. I deserved more, and so did my children.  His lies stole my life from age 26-41.  The consequences of his lies will steal the rest of my life. Everything looks so black. I never imagined pain like this existed, especially for someone so innocent.”

I spent depressing days packing stuff to move, preparing to leave the home I had brought each of my babies home to, had lived in for 16 years and had always thought it would be the home I’d live in when I was 80 years old.  I cried a lot. I reminisced. I mourned. I felt as if my heart had broken and would never heal.  And when I thought about my kids…I felt grief like I’d never felt before.

But I always pulled it together by the time my kids got home from school.

I had to carry on and keep it together (or at least look like I was keeping it together!) for my kids.  I had to show them what we do when our world falls apart:  we keep living.

My mom taught me that.

When I was 19 and my dad died unexpectedly in an airplane crash, I came home from college for the funeral to a house full of well-meaning neighbors and friends who told me I would not be returning to school because I was needed at home to help my mom and family.  So many told me that I thought my mom had decided that in my absence.  When I asked her if it was true that I wouldn’t be returning to college because my dad died, she was stunned.  And she corrected that mistaken assumption.  ”Absolutely you will be returning to school!  Andrea, you don’t stop living just because something terrible has happened to you!  You keep doing what you need to do, you keep living, you keep smiling even though you don’t feel like it, and some day your smiles will feel real again.”

So I smiled in 1986-1987 when I didn’t feel like it.  And I smiled in 2009 when I REALLY didn’t feel like it too.  They were forced.  They were ‘fake’ in that I didn’t feel them on the inside but I showed them on the outside anyway.  I smiled for the sake of my children.

I remember I was still forcing myself to smile in August 2009.  By then, it killed me that I didn’t mean them. I’d always been a pretty cheerful and positive person and it was hard for me to not feel like myself any more.  I had moments that I wondered if, in addition to losing everything I had known as my life, I had lost myself too.  I remember wondering if I’d ever smile, for real, again.

However, my mom turned out to be right.  As usual.

By October 2009, the smiles were real and the tears were less and less.  Sometime that month I realized I had gone an entire week without crying!  Baby steps forward, but steps forward all the same.  I think that’s one thing 2009 reinforced to me:  it doesn’t matter how fast you move along the path of your unexpected life.  Just as long as you keep moving.  Forward. Pressing on.

Oh, and smiling!