The Longing That Never Fades

I stopped longing for John. I didn't realize that that was something that would truly happen.

I cannot begin to express to you the guilt that sometimes supersedes relief when your soul accepts that there is no longer hope in longing for your late spouse. 

Because I haven't just stopped longing for him, I have also been longing for a different partner to exist in my future. I don't want to live the rest of my life without the intimacy and love that I know can exist in a godly marriage. I don't want my daughter to never know the love of an earthly father who chooses to keep her forever. In all the support and love that we have in our family and our community, there is no substitution for a husband and a father, tangibly felt in an earthly presence.

And when I tell you that it is hard. I want you to truly understand that depths of that. 

It is hard to do things in my life that people do not agree with or are not ready for. There is no winning in grief, there is only accepting grief and how it manifests in each of us differently. None of us are on the same page as we grieve John's absence. And the whole world continues to remind me that it has not be very long since John died. I have not forgotten, my friends, and, as always, I appreciate your concern and words of wisdom. But I am the author of this particular story and these are the words I am choosing to write.  

It is hard to imagine someone who could possibly fit into my world. The complexity of being a widowed, single mother in the dating world is certainly not lost on me. Most men my age haven't gone through even a small portion of the grief and trauma that I have experienced in my 33 years. And I am glad for them, I am thankful that grief has not taken a front seat in their lives. But, I have a different story, and it seems harder to imagine a man willing to walk into that and embrace it wholeheartedly. And am I selfish for asking that of one...particularly when the simplicity of an unburdened wife is a true blessing?

It would be hard to introduce him into my life: "Thanks for thinking I'm a pretty awesome. Oh, by the way, here is my adopted teen, years of infertility and grief, a dead spouse, and a stillborn son…and the friends and family that also loved my little family and who still grieve them...you good?"

What a burden for a man to bear. To come into a well-established and well-broken family, and to willingly take up the mantle of husband, father, protecter, and spiritual leader. 

The calling of my life has been to grieve, and to grieve well, to find the joy amidst the bitter brokenness, and to rejoice in even the hardest of moments. 

It's been incredibly hard. And, oftentimes, it still is. 

I cannot tell you if there is some godly plan for another man to walk into my life and choose to stay. But I can tell you that I have hope there could be a man like that. If only because I have seen them in my world. In my friend who chose to believe that being a stepfather in the messiness of life was a cherished calling, in my father-in-law who never differentiated between the child born of his blood or the ones born of his marriage to their mother (much like his father before him), and in my own father who built a whole, god-fearing family from his previously broken one. 

I have seen such redemptive stories in my life...and it always seems like it's worth longing for...worth searching for...worth fighting for.