X's

It's hard to wash the X out of your clothes.

Here you are, divorced, and you feel as if a big X is marked across your chest. You go to church, to the grocery store, to work and that X is flashing in a neon sort of way letting the world know that you failed.

Big time.

You feel that even your license plate transforms into an “X” so that those driving in your vicinity can keep their distance as if you were in a Student Driver car situation and didn't know the rules of the road.

Great.

You hear everyone say, “It wasn't your fault. You're better off without him/her.” Etcetera, etcetera. Blah, blah, blah.

Uh-huh. Right.

But you know that your children would be better off with their family intact because then they may not have felt as if they were tossed out of a boat during a storm and no one threw them a life raft. You know that they probably felt as if they were treading water for no fault of their own and the sharks in the dark were circling. But you were in no shape to help them because you were in the shark's teeth trying to save your own life . . . such as it was.

Somehow or other you were able to swim to shore and gasp for breath on dry land. Exhausted. But now what do you do?

You look around. This doesn't look the same. You're on a different island and you have nothing. What to do? What to do?

Think Swiss Family Robinson.

Okay, so they had their whole family dashed together on shore and were able to rebuild their lives as a whole. And lookey there . . . God even brought a girl to the island to answer the dilemma of, “How are we going to survive and extend our existence on this land?” Not only were they able to rescue an organ for music, clothes, and sails to make clothes, foodstuff, books, an ostrich, but also a donkey! Who knew?

So . . . hang in there.

 Sooner or later the sun will shine and fade that big 'ol X on your shirt. It may not fade it completely. You may have to physically cut it out of your life, I mean your T-shirt, with a pair of scissors.

But it's easier to wash or cut out an X off your clothes than bleach the emotions out of your heart.

© nancy 9.14.2009