These Bones Will Dance Again

I had an incredibly helpful yet potentially devastating revelation recently. I was reflecting on some recent tense conversations my husband and I have had and a line from Anne of Green Gables came to mind.

"My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes. That's a sentence I read once and I say it over to comfort myself in these times that try the soul."

-Anne Shirley

My mind altered the metaphor and I began to picture this vast desert with scattered bones partially submerged beneath the sand, the wind dusting the grains about the crevices of a decaying skull. These bones represent an organism that was once healthy and vibrant; a body that lived for the joy of movement--the freedom of dance. Then I thought, "This is our marriage--a wasteland filled with lost hopes and dead things." My husband and I are moving through it alone and in opposite directions, widening the gulf between us. This is the enormity of the task before us. Without GOD, it is literally impossible and crazy to hope to restore. But our trust cannot start with a dead thing or even in each other. It has to start with the living GOD of the universe, the one whose ear is especially attentive to the prayers of those who call Him Abba.

Fifteen years ago I started dating a guy who seemed right in most of the ways that mattered. The things he said and did that didn't sit well with me I let slide because he wasn't a jerk in the typical way many guys are. I knew I would never have to worry about infidelity or him being an uninvolved father or making grand romantic overtures, in part, to excuse unacceptable behavior. I pretended not to care when I felt slighted by his lack of attentiveness at times. I downplayed the challenges our mental health struggles would create in our relationship. I internalized his muted responses to my once high libido to the point that I have had next to no drive at all since our four-year-old was born (this is a far more complicated issue than this statement implies but the point here is still valid).

In many of the ways he couldn't show up in our relationship--as my advocate, my protector, adoring pursuer-- I overcompensated. I got so good at convincing myself that I didn't long for any of it that once he finally began to make these overtures I did not trust them and could not receive them. While he was busy learning how to exhibit more emotional range my ravaged psyche got busier shutting down emotionally. It was a defense mechanism so effective that it was in full effect before I even recognized what was happening.

And so, here we are. I have stranded us in this wilderness of my own making, willing to starve and dehydrate us both rather than joining forces to dig a well and plant some dessert hardy vegetation.

I dont extol my self-imposed isolation as a virtue. It was a move of desperation. I can't sort out if Im reaping the just consequences of having wounded my spouse one too many times in my knee-jerk efforts to protect myself from him or if this is just the natural byproduct of loving someone as difficult as I am. Either I unknowingly ruined a deeply flawed but overall wonderful man or he was never as wonderful as I believed him to be in the first place. I cant accept that this present iteration of the person I have spent nearly all of my adult life with is the final one. GOD certainly isnt done working on me and I dont believe He is done working on him either. But the process (yes, I said a word that triggers him) really sucks.

Please understand that this is not a matter of love. Love was never the problem and still isn't. It's that I no longer know what the bedrock of our relationship is. It's this absence of a firm foundation that has me feeling unmoored and unsafe. No amount of love can fix that without rebuidling trust in each other.

Im not trying to "change my husband back" or persuade him of anything at this point. Its me who needs to be persuaded to keep pressing on. And so, rather than run the risk of saying or doing something even more regrettable, I have sequestered myself to the guest room. Like dessert mothers of old, I am drinking deeply from the eternal well of life and depriving my flesh of its destructive desire to retaliate against my spouse. Prayer has been my refreshment and solitude, a decadent treat. But just outside the door, my husband and children are watching and waiting to see what I will do next. Will this be the day that my Christ-like mind will declare itself the master of my whims and protests? Is this the moment my belief that our marriage will be healed and stronger than ever before will kick into high gear? Apparently today is not that day.

Living separately together has felt like the most natural thing in the world until I finally heard a hint of uncertainty in his voice yesterday for the first time in a very long time. It made me hope again. Bringing our most vulnerable selves before our GOD and allowing THAT self to suffer and die daily is what will activate His resurrection power in our relationship. For now, I'm not engaging in any further verbal warfare or stony silent treatments. I'm practicing being still in this uncomfortable space while I wait on the LORD. I truly believe that if I kneel quietly before Him, He will minister to my brokenness and give me the courage to confront the ways I need to grow in my marriage. In the meantime, I cast my eyes towards that desert waiting for His breath to animate those dry bones again. I have a waltz in my heart that I'm saving for my dance partner in life. We just have to want to dance together again one day.

Stay Thoughtful.

-Jayma Anne