The Tormenting Factor

Divorce is a death of someone's choice. It is like a funeral in the fact that it hits you hardest after all the visitors are gone, and you are alone in the midnight hours. Night after night, I was tormented in my private bedroom retreat. I don't have the words to tell you how severely my heart was breaking. I prayed to God to let me die. I didn't want to commit suicide because I didn't want to go to hell. After a while, I figured hell couldn't hurt this bad. The more I thought about it, the more suicidal I became. I planned to end my life one day after the children were gone to school. Aunt Pam loved my children and she had lost a child. I knew she would take good care of my children. Celia happened to be on my doorstep. I know that God sends messengers and I am very sure it was the Holy Spirit that caused Celia to visit. I didn't tell her what I had planned, but it was like she somehow knew. She asked me to consider my children. She convinced me that no one could replace their mother. She wasn't a Christian then, but she had been through almost the exact same thing. She made me think about “what my children were feeling”, because up until that point, I couldn't see beyond my own pain. After our visit, I knew I had to pull myself together and take care of my children. Sometimes, it just takes someone who has walked in your shoes to help you see the light. How do you explain depression? I won't even try, except to say I felt like I was a failure as a Christian. I felt like I was a failure as a wife. Maybe I was the cause instead of the victim, because I had tried to control his drinking. I blamed myself because the marriage ended. I did not yet realize that controlling my spouse's drinking was my grandmother's generational curse to me. I had tried to be his Holy Spirit. I definitely was a failure as a Mother. I hadn't even considered what my children must be feeling. Adul was the only father the children had really known. I overheard Wenda tell Christi, “Mommy made Daddy leave!” How did my children feel about me, thinking this? Through ten years of his affairs with other women, I had been blind. Maybe I had just closed my eyes, because when I look back, I can't understand why I did not see what was happening. I blamed myself for being so stupid. My emotions had made my body sick and weak. I had too many negative thoughts going round and round in my head. I didn't think I would ever recover. That's what depression does, and the only thing that can help depression is God. A depressed person is so easy to manipulate. According to the dictionary, manipulation means “handling or managing skillfully, very often, unfairly.” Manipulation is a skill that is used to get what one wants. People with “street sense” are excellent manipulators, and Adul was the best. I did not realize that he had manipulated me all these years, because I still worshipped the ground where he walked. I became like my grandmother when she took to her bed of affliction because of bitterness, unforgiveness, and disappointment in her marriage. For the longest time, I had an extraordinary inability to deal with this trial. I wallowed in extreme self pity and sorrow, but then God sent extraordinary help. I remembered my dream, where I saw my Grandmother in Mother's living room. She had been made whole. If God could heal her twisted body, he could heal my broken heart…but how could I forgive Adul? I was ashamed to walk down the street, because I felt like my husband had been to bed with every woman in three states. Then a spirit of laughter hit me! All of this for a toothless, over sexed, scrawny man. Yes, I said "toothless". Adul always chewed tobacco and his teeth were never very good. The day Robert kicked him in the face, he lost some of his teeth. Then he fell into the reel at the drive-in theater during a fight over another woman, and knocked the rest of his teeth out. The dentist made him a set of dentures, but he couldn't chew tobacco with them, so he carried them in his shirt pocket most of the time. They fell out of his pocket one day as he was paving a driveway; he rolled them into the blacktop with the paving machine before he realized they were gone. This happened while he was paving Meda Childers's driveway. She actually has a “piece” of him to remember. He had another set of dentures made. He was flirting with another woman on a different day as he was driving down the road. I was in the car with him, and I caught him flirting. He realized I had seen him, and he told me he was married, not dead. I threw one of Allen's little metal matchbox cars at him. It was the only thing I could get my hands on at the time. The little car hit his shirt pocket and broke that set of teeth as well. God had sent me his very own medicine, laughter. "A cheerful heart is good medicine..." Proverbs 17:22. I can still hear my Pastor's voice, "If you are going to fall in love… make sure he has at least one tooth!” The humor of Adul's teeth was the life jacket that kept me from drowning in my tears.