WHY?

Have you ever gotten lost in the WHYs?

Why did this happen to me, my marriage, my family?

Why us?

Why me?

Why can’t I make this better?

Recently the young daughter of a friend of mine went through a breakup — the sad, broken-hearted, first-love kind of breakup. Sigh. We’ve all been there and this pain, all too familiar.

And along with this scenario of young love, regrettable words were said, and hurtful actions taken. My friend’s daughter was crushed and confused. She plead with her mother, “Why? I just don’t understand what happened or why he did what he did...and said what he said. Why is he acting this way? It just doesn’t make sense.”

So, while simultaneously trying to mend her emotional wounds, she spent an inordinate amount of time trying to answer questions only he could answer.

We’ve all been there done that one too!

In fact, we have to be mindful of continuing to do that throughout our lives, asking ourselves what is ours to control and to fix. Sounds simple enough and yet, it’s precisely the kind of thinking that keeps us needlessly entangled in the weeds of divorce — or in the drama of other people’s lives.

But how do we free ourselves?

I loved the prologue of a memoir I’m currently reading by Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, where she writes:

This isn’t a tell-all because “all” is something we can’t access. We don’t get “all”. “Some,” yes. “Most” if we’re lucky. “All,” no. There’s no such thing as a tell-all, only a tell-some—a tell-most, maybe. This is a tell-mine, and the mine keeps changing, because I keep changing. The mine is slippery like that.

This isn’t a tell-all because some of what I’m telling you is what I don’t know. I’m offering the absences, too—the spaces I know aren’t empty, but I can’t see what’s inside them. Like the white spaces between stanzas in a poem: What is unspoken, unwritten there? How do we read those silences?

There is something so hauntingly real and relatable in those words.

We can only tell all and know all about one person — the one staring back at you in the mirror. Yet, try as we might many of us mamas are so-called fixers, savers, people pleasers, women who can gather shattered pieces and glue them back together.

What if they aren’t meant to be glued back together?

What if you aren’t meant to fix anyone?

What if you will never know ALL the answers — all the whys that lead up to your divorce?

AND what if you could simply let go of the WHYs that belong to another and only focus upon those of yourself?

Well, that would surely free up some space in your life, wouldn’t you say?

The only thing you can do with the pieces and parts of a broken marriage is evaluate your role in it. What good can you take away from it?

Well, there are your lessons learned and what about those beautiful babies you birthed? Without this partner and these experiences you wouldn’t have those kids and this version of yourself.

Yes, this is an ending, but it is also a beginning and a chance to literally see things differently.

I recently had the lens in my left eye replaced. The metaphor to use this as an opportunity to see the world in a different way, is not lost upon me. And it had me thinking of the mamas I coach. Divorce, like eye surgery, provides us with the ability to see and be seen in a new light.

Suddenly the world before you is forever altered and unlike what you thought it was before — or maybe what it would always look like.

So, what can you do with that?

Learn more about yourself — ask yourself: What lead me to this person, this setup, these responses? How can I use this pain and this information moving forward?

That’s the gold you want to mine.

That’s what you control.

That’s what you can change.

That’s what you can protect and create boundaries around.

That’s what you want to model for your kids.

Don’t waste your time feeling guilty, beating yourself up, trying to figure out someone else’s motivations. As Maggie Smith said, don’t worry about writing a ‘tell-all’. Instead, write a ‘tell-mine’.

The past is past. We can’t rewrite history, but we are writing the future. We can write what comes next.

It starts today with how you view your story, the story of your marriage and the story of your next chapters. You get to control that, mama. So why not make it glorious, breathtakingly YOU.