- Not The Only One!
- Post #87
- 06 Jul 23
- “Two Houses”
- Howdy!
- I hope this finds the majority of you guys doing fairly well. This blog is called what it is because , while some of my views and thought processes are not mainstream or normal by today’s standards, I don’t believe that I’m alone , or the last person on the planet who has these kinds thoughts and interpretations of life. I have been spending a significant amount of time with my son of late , as he has been helping me move. This on some level for me has been quality time despite the moving part. Our relationship became damaged, as he was thrown into the middle of his mother’s and mine’s mess, when we were splitting up. She lead him to believe that much of our dysfunction was about him, when nothing could be further from the truth. It has taken him the better part of a decade to get a somewhat objective point of view of what actually happened. The thing is kids often blame themselves or wonder what part that they played in the destruction of their happy homes. There are times in life when things just hit you, and they weigh on you like a ton of bricks. They crush you and make you feel claustrophobic , almost like something is crawling or irritating your skin and you just can’t get it off of you, or some how escape it. This may seem like a strange one, but for me it happened about eight years ago, while I was at a Christmas party. I remember it ,just like it was yesterday. The guy who was hosting the party was name Mike, and he lives in a very beautiful home, it looks something like those paintings of that guy who use to do all of those classic paintings and remarkable landscapes back in the day.., maybe Norman Rockwell was his name. One of the things that struck me was Michael’s strength, he had just lost his wife back in the summer to a long drawn out battle with cancer. I think one of his kids said that they couldn’t ever remember a time when their mother was not dealing with cancer. Nevertheless, here he was hosting a huge Christmas party less than six months after loosing his wife. As I was walking around through the house, there were just pictures and reminders of a life that was full of family and love. She had gone on a head of to be with Jesus, but her presence was felt all throughout the home. One of their family traditions was to take a family photo each year and turn it into a Christmas tree ornament, and all of sudden it hit me that I was never going to have that, and it hit me like a panic attack and I couldn’t breath, so I whisked myself to the front porch out in the bitter cold and had myself a good old man’s cry, and if you are unfamiliar with that, a man’s cry, it’s the one, when You are encountered by someone else, you pretend that you have something in your eye, or your sinuses are acting up really bad, ☺️☺️and you try to play it off and pull it together, while the whole time on the inside you are bitterly weeping like a two year old, who has been put into time out for the fifth time in the last hour. When I say something that I will never have that , it’s not about envy, but about significance as in having that one enduring love with one person, through it all, even though it was mired by cancer. Some other time, fairly close to around the same time, I took a life changing course at my church called FPU, Financial Peace University. The guy who started FPU is named Dave Ramsey , he spoke about how financial ruin had entered into his life and wreaked havoc and he wanted to teach people, especially the ones in the family of God, how to handle money God’s way. I remember in one of the sessions where he was talking about home and that there is no place like home. I remember once again feeling sad because home is a place of belonging ,a place where family is present, a place of security, a place to be comfortable and to be yourself, and without those things, it’s just a house. And we all know that a house is not a home without those things, so once again it hit me that I was missing one of the biggest fundamentals in life. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mansion, a slum, or a grass hut with a dirt floor, without love and family, what’s the point? I want to say that I once again have digressed, but not so much!, this time. Getting back to my son , he tells me that he found himself driving past the old homestead the other day and he noted the changes that had been made to the place. When his sister was here, she would occasionally do a drive by as well. This is one of the big black eyes of divorce, you can never go back home. There is someone else living in what use to be our place. Even if one parent or the other ends up with the marital home, it’s still just not the same. There are those old memories that bring a smile to your face and are quite vivid and now it’s more like a squadron of planes flying the missing man formation, or an empty chair at the Thanksgiving dinner, where someone use to sit, who is no longer with us. I had seen this years prior and never recognized it for what it’s was. It’s not a surprise and I have mentioned before that I have been married more than once. I was married to a very beautiful and intelligent woman after my kids mom. She was from a very beautiful small town, that was mostly surrounded by water, so just gorgeous in every direction that you looked. So, one day while we were out and about, she took me for a tour of the old neighborhood and past the house she had grown up in. As she shared and relived a few old memories about herself and her siblings, her whole demeanor just got extremely bright and she began to glow, much like pregnant mom’s do while carrying a child. It was a place that held an immense amount of warmth and heart felt memories for her. A different time and place, but the story was the same, someone else was living in a place that she use to call home. I’m not sure why it resonated with me this time so much, when my son talked to me about doing a drive by. There is this thing about it being our informative years where we experience a lot of first. I don’t believe that many of us remember taking our first steps in life, but most remember some special birthday or some holiday that was extra special. Maybe it was your first date, and your father told you that the young man better come up to the door introduce himself and make a great impression, or it was going to be a very short courtship ☺️☺️. Maybe we remember our first bike ride up and down the driveway followed by skent knees or some other minor injury that left a scar. Perhaps it’s your first day off of the school bus, as your mom stood on the porch or at the end of the driveway. It could be cutting the lawn, hanging up Christmas lights, or a million other little things that reminds us of the good old day, which for some have become their glory days. Some years ago, probably over a decade or so, one of my favorite Christian artists, named Matthew West, wrote a song about two houses. He use to let people write him letters about their stories and he would turn them into songs. Two Houses was someone’s story and yes it was written from a child’s perspective about having to go between two houses after a divorce, and having to do two Christmases, and while You would sometimes make out in the gift giving department, you would gladly give it all up , just to be able to go back to the way things use to be when the home was full of love ,and you knew nothing about every other weekend. Now your life is full of stuff, mostly due to parental gilt, and when all you really want is an intact family and home life. Two Houses is not about the go between for most folks, especially after you get older. It’s about every other place after that is just not” there “and never truly home. I have always felt for military brats and other people like them who move around a lot, but if you ever sit down to talk to them, there is some place that they are more drawn to than others. It could be tied to some high school memory, or living near a beach, or some place in the world considered a little exotic like Hawaii, or Italy . We experience and endure so many cliches in life, but maybe we should reexamine the one about,” home is where the heart is,” and ask ourselves is it a cliche or one of the most truthful statements ever made. One of the things that has always drawn my mind to dysfunction is how can we love someone so much, and then be so angry and say and do such mean and hateful things once the love has escaped the relationship. There was a time when people use to stay together for the sake of the kids, but no more!. We are hell bent on having it our way, much like at Burger King, we want it our way, whatever that may be. The majority of the time we have blinders on, and they can only focus through the lens of selfishness and what will make me happy, or satisfy my needs and desires. We very rarely give our kids a vote in something that will profoundly shape and change their world. All to often kids become pawns or bargaining chips between their parents. We have practiced a speech about how the two of us are not getting along, and it’s probably for the best that we part ways. Again, being drug to the dysfunction, a person that You had hopes and dreams with, a person that You couldn’t keep your hands off, has now become your nemesis , someone you can’t stand to look at, be around and at times are extremely pissed that they are still drawing breath in their lungs.☺️☺️ I always told myself that I would never cheat in a relationship, because the cost was to high. It was a non-negotiable for me, no matter what. I wanted no part in anything that came along with the two houses. I didn’t want the awkwardness of the split holidays, guilty gift giving, and trying to fit someone new into my kids life and wondering how they would receive that. I didn’t cheat, and yet we still found ourselves ship wrecked on the rocks misery and disconeintment. Another strange thought , how do you have this person in your life that you can talk to them about anything and everything, and now you can’t even find the words to speak civilly to one another. I think it’s another version of never never land, everything that should have never ever been said or done, finds roots there. The thing about two houses is just that it’s two , which is divided, or the opposite of one and togetherness. It just lacks wholeness and the kind of love that turns the two into the one . There has been a significant amount of data collected on divorced kids, and the longitudinal studies are the best ,,but the data is overwhelmingly negative, and not just from a social economic point of view. Children who experience and are the by product of broken homes are four times as likely to become divorced themselves. Many have trust issues when it comes to their interpersonal relationships. The irony is that our kids are still watching us and the lesson that we are teaching them is ,when the going gets tough, that’s a perfect time to check out. If you don’t find this both troubling and disgusting, then just consider that most people who are abusive in life, were once abused themselves, so its a learned behavior and we are teaching our kids how to quit at the drop of a hat, or at the least amount of discomfort. The news flash for all of us , should be that marriage is hard, and its really super duper hard when we make it all about ourselves, instead of what is better for the whole. I wish that marriage wasn’t so romanticized, and that people got that they were entering into a covenant relationship, with many highs and lows, and that there would be days that they would question everything about it , right down to whether you choose the right partner or not. Its one of those propositions with a huge upside and rewards that few attain to now days. People need to remember that marriage is not a competition where one wins and dominates and the other looses. Its a calibration to make beautiful music together. I think on the simplest of levels it comes down to all of us just wanting to be loved. We want that unconditional love, that is free of judgment and the having to perform or produce. We want to be just accepted for who we are and especially on the messy days , when we can’t figure out why anyone would want to love us with all of our warts and freckles . We want someone who will back us and support us, even when we color a little bit outside of the lines sometimes . We want that enduring love that gets better with time, but often unfortunately we want that to be pain free and without putting in the work, and that just doesn’t happen. Some of us are perfectionist and we want everything to be ideal, just as it is in our heads, and that’s just another place where life doesn’t always just want to get along . We want that love that stays strong through the good, bad and the ugly. I know that sometimes I walk the road of pessimism, but that is truly not who I am , that being said I want to leave with some good news and perhaps for some the best news ever possible. And that is to inform you that the kind of love you are looking, searching for and craving is a real thing and can be yours, yep , absolutely all yours, just for the asking. The good news is that God loves you so much and He loves you just the way that You are without any pretense, or having the feeling that you have to somehow clean up your act first. I think that is sometimes a twisted well kept secret, and that is that God loves broken people, He wants to be in a love relationship with you and He doesn’t care where you have been or what you have done , and He just wants you. He’s not asking you to jump through any hoops ,so you don’t have to dress a certain way, He doesn’t care. He doesn’t need your money, or whatever obstacles you put into place to convince yourself that He cares about this or that ! He doesn’t care what your educational background is, or the color of your skin, or any of the crap that people put in the way to keep you from coming to Him. I often think instead of other people tripping us up, we do that to ourselves, when we don’t think that we are good enough, or feel to broken from shame or somehow to dirty and unacceptable to God,, but I can promise you that He doesn’t care about any of that, that is just you with a bunch of negative self talk, or you are surrounding yourself with a whole lot of negative influences, or the wrong people. God loves you so much that He gave His one and only Son to be a sacrifice for sin, just so you could come into His presence. It’s not a magic pill or silver bullet, it’s just that all encompassing unconditional love that we all crave. God is the only person who can be there for you, no matter what comes your way. Don’t settle for the cheap imitation version of love . If you are caught up in the doing of things and are on the treadmill of just being a good person, how will you ever know, when or what is good enough? When Jesus died on the cross, He said ” It is Finished ” . He said it was done, !!and that means we can stop trying to do and be, what we never could! God loves you just as you are, and if you take nothing else away from this today, know that He loves you and will never change His mind about that, regardless of what you have done, or where you have been. A bit long as usual, hope to get feedback from you guys.
- Till Next Time, ✌️Peace!
- Sandy The Southerner
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