All You Can Do

Or, I’m mostly thinking about me now

It’s a common–and wise, I will add—saying, control what you can control; but it hits differently when everything you saw for your future just a few short years ago is now impossible; when your life truly, genuinely feels out of control. 

Say, for example, when your marriage ends and you become a single mother to six children.

Controlling what I can control has become a bit more important than it felt before.

For weeks, my mind spent a whole lot of time on a loop of what happened to me, what happened to us. The thoughts bothered me all day and fully assaulted me at night, because intrusive thoughts love the dark, don’t they?

But we are approaching two months since the light finally illuminated the secrets for the final time, and what I’ve really been thinking about lately is changing. I’m starting to give less time to what happened to me, and more time to, well, me. 

(Stay with me on this.)

In his fabulous book, How to Stay Married–which is not at all a book with a formula for staying married, but rather an honest and hilarious and devastating story of both loss and forgiveness in his own marriage–Harrison Scott Key wrote this:

“What will you do with the fact that one in four marriages experiences infidelity? If you’re a man, you’re more likely to commit infidelity than you are to play a musical instrument. If you’re a woman, you’re more likely to have an affair than you are to have bangs.

These odds are not great. All you can do is get your own heart in order. Ask God to help. If you don’t believe in God, ask your therapist. Unbury the deadness in your past and reckon with it. Then give it a good funeral. Put out some flowers and get busy living. Buddha was right. The ego is your only real enemy, feeding off the hurt of your history. It is the adversary you must first slay before you can be of any real use to humankind.”

If these statistics are true–and I believe they are, both in and out of the Church–that means there are, quite literally, thousands of you reading this who, along with me, know what it feels like to be on the painful side of that data. I am and will never claim to be qualified to tell one person what to do next, how to move forward, what reconciliation should look like. But Key’s words are becoming a sort of daily starting point for me, a way to show up the next day a little less heavy with grief than the day before: All you can do is get your own heart in order.

Something I’ve learned in the last ten years is that grief and anger have a terrible tendency to come out sideways. Pain needs a place to go, a thing to blame, so we put it somewhere and I think we miss the target pretty often.

When Cannon was first diagnosed with autism and I was really struggling with the acceptance of that, I walked out the door on my three best friends because they were late for a playdate. Was it a big deal that they were late? No. Was I drowning trying to keep my son occupied for those extra minutes, and needing in that moment more than anything to feel something different than sadness over my reality? Yes. And they were right there for me to throw it at.

In December of 2021, when Alex was gone in recovery for four months, and the initial wave of support I received started to slow down, I began thinking about all the people whom I hadn’t heard from in a while, who were no longer regularly checking in on how I was doing alone with the kids. And at the risk of sounding like a truly terrible person, I would come up with a list of names–people from church, work, anywhere in my life–and mentally accuse them of not caring. I made the choice to be mad at them. But was I really mad at these friends–for living their life and taking care of their own children and managing their own stresses and keeping up with all of the logistics of living? No. But was I, once again, wanting to feel something other than sadness over my reality? Yes. And their names were right there running through my mind to blame. 

Of course, our healing is certainly wrapped up in the actions and support of others, but what has taken God the better part of a decade to teach me is that it’s all too easy to spend time thinking about what everyone else is or isn’t doing–and in my case, this includes the person who hurt me badly–than it is to think about how I am responsible to “get busy living,” to control what I can control. 

And I don’t know, but I guess even in the middle of the grief, I want to be found living. Not neglecting the pain, but still living. Not stuffing all the feelings down, but still living. And I think this looks like repentance and doing the dishes and answering the text and riding the Peloton and asking for help and asking my friends to forgive me for being a jerk and reading fiction and putting the laundry away and saying thank you and lifting weights and complimenting the barista and playing the board game with the toddlers again and did I mention repentance? Because my heart is a mess of mixed motives on a good day, and grief just tends to justify all those poor motives into acceptance. That happened to me, so I can feel and act like this. I don’t think that’s a good long term strategy. But asking God every day to make my heart a little more like his even while I’m sad, that feels like a better one. After all, Jesus had a moment of anger, not a ministry of one. The adversary is still my own sin. I can sense even now how the habits I practice in the middle of what’s hard will set up the trajectory of who I will be for the rest of my life. 

So this is just me, saying that yes, this is very hard and will continue to be–and I know I will feel that profoundly more on some days than others. And yes, I’m always going to remember what died, what was lost. But I want to keep putting fresh flowers on the table, and keep living.

Footnote: I have always been better at writing than living. I fear this piece makes me sound like I’m just doing amazing and flourishing and harboring no bitterness at all. That would not be true. Ask the people who have listened to me venting or waited three days while I ignore their efforts to check on me. But I am a little more okay every day. Or most days, especially when Cannon is okay—and he’s not always, so that makes a big difference right now. There is so much hard, hard work ahead, and forever. But knowing that is why what I’ve written here means so much to me, because it’s the goal: to get busy living. So I write it, because the words are always what God has used to help me live.