My first experience of broken family was when my grandfather passed away. I was 14 years old and things were just never the same without him around.
Then my parents divorced when I was 16 and my family was truly broken... and things have never been the same.
Brokenness seems a common theme in life, particularly surrounding family. We tend to have idealised dreams of creating a perfect family, being a part of a perfect family, even comparing ourselves and our own experiences to others who we think have the perfect family... In reality, though, there is no perfect family. Each and every one of us has our own brokenness, our own challenges and our own imperfections.
15 years, 8 months and 16 days ago my family broke again when Mikaila was born sleeping... The break has mended somewhat with time, but the cracks will always be there...
9 years, 2 months ago my family broke... with the loss of my 4th baby. A baby I never had the chance to know or connect with. A baby that was gone even before I had the time to feel it was a part of me or for the pregnancy to become 'real' to me...
3 years, 8 months ago my family broke again... In a way that I never imagined, even after what we had been through already. My marriage broke down and my husband and I divorced. It has again mended somewhat with time, but with even deeper cracks and bigger gaps... My dream of creating the 'perfect' family was now completely shattered forever...
1 year ago it was broken yet again... when my oldest son, my second born child, made the choice to live with his Dad. I believe in children having a voice and being heard and would never stand in the way of ANY of my children making such a decision... BUT IT HURTS.
I know that I will mend again, but each break leaves deeper scars that seem harder to heal.
THIS is my struggle TODAY... An accumulation of grief. Not just for Mikaila, but for the baby I never got to know and for the family that will never again resemble the one I had always longed for...
I hope that
through my brokenness I can become stronger and more beautiful within my soul… like a piece of pottery that has undergone the art of
Kintsugi – “golden joinery” that turns ugly breaks into beautiful art.
Kenetha J. Stanton has summed it up perfectly on the home page of her
blog, "A KintsugiLife - Becoming strong at life's broken places and
finding beauty in the healing". She writes:
“The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.” ~Ernest Hemingway
“We all get broken in one way or another in this life. It’s an
unavoidable part of living.
But we do have a choice about how we handle those breaks. Sometimes we
get stuck in the brokenness and never heal. Or we try to pretend the brokenness
is not there, driving it into our shadow where we act it out toward others
without knowing why.
Sometimes we give ourselves the time and resources we need to heal those
broken places, but the resulting scars remain tender and reactive.
And then there are the times when we do the hard work that’s required to
not only heal the broken places, but to make those places stronger than they
were before. It is then that our scars become beautiful in the way they allow
us to bring healing to the world around us.
The Japanese art of Kintsugi
repairs broken pottery with seams of gold and is a fitting metaphor for this
last way of dealing with the broken places that life gives all of us. Kintsugi
repairs the brokenness in a way that makes the container even more beautiful
than it was prior to being broken. It is a long and difficult process, but the
results are worth it.”
Today my picture is borrowed from Elephant Journal.
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