Serendipitous God

the separate lives of unions...

So you build that wall and you make it stronger.

Our Mount Baldy cabin, April 20th 1985

How many of you have been in long marriages that have worn the days with far more than you ever thought you could handle? Maybe you considered ending it. Maybe you did. I get it.

My husband has spent most of his life working un-Godly hours trying to keep our family small non-union electrical business together. I pray daily for his safety, his skin, his back, his health, his retirement someday. He is the most physically strong man I have ever met. Nothing gets to him. While my shoulders flare with insurmountable pain he gives me more pain just imagining him lifting heavy air conditioning units off a rooftop, as has been his blessed job the last few weeks. The trade-off is that he gets to stare at the ocean while doing it. While life goes by on skates, bicycles, business suits, sun dresses and sandals, he is the guy keeping the lights and the air running. During our crazy renovation four years ago, he had an air conditioning replacement job in the Compton School District. He lost count after he rewired 20 new units by himself.

John has worked mostly alone and/or with one of his two employees for 40 years, while also running his little shop. He likes being his own man, and his own secretary, since we went through an embezzlement several years ago. At the time, I was very busy with my work, while taking care of our kids and home priorities. He decided the office job would be his too. He never looked back, yet somehow he’s also managed to keep his life-lines going as well, playing music and cycling when he can. I understand that this is passion mixed with stress medicine.

We have lived with our responsibilities divided up neatly, like a pie, him eating much of it physically, me emotionally. Both of us, often undone, like three year olds at the end of many days. We almost called it quits. Twice. We cried in separate spaces and never wanted “us” to be over.

I guess we understood deep down that “us” existed between “us.” Him and I. I and Him. Our faith was hung out to dry many times. “We can do this alone.”

Lately, I’ve been writing about letting go of our grown kids. It’s imperative .. if it’s possible.

A gift.

Yesterday, a major breakthrough in our four year journey of being blindsided by our own doing, not understanding that once the door opened, there would be no expectation, even the slightest hope, to have what we desired out of family life.

I have been ahead on the journey. Running toward God, freedom, purpose, love and acceptance. John has been several miles behind me, as men often bottle emotions and carry them for others. They are much like us women, but we are often more expressive. We moms like to worry. They husbands/partners like to fix. That doesn’t include long poetic conversations of understanding. They just want to yank the air conditioner off the roof and well, you know…. but I guess I am a newer model these days.

Life has been beautiful lately, as He writes our story and theirs.

I was in the kitchen playing Genesis yesterday. Busy, focused on chores when suddenly Phil Collins filled the space between my ears with “Separate Lives.” I stopped what I was doing and began to cry. There is just some music that resonates so deeply, even if it’s not the perfect story of your life. Lines, lyrics jumping out, taking you back to that place where you were fighting it out so contentious, there was nothing left but to sit on the floor of the water closet wishing it would give way and swallow you. But the kids. They need to see better. So you pick yourself back up, smile, throw some eye-drops into those red lines and get dinner ready.

It was around 11 a.m.

I picked up my phone and texted John, wet-faced: (from the dogs and me :)

“We love you. Especially me. oxox

Thank you for all the years you have loved me despite. I never deserved it.”

The song was over and I went on with the day.

John came home early, which was rare, from a long day, beginning at 4am, from the rooftop of his job. I offered some coffee in the garden. We sat there for an hour, a light wind moving the palms planted in 1953. Both of us wanted to close our eyes. He was talking about various things as I was staring at his worn down hands, split nails, dirty jeans, heavy boots, spotty head from cryo freezing… when he said something extremely unusual.

“I need to talk to you about something.”

I have found that unless my writing is brutally honest, it won’t matter to anyone. I hope this matters. Our personal conversation scenarios have ran their course, like circling a tree.

“Is everything okay?” I said.

“Yeah. it’s good. Let me say this all the way through.”

“Today, at the same time you wrote me (he didn’t have time to text back), I was standing on the roof thinking and looking out. It was a moment, what’s that word? seren? (me: serendipitous?) yes, that’s it. I was thinking about my family, my grandparents, who came to America, alone, in the 1920’s. I only saw them on occasion. I loved them. They were special to me. But I guess they weren’t that involved. My mom and all her relationships and inability to get along with her sisters. Just about everybody. My family’s inability to be a close family. Never desiring my kids to be close to their kids. I looked at your family and how your dad left a country for his own reasons. Family pain? who knows. I’m sorry to you Deb. I’m sorry that when you met me you thought you scored this big close family. I tried. I gave it all I had. I was thinking that it’s just how it is. I accept it now. I accept what our path has been. I accept it. I just need you to know that.”

Side by side. He caught up to me. How beautiful. I’m the one usually lagging behind my strong, fast, impatient guy.

The blindside
of missed
fortune
to know
You
trusting
only
our love
binds us
in circles
of madness
flesh
needing
wanting
desires
promises
to us
nothing
compared to
the freedom
we have
in You
to love
with
reckless
abandonment
oh
serendipitous
God...

- deborah t. hewitt

“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.” - Robert Browning

From the movie White Nights, 1985 (the year we were married), it’s a complicated look at love in the world. The lyrics of struggle when you ebb and flow, when you lose your way. Sometimes forever.

It’s a wild adventure. life.

That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. - Corinthians 12:10

Grow strong. ox