The Dark Shape of Sadness

Held up against the Light of the World

Photo by Ahmet Sali on Unsplash

To the moms at the park, she has a short fuse and can’t handle her toddler’s insistence on staying to play longer. When she snatches the two year old up and hoists her over her shoulder, they murmur to one another in judgement about why she’s losing it over such a small offense.

To her friends on Marco Polo, she’s back with yet another message about her prolonged anxiety attack symptoms, which refuse to relent. When she complains for the 7th day in a row about her racing heart, dry mouth, and overwhelming sense of dread, while they validate her feelings, they silently wonder why she can’t just get it together.

To her nurses, she’s a patient off their caseload; a collective sigh of relief released over their most high maintenance client finally being gone for good. When she would cry on the phone and raise her voice in frustration over their lack of scheduling or inability to locate a test result, they would tell her calm down and wonder why she was so worked up.

To her husband, she’s another night of apologies over you’re own your own meals, a messy house, and lethargy. When they planned this last embryo transfer, they knew the odds of failure and anticipated the sadness, but also the relief when this door finally closed, one way or the other. When two months have passed and her grief seems to resurface anew, he wonders when she’ll finally feel the reprieve.

To the politicians and keyboard warriors, she’s unworthy of making her own decisions regarding the future of her embryos and future fertility. When she tries to wade into the waters of such a nuanced conversation with those who will never be affected by such decisions, they wonder why she doesn’t see it their way and simply go on about their lives, unchanged.

To the cashier at Ikea, she’s just another shopper out with her husband and child, purchasing furnishings for her home. When she suddenly becomes very hot and feels like she might pass out, needing to guzzle a bottle of water before purchasing cube storage for their new office in lieu of a nursery, he wonders when shopping for organizational systems became such a feat.

To the friends who ask when she’s going to have more kids, she’s irrational for spluttering and spurting and turning red faced in response. When she eventually spills the truth— that she’s tried, five times over, to no avail, and is now out of tries, they wonder why she had such a strong reaction to a simple yes or no question.

To the audience in the crowd, she is nervous but also resolute in her claims that the Lord has been faithful during this time. When she shares the truths He has revealed during their study of the book of John, they wonder how someone can find hope despite their seemingly bleak circumstances.

To the loved ones who have let her cry at inappropriate times and dropped off care packages on her porch; to the ones who have sent lengthy prayers and the ones who have sent short prayers; to the ones who have laid hands on her and the ones who have wrapped arms around her— she wonders how she would have ever made it through without such a physical manifestation of the body of Christ supporting her.

To anyone observing her from afar, at any one moment in time, they will see but a fragment of her grief; even she can’t experience it in it’s fullness all at once. The hardest question for her to answer is “how are you doing?” because the answer changes every minute, every hour, every day.

It’s easy for her to get lost in the details of this particular heartbreak and want to account for every injustice about the situation, but her ultimate hope is that as the edges of her pain soften, so will the details and she will one day look back on this time as a silhouette of grief— a dark shape of sadness held up against the Light of the World. Not because she hopes to forget or dishonor her darkest days, but because “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). She knows she will not be overcome by the darkness, nor will the darkness disappear, but it will be held up agains the Light as a reminder of what He has brought her through.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Silhouette."

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Dinner

If I had to preemptively choose my salad of the summer, I would confidently choose this salad, and it’s only mid-May. I have been riffing on this for weeks with no end in sight. I have subbed Instant pot shredded chicken or Rotisserie chicken for grilled chicken skewers, frozen Mexican street corn for grilled corn, and goat cheese for blue cheese, but I’m obsessed with this dressing and the addition of honey to the buffalo sauce. I plan on adding this salad to my meal rotation for lunch or dinner at least once a week for the foreseeable future.

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Rave

I am a big time tea girlie, like big time. Last summer, before my daughter was even two years old, I went to mail something at the post office mail box and when I rolled down the window, she instinctively said “tea, large” because she was so used to those words coming out of my mouth whenever I rolled my window down (of course I went and ordered a tea right after).

So imagine my delight when not one, but two, HteaO’s opened nearly equidistant from my house this year! I’ve gone a few times, but now that the weather is warming up, I am becoming a frequent flier¹ and my drink of choice comes from their secret menu (did we know they had a secret menu??) with a little tweak.

My current order is a Wedding Cake tea (which is normally half sweet almond green tea, half sweet coconut tea) with unsweet coconut. Ordering a half sweet, half unsweet tea results in my ideal level of sweetness and I foresee many trips all summer long.

1. As I’m writing this very rave, my husband calls me on his way home from work to tell me he is stopping to get a tea and asks if I want one, which is very loving of him. I tell him I have already gotten one today, which is very mature of me. I feel the timing of this interaction could only be described as providential.