Your Hearts Need Healed

Mom. Dad. Hi.

You've ruined marriage for me.

I think this way because you guys are still married even though you both gave up on each other years ago. I remember experiencing the crumble.

Your marriage is so broken. I wish you were divorced, and it's clear you divorced each other in your hearts years ago. I still struggle to accept the details that my dad was the one who wanted a divorce, that he said all those awful things to you, mom, to make you feel less than your worth. Yet all I see these days is my mom buried in some man she's never physically met, and it makes me angry.

I'm better off single if this is what marriage is supposed to be like. I'm so afraid of loving someone, getting hurt, and just never trying to mend it. I'm afraid of committing adultery against my future husband, if I get to have a husband. I'm afraid of unforgiveness, of holding a grudge to the point where I just abandon my husband, and I'm hoping if I did this, that he would divorce so I might come to my senses that this isn't how you treat another person.

The fact is, you're both broken. Both filled with deep wounds of unhealed trauma and pain. Yet you ignore it, and in the process of your ignoring it, you ignore us, your kids, and we're all left broken and wounded and traumatized and unhealed. A family of hurt people hurting people.

I could tell you all of this, but I doubt you would listen. You didn't want to listen to me when I wanted us to be closer as a family all those years ago. Maybe we tried too hard, why did we give up trying? This whole place is falling apart and all I see is brokenness and selfishness and I wish I could unlearn it.

As I write this, I wonder, why don't I pray for us more?