A sideways love story

It was the very best love story and I took joy in telling it.

We met when we were 15, in grade nine science. The following year, we had social studies together and when we went to the library to research Barkerville, he carved his initials in the bottom of my wood-soled clogs.

By the end of grade 12, I was madly in love with him. After completing one year of Bible school, graduating from B.C. Institute of Technology, and setting up in good jobs, we got married and had three left-handed, brown-eyed boys. And we lived happily ever after.

Until it all went sideways.

We were on the way to our pastor’s retirement dinner when he said, matter-of-factly, “I don’t love you anymore. I think my life would be better without you.” Eighteen months later, despite a year of counselling, pleading, and promises (“I’ll do anything, please don’t leave. . . .”), he left.

It was Christmas 1998 and I was shattered.

I’ve heard it said the first year of marriage is the hardest. I can say with authority that the last one is harder. And the first year on your own is a killer.

The weeping. Wailing. Gut-wrenching sobbing. Cries out to God. The heartbreaking pain so intense it’s physical. The loneliness. The feeling of inadequacy due to rejection. The lack of identity. (I’d been “his” girl since I was 15. Now, at 37, I was no one’s.) The wrestling with God to please, please, please fix us. I had a box of Kleenex with me at all times.

That first year? It was the most brutal I’ve lived through so far. It was all about death – the death of a marriage, the death of a dream. It was the end of a life that had been joined together forever, for better or for worse.

I bonded with King David that year, reading the Psalms over and over. I am worn out from sobbing. All night I flood my bed with weeping, drenching it with my tears. My vision is blurred by grief; my eyes are worn out (Psalm 6:6–7, NLT).

Also that first year? It was the best I’ve lived through so far. God was there, right beside me. I had more God moments during those 12 months than I’d had in my entire 37 years. He wowed me with answers to specific prayers. He brought incredible people into my life. He spoke to me and I heard him.

And also that year? I learned to sing worship songs and really mean them. For a Mennonite chick who’d been singing songs from the green hymnal and choruses from the S.P.U.G. book her whole life, this added a new dimension to Sunday mornings. I did call out to God, again and again. He was my rock. He lifted me up when I was down.

One year to the day after he left, I had a party. It was a Christmas gathering, a celebration evening, an “I-made-it-365-days-without-a-husband-and-it-sucked-but-I-survived” appetizer night. I invited the 57 people who had helped me through the worst.

Life hasn’t been all lollipops and candyfloss since then, but the deep feelings of despair have never returned.

The tiny church that loved me through all 1999 closed down in 2000, mere minutes after I moved into the neighbourhood. It felt like I got dumped a second time. Those of us from Fraser Heights scattered like cherry blossoms in the wind to a variety of churches. I was on my own again.

I lifted my hands up to God. “I don’t understand. I’m scared, hurt, and lonely. Take my hopes of getting married again, my dreams of being loved and cherished, my desire for stability, my longing for predictability. Take my ‘happily ever after’ fantasy. Show me your will. Then give me the strength to do it.”

It’s been more than eight years since my ex-husband said goodbye.

In the early days, I had hoped that God would bless me for my faithfulness by bringing a strong but gentle, loving, caring, shaggy-haired, guitar-playing, denim-wearing, godly man to rescue me from my singleness. Instead, God has led me on the most unexpected adventure and has brought me to a place where I have complete contentment and peace about being single. It is well with my soul.

For a Mennonite girl who had a hope chest filled with eight place settings of Noritake china and a full set of silverware before her 16th birthday, that’s a God-sized miracle indeed.

Jane O. and her brown-eyed boys attend Murrayville Community Church, Langley, B.C.