Primal Loss by Leila Miller

Author:Leila Miller [Miller, Leila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LCB Publishing
Published: 2017-05-20T22:00:00+00:00

Resiliency? Well, the divorce stripped me entirely of my faith…God had been totally obscured from view because of the trauma of separation and divorce, and He became a complete stranger to me. All of the carefully prepared for, reverently received sacraments of my childhood were not enough to blunt the trauma to my faith that came from the wrecking ball that was divorce. When I finally realized that there wasn’t a way around dealing with the realities of my parents’ dysfunction and the civil divorce that followed it, I began to make personal progress—tackling it head-on. From my knees, which was all I could accomplish by that point in my twenties, I found myself talking to an unfamiliar God who I wasn’t sure was listening. I also wasn’t sure I held God blameless for allowing me to grow up the way I had, and with the resulting family structure I was left with when the majority of the “dysfunction cloud” had settled. And yet, God heard my prayers and, mercifully, restored my faith.

My siblings have not taken the same restorative path as me. Their 20s and 30s have been spent still dealing with the realities of their destroyed family. They have not been able to keep their faith due to the divorce, and they are completely devoid of any faith in God. They believe that they are in control of what happens, without a need for a God. They mock me for having a faith. I’m not trying to inflate my ability to cope over my siblings’ ability, but rather to draw a distinction as to how it impacts each child of a family uniquely.

We don’t attend each others’ weddings, baptisms, or graduations. We, as siblings, are constant mirrors of our parents’ dysfunction to each other, even to this day. We have been unable to find common ground, and it always comes back to the circumstances surrounding the separation and divorce of our parents. That is the root cause. I didn’t just lose parents, I also lost siblings, nieces, and nephews. My entire nuclear family disintegrated. Yet if you knew me only as a professional, you wouldn’t have any idea of what utter catastrophe my nuclear family represents in my world. In this way, I live two realities—the one that people expect from someone who “has her ducks in a row” and the one of shaking my head at the train wreck that my nuclear family is and always will be. A resilient child I might be, but that can’t change the reality that family is always a sore subject…which I share with very few people.

Divorce impacts every holiday, every milestone in life, every accomplishment and failure. It impacts the way I relate to my own spouse and his family. It impacts how I deal with growing my own family. And most importantly—I can’t stress this enough—it impacts my inner dialogue. That inner dialogue is a daily reminder that what I had modeled for me is not what I can trust or take for granted.

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