When I found out I was getting a divorce, I immediately knew that I did not want to stay in our marital home. My disconnection from my intuition immediately reconnected and I remember being hit so strongly by this knowing. The energy in the home was harsh, the colors were dark, the feeling was uncomfortable. I remember having a conversation with my mom and her asking me, “Is there any way you can stay in that house, don’t you think it would be better for the girls?” Without hesitation I knew it wasn’t. I knew that there was something better for us, and more importantly I knew that I could create our next landing place to be exactly what I wanted. So I intentionally pulled up the roots of my daughters, packed and moved our belongings into storage and my two girls and I moved in with my parents. Three uprooted girls, lost, sad, in the midst of the storm, looking into a huge unknown and holding on to a whole lot of hope.
Sorting through a marriage takes time and a lot of emotional energy. Our divorce negotiations went back and forth, forward and backward. After several months, we were able to come to an agreement. On a sunny summer afternoon, at my youngest daughter’s softball game, my soon to be ex husband handed me the divorce documents, finally signed with his signature, given to me to take to the court house. The sense of relief overflowed in me. That chapter was finally closing, the pain and turmoil and feeling of a loss of control had dissipated and I finally felt free. As we drove away from the softball field, I looked at the papers on my passenger seat and felt huge relief. What happened next was going to change the trajectory of our lives and I didn’t even know it.
On the drive back to my parent’s house from the softball game, signed divorce papers on the seat next to me, and a cute little 9 year old softball player in my back seat complaining that she had to go to the bathroom, I saw an open house sign. I quickly asked my daughter if she could hold it just a few minutes longer and with her permission, I turned into the neighborhood. We pulled up to the house. I could see that it needed work, it definitely hadn’t been loved by anyone in a while. The house paint was drab, the yard was mostly untouched, but it was cute and I could see the potential. We walked into the house and my eye was immediately drawn to the back of the home, which had bright open windows that looked out to a greenbelt and a walking path behind it. We took a quick look around, trying to beat the clock on my daughter’s bladder, got back in the car and went to my parent’s house. As I drove I grew more and more excited, felt more and more free, and knew without a doubt that this was the home we were meant to be in. This was the home that the girls and I would be able to replant ourselves, a home that would provide us the peace, the stability, the love that we would need as each of us rebuilt ourselves. I made a call to my Realtor and by the end of the weekend I had the home under contract and we moved in a few months later.
When your whole world has been turned upside down, when your life is a game board that has been thrown up into the air, all the pieces flying all over the place, who knows where they are going to land, we need a sense of place. We need a place to root down into, a home where we can feel safe. We need a physical structure, we need walls, we need carpet, we need a bedroom, we need stability. We need it because this is where we begin to rebuild our trust. When we know where we are going to lay our head at night, every night for the foreseeable future, little by little we begin to trust that place will be there every night. And as each night passes, our trust grows even more. And over time that foundation grows, and our roots into that trust grow deeper and deeper. Eventually when we feel secure in that trust, we begin to regrow the ability to trust ourselves. We learn to trust in the faith that everything works out the way it’s meant to, and always, always for our greater good. And we continue to reconnect to and trust our inner knowing. That intuition gets louder and louder. And when we can root so far down into the trust of ourselves, then we can begin to grow our trust in other people. This is how we heal, this is how we start to show up in the world as the best version of ourselves. And this is why I serve women going through divorce sell their marital home and find the exact right place to begin the next chapter of their lives, a place for them to reconnect to themselves and to reconnect to their trust.
