My parents divorced when I was 14.  But my story begins much earlier, one night when I was 3, 4, or maybe 5 (I can’t quite recall).  I was in my parents’ master bedroom. My dad was behind the walk-in closet door, and my mom was with me in the room.  It was dark, and she was crying.  I asked her what was wrong, and she responded, “Your dad says he doesn’t love me anymore.”  I don’t remember what happened next.  I don’t even remember how I felt.  I just remember that it was dark.  This is one of my earliest childhood memories. 

Of course, I have more memories surrounding the divorce itself and the other events leading up to it over the years.  But I share the very first memory in detail because I think it defines my greatest wound and my subsequent (ongoing!) healing. 

As a child, I apprehended that the love of my parents together (something which is supposed to be stable and permanent) had somehow ceased to exist.  Thus, I learned that love is conditional and may stop—unexpectedly, and without explanation—at any point.  As I grew older, I yearned for a deep, stable, all-encompassing love.  Yet I had trouble feeling like God was really there for me.  I also doubted whether any really good young man would want to marry me, since I knew that people like myself—a child of divorced parents—carry emotional and psychological “baggage” which, they say, is likely to cause problems later on.

God is good, however, and He has brought me more healing than I even knew I needed.  In college, I met a young man who would become my future husband.  He used to ask me a question that I found odd: “Where are you?”  This was confusing to me at first.  “What do you mean? I’m right here!” What he really wanted to know and “see” was what I kept hidden from most people: what I was experiencing in my heart, mind, and soul.  Gradually, I began to thaw out; I learned to cry again (after a period of emotional shutdown); I learned to put my interior life into words and to share those thoughts with him. 

Because of my fundamental insecurity and my fears that love would suddenly stop, I always pushed myself hard to achieve (I graduated as valedictorian in college).  I felt like I didn’t deserve love just for being myself; I had to earn respect.  My husband’s steady temperament and deep capacity for love attracted me and made me feel secure; yet neither of us were prepared for the ways my “baggage” would weigh us down in the days and years after our wedding.

As I said, I’m a doer, an achiever.  I like tangible results that I can point to, to feel like I’ve accomplished something, so that I can feel worthy of others’ love.  Once we had a child and a house, I resigned myself to what I saw as my role in life: housework and childcare.  I was sad about this being “it,” but committed to doing it the best I knew how.  My husband tried time and again to get me to prioritize relationships (especially ours!) over chores and work, but I usually just didn’t get it.  Fast forward to 5 years of marriage and 4 kids… finally, in desperation, my husband put it this way: “I just want you… to be with me!” 

At this point in time, I was several weeks into the virtual Life-Giving Wounds retreat.  While all the talks were excellent, the live-streamed Adoration night (Zoom session with Jesus!) was definitely the pivotal point for me.  During the reflection Fr. Mario offered, he pointed out that this retreat is fundamentally about an encounter with Christ crucified.  It’s not about never feeling pain again.  It’s about encountering a God Who knows what pain is, and Who is with us in the midst of our pain.  Wow.  God just wants us… to be with Him! 

And so I finally understood.  What my husband had been trying to express to me all along was his desire for deep interpersonal unity between me and him, no matter what else was going on.  It didn’t matter too much whether the housework was done or not.  What mattered most to him was the ongoing gift of myself to him — not just my work and my accomplishments, or even my body (important), but primarily the gift of my mind and heart.  In order to give those, I have to be present to myself; I have to stop doing things long enough to reflect, to ponder, to articulate the movements of my heart.  This takes courage—it’s scary to go there alone.  But I am not alone.  Christ crucified is with me, even when I don’t always feel Him.  He is “waiting in the wound” in my heart. 

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Note: The “theme song” of Life-Giving Wounds is “Waiting in the Wound” by Michael Corsini. Picture of woman writing (on blog home page) used for illustrative purposes only.

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Murielle Blanchard graduated from Wyoming Catholic College in 2015. She and her husband (also a WCC grad) live in Arizona with their 4 children. In her small amounts of spare time, she enjoys reading, working out, baking, and painting. Her work can be found at www.etsy.com/shop/DesertShipOfBeauty.