Acceptance

About a month after our divorce was final, my ex-husband walked into our youngest son’s church league basketball game sporting a fresh haircut.  When we met my freshman year of college, he wore his hair longer, combed back, and usually under a well-worn, faded black baseball cap.  We would watch movies with his head on a pillow in my lap, my hands learning the texture of his thick, black hair.  Through the years, I knew how it felt freshly cut and how it felt as it grew out.  As he aged, he went to a shorter cut because his hair didn’t really grow long, just big.  I liked the feel of it best when it was short and freshly cut.  For twenty years I responded to his haircuts…noticing in my fingertips the difference a cut made in the feel of his hair… So when he walked into the church gymnasium that day, my arm lifted out of habit to touch his head, as I’d done so very many times…but as my hand went up, the realization came that now divorced, I no longer had the right to just touch him.  It was no longer a welcome intimacy.  I returned my hand to my side, found a seat in the stands, and fought tears for the four quarters of the basketball game.  Blinking fast.  Holding my eyes open wide.  Slipping off to the bathroom a few times when the tears threatened to spill.  This wasn’t the first instance of acceptance…or the last.  It wasn’t the most significant…or the least.  

I can’t even say that for me there was a time frame of acceptance.  It was more like moments – scattered and met with resistance at first…gradually increasing as the situation deteriorated…until I could no longer resist or deny that not only was my marriage gone but perhaps it never was what I thought in the first place.  I suppose that as I moved out of the denial and bargaining stages, the only healthy option was acceptance.   Sometimes it came with anger.  Sometimes with sadness.  

It was gradual for me.  Early on and for a long time, I basically had to be punched in the face with big, excruciating, blaringly obvious gestures in order to see the truth enough to accept the disregard and disrespect for what they were.  Even then, I could only accept things for what they were at the moment.  I refused to even consider that our history was anything other than what I treasured it to be or that he was anything other than what I believed him to be.  It wasn’t until much later that I could entertain the idea or accept that had things ever been what I had believed for twenty years, they should not have blown up in such tragic fashion or reached such a drastic, unrecognizable end.  Accepting the possibility that I could have been wrong for SO long about something SO important was awful.  Accepting that every memory I had could be a tainted lie was devastating.  Letting go of a dreamed-of future was painful but still easier than letting go of a twenty year past with a man I had known over half my life.  

Acceptance is not a beautiful, sweet stage of grief, where you’re suddenly okay with your loss or happy in your new circumstances.  It takes time and healing and willingness.  Acceptance doesn’t mean you condone the pain.  It simply means that you have healed enough to confront the pain – as ugly and unfair as it may be – and accept the changes and losses in order to move forward.  Acceptance is facing the reality that wrecked you in order to find yourself among that wreckage.  Acceptance is a choice to let go of what was so that you can live for what will be.