I have an 8×20 inch plaque over my bed that reads, “It is well with my soul.” Its size is out of proportion to the king size frame and mattress, but when I moved the bed and all my earthly belongings into this rental house after my divorce, that phrase seemed most appropriate for how I felt. Enough time had passed since my ex husband’s leaving that I had released the death-grip on our previous life and finally come to peace with moving. I’d spent enough nights alone – both figuratively while he was still with me and physically after he left – that I was no longer grieving that empty side of the bed. It was well with my soul to lie alone.

It caught me off-guard one night this week when, around 1am, I was staring at the other side of the bed remembering when he was there, when he was there but wasn’t, then when he wasn’t there at all. I didn’t miss him. I didn’t hurt. It was just an awareness. A soul funk. My mind shifted to how the ladies from the church slept in that spot after I brought my daughter home from the hospital. How the younger boys slept in their daddy’s spot in those earliest weeks after he left. How that’s now the kids’ safe spot when they can’t sleep and need to be near me.

Years have passed now — more than four since my ex husband left and almost three since the kids and I moved. God has given me tremendous peace and done an incredible healing work during that time, but there are still periods when I’ll suddenly find myself in that sort of soul funk. I don’t know how else to describe it but to call it soul memory – where some subconscious part of you feels the trauma and pain of those days years ago without you actively recalling it (and maybe even when you’d rather not revisit it at all).

I guess it makes sense that it happened this week, for the days leading up to my daughter’s birthday to be one of those soul funk times for me. After all, those days were the hardest of my life – deciding whether to do what would hurt me least, which was to banish my husband from the delivery room since it didn’t seem fair for him to be present for our daughter’s arrival when he’d been absent in one form or another for the duration of the pregnancy… or to do what would potentially hurt my daughter least, which was to have her daddy present at her birth. I didn’t want her to one day look at pictures and wonder why he wasn’t there or think there was any lack of feeling for her. Our marriage failure shouldn’t ever make her doubt her worth. So I allowed him to be there. And seeing his emotion, I allowed myself to hope. And that misguided hope led to the most painful days of my life, when, despite how things seemed with our family at the hospital, my husband went from us…to the other woman. I’d thought I understood betrayal and loss when he left us six weeks prior, but nothing I’d felt to that point even compared.

Those were darkest days of deepest pain, softened only by the beautiful newborn joy in my arms. I would spend hours and hours while caring for her – rocking, walking, bouncing – wondering how had my life come to that sort of sadness. Then when she finally slept, I would lie awake, staring at the other side of the bed longing for what life had been and what I thought it would be…but ultimately feeling utter loss and rejection.

I guess your soul doesn’t forget stuff like that.

Those deepest emotional wounds, though healing more and more with time, still ache on occasion. And though I sometimes think I’d rather there come a day when my soul doesn’t remind me of the trauma it survived, I guess I couldn’t appreciate the healing if I altogether forgot the injury. I couldn’t appreciate that plaque above my bed. I couldn’t be thankful for the wellness with my soul — the ok-ness in lying alone — without the soul memory of how unwell it used to be.