The Gospel According to Pink

The Spousal Unit has been in rehab since Friday.  It's very quiet in my neck of the woods.  It's been so long since I've experienced anything like it that it's almost a little eerie.  I don't remember how it felt to just sit and be still or just sit and listen to the stillness around me.

When I got home Friday morning, I started crying (again) and said thank you to God a bunch of times.  I am utterly, truly grateful that God moved so very quickly to get my Spousal Unit into rehab.  And, a few days later, I'm still grateful but it's also like I can start to feel the...weight of current and future changes settle down on me.  Things are going to be changing in a lot of ways.  The hope and prayer is that the end result will be restoration and reconciliation but this is still unsettling in the fact that I've lived one way for almost ten years and now I'm going to be taking steps on a new path - by myself to some extent.  Not that I won't have the support of my friends and church (as will the SU) but rehab, separation...all that was never in my plans and now it's here.

I've been listening to Pink's "Try" a lot.  It's meant different things at different times.  For a long time, it was kind of my "keep going" song while God was telling me to stay and to be Jesus to the SU.  Now that we are at this point, it's started to mean something different to me.  However, I keep gravitating to the chorus nowadays.  It's not in the "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" sense.  It's more that even with all the hurt and confusion and worry I feel, I can't give up.  I have to get up each day and try to do what I need to do to repair myself and be ready for the hoped-for reconciliation:

Where there is desire, there's gonna to be a flame
Where there is a flame, someone's bound to get burned
But just because it burns doesn't mean you're gonna die
You gotta get up and try, try, try

It's not easy.  I'm sleeping like crap right now and expect to for a while.  I wake up multiple times throughout the night.  Some of it is ingrained from night after night of getting up to see where the SU had passed out this time and try to get him into bed.  Some of it is just that I plain miss him.  And a lot of it is probably stress, etc., related to suddenly having something removed that has been a part of my life for years (even if it wasn't good).

I worry.  This is prime time for worrying.  One of the things I worry about is money.  God has been very good in terms of provision so far but money is one of my buttons and has been since my childhood.  I set up my power to be turned on in the new apartment and found out I have to pay $215 as a "new" account even though it's the same company we've been using and I'm only moving one building over.  I'm buying only minimal groceries and trying to keep enough money to pay both March and April rent (the SU should be home mid-March if he only does 30 days.  I move out March 28th)..  I don't know what he's going to do come May.  This morning, I took a walk for my workout today and scrounged around in car ashtrays and loose coins on desks so I could buy a cup of coffee rather than use any of the remaining funds in our bank account.  Money is a chink in my armor and I'm going to have to work hard on continually turning that over to God and trusting Him.

Master Chief has referred me to a new therapist who has been through this and will also cost less but my brain says "Hey, that's $40 dollars that you could be saving instead."  That's where I try to use Pink because therapy is part of my "try, try, try".  I cannot get better on my own.  I cannot deal with the issues I need to on my own.  God provided Master Chief and now he's provided Cortana (dude, I have got to stop with the pop culture references at some point).

I'm also going to investigate local Alanon meetings again.  I told the SU I would and it's another resource.  I tried Celebrate Recovery a few years ago and...no.  When you know more than the small group leader and end up facilitating the discussion, it kinda makes you not want to come back.  I've successfully used that excuse to avoid any other CR or Alanon groups.  But I'm going to have to "try" as another commitment to my own recovery along with trying to remember the things I liked to do before and making myself do them again.

I sound really firm, really committed as I read this over but part of me is quaking in my boots.  My church as been truly awesome.  Support is there both for the SU and myself.  I managed to let our life group know what was going on last night and they prayed for both the SU and me.  But sitting here alone I can feel the weight of change and it's kinda scary.  Well, no, it's a lot scary.

But I'll get up and try.  I want the opportunity.  I want to change.  I need to change.  Change can be good.  It just sucks that sometimes it really hurts along the way.