By Lizzy Sabin
When we’re young we’re encouraged to find our niche in life. Our personal form of self-expression to help us process hard moments and emotions, which everyone faces.
When my teenage mind could no longer handle the things I was experiencing I chose to write and I usually wrote about the trials my family was experiencing.
Families are this beautiful and tricky unit that have a defining and lasting impact on our lives.
I’d like to share a piece of mine with you.
It’s hard for me to be mad at you
You’re the man that I always looked up to
The one filled with love and morale
Where has this man gone now?
I see you, watch you crumble, we all watch the pieces of you fall
I tried picking them up, gluing back together what I could remember
But you shattered them again
I sat and cried and you just watched
I swear, I screamed your name, but something blocked your heart from hearing
You leave me in my despair
You’ve left us all to your deep gloom
It’s wading over you now
Soon you will be consumed
You wont be able to breathe
So we all screamed. Wake up! Swim away!
But instead you just sank
Incapable of hearing the reason in all of our minds
So lost that you forgot the impact you have
Now I see you floating around the bottom filled with your hate
Is that what took you first?
Made you incapable of hearing, loving, feeling?
Or was it your pride?
Did it fill your shoes and break your mind?
You left us before your body ever did
In the worst possible way
You lost your sanity
You lost what made you, you.
Even though she asked you to make things better
To work on the hurt that you felt
She begged you to stay
To pray
To help us pick you up
But you never did
Now I see you at the bottom of the water
You just couldn’t hold on
Once you dipped a toe the rest lunged.
Your body has sunk with the rest of you
I suppose it felt easier than to rise above the ripping tides
You chose the ‘simpler’ way out and left us to our own demise
I can’t bear to see the remains of you
It breaks me down
I used to wish to just feel sympathy instead of a bitter pain
Why couldn’t you change for us?
Why wasn’t your children’s love enough
I knew what you could be, what you could do.
You just let your potential go
You tried to set our family free
But now all we do is miss you
Your laugh
The way you made us smile
The way you spoke, how your brain worked
It’s all wasted
Gone.
Sunken down to the bottom, useless and lifeless
I’ll wait for the pieces to float back up to the top
Collect them
Keep them
Until we can forget and let go
Until the scent of you leaves, the memories fade and somehow we all move on
It all seems impossible now
To heal from a hurt that could have been prevented
To forgive a love that has since been neglected
We can’t hold on forever
You couldn’t hold on till the end
You let us go, so we have to let go too
Some part of me will always miss you
I try not to wonder about lives that could have been
Or make believe memories
But I will feel a space inside me that you were to fill
Because now it’s empty
And I can’t make it go away
I was made to be loved by two
So how do I stop missing you?
My parents divorced when I was 18 years old after several years of struggling without outside help. I always thought that was the only way things in our family could get better.
We had the belief that after the divorce things would be simpler and lighter.
But they were just hard in a different way. I always wonder if our family could have healed and remained together if we had the proper information and help.
If your marriage is suffering and you feel like the issues you are facing cannot be resolved think of your children and the family you have created. It will not always be easier to be divorced. It won’t heal what you’re currently going through.
But it will, always, affect your kids.
There are ways to get help.
I ask you to use the below links to read the facts and get the help you need before you walk away from the life you chose to lead.
Lizzy Sabin is from Annapolis, Maryland. She loves learning about the family and is recently and happily married. Lizzy hopes to be a marriage and family therapist one day.