Don't Water the Weeds

“The grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence! It’s green where you water it! ”

I said this through tears toward the end of our marriage—when I was still fighting to save it. I had been literally begging my ex to re-engage in our relationship for years, doing everything I could think of to water and tend the grass of our marriage. Out of desperation, I was doing more than my share. I had read a library full of books. I’d sought counsel from our priest. I journaled furiously and went to therapy to figure out my part of it. Searching for a way to reconnect, I invited him out on dates and hung on his every word, hoping to please him. I worked my butt off to jump through every hoop he threw at me. But nothing could get him to invest in us. Turns out he was watering grass across the fence. Fertilizing someone else’s lawn, so to speak. 

This painful reality led us to divorce and set my life on a different path. I’m learning to tend my own yard now.

One morning recently, I woke up thinking of the words I’d said about “watering the grass” and all the frustration and anguish I felt during that time, and realized that this truth also had implications for me. 

It had been a pretty sleepless night. I’d been wrestling with thoughts and feelings that dragged me back into the past and things beyond my control, questioning actions I’d already taken, and playing through different ways that things could have turned out. It was a futile and exhausting exercise that I eventually escaped only by finally drifting off in the early hours of the morning. 

I had been up all night, watering weeds.

It occurred to me that I had a choice about what I did on my side of the fence, now that the whole yard was mine. Was I going to water those weeds or pull them up?

All of these weedy thoughts were invading the otherwise beautiful green garden of my present. I love the life that I have built post-divorce; it’s filled with people, experiences, and a ME I couldn’t have become from within that marriage. The work I am committed to which nurtures and nourishes the unique woman God made me is worth every bit of the sweat equity required. At times, the work has been hard and tedious (and who’s kidding, it still is some days)—but overall, I feel like a desert that’s been transformed into a lush garden.  A garden that I tend daily. And one that’s flowering beautifully right now.

And yet, even in the healthiest of gardens, weeds will always be a threat. The weeds of the “if only’s,” “buts,” and “might have beens'' must be diligently plucked before they spread. I also have to pull up the weeds representing the stories I’ve told myself about the choices my ex made - the stories that place me as a victim or suggest I’m somehow flawed, broken, or not worthy of being chosen. I don’t have let these thoughts take root within me anymore. Get the weed-whacker. It’s time for them to go.

I have to trust the journey, and all the lessons along the way. Although it led to a place I never thought I’d be - the Land of Divorced - it’s also turned out to be a place where I can be truly content. And the grass is so damn green here.