When She Returned

by Lucinda Berry

Unfortunately, their emotional maturity had come at the expense of unimaginable heartache and loss.

as hard as my sons prayed for James’s healing, in the end they prayed just as hard for his death.

I felt the shock waves splinter our former existence. We’d forever live in a distinct before-and-after sequence now.

I could tell he didn’t have kids by the way my presence made him uncomfortable.

Becoming a mom felt like I had forfeited all my rights in favor of others.

Once your child was five, it no longer qualified as pregnancy weight, did it?

a straight face and not show my annoyance. The only people who ever complained about having all kinds of money and not being happy were the ones who had it.

not liking change and being resistant to anything that doesn’t fall within their traditional ideologies.”

it wasn’t worth the argument.

Remember, when you change yourself, you change the world around you.”

which was what always happened whenever I did anything new—he tolerated it from me but he didn’t want any part of it.

contentment with sameness

The problem with having a fairy-tale relationship story was how much other people were invested in keeping the fairy tale alive. It wasn’t just our story—it was everyone’s.

Traumatic grief was groundless, a free fall into space. Unless you’d been there before, you couldn’t understand what it felt like.

Where was my faith? The point was to make a blind leap. It wasn’t a jump if I already knew everything that was going to happen afterward.

no matter what the circumstances were—