Another Summer of Bittersweet, But Different

It’s been five years since the original summer of bittersweet. I am not the person I was that summer; loss, marriage, time and now motherhood have changed me. 

The bitterness that started one late spring afternoon in 2017 as I sat in the ditch of a lonely Saskatchewan highway haunted me for long. It still can when I give it power. It’s especially real at this time of year, the time when everything went down. 

The summer of 2022 has its own sets of bitterness and goodness, possibly bringing the bittersweet into higher relief  than recent  years. I’ve relived the intensity of emotions that crammed into the weeks before and after our wedding. There was so much tragedy happening to people I knew that summer, not only to me, but, at the time, my pain was I all I saw.

This summer there was the bitter again.  The days of shuttling my infant through hospital hallways, both of us dreading the next medical procedure or bad news from a doctor. That’s the bitter. The long lonely hospital nights. I despaired of ever finding the sweet again. Those days passed and are mostly just something I complain about now. I’m not good at handling the bitter parts of life. It’s easy to be happy, to smile, to praise when the bitter is over and I’m sitting on the rocks at the lake cuddling my contended 3 month old and dangling my feet in the icy waves. But on the hard days when Bébé was being poked by careless nurses, when a doctor wasn’t  careful with my newborn, when i face any hard thing I dissolved into an angry mess. In hard times my entitledness fully lives these song lyrics: “I was sure by now, God, You would have reached down And wiped our tears away Stepped in and saved the day. But once again I say, A-men, and it's still raining” * When things get better and they inevitably and unexpectedly (not the way I imagine) do, I wonder why I can’t live the rest of the song: “And though my heart is torn, I will praise You in this storm.”* 

Now there is the sweet. When I’m rocking my precious child in the cool breeze wafting in on the sunset and drinking Agua Fresca or iced coffee with my husband, that’s the sweet. I want to freeze this moment and replay it infinitely on repeat. This is your cue to gag, my unsappy people. There’s so much more good. A sunset walk with my puppy and my child, days at the lake with BTTs family, fresh garden produce, sunshine, having coffee with the neighbors. Many days have felt too good to be true. 

*Praise You in This Storm by Casting Crowns