You know, it’s a strange thing when a certain kind of heartache doesn’t feel novel anymore. When you’ve been through it before and it hurts, but it also feels familiar because you’ve hurt like that before.
These repetitive kinds of pain are not uncommon in the coaching life.
In this life, the first loss hurts, and the other losses hurts.
The first parent e-mail or social media criticism hurts, and so do the others.
The first move hurts, and the next move hurts.
Each time we wonder how we will get through, and each time we know we will, but the time between the hurt and the healing sometimes feels like too much to bear.
That’s this move for me.
I think the pain of this move is not so much the place (although I do love it here). It’s the layering. The layering of one town filled with people, memories, and traditions, now layered upon another town filled with people, memories, and traditions.
Friends’ faces that I left seven years ago, overlapping in my mind’s eye with those I left three years ago, now joined by the current ones.
Oh, and their children. All those children. The ones I’ve watched grow, the ones I loved, the ones I imagined growing up with my children. It’s all changing. Ending.
Grieving. All over again.
I know, because we’ve moved before, there will come a time when I will get to put my energy into the transition.
I will look for homes. I will research doctors and dentists. I will look up where we might go to church. I will pack. (Oh, the packing!)
We will, at some point, learn the date when we really have to say goodbye. We will do the hugs and the tears and then we will transfer our focus and officially, officially, let go.
But, until then…
I am just going to sit here with you, the wives of the in-between.
I don’t want any of us to hurt, but I take comfort in your common experience because it means I am not alone. You, and me, and thousands of coaches’ wives all over this country are in this together. Knowing we are done where we are, possibly unsure of where we are headed, but all collectively grieving, trying not to worry, and praying.
Praying. Knowing that God has met us in each transition, each loss, each challenge along the way and, He will meet us again.
He will provide a job.
He will provide a home.
He will provide friends.
He will provide people to love and people to love us.
He will provide for our children.
He will find them friends.
He will make it okay again in time, just like He did before.
Much love to you during this time, the wives of the in-between.