What is that sound?

On Wednesday May 10, 2017 I moved in with my sister.  She lives in Southwest Fort Worth – about 35 miles away from where I was living.  It feels so far away from all my “people” but have decided to see this time as another layer in my recovery and healing.  God is working on me and am so thankful that my sister has a safe place that I can call home base for a few months while starting my business.  I pray for her and her marriage every day now.  It’s not like I did not pray for her before, but now – I make sure that I pray for her.

The first morning that I woke up at her home I heard something.  It was odd to me.

The last two years, either I have been alone or with a roommate and the morning “sounds” were very quiet.  My goal with having a roommate was to not be seen or heard – calm, quiet and peaceful.  Those were the adjectives that I wanted L to use when she thought of me.

The 3 years prior to that, I was in hell.  Ok, not “literally” but close.  I was in a situation where any noise or anything that was not part of the routine would cause the earth to shatter.  The goal was to be as calm, quiet and peaceful as to not “poke the bear” and cause him to get out of hand.

Now I see that my goal in having the same situation over the last 2 years has been a reflection of what I had learned to do to survive during my abusive relationship.

Back to the day after I moved in with D – that morning I woke up to the sounds of laughter.  D and her husband were in the kitchen, laughing and having a good time.  I cried.  I didn’t expect to cry, but I did.  Hearing the sounds of love and kindness pinged my heart in a way that I had not even realized I had been missing.

Then I went out of my room to go to the bathroom and D was cooking something and the smoke detector went off – my heart got afraid.  In my old situation that would not have been good and I would have had to spend the rest of the morning walking on egg shells to make sure nothing else happened to cause him to be upset.

But what I heard from her husband while the smoke detector was going off was laughter and he said, “Oh my wife is cooking again”.

It has been over a week now and I hear laughter almost every morning.  What a nice sound to wake up to.

In the back of my brain, I am hearing a different sound too tho.  More a question than a sound.  The question is, I wonder if this is real?  I so want it to be, for my sister’s sake. I talked with my 20-year-old son about all of this.  He was the only one that really understands what I went through because he was there with me.

He told me not to project my stuff on their relationship.  Smart kid.

God is redeeming me in ways I didn’t even know I needed to be redeemed – with something as simple and beautiful as the sound of laughter.

Blessings.

-S