Rebuilding after the crash

When I was a kid, I loved going to work with my dad. The dusty work truck with coffee mugs rattling around the cab was one of my favorite places to be.

Dad is an orchardist by calling and passion but it wasn’t always financial viable for our family of five. So, he took up general contracting when there wasn’t farming to be done. He took on all kinds of jobs big and small. We built fences together as well as houses and wine tasting buildings.

One of the smaller jobs was rebuilding a stone wall hit by a drunk driver.

When we arrived all the old stones from the wall were scattered on the sidewalk. Many still had mortar attached.

We spent the next couple of days reusing most of these stones to rebuild the wall adding new mortar. By the end of that job the wall looked good as new. I now walk by it on the way downtown, usually not even thinking about it being the wall that broke apart so many years ago.

But, it’s not the same wall at all. There is no way we put the stones back in exactly the same way they were when it was first built. New mortar held the stones in place. We added a few new stones. The old ones all covered in mortar wouldn’t have looked right on the wall face.

Our lives and our families experience trauma. Like that wall experienced a car crash, your family might experience death, divorce, chronic disease or some other major disruption.

For me, right now, the car that smashed into the stone wall of my life is divorce.

Dads, in these situations, it’s on us to lead the way in rebuilding. Life isn’t going to be the same. You aren’t going to piece life back together to how it was before. But, you are going to rebuild.

I’m still in the process of rebuilding the stone wall of my life. It take time to figure out what needs to stay, what needs to go and how to bind everything together again. Making conscious decisions about how to rebuild is the key to creating something that will last.

After the trauma of divorce you aren’t going to be able to go back to the way things were before, but you can rebuild.

What do you think?: One constant in life is change. Often change is slow and unnoticeable. Other times it’s abrupt, sudden and disruptive. How do we come back when life is falling apart?