We walked through the door because it was called “The Shard Shop” and that’s just a name that calls out to you. Our friend uses the word “shard” to describe the shattering of your heart that happens when something is too precious to take in. Looking at old pictures of your newborn baby? Shards. Reading old Mother’s Day cards from your children? Shards. Watching your kids hold hands as they walk down the block. ALL THE SHARDS.
So we went in, wondering what in the world a ShardShop might actually be. Turns out it is a studio where people create their own art out of broken glass. They take glass pieces, put them on a canvas and it goes through a glazing type process overnight. We didn’t have time to get involved in a class, but there was something that spoke to my heart from the bins of broken glass, divided up by color.
There has been a lot of shattering in my life. My expectations of what my life would look like. My ideas of how easy it would be to become a mother. My thoughts on what marriage would be like. My ideas about what kind of career I could pursue. All of these things have felt shattered for a season.
Sometimes the shattering was painful and all at once. Sometimes it was a slow process of recognizing how shattered things had become. Sometimes it was a relief to let go of the old to make way for the new. Shattering the old ways and old ideas can be exciting as we look to the next challenge.
But what resonated with me most was seeing the perfectly good (as far as I could tell) blue glass cup sitting there on top of the bin of blue pieces, amidst all the wreckage. My gut instinct was to wonder if maybe it’s still useful. Maybe it just needs to be washed up. Maybe that tiny crack can be repaired. Why shatter something that still has some usefulness?
But I’ve been there. I’ve stood there and stared at my old way of doing things. I’ve thought, “It still works. Sort of. It’s functional enough. I don’t want to let it go.”
I’ve seen this in my parenting. Why can’t I just raise kids the way everybody else raises kids? Why do mine need so much intentionality? So much structure? So much reassurance? I remember finally getting to the point of realizing that if traditional parenting methods worked for raising my kids who have experienced trauma, I would do them. Happily. But they were like that blue glass that maybe was kind of functional, but it wasn’t what we needed. I needed to smash those ideas of parenting so my kids could thrive. So our home could be something different. Something beautiful.
So I smashed it. And I learned what we needed and how to become a mother who could help my children heal. It was hard, but it was necessary. And as I’ve helped them put the pieces of their story together, I’ve seen how redemptive this process can be when I let go of my expectations and embrace the shattering that has to happen. They experienced a shattering before I ever entered the picture. Now it’s my joy to help them create beauty from the pieces.
I’ve seen this in my marriage. I wanted to hold on to old patterns that felt functional to me, but were hurting us in the long run. I didn’t want to have to change. I wanted to hold to my original ideas about what it meant to be a wife and what my husband would be like. But that wasn’t healthy. We weren’t healthy. It was a grief like I can’t describe to have to let go of my preconceived ideas about what marriage would be like to embrace what my marriage actually was. It was a smashing of that glass, but in the aftermath, I could feel myself on the floor, trying to piece it all back together, cutting myself again and again through the process until I accepted that I couldn’t put that old thing back together. It had to become a new thing. A beautiful thing. Something we built together in light of the reality of who we genuinely are, not who we thought we might be.
But like we all learned from The Velveteen Rabbit, that becoming a new, real, beautiful thing doesn’t happen all at once. The shattering, the smashing may happen in an instant, but putting the pieces together to form something new may take a long time. It’s a precious process that can’t be rushed. It comes with moments of ugliness, moments of indecision, moments of failure. But I’m beginning to see the light shining through this better version of what we’ve created. Sometimes it takes letting go of what seemed functional and what we hoped would work to find the beauty that was waiting there all along.