From Darkness To Marvelous Light

Its Darkest Before the Dawn

Until I started writing this, I didn’t realize how much of my past I had suppressed from my memory. Those dark hours started around the time I was pregnant with my third child from a man I had dated in high school and who had just been released from prison after serving ten years for armed robbery. Great job, right?

I already had two beautiful girls from a previously failed relationship where I had been abused physically, verbally, and emotionally and from which I received no support for them at all. His mother and sisters were good to us though. I’m thankful for that.

Anyway, here I was pregnant again eight years later and hoping this would complete my little family but he ended up leaving me for an older woman who was divorced with three kids of her own when I was about three months pregnant. I was truly devastated and spiraled into depression. I already felt helpless and vulnerable being pregnant but now I felt abandoned and ashamed. I am also ashamed to admit that I drank wine every night to get numb and to be able to sleep while I was pregnant. It was this situation that precluded my first spiritual experience.

Weeping May Endure for a Night; but Joy Comes in the Morning

I was home alone feeling like a failure, crying and begging God to take away the pain and allow me to go on with my life. It was then that I saw a bright light behind my closed eyelids like the sun came out from behind a cloud, but when I opened my eyes, the room was still the same, dark with closed blinds. Then suddenly I felt a warm, loving , comforting feeling descend upon me that gave me a feeling of complete peace and contentment. I was renewed.

From that day going forward, I never shed another tear about that situation and I never felt anything negative towards my sons father either. I actually felt nothing for him after that. I thanked God continually for his mercy and for showing me how powerful He was and that I was loved.

As grace would have it, my son was born perfect but then diagnosed a week later with Sickle Cell Anemia, a very painful and debilitating blood disorder. This, more than my desire to heal others, encouraged me to go to school and get a Nursing degree. I met my husband around this time and my son wasn’t quite a year old yet. There were problems from the beginning, but we were in love and determined to stay together.

We had a daughter together three years into the relationship and around the time I finished Nursing school. Then tragedy struck when my sons father was murdered by TPD officers during a routine traffic stop. I was heartbroken. He loved his son and now my son was another black boy without a father; and at five years old my son wouldn’t remember his dad.

My ex-husband who was my boyfriend at the time tried to step up but there was a lot of interference from my family which was largely my fault. They were my backup. I probably packed up and left him at least 10 times. But I always came back. LOL. We definitely did not know how to communicate. We would sit for hours trying to talk thru our issues but not saying a word. We would go weeks in the same home, sleeping in the same bed without speaking. We were messed up. We loved each other; but did not know how to do it properly. We were both coming from dysfunctional family structures and carrying childhood trauma.

Things deteriorated rapidly after I graduated from nursing school. I worked as an Intensive Care Unit nurse in a Level One Hospital in their Surgical Trauma ICU meaning I went to work in the trenches everyday but then had to go home to another war zone. It became intolerable. We were together a total of 15 years, five of which we were married. After the separation and eventually the divorce, I began my road to healing. I was basically trying to figure out who I really was and why I made choices that I did. I would go on to have more dysfunctional relationships.

The more chaotic my personal life was the more I worked and the more money I made. It became the security I needed but couldn’t obtain in my relationships. I brought my dream house and put my kids through college. But I always still felt like I had failed in some way.

Light of a New Day

I credit Covid, and the devastation it brought with it, with my spiritual awakening. Almost out of the blue I began to see beyond the illusion we call reality. I began to receive “downloads” or information that I never dreamed that I would accept as the truth and I was in awe with how everything resonated with my spirit! I started Goddess Energy LLC as a means to share the knowledge I had received and to uplift women by helping them to recognize and to unleash the God/Goddess within themselves. I wanted them to see, as I did, that everything they needed to craft a very fulfilling life for themselves was already inside of them waiting to be acknowledged . For we are God, or Source, or Spirit, whatever you want to call them(God is a male and female energy) just having a human experience. We are fractals of the God Source realizing him/herself from a 3 dimensional perspective.

Therefore, if God is infinite, then so are we and so are the possibilities of what we can achieve.

Thank you Andrew A Heron for allowing me to share my journey.

Enriquita Marshall