Peeks of Sunshine
Sunshine is peeking over the horizon. Just a little. Just a few rays. The phone hasn't rung all week since Tuesday, I'm eating and sleeping (I even cooked one night), and the panic or anxiety I've been feeling is starting to abate, as nothing is feeding it anymore. I cut off the drama at the source.
I'm still struggling a little bit. While I desperately need this time and know I must traverse the coming months alone, it's scary, a little bit. Letting go is hard. This whole experience between the HL and TCMT is hard in another way from the divorce; that turned my entire life upside down publically, practically, personally, and fundamentally. Losing the relationship was just one loss amidst so many.
With this experience, I have to ask myself what's right for me and what I mean to have with my life. I thought I had that answer in my marriage, but I never asked myself this through the divorce, as the demanding realities of that experience, and maybe the trauma of it, precluded such invasive self-examination. So now I've finally stopped, stopped the insanity... and discovered that at this crossroads of my life, I don't know the answer. I'm living a life I never really imagined I'd live. I'm a 35 year old divorced professional woman as a master's degree -- a manifestation of myself I never imagined I'd have the chance to get to know. What does she want?
Many people turn to relationships and having families to give their lives purpose and focus. My friends who are parents adore their children without qualification and find comfort and security from their husbands or wives. Those marital relationships are simple for some, more complicated for others, but even the challenging relationships provide a hub... a hinge... a center point off of which to live the rest of "real life." The family is the rationale.
And here I am, choosing the opposite. Choosing to be alone. It's the stronger choice right now, the harder choice, and the necessary choice... and it's scary. I know that I'm 35 years old, but I'm youthful, I'm child-free, and I'm fairly interesting, so I realize it's unlikely I'll be alone forever unless I make that my choice, yet the possibility remains that I could be alone, even if a time arises when I don't want to be. Maybe I'll find that I do want to be... or that I want to be alone if the alternative choice is attachment to someone who's somehow unworthy of the feelings I may discover that I have for him and the hopes I may bear for our future.
But I'm finally learning that I'm unwilling to compromise my own needs for those of another, which means that I'd have to find someone who's own needs dovetail with my own in a, well, uninvasive kind of way. For example, when TCMT called me Tuesday, he showed me that he placed his own feelings ahead of mine, though he claims he really likes me. His needs trespassed on mine. If he "really" liked me, he'd want what's best for me, and if I say that's time, he'd respect it. But what he really wants, and what he admitted in so many words, is for me to be happy with him. That's not the same at all.
Now one could argue that I'm placing my own needs firmly before his by telling him I don't want a relationship after all, and he gets no consideration, that his feelings don't come before mine. I suppose that's true as far as it goes, but in a backwards kind of way, I know I'm doing him a favor not to pretend feelings I'm not having. Also, whoever says "no" must prevail; it's the unwritten law of dating relationships.
I think I understand my ex-husband a little better through all this... and I definitely understand the HL better. I still think my ex-husband was wrong to ditch a marriage, when on all those levels so much more was at stake, but I do feel more compassionate about his inability to master all that must've been going through his mind. I don't exonerate him, in other words, but I forgive him. I forgive them all.
I'm still struggling a little bit. While I desperately need this time and know I must traverse the coming months alone, it's scary, a little bit. Letting go is hard. This whole experience between the HL and TCMT is hard in another way from the divorce; that turned my entire life upside down publically, practically, personally, and fundamentally. Losing the relationship was just one loss amidst so many.
With this experience, I have to ask myself what's right for me and what I mean to have with my life. I thought I had that answer in my marriage, but I never asked myself this through the divorce, as the demanding realities of that experience, and maybe the trauma of it, precluded such invasive self-examination. So now I've finally stopped, stopped the insanity... and discovered that at this crossroads of my life, I don't know the answer. I'm living a life I never really imagined I'd live. I'm a 35 year old divorced professional woman as a master's degree -- a manifestation of myself I never imagined I'd have the chance to get to know. What does she want?
Many people turn to relationships and having families to give their lives purpose and focus. My friends who are parents adore their children without qualification and find comfort and security from their husbands or wives. Those marital relationships are simple for some, more complicated for others, but even the challenging relationships provide a hub... a hinge... a center point off of which to live the rest of "real life." The family is the rationale.
And here I am, choosing the opposite. Choosing to be alone. It's the stronger choice right now, the harder choice, and the necessary choice... and it's scary. I know that I'm 35 years old, but I'm youthful, I'm child-free, and I'm fairly interesting, so I realize it's unlikely I'll be alone forever unless I make that my choice, yet the possibility remains that I could be alone, even if a time arises when I don't want to be. Maybe I'll find that I do want to be... or that I want to be alone if the alternative choice is attachment to someone who's somehow unworthy of the feelings I may discover that I have for him and the hopes I may bear for our future.
But I'm finally learning that I'm unwilling to compromise my own needs for those of another, which means that I'd have to find someone who's own needs dovetail with my own in a, well, uninvasive kind of way. For example, when TCMT called me Tuesday, he showed me that he placed his own feelings ahead of mine, though he claims he really likes me. His needs trespassed on mine. If he "really" liked me, he'd want what's best for me, and if I say that's time, he'd respect it. But what he really wants, and what he admitted in so many words, is for me to be happy with him. That's not the same at all.
Now one could argue that I'm placing my own needs firmly before his by telling him I don't want a relationship after all, and he gets no consideration, that his feelings don't come before mine. I suppose that's true as far as it goes, but in a backwards kind of way, I know I'm doing him a favor not to pretend feelings I'm not having. Also, whoever says "no" must prevail; it's the unwritten law of dating relationships.
I think I understand my ex-husband a little better through all this... and I definitely understand the HL better. I still think my ex-husband was wrong to ditch a marriage, when on all those levels so much more was at stake, but I do feel more compassionate about his inability to master all that must've been going through his mind. I don't exonerate him, in other words, but I forgive him. I forgive them all.
posted by bluedana @ 5:31 AM
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