Realization

I think it's time to begin a brand new blog.

The other day, as I was driving home from somewhere, I was thinking about the latest guy whom I met online and how I'd explain my divorce and my past to him, should it get to that point. How would I make him understand what happened? How bereft I was, how disappointed and shattered, how vulnerable I still am now? But then I suddenly realized, "That's all over, why do I have to make a big deal about it at all?"

It's all over. Why DO I have to make a big deal about it?

My ex husband left over three years ago. Three years of holidays, three years of work, three years with other relationships, other accomplishments, other births and losses and milestones. Sure, it was a big deal. It's been one of the most painful things I've ever undergone. But it happened three years ago. Yes, while I had him I loved my husband wholly with my wholly sincere imperfection. It was a marriage in error, perhaps, but while I had it, I did my very best to make him happy and to be happy. Then he chose to leave, so it's over, and it's been over FOR THREE YEARS. I am sorry it ended on one hand, because I believe in commitment and meant to honor mine for the rest of my life, but he made sure it didn't work out that way. Three years ago. On another hand, I honestly cannot imagine being married to him now, today, Easter Sunday. I cannot imagine it.

I realized in the car that afternoon that I'm different. The last three years have changed me. Like, I told my friends that I can look around my house and find it almost impossible to believe my husband was ever here; I look at myself now, and I can't imagine that the woman reflected to me is the same woman who was ever married to him. I can only assume my husband has learned and grown in the same amount of time; we are most likely not recognizable to one another now. The forms are probably the same, such as how we drink our coffee or what we think is funny. We'd certainly find one another familiar, but the two people who were married from 1998 to 2004 have evolved and changed, and the door, I see now, has shut on them.

I remember once talking to my husband about what would happen to me if anything happened to him. He traveled a lot, and there was always a chance something terrible would happen on the road (and he also drank a lot, which is never a terribly smart combination, a thought I kept in the back of my mind). I knew I'd be okay financially, and we'd intentionally bought a house either of us could afford alone (what a prophet I turned out to be), but I remember looking at him and saying, "If you went away now, then in my whole life, you wind up being just a drop."

He nodded. "A blip," he agreed.

It was an almost incomprehensible thought, because he took up so much of my present, but logically, I knew it was true. If he went away, he'd turn into little more than a blip for the rest of my life. He'd be a blip I loved, a blip that totally consumed the attention and focus of my life for that duration, but if we spent a handful of years together, and I lived until 94 (as the online death-predictor projects I shall), then, indeed, he would turn into little more than a blip.

What a prophet he turned out to be.

So, I think I'm done with this blog. The divorce recovery is not over, certainly, as losses and challenges merely graft onto our existing personalities, they are not something we resolve altogether and put into a decorated box on the shelf of our mental closet. But I realize now that the divorce does not define me. The divorce is not the barometer of my welfare. It's not a litmus test of my worthiness to be loved. It's a bad thing that happened in the midst of other bad things I've weathered, and admist all the good things, too.

So... I will begin anew. Today!

Forgiveness... Even If You Don't Love Me Anymore

I'm watching a TV show right now where the daughter (the product of her mother's affair with a married man) is angry with her mother for depriving her of the large, noisy, boisterous family that was her father's other life, raising her in isolation. It's fictional situation with contrived responses, but the actress playing the mother had hurt in her eyes, and I thought, "Why can't people be gentle with one another's feelings? Why can't the daughter respect that her mother did the best she could knowing what she knew? Where's the respect?"

Hurt feelings know no respect. Feelings know no respect. We can't control them, though we can sit on them, suppress them, or otherwise ignore them, at least for a time. But they don't go away... "The Law of the Conservation of Feelings." We can resolve them, however, but putting an end to the damage they do to us in our decision-making and futures. I don't understand the process of how this happens.

When my grandmother died in 1994, it was the first time I ever felt crashing around me. She was an anchor in my young life, a presence as irrefutable as the sun coming up in the east. Living without her was incomprehensible; it was the most frightening thing I had ever done to that point. But I was able to do it because I remained convinced of her flawed yet encompassing love of me, and I knew that in a way, her death didn't change the love. But then, so much of what happened in the two years that followed... my dysfunctional relationship that led to a decade of fears... meeting my ex-husband... moving to Texas... all positively correlate to losing her. Am I over her being gone? Of course I am... it was her turn to go, and I can't blame someone from dying against her will. But used to her being gone... that took time... and it hurt... and it doesn't hurt now, but I still wonder about her sometimes... where she is, what she'd think about how all of us have changed. But death... death is guaranteed, death I understand. Death is an equalizer, and nobody can take it personally, not really.

Could I rush that? No. And it didn't happen positively. It was a struggle. It involved a great deal of time. It wasn't a conscious effort. It wasn't reflective or introspective. I did a lot of dumb and stupid things that I could not have possibly done had my grandmother been there. And then I left town entirely and started over in a place that had nothing to do with my grandmother or the life I'd lived before.

How do people get over things? Maybe some are masters of their feelings. Some are devoid of feelings, I guess. Some become victimized by their feelings. Some learn the hard way. I'm in that group. Why is it always so freaking HARD? Why do I have to be afraid at all? Why are my feelings betraying me? Disrespecting me? Stupid disrespectful feelings.

So there's finally a guy online whom I want to meet... however scared I am. I need to just damn the torpedoes and GO FOR IT. I finally want to... if I don't think too much about it. Damn torpedoes, anyway.