Divorced Life

I was not totally honest with all of you yesterday when I said I was bringing something to my parents for July 4. I did make the ice cream dessert, but I reluctantly forgot to tell you that I will only have to climb down two flights of stairs to the party.

Yes, I live with my parents! Hey, I would not knock it until you try it. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to say that I live with my parents. I guess society looks down at people who after 30 live with their parents. I don’t know why that is, when in history the nuclear family all lived together.

I thought living with my parents was only going to be temporary when my husband left me for that red-headed %$#*. You get the picture. It turned into fifteen years. Sure it’s tough living with your parents as an adult, but my boys grew up with a wonderful support system.

Now, you have to remember in the beginning I was on anti-anxiety medication. It was either live in the projects, or live in a warm home with good food. I chose the good food.

Keep in mind my ex only gave me fifty dollars a month for alimony; food stamps and no car wouldn’t get me very far. Did I mention my ex left me two weeks after I gave birth to his second child!

I’ll never forget that day in May when he told me he was not “in love�? with me any more; what a man, “whatta man, whatta man, whatta mighty good man.�? He was certainly not like the 1994 hit song by Salt-N-Pepa with En Vogue. He was the man who told his wife after giving birth to his son that he was not in love with her anymore, and was leaving for a nineteen year old nursing student. What a jerk.

I forgave him, but I did not forget. He made me who I’ am today.

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Getting past the hate that has been stirred and simmers inside of me in the aftermath of everything that has happened is no easy task. I have to communicate with my ex out of an obligation to my children. I have to communicate with him due to our ongoing court battle. The intention is always to be nice, but no matter how I try the man plucks the wrong chords like a tone deaf guitarist and I revert into the bitter angry divorcee I loathe being.

How can you be cordial and respect each other after divorce when so much hate and dislike festers below the surface? How and when do you get to a place where the words don’t sting anymore?

It seems like I’m the wooden paddle and he’s the ball his words bounce off of me but keep coming back, when will the string break and send the ball rolling away? When will I be free?

I’ve realized that death is increasingly becoming as exhausting and expensive as divorce. The finality of it and emotional turmoil is equally the same but the added element is that what is thought to be the difinitive end is not. When matters of legality, property and various other issues come into play, there isn’t a moment to truly grieve and pick up the pieces when the past and immediate presence is thrusting itself in your face continuously, leaving no room to breathe much less think of anything else.

I feel torn to pieces but who I am today is not allowing me the simple relief of release. I haven’t cried yet although the news of this tragic event has been compounded most recently by a startling revelation that another close family member is very ill. I feel helpless, guilt-ridden to be help to anyone right now. Trapped in my own personal misery that I haven’t been able to overcome in two years and now I need to be there for my mom, but I don’t know how to genuinely be there.

On the inside I wonder what has become of me and if death comes in threes maybe the dip in temperature outside could be a sign that a deeper chill is on the horizon. Is the universe probing me to stay on course and make a change sooner rather than later? Should I settle this court battle I’m locked in with my ex and move on to something better on the horizon or should I stay and fight? Am I on borrowed time that I can’t afford to lose right now?

Death brings as many questions as it does resolve. Should we sit quiet and listen or challenge what it’s revealing to us?

My family is still a bit in turmoil. What do you say when there’s nothing to say. Everything has been so turmultuous in my life the past few years and now on the horizon with these latest events I wonder what the universe is trying to tell me. I feel like I have no control over anything yet I’m expected to know what the “right” thing to do is.

Whenever someone passes over it’s always a moment to examine your own life. I start to sense the shadow of my mortality following me. A reminder that my seconds are borrowed and will need to be returned one day. It’s the uncertainty and looming sponteneity that chills me.

In the wake of marriage the end doesn’t seem so bad, at least there’s life in the aftermath. However in death the end of the road is absolute and final. There are no second chances.

Unfortunately there’s been a tragedy in my family. I had a tough time sleeping last night and all my thoughts are unfocused today. I decided to share something I wrote last year when I was going through a brief moment of panic and frustration:

The past couple of days have been really stressful in my household. Last night had to take my five year old to the emergency room for breathing treatments. I hate hospitals. No I detest hospitals. A veil of dread falls over me when I step through the door. Emergency rooms are the worse. A crowd of sick people sitting around miserable for what seems like ages and the whole time I’m terrified one of them has a contagious disease that my children or I will get. Paranoia kicks into high gear.

Finally I’ve been slipping into a depression of my own making and I can’t exactly explain why. My ups and downs the past few years have me feeling a bit scattered and unable to focus on anything of substance. I’m probably making no sense (right now).
Maybe later today I can make (a little) sense of things. I have a question. What do you do to overcome depression, when you don’t know exactly why you are depressed?

I’ve had many conversations with my ex- husband that ended contentiously. I’d always tell myself before I picked up the phone, that I would try and be civil. I really wanted to end the conversation on a good note. Somehow it always ended the same. In harsh words and someone slamming the phone down leaving the other to stew in their anger against the sound of a dial tone.

After one of these not-so-pleasant conversations I thought about the idea of karma.

Does it really exist or was it wishful thinking? Is a cosmic force pulling us along through life and dealing our rewards (and downfalls) based on the energy we put out? I put pen to paper and decided to write my thoughts down. Hoping that maybe I’d draw my own conclusions about it. I thought maybe if there is a such thing, I could save myself a lot of anguish. Maybe I could talk with my ex nowing that know matter what he said to me (or did), karma would handle it all in the end.

Before I married Thursday was my favorite day of the week. I had a sort of ritual where most of my friends, at the time, would meet up and go to this lil’ artsy bar in Chicago. I remember many Thursdays standing in that smoke filled place with the mix matched sofas and various lava lamps, feeling a sense of belonging, excitement and suprisingly…contentment.

It became an unbreakable staple as my days moved along and weeks passed by. Something to look forward to even if the days before and after seemed to stretch me or gather clouds of discontentment. I cherish these times although in the moment I took them for granted. I assumed they’d be there forever. At least I have them locked away in memories of laughter, silliness and retrospection. I have an official seal that says, “hey I am legitimitely one of the cool kids”, I’m just on hiatus now.

Ironically at that same bar on the same day, which (if omens are to be believed) happend to have also been my birthday (that year), I met my ex-husband. The events before our conversation (that day) and after I remember, but by some unusual and slightly morbid twist of fate, to this day I cannot recall what was said. In the years since I’ve needed others who were present at the time to fill in the blanks for me. It seems that I immediately forgot meeting him after the brief conversation at the bar. A week later he was there again. He approached me and started a discussion and I literally had no idea who he was.

Was some spiritual entity attempting to protect me from the future consequences that were sure to come? Was I given a stopwatch to correct a mistake before it happened? I’ve pondered this idea the past year. Something stepped in and gave me a lifevest seeing I was one minute from falling over the edge of a very rocky boat. Too bad I didn’t take it.

My Thursdays have never been the same since (but I still love lava lamps).

Dissect an affair into equal parts then look closely at the unequal emotional results. The consequences of actions that start with a tiny tear in the fabric of an marriage then becomes a gaping rip and the steady hands of the best surgeon with the finiest thread and needle cannot mend it.

When it’s said and done, examine the fatality of marriage with the precision and careful eye of a Forensic Pathologist. This post mortem autopsy is something I did, because I can’t help but to know any and every moment or tidbit that eventually led the relationship to its demise. Is it healthy and does it emanate a foul smell in my otherwise struggling-torecover bereaved mind? No, not on a ongoing basis. However maybe once is not so bad. I think it’s helpful to look at not only our own roles in the end but those of the other party. It’s helpful when the dust settles and you eventually move on, why repeat the same mistakes a second time around?

My conclusion, it’s not such a bad idea to practice preventive relationship therapy. If you can understand the negatives you bring to the table and resolve them before entering another marriage, recognize what you do not want in a mate (and the limitations of what you will accept in mate) then you can save yourself, your heart and a story of new love instead of grieving yet another relationship demise.