Sometimes being an adult is no fun.  Being a mom with kids is fun and of course rewarding much of the time, but now I find that decisions I made easily before (as a married suburban mom) are so very difficult right now.  Today I put myself first - my kids first - and although that is the “right” decision, it hurts a lot.  Quite frankly, I’ve tired of hurting all the time. Those moments where I feel peace, or joy - they are crack to me, and I want more of them.  I can sense that as I put one foot in front of the other there will be more moments of pure sunshine, but they are few and far between right now.

Today was bad enough that I had the telltale tingling extremities.  My face went numb, my heart went nuts, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.  I never carry my emergency stash of chill pills anymore, but that won’t happen again.  I need to be more boy scout (always be prepared!) and less super woman (who needs drugs to manage panic?  not me!). 

Today was another tiny step, and another version of the realization I’ve had since this all began.  Nothing makes it easier.  Support helps navigate this mess, but I have to go through the emotions. There are no shortcuts, no distractions big enough to pull me away from what I need to feel. 

I am sitting in my living room and feeling completely and utterly overwhelmed by the stuff around me.  In other moves, within 1 week I’ve had everything neatly stored - in some cases, even the pictures were hung and the house was clean.  I’m more than a week into this now and it looks almost worse.  I have no energy. I want to sleep.  I want to eat, I don’t want to run, and I want to really hide in my bed for a minimum of 24 hours.  I’ve been here before and know how intense these feelings can be, and I know that they will fade and subside and I will be just fine. Or better than fine - I will be great. 

I’m going to write this down because I’ve been saying it in my head to many people:  because I asked for this doesn’t make it less hard. Going through wedding albums, reading engagement cards, picking through the things that my husband felt were too painful for him to deal with and having to throw those things away was heart-rending.  I’ve never been faced with the reality of the divorce more than I was putting things into boxes, filling trash bag after trash bag, forcing myself to not be overly sentimental, forcing myself to keep the wedding albums because I know the girls will want to see them one day. 

As I made yet another trip to the Wyndham house today, I wandered upstairs and felt myself coming unglued again. The house looks sad and bleak.  There are random leftovers from a life lived there; a tiny smiley-face bead from a necklace of Arden’s, rolled carelessly into a corner where it will be consumed hungrily by a vacuum.  Half of an earring.  A leftover scrap of Thora’s rawhide.  A stick of butter; a dying plant.  It looks like ghosts live there now, even though I can still smell the smells of my kitchen or bedroom, and feel the cool tile under my feet. 

This new house feels safe to me - it has so many locks and doors and places to hide.  Underneath the smell of animal from previous tenants, the good hardwood smells are still here.  Because it’s so different from my previous life, it feels welcoming. It also feels alien and a bit scary.  I have a few security blankets and I had to get rid of one today.  There’s a fine line between getting warmth from a blanket and being smothered by one. 

I’m trying to focus on breathing, and warming myself. 

...my best friend received a devastating diagnosis.
...I found out I need a biopsy (it’s happening tomorrow!)
...I missed some major warning signs about a person in my life and really screwed things up.
...I continued to put myself last behind everyone else and their brother.
...I asked for help from people i didn’t want to help me, but had no choice.
...I helped someone i love learn how to commit someone they love to a mental hospital against their will.

it’s no wonder i have gotten NO work done and am so far behind that at this point, i don’t think i will ever catch up. 

my best friend wrote to me a couple of days again, and something she said really resonated with me.  she said: 

I’m changing a lot of the priorities and friendships in my life.  It just makes you recognize how petty and superficial a lot of the shit in life is.  I’m trying to clear that out and make room for what’s important.  And for that, I am grateful.  I think a lot of people live their whole lives trying to gain the approval of others and over the course of the past six months, I have just about totally eliminated a lot of the bullshit.  It also means I am eliminating friends, but that’s OK.  They weren’t real friends to begin with.

i’ve been going through that process for the last 8 months.  and even though right now it feels like the entire karmic universe is pooping on my head for sins i’ve committed that i’m unaware of (well, some of them, at least), another friend mentioned that “god is trying to get your attention”.  that’s possible too.  my attention has been gotten.  i’ve been faced with just about every nightmare situation i can come up with, yet i’m still able to hold my children at night and breathe in their sleepy scents.  even in the midst of what is most definitely a hurricane of epic emotional proportions, i continue to write about gratitude, model good behavior for certain people in my life, and attempt to balance on the fine point between supportive and enabling. 

i need to follow my best friend’s advice.  life really is too short.  you have no idea what curve balls are going to be thrown at you.  my life’s goal is not to be happy; happiness is fleeting.  life is hard and full of moments of joy or sadness.  being content, or secure in the decisions you’ve made, is what it’s all about for me.  learning not to get wrapped up in other’s issues, and help and hold the ones who deserve all that i have to offer, has been a hard lesson for me.  oddly i feel stronger right now than i’ve ever felt. 

as i changed the water filter in my expensive high-end refrigerator that will be left behind along with the rest of this ridiculous house, i realized it was the last time i’d ever have to change it.  the new refrigerator has no ice maker or water dispenser.  it sits on a floor of yellowed linoleum that probably should have been replaced a minimum of 15 years ago.  for the first time, i couldn’t wait to get onto that linoleum and back to ice cube trays.  i haven’t been on my own since 1999.  having my own space, being alone with the girls and the dog, getting some breathing room and figuring out why this all happened and why right now, seems necessary. 

i’ve reached a level of peace with my situation and for that i am most grateful.  our short sale may very well fall through; the second mortgage company is still dragging their feet, and the buyers are getting very nervous.  we are reaching month 4 of waiting.  regardless, i’m moving out.  mike has already left.  the house will sit here, empty, waiting for either a new family to come in and love it, or for the bank to come and take it.  i realize that there is absolutely NOTHING i can do about it - and i’m totally fine with it.  i can’t control what happens to me financially at this point and am making the best of an absolutely horrendous situation.  do i still have guilt that the father of my children is being dragged into this hell unwillingly?  i do, but i also know that he will end up much happier without me and with someone else than he realizes at this point.

i’m getting ready to say goodbye to dan and nicole, two people who have never hesitated to help when i’ve needed it.  hopefully i’ve been there for them as well.  there will be a legendary party at the house on saturday - it’s a graduation party for one of the few people i’ve ever known who graduated summa cum laude and know how to pronounce it.

(when i pronounced it, it sounded like the title of a porno)

they’re totally worth the drive to blacksburg, however, and i’ll be darkening their doorstep as much as i can, probably with two kids in tow. 

in the meantime, i’m going to keep focusing on the gratitude.  and trying to learn from my mistakes. 

The toilet overflowed in the bathroom. 

The pond’s pump stopped working.  I’ve done everything I know how to - still isn’t working.  The mosquitoes are having an orgy in there and breeding like there is no tomorrow. 

Thora’s life was saved when Lily stuck her hands into her mouth and pulled a toothpaste cap out of there.  She was about to swallow it whole. 

I am total Robo-Mom this weekend:  “Does not compute. Danger Will Robinson.  Children Play Quietly.  Mommy Needs A Martini.” 

My schedule is killing me.

The house is falling apart.  It’s dirty a lot these days. 

I accidentally threw out a 2 page fiction story Lily wrote. She’s been crying for the last 2 hours.  Major #momfail.

I am upset with a lot of people.  Most of them are upset right back at me. 

My upcoming weekend without the kids just got shot down. 

You should see me up in this stupid home - running around with towels, mopping stuff, cussing out the pond, wondering how I’m going to squeeze these little facets of my life into boxes and move them somewhere.  I look like a maniac.  I’m thinking of filming myself so the self-deprecating laughter comes more easily.  Right now it is very, very hard to laugh about anything.  I feel like I’ve been pulling all-nighters for 6 months.  The high I had two weeks ago is not with me anymore. I no longer feel like SuperWoman, able to leap divorces and bankruptcy in a single bound.  I am very much human, very much flawed, and very much in need of some respite from my own brain. 

I made the mistake of thinking it was almost over.  Seriously though, it really is - but for some reason now that the majority of the hard stuff is done, I am faced with stillness and I have to think and digest everything that has happened.  I don’t regret anything but damn, I want my life to stabilize so I can be a friend to others, a better daughter, a better mother.  Despite feeling fat, I’m as thin as I’ve ever been - in the sense that I’m stretched to the breaking point in all directions.  Self-pity is something I loathe, but I am wearing it like a comfy bathrobe these days.  In my head:  “I did this.  I did this.  My fault.  Live with it.  Deal with it.”  I follow it with affirmations like “This is the right thing.  I’m doing the right thing.  I will survive this.  It’s all noise, emotions.  They come and go. For every depth of despair there is a peak of joy to offset it.” 

When I run and my hip doesn’t feel like it’s going to fly out of my skin like a surgical discus, everything falls away.  I understand the addiction now, but I can’t indulge in that.  It hurts too much.  So I spend the days thinking, being still, making long lists I don’t complete anymore.  Most of the times I meet my deadlines but sometimes I don’t.  Sometimes I don’t call people back.  More often than not, actually.  I am scared to crawl back into the hole from September.  I am deathly afraid of it.  I can see the edges of it and I dance around it.  Distraction, writing, therapy.  Medication that mixed with the aforementioned has saved my life in the most literal way. 

I love the cheesy phrase “Is that the light at the end of the tunnel, or just an oncoming train?”  It sums up any kind of journey, or deviation from how your life was supposed to look. 

So, I’m not sure what the light is right now.  My heart tells me it’s the end of this particular tunnel, but I’m not dumb enough to assume that’s the only tunnel.  The dark parts make the light so much brighter. 

The house sold.  We are now waiting on bank approval for the short sale.  Our first mortgage company will probably grant it; the second, well, who knows. They aren’t going to get paid at all.  President Obama recently announced a new program that is supposed to help people in our exact situation, where the 2nd mortgage company holds up the short sale.  Not sure it’s going to be really underway in time to help us, but hopefully it will help others.  Today contractors are being deployed to look at a “huge crack” in the garage floor.  It was there when we bought it, but our home inspector never said a word about it.  I just assumed all garage floors cracked over time.  Stupid me. 

I know the people buying our house.  Their daughter is a good friend of Lily’s.  I haven’t gotten around to telling her that in all probability, her friend who has spent the night here before, may be living in “her” bedroom.  I had a mini-pity party yesterday as I looked at the first rental house on the list.  It was quite undesirable.  Arden’s first words as we pull up to the house:  “This house is HIDEOUS, Mama!”  Lily’s words, a few minutes later, “What is that SMELL?”  followed quickly by a whispered, “Mommy, I don’t want to live here.  This house is scary!”  Scarring my children by looking at random weird houses is really not fun.

It was a cross between the homestead on Little House on the Prairie and a crack house.  $1200/month I might add.  Pass.  Next.  Looking at 3 more today and one tomorrow.

The Property and Settlement Agreement (a nice way to say, All The Crap We Agree To Before We Can Get Divorced) is signed.  Neither of us got everything we wanted.  Actually, Mike wanted none of this entire thing, so he really got the short end of the stick.  I am still trying to figure out how I’m going to live on my monthly allotment.  When I heard the papers had been signed, I was on my way to Yorktown to visit Anja and family.  I cried in the car.  I was careful not to get snot on the interior, however. 

A few people have made it clear they have no sympathy for me.  I don’t want sympathy so that works fine for me.  What these people don’t get is that even though this was my “idea”, it’s still hard. It’s hard to get your marriage boiled down on 17 pieces of paper with neat paragraphs and lines dividing your assets and debts, dividing the two of you.  If marriage is an unnatural state, as many have asserted, divorce is a genetically engineered goat with 5 heads. 

I cried again last night while eating cheap Mexican food with Robey and Nicole. It’s easy to point to my hospitalization as the reason for my divorce.  Writing me off as crazy is a quick way to say, “She’s stupid, and doesn’t know what she’s doing.”  I personally believe that my visit to CrazyTown was the end result of not being crazy, and not the other way around.  There were some factors that finally pushed me to separate from my husband, and those factors pushed my brain to separate from my body.  If it makes it easier for others to write off my behavior as irrational and bipolar, I’m okay with that.  It fits into a nice box and is easily dismissed. 

That is not what happened, however. 

The factors that led me to the place where I realized how it really was for me are hard for me to look at now.  I don’t want to be reminded of anything that resembles the hospital, the music I was listening to at the time, the smell of the ambulance, or my lack of sleep.  Something happened last week that reminded me of that time in my life, and it threw me for a huge loop.  I couldn’t figure out why at first.  Robey kept poking at me last night, asking questions, digging.  She knew I hadn’t figured it out yet.  Turns out I associate many of those things with the end of my marriage, and looking at them even months out is very, very painful.  It was truly the worst time of my life.  I was weak, I was needy, I was exhausted, and I wasn’t rational.  It is an understatement to say that I wasn’t acting as I normally did.  No one wants to look at that kind of stuff again, once you are past it.  Being forced to look at it wrecked me for a couple of days.  I didn’t even bring it up in therapy.  I promise to next week. 

There are many endings happening right now, followed closely by beginnings.  I’m started to feel less like I’m living in a nightmare and more like I’m living in a resigned state.  Resignation by its very nature is not a negative state.  It means finished and accepting.  I am resigning from my old life, and starting a new one.  It may not be the prettiest year of my life in terms of finances or high end furnishings, and unless Robey can get me a big discount on designer jeans, it won’t be a year of dressing well either.  It has been harder than I’d like to admit letting go of the house and the suburban perfectness that is Wyndham.  I hate it, but seeing my kids looking at me with big eyes made me want to crawl under the Lexus SUVs in the carpool lane at school and end it all. 

(reality:  kids are resilient, and pretty bedrooms don’t equal happy children)

(reality:  i am not going to shrivel and die without a sunken tub or a screened porch or grass to cut)

For now, one major obstacle is over.  We wait to sell the house; I wait to sign a lease.  After that, there is a wait for the divorce to be final - which will be at the end of August.  And after that, I find out if it’s a train or a beautiful blue sky with lots of sunshine. 

Every time I think I’ve had one of the hardest days of my life, or hit the biggest speedbump, I can be sure that there is another larger, bumpier and sharper one up ahead.  It’s good to have this mindset because life is definitely a journey, and it’s not always smooth. 

Ever heard of collaborative divorce?  Now you have. 

Mike and I had our first meeting with a “divorce coach” this morning.  If we proceed down the collaborative path, she will be our main point of contact.  Involved in the collaborative process will be a child specialist, a financial analyst, and two lawyers trained in the collaborative approach.

I could go into the details of how it’s supposed to work, but I’m really quite raw and very tired from this morning and I don’t feel like it.  If you’re curious you can read all about it at the link above.  One thing I came away from the meeting with:  if divorce is a shit sundae, collaborative divorce is a scoop of ice cream with shit sprinkles.  It puts the family first, especially the kids, and contractually binds you to negotiate the terms of the divorce in the most reasonable way possible.  There were a lot of tears during the meeting.  There’s nothing like saying the words outloud to make reality set in and force you to face what you may have been avoiding.  It was not easy and it was more than a little bit heart-wrenching, but we took that first step and it was a doozy.

Someone once remarked to me that ending a relationship is a series of tiny steps.  The doubt in your head, the acknowledgement of issues between you, the first vocalization that something is not right - they are all tiny steps in one direction.  Sometimes they can be repaired and turned back.  Sometimes they can’t. 

After all the head shaking and confused looks we’ve gotten after explanation how we are doing our separation, it was very validating to be commended by the divorce coach. She commended us for truly putting the kids first even though she can tell we are both suffering from our living situation.  For those who aren’t aware, the girls stay put in our house and the parental units rotate in and out of it.  We rent a small room about 25 minutes away from here where we stay on alternating weeks.  It is difficult even at its best; for Mike who hates change in any shape or form, it’s incredibly difficult.  She also told us that if the kids are still not acting out in school, we are doing something right.  The Child Specialist will help us to determine how they are actually doing and suggest therapists for them if it comes to that.  In the meantime we try to be open with them, answer the questions we are asked, and reassure them that we love the hell out of them. 

Divorce is a terribly sad thing, no matter what.  Mike and I still remain calm and mostly quiet with each other.  It makes it worse.  Neither of us seems to want to fight about things - at least not yet - and that makes it worse. There is no anger to propel me forward.  I’m sure there will be on his side, sooner rather than later, but I just have a large empty hole of sadness and it makes me want to take very long naps. 

This whole process will be draining, financially and emotionally.  It adds another layer of guilt onto a sandwich that is already piled precariously high with guilt meat and mustard and shamed lettuce and pickles.  This process is going to be expensive.  The divorce coach and child specialist run around $175/hour.  The lawyers require retainers.  If we both end up with a divorce coach instead of using one, it will be twice as much.  The financial analyst takes a retainer too. Emotionally the costs are not countable, at least not now.  We fumble toward some resolution, mostly in the dark, trying not to fall down.