I just received word that we actually achieved closure today - in terms of the house.  This means that potentially CitiMortgage will stop calling me 8 times a day, including Saturdays and Sundays and National Holidays.  This means I am officially no longer a Wyndhamite and I can officially never have to deal with someone’s obsession over curtains or cracks in walls or other things that are randomly loathsome to a buyer.  Over and out.  I am done with that place.  I cried when I got the text from Chris - 80% pure relief, 20% “holy crap I’m no longer a homeowner and am back to being 20 and renting places that smell funky”. 

I’m focused on the 80%. 

Hi there.

I know we haven’t been talking much these days.  Hell, we haven’t been communicating in years.  I know you are angry at me, and I understand that anger.  It’s unfortunate that you can’t just scream at me or throw something and be done with it.  Understand that I too am angry.  Very angry. I am angry despite you thinking I have no right to be angry. 

See, I don’t mind cleaning up my own mess.  I say this even though I tell the girls that I don’t care who made the mess in the crayon drawer - it’s up to both of them to clean it up.  Okay, I’ll clean it up by myself because it’s my mess, and I “wanted” this. 

This mess has taken me literally months to clean up.  While you floated through your days, at work, spending your energy hating me, I was negotiating with people who make me sick to my stomach, fielding phone calls from collection agencies, begging, pleading, cajoling everyone involved in this process to please help, to work together, to make this go.  At the 11th hour, we are nearly there and are going to escape this (relatively) unscathed. 

For a month and a half, I spent my evenings tearing through the wreckage of our life.  I packed boxes that tore me to shreds.  I had to decide what things to toss and what things to keep for the kids, even though I felt like I was being burned at the stake looking through some of the scrapbooks and remnants of my now-previous life.  I found your wedding ring shoved into a toothbrush cover.  It was about to go into the trash; I heard it rattling and realized what it was.  I know it was your way of saying to me:  Go To Hell and Take Your Trash With You.  Message received.  Note taken. 

After the packing and the moving and more negotiating with a slew of extremely demanding and unsympathetic people, I spent more time unpacking, fixing, redoing.  I thought about the girls and the chaos and upheaval.  I didn’t sleep much, because I wanted to make things as okay for them as I could.  The weekends you had them, I unpacked and painted and scrubbed.  You probably spent more time hating me then too - throwing all that hatred into the pool as you soaked in the sun and watched the children we had together splash.  I know some of the hatred was obvious even to our children when Lily asked me about it, catching me unprepared as always when she drops those questions during a car ride. 

So it must be nice.  It must feel great for you.  It must be heaven to sit across from me in a lawyer’s office, signing documents that will relieve us of the biggest financial obligation or anchor we have, and looking me in the eye as you tell me you won’t help me.  As you stick it to me, you have legitimized your right to be angry and to make me “fix it”.  All the years of me fixing everything came rushing into that lawyer’s office and I nearly exploded.  The words out of my mouth were measured but you know me well enough to also know that there was fury behind them, mixed with exhaustion, mixed with desperation.  It’s FINE.  I will take care of it.  Put the nails through my hands and feet; I’m a martyr, and I’ll fix this like I always fix the messes.  You sit down, sip your beer.  I’ll take care of it. 

I wonder what would happen if I adopted your attitude.  If I stopped caring.  If I told everyone - realtors included - to go screw themselves and see what happens.  If the closing were to fall through, would you help out then?  Would the realtors step up?  Would anyone do anything to make the deal go?  It must be nice to shrug your shoulders and say, “You did this, now you take care of it.”  I’d like to say that to you as well.  You did this, now you fix it.  All that yammering in marriage counseling about taking responsibility - taking two to tango - taking two to destroy a marriage.  I think those were words designed to make me think you actually believed it.  You don’t.  This is squarely on my shoulders.  It is my spilled milk to clean up.  I’ll clean up yours, because it’s there too, mixed and curdling.  It’s too much effort to figure out where to divide the mess, and make you clean up your portion of it. 

I used to feel such huge amounts of guilt.  I used to think you were the victim and I was a terrible person for making decisions that were best for me.  I don’t anymore - or at least not today.  We both built this life, and we both ruined it too. At some point you will emerge from your rage and start rebuilding your life, as I have done with mine.  Maybe you’ll take a hard look at yourself and attempt to avoid the mistakes you made with me, just as I’ve done - tearing myself into tiny bite-sized pieces so I can make myself a better person.  Maybe you won’t.  At this point, I’m beyond feeling badly about it. 

Today, I know you’re feeling good.  The house is nearly gone, your wife is nearly an ex, and you only have to stomach seeing me through car doors or apartment windows.  Standing the elevator together, I could feel the hate steaming from your skin.  Where once we were magnets, the poles have been reversed.  We stood on opposite sides, as far apart as possible.  When we said goodbye, it was code for “screw you”.  Today, you stuck it to me.  You enjoyed the power of making me suffer, even if it’s just a little bit.  You can have that.  Enjoy it while it lasts.  One day I’ll be in the same position you are, and I’ll remember this, and I’ll do the right thing instead of letting my anger control me and turn me into the lowest kind of person. 

It must be nice.  For you. 

I’ve said it before, but sometimes I feel like the biggest mistake I ever made was not having an anonymous blog.  On the other hand, I always read anon-blogs as fiction, and part of my big chest-pounding on this blog is that it is real, even if it’s only my version of reality. 

There are two huge issues in my life right now that are off-limits to the blogging world, three if you count the intricacies of my impending divorce.  I can write about the general feelings or the good/bad days, but getting into specifics crosses the line I’ve put down for myself and eventually for my children. 

I’m reading Perfection by Julie Metz right now.  Although her situation is very different than mine, her feelings are similar to my own struggle(s).  But I can’t help wondering, as I plow through the pages, how will her daughter feel about this? She’ll be a teenager now, with a famous author as a mom, the intense, sordid details of her deceased father published for the world to read.  Her father can easily be categorized as a bastard because he was a cheater, and a liar.  He’s also more than that.  Her mother, sometimes neurotic, mostly spot-on with her feelings and her reactions - it’s all there too, including her first sexual encounters after the death of her husband.  I just can’t imagine Lily and Arden reading that about me until, well, never - or at least until I was dead and didn’t have to look them in their beautiful eyes. 

The blog is bad enough.  We’re going on a year now of a lot of sadness, introspection, criticism (mostly self-induced, I admit), failed friendships and relationships.  It’s hard for me to read, but I am compelled to keep writing.  I’ve also been compelled to start writing letters again, stored privately on my laptop, not sent.  Some of them are to myself.  Many of them are to other people: those who have “wronged” me, those I’ve wronged, the friends I’ve neglected over the past 12 months who no longer have patience for me, the friends who have stayed with me through lots of dark times and bad phone calls, who handed me tissues and told me I had snot on my chin.  One of the most difficult and draining relationships I’ve had has received a ton of letters that only my computer has read.  I rarely can bring myself to read them once they are written.  Eventually I can have a bonfire burning party and dance around the flames.  Instead of burning my bra, or censored books, I’ll be burning up all those words and tears and joy and maybe then I can move beyond the anchors holding me down and back. 

Between my therapist and my life coach, I’m mentally healthier - and more aware - than I’ve ever been in my life.  As I notch the days under my belt, each morning marks another small success.  I made it.  Each time I am able to love my kids, or cuddle them in the mornings when they smell of sleep and salt, it’s a victory.  Each time I allow myself a few minutes to cry or express the complete and total exhaustion I feel mentally, I’m winning the war.  So many moments curled on my bed in fetal position or stretched out on the floor of the screened porch while I ache and feel hopeless end up adding to the anthill of strength I’m home-growing with organic intensity.  I used to doubt I was going to survive this, but I’ve got no doubts about any of that.  I have no doubts regarding the decisions I’ve made, or the ugly path I’ve walked to get to this day, this point in the long process.  I have no doubts that I’ll emerge better, more content, more lovable: a better friend, a better girlfriend, a better partner, daughter, sister, aunt, niece, dance partner, designated driver, confidante, wingman.  Wingwoman. 

I had a major epiphany last night, out of the blue.  I was brushing my teeth and wham.  Suddenly the confusion in my head cleared.  I realized that I’ve been punishing myself for wronging my husband, destroying his life, dragging my kids through this chaos - into the land of camel crickets and shared bedrooms and non-manicured lawns.  I took on a couple of people - messed up in their own private ways, their sole purpose in my life to punish me for what I’ve done to others.  I allowed them to make me feel worse about myself, to control me, to put up with crap I never would have in my previous lives (let’s not count college, shall we?).  Even these people have served their purpose, but I’m done with that lesson now and it’s time to cut and run. 

The second piece of the epiphany was that in one case, I realized the relationship was so very similar to a past one where I had no control over anything. I acquiesced, I bent.  I pushed my needs so far into my chest I no longer realized I had them, except for a lingering sense that something was terribly off.  At a time when I am supposed to be expanding - doing the things I’ve wanted/needed to do over the past decade plus but haven’t, for so many reasons - I was retracting, narrowing my world, narrowing my expectations, giving up. 

The third piece was that I have no control over others, but I can allow them to control me.  For so long I’ve placed my own needs secondary to everyone else.  It is the epitome of selfishness to say that I truly want to focus on me for a while?  Healing myself, being a better mom - not only for the kids, but for me?  I don’t want to settle - for anything.  If that means many more days and nights of fetal positioning, rocking, and snot on my chin, I think I can survive it.  I’m hopeful.  All signs, says the Magic 8 Ball, point to ‘yes’. 

In the meantime:  this day is “bad”.  This day is hard.  I am tired of hard and bad days; I am tired of writing about them.  I am tired of being tired, exhausted really. I am tired of killing bugs and cleaning carpets.  I’m tired of drilling, hanging things, trying to make this home feel like home.  There are piles of laundry in 3 rooms.  I feel like doing nothing about them.  I feel like sleeping.  Instead of that, I will have lunch with a friend who puts up with me and has as of yet not deleted me from her life because I am so tapped out.  I will stick to my hard decisions even though they completely and entirely suck right now. I will also run 3 miles this afternoon in sweltering heat, and I will not pass out or vomit - at least not publicly. 

Later, I’ll make dinner for the kids and myself and we will sit at my cleared dining room table in a darkened room that still doesn’t quite feel like mine yet, and we will talk about Puffles, Club Penguin and summer camp.  I will do laundry, work, add inventory to my site.  Later I will get into my bed, still my favorite space in the universe, and I will stretch out because it’s all my space and there is no one to demand anything from me, including pillows or leg room.  It will be an odd mixture of terrifying aloneness and blissful solitude.  The house will make weird sounds; Thora will growl or sometimes bark.  She will end up, against my wishes, at the foot of the bed.  She is the only thing I will allow to share my comforter.  In the morning she will lick my face and I will awake, victorious that another day is behind me and a new one is in front of me. 

It’s no secret that I have strong associations (and love) for music.  With the exception of screaming speed metal, I can listen to just about anything.  It started way back in 1989, when I DJ’d at a college radio station.  I took the slots they gave me - and one of them was called “The Revolving Fandango”.  It was literally a song from every genre of music one could think of.  Being 17-ish, I had no idea what to play for Blues, or Folk, or C&W, and most of the rock was alternative.  Thankfully I had some education in Jazz courtesy of my dad (he loved to drive my mom nuts with scat jazz).  I would wander around the tiny, smelly (think bean burritos, rank beer, a faint scent of urine, and something that always reminded me of moss) lovingly fingering the album covers, pulling them out and placing them on the turntables. 

Because 90% of this music was new to me, I learned A LOT about music genres and my taste buds for music became far more sophisticated than my taste buds for food.  It’s still that way. 

Along the way, music has been a backdrop for whatever I was going through in my life.  I would bond with albums and later CDs and now MP3s like lovers, depending on my mood and their staying power.  During the initial stage of my separation, I listened incessantly to Iron and Wine, Shawn Colvin and David Gray’s Draw the Line, which to this day I swear he wrote just for me. 

Nicole told me I had to listen to the new Court Yard Hounds offering.  Never a huge fan of traditional country music, I do confess to liking the Dixie Chicks.  I like them still with their lead singer on hiatus from them.  Emily Robison’s divorce obviously plays a huge part in the songwriting.  Nothing soothes my broken-down soul than other women crooning their way through their broken fairytales.  Misery indeed loves company. 

The opening song is called “Skyline” and I’ve put it right down there for you.  It’s my life, in this moment, in a nutshell.  Or an MP3 player, embedded on this site, which is way more tech savvy than a nutshell.  (or not so much, considering it took a good 30 minutes to figure out how to do this)

If you don’t feel like listening to the song (but you should), the lyrics are as follows:

What am I doin’ here
In such a lonely place?
Birds fly below
I’m high up in my cage

Wide awake again
Or am I dreamin’?
Trains passing by
World’s spinning ‘round my head

Then I heard a sweet voice cry
Telling me, yeah it’s gonna be alright

I just look at the skyline
A million lights are lookin’ back at me
And when they shine
I see a place I know I’ll find some peace
I just look at the skyline

I used to rush around
To keep busy in the day
Then we’d sit up and drink
We might find something new to say
No, I can’t live this way…

But then I heard that sweet voice cry
Telling me, yeah it’s gonna be alright

I just look at the skyline
A million lights are lookin’ back at me
And when they shine
I see a place I know I’ll find some peace
I just look at the skyline

I look at the skyline
A million lights are lookin’ back at me
And when they shine
I see a place I know I’ll find some peace
I just look at the skyline

What am I doin’ here
In such a lonely place?

In other non-divorce-related news . . .

Lily has always been fascinated with art. She’s been drawing since she could hold any type of instrument with color in it.  Her first grade class had a final project, and it was to draw the Queen of England.  Here’s her rendition:

Considering my artistic abilities consist of stick figures and lines that are never straight, I was impressed that my 7 year old is already drawing better than me.  She did it in watercolors and proudly explained that she made the “peach” color by mixing pink and yellow and a tiny bit of brown to give it just the right shade.  Arden’s teachers also tell me she’s advanced in art, but when they are your kids, it’s just the way they are.  I really try not to be like many of the moms I know, who think every little thing their child does is the BEST, most BRILLIANT, most GENIUS thing on earth.  Everyone has their talents and skills; Lily’s is definitely art and writing.  I can only take credit for the writing. 

Her first grade recognition assembly is on Thursday; she’s getting an award for something that will hopefully make sense during the presentation (it’s called something like “Appreciating Differences”) and an award for missing only 1 day of school and no tardies.  She would have had perfect attendance had I not given us all the stomach flu.  Way to go, mom!

Hey, look!  I’m still standing . . . to quote Elton John and his big goofy glasses.  Try not to pay attention to the fishing line wrapped around me, holding me up.  If it LOOKS like I’m standing, it totally counts. 

Earlier in the week we received approval from our first mortgage company (CitiMortgage) on the short sale.  The second mortgage company - who happens to be SunTrust - has been nothing but a pain in the ass since this all started.  Who can blame them, really?  The first mortgage company gets a chunk of cash, not to mention the gajillions of interest charged for the past 4 years.  SunTrust will get nothing.  Not a dime.  They could try to sue us - and maybe they will - but what are they going to sue us for?  A rental apartment?  A farting labrador?  Maybe a 401(k).  Still, our first mortgage company has told us we must close by June 3.  Happy to do that, but we can’t until SunTrust decides what they’re doing.  So now our realtor has to go back again and negotiate an extension for us. 

Frustrating as well because SunTrust is local, but has been impossible to reach.  Their customer service is, well, lacking at best, nearly criminal at worst.  Some departments only allow you to communicate with them via fax.  They apparently haven’t heard about telephones.  Or email.  Or they’ve heard of them, and have decided, “Meh.  Why bother with those when we can hide behind a fax machine?”  CitiMortgage on the other hand has been efficient, polite, easy to reach, and did I already say, efficient? It’s a much better organization and structure for this kind of unpleasantness. 

Our most fabulous (and incredibly patient) realtor asked me today if I was hanging in there.  Yep, I said.  I am.  But I am definitely getting to the end of my rope over here.  Between a divorce, packing this entire monstrosity alone, the emotional toll, caring for my children, dealing with a couple of friendships that really need to change or end, and my job (which suddenly is going nuts - yay money, boo timing!), I am truly very tired now.  I had a medical procedure done earlier in the week.  Normally I’d be bouncing off the walls by now, but it threw me for a loop.  I am still tired, cranky, sore, and unable to be excited about anything.  Forcing myself to run or swim laps is as appealing as scrubbing grout on my hands and knees, or listening to another Junie B. Jones book. 

I try to look around me and see progress.  But right now, as I look around, I realize that I’ve forgotten to take that picture down, or that I really haven’t cleaned out my closet, or that I’m going to find another unpleasant surprise in a drawer somewhere (like when I found my husband’s wedding ring shoved into a toothbrush holder and thrown into a drawer).  There are little “Fuck You’s” all over the house - excuse my French, but that’s what they are - and I don’t blame him.  Packing up and tearing apart is hard enough.  The FU’s are, as I enjoy saying, the cherry on my shit sundae. 

I’ve hired a moving company, gotten all of the utilities set up at the rental house, bought all of the paint, coerced, begged and threatened every person I know within a 50 mile radius into either helping with the kids or picking up a paintbrush or scrubbing a floor, packed about 1/4 of the house, sorted and sold over 150 books (and there’s still an attic full of them), removed all of my yard stuff that I can, and begun sorting the garage.  I’m making progress, but for someone who’s mantra has always been “just get it done”, I’m really not getting it done.  It’s May 6, and I am moving.  I am not ready. 

I’ve got two very difficult discussions scheduled for the next week.  I don’t want to have either of them, but I must.  Since I am always saying 2010 is the year of honesty, I also have to admit that 2010 is the year of admitting when enough is too much, and when I have to draw the line between being supportive and loyal and when I’m hurting myself by doing so.  Honesty is great in theory but it sucks to implement. 

In the meantime, if any of my readers are in the SunTrust short sale department, could y’all please install that crazy thing known as a telephone, and could you also light a fire under your ass?  We’re dying over here.