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.