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.