A week or so ago, someone I work with was telling me about a major life decision she’d made.  She had been a single mother for almost 2 decades and had a rough time going from staying home with her daughters to being able to find a job, learning new skills, crawling her way up, one step at a time.  She shared that she was often frightened of taking unnecessary risks because she felt her footing was always so unstable, and her time always so limited.  There were a number of major decisions she’d made, but she was telling me how she knew she’d made the right ones and when to run from others.

“I’m at peace when I make the right decision,” she said, “and when I am going in the wrong direction, I feel out of sorts, chaotic.”  She has a very strong faith and talks about God using the types of words I reserve for therapy – asking for help, digging for the truth, relying on faith to get you where you are going, working hard to do the right things. 

I’ve rarely felt pure peace with the decisions I’ve made in the past.  Even going back to work full-time, though very necessary and much appreciated, has not been 100% peaceful.  Just last night Lily turned on the waterworks again over how much she misses me in the afternoons and how she wishes I could go back to being her mom that was at the bus stop and made snacks and hosted play dates. 

(note:  I really think she misses the play dates more than anything having to do with me, but it’s sweet nonetheless)

I think this is fairly normal, feeling bittersweet about things you’ve done in the past.  People often ask if I regret my marriage and the answer is always a solid “hell, no.”  I still care about and respect Mike in many ways.  We made two amazing children, had many good years and developed ourselves and our careers together.  I’m bittersweet about the pain the dissolution caused me and my family, and any potential permanent damage it may have caused.  Sometimes I look back and question all the steps that led me to where I am today.  At the end, though, it doesn’t matter.  I’m here, I’m me, and most of the time I like both of those things. 

One of the things holding me back was the plain old vanilla variety of fear.  Divorced people are the true walking wounded, dragging around dead love and bags full of sadness into their future lives.  Everyone carries their burdens differently.  I have friends who have literally jumped from the marital bed into another marital bed, almost without blinking.  I have other friends who grew intense distrust in their minds, a different kind of poisonous mushroom, and avoid relationships altogether.  Still others seek out destructive patterns almost as if they want to be reminded of everything that went wrong in their marriage.  Many of them have come out of it now, having shaken off the dirt of their interim periods.  For me, I dragged fear out of my marriage.  I dated people that weren’t by any means good enough for me or worth 2 minutes of my time.  I had friends in my life that made me crazier than I already was.  I surrounded myself with liars and cheats and in some cases, thieves – both of my time and the little money I had. 

This just made the fear so much worse. If I couldn’t trust my judgment (because obviously, my judgment is no good:  the person I married is no longer my husband, so that’s Failure – 1, Judgment – 0).  Then I continued to make bad decisions, wrong decisions, and suspect decisions.  I started to do the opposite of what my brain told me to do because there was no way it could be right when so often it had been wrong. 

Even as recently as August, I was struggling with self-doubt and against those things I felt were good.  I couldn’t find a job, my relationships with others seemed either completely disconnected or shallow, and my relationship with Running Boy was complicated by a whole bunch of external factors.  I was tired and at times it seemed like it was easier just to cocoon myself, make sure I didn’t hurt anyone, anything, or myself. 

So this fall, I took it slowly.  I made careful decisions.  I thought through my job decision carefully.  I eased into working; normally I come in with both barrels blazing ready to change the world. This time I let myself adapt to corporate life after all these years, one single toe in the company water at a time.  I stopped worrying about my relationships and what was going to happen and started focusing on the moments in between the worry – the moments where my life actually happened. 

And I realized:  I was happy.  Content.  Satisfied with my life and the direction, with how my children have adapted; hell, I was even pleased with how Thora had finally stopped eating my house or destroying expensive things (this was because I changed my approach to her, and stopped leaving those things where she could reach them). 

I’ve made some seriously major decisions in the past month.  At some point I’ll be able to talk about them, but not right now.  I’m still sitting with them, cautiously enjoying them, poking them to make sure they aren’t suddenly going to turn into monsters with teeth and hair and start biting me.  They haven’t.  When I made the biggest decision, I woke up the next morning expecting to feel dread or despair.  Instead, I felt peace and comfort.  I had the usual niggling worries, but none of the big screaming doubts and insecurities.  It felt right, and not just at that moment. 

Days have passed and I still wake up every morning calm and peaceful.  It seems like 3 years of terror’s chaotic reign has decided to pack up and move to more pleasant quarters.  I feel like I’m visiting myself in the past, when I had my shit together and I was a normal person who wasn’t stressed to the gills and ripping myself to pieces internally every day.  It was good to meet my old self, but with a new-found sense of security and conviction.  Do I know I’m 100% right?  Nope, never will.  But I do know this:  I’ve never felt more certain about any decision I’ve made.