How do you trust your ability to make sound decisions after what you thought was ‘happily ever after’ turned out to be an ugly divorce and custody battle?
Trusting my gut seems riskier now.
I had faith in my marriage. I trusted a man who had been my best friend for more than 10 years, whom I had a child with.
I couldn’t have been more wrong about him. He cheated, lied, assaulted and stole from me, and then left me to figure out how to care for our child and put all the pieces of my life together differently.
I was left questioning everything.
In the beginning, I wondered how I would make it through. Time was the answer, because I more than made it through my divorce – I thrived.
But the marks of those experiences are still there. How could they not be.
Where’s the sweet spot between remaining vigilant about not repeating mistakes and having the courage to make new ones?
942 days ago it felt like my world came crashing down on me. From that day on, the life I had built over the previous 8 years of marriage would no longer be the life I would be living.
Well, my life would be the same. But my “world” wouldn’t be.
Life is what we experience each time we take a breath, when we feel alive just from looking into our children’s eyes or feeling their breath on our skin.
Life is literally every breath — the beginning and the end.
The world we live in, it’s what surrounds us, what we choose to do with our life (and some of what is chosen for us).
We don’t control life. We do control the world around us — the immediate environment we live in, who inhabits it, who we interact with, where we go, what we do for work, how we spend our time.
942 days ago, when my husband decided that the world we had built together was no longer what he wanted, it crushed me. But my life went on.
I was grateful to be alive and capable of creating an improved world for myself and my son. Just the year before, I was scared that I would die of cancer and leave my son motherless.
Maybe shedding a partner who was never capable of being there for me would be a blessing in the end.
Turns out, it was.
I found it was easier to breathe without him, after the initial sadness and anger passed. I realized how difficult it had been to be married to him, how hard I worked to keep my marriage intact. I just kept going because I didn’t realize I had a choice. I embraced the suck.
While catching the commuter train this morning, Miranda Lambert’s melodic voice filled my ear buds and unexpectedly brought me to tears.
I quickly swatted the tears away, but it got me thinking —
Lately, my life has resembled a country song.
My ex split when our son was three. He was barely there for our son those first few months, as he tried to figure himself out, hold on to his job, his affair partner, and grapple with his addictions.
In hindsight, he wasn’t around much before either, you know, because he was busy “working late.”
There I was, with a full-time job, health crisis of my own, and a little boy who wanted to know when Daddy was coming home, why Daddy left, why Daddy didn’t pick him up from school anymore, why, why, why.
Family flew into town to help me those first few weeks and it was still hard. I was in shock, stopped eating, and operated on auto-pilot at work and with friends.
My son did not adjust well, often clinging to my legs while I tried to make dinner, he was wetting the bed again, having nightmares, trying to nurse, he didn’t want to let me out of his grasp.
In a nutshell, it was regression and he also started showing signs of anxiety.
I gave our family dog to my best friend. That broke my heart too.
For so long, I separated the heartache I experienced during the aftermath of my ex leaving from everything else I had to contend with in my life. I pressed “pause” on the heartache and trudged ahead.
I had no idea how long it would take to get through my divorce and custody battle. More than two years went by, and we still weren’t divorced, nor did we have a court-approved visitation schedule.
I had my son full-time and we had a makeshift schedule where his Dad would come over to take him to school, and pick him up from school on other days for dinner visits, which eventually morphed into every other weekend sleepovers, always requiring 50+ emails back-and-forth to coordinate. Exhausting to say the least, but at least he was involved in his son’s life again.
During that time, I refinanced the house so we didn’t have to move and spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours preparing for our custody trial.
I took and failed a credentialing test I really needed for work (fail!), I spent a lot of time and stress trying to get into a different career field, thinking I would need the extra income, but it was not meant to be (fail!).
I underwent radiosurgery at a hospital out-of-state, a week before my son started elementary school and it was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. I couldn’t have made it through that without the love and support of my family and loving boyfriend.
As you can see, life just never stopped hurling challenges our way. Not for a second.
No wonder I pushed down the heartache. But this morning, listening to that song, it came back to me and I remembered just how raw and devastating it all was — the heartache of being left.
It reminded me that it’s ok to reflect on how hard a period of your life was, and how much you went through, because you did it. You made it to the other side. I did that.
Here’s to reflection and the growth that comes from it. Thanks, Miranda.
The divorce stress diet typically consists of coffee, wine, bourbon {oh wait, is that last one just me?}, and some crackers every couple of days.
The custody trial appetite? It’s like being pregnant and preparing for your 8th month, devouring every chip and brownie and doughnut and slice of pizza in sight.
I didn’t realize I was married to a narcissist until I divorced one. Click over to YourTango to read how I learned to deal with the narcissist in my life, through divorce and co-parenting. You can’t change a narcissist, but you can protect yourself from the havoc they wreak on your life:
While catching the commuter train this morning, Miranda Lambert’s melodic voice filled my ear buds and unexpectedly brought me to tears.
