New Chapters

When I first started this blog, I had no idea how I was going to craft my life.  I was desperate to escape my unhealthy marriage, coming out of cancer treatment, unemployed, with next to no savings and way too much debt.  In the header, I wonder out loud how I will "return to the workforce" and "get my financial life in order" while getting through divorce.

And I did it.  I really did it!

I am approaching the one year anniversary of my employment.  I have paid down debt through a refinance, and I actually have a little savings account.  (Nowhere near what it "should" be, but I no longer stress nightly about car repairs or groceries.)  The divorce is final, and my beautiful daughter is doing well.

So, it's time for me to move on.  I refuse to live my life stuck in my divorce, and while I don't have my entire life figured out (ha! does anyone?) I no longer live thinking about divorce all the time.  I'm moving up Maslow's pyramid, thinking about the great wide world and my place in it.  My blog has served the great purpose of helping me to process my life's events, but the reasons I set forth for having a blog have come to pass, and it's time to end PollyAnna's Divorce.

I'm moving on to other things in my life.  Serious writing - the kind where I actually draft it and edit it, not just spill whatever comes to mind.  Travel.  Career advancement.  Volunteering for causes I believe in.  Sharing time with friends.  Reading.  And of course, being with my beautiful daughter, teaching her and learning from her and just plain enjoying her.

I am so grateful to each of my readers here for caring about me, and for sharing your stories with me.  I think that it's so important to change the divorce paradigm from one where angry adults hurl insults at one another to one where two adults acknowledge that it doesn't work but that there were lessons learned and beautiful children gained.  If you found me here, perhaps that is what you were looking for....and I hope you found it.

My relationship with my ex is often strained, but somehow we have found a way to a co-parenting relationship that works well enough.  Not a minute goes by that I do not mourn that my life could not have had the happy marriage I craved, that my daughter's nuclear family had to be so broken...but not a minute goes by that I am not grateful to have put my ugly marriage behind me.  I hope that readers here see those two sides, and know that if I could set aside my anger to find some peace for my daughter AND for myself, maybe it is possible for them, too.  That if I can navigate the rough waters between being a stay at home mom and a single working mom, they can too.  That if I can land on my feet, they can too.

There will be future challenges - of course there will.  There will be future joys, too.  But the time has come to end this chapter, to focus on what is to come.  I'm no longer a woman fighting through divorce: I've survived that battle, and now I'm putting it behind me, taking its lessons and its scars with me, but refusing to let it define me as a human being.  The divorce and its aftermath will last a lifetime, I have no doubt about that, but it is no longer the central part of my existance, and for that I am grateful.

I don't know what the future will bring.  I have many hopes and dreams, and these days, I'm working on them more than I'm working on staying afloat.  I am grateful.

I wish you all the best.  May you, too, find that distant shore, and may you, too find peace.

*****

And as my parting gift, I leave you with a favorite poem.  May you know what kindness is.

http://www.elise.com/q/poetry/naomi.htm

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you every where like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

This is really happening

When I had cancer, after the initial diagnosis I was required to have three surgeries (two large and one small) before I started chemo, and then I did two sessions of chemo before I started to really lose my hair, about two months after the initial diagosis.  I chose to get my head shaved, rather than having it come out bit by bit, leaving a trail around the house, because it completely unnerved me to touch my head and have a handful come out.

Being PollyAnna, I turned it into a bit of a party.  I got my closest friends to come, and my hair stylist hosted us at her salon early on a Saturday before it really opened.  I didn't want to see myself half shaved - I've never been a punk rocker - and so I faced away from the mirror, towards my friends, as she shaved me.

Finally, it was done, and they asked me if I was ready to see myself.  I took a deep breath, and they slowly turned my chair around to face the mirror.  The words that flew out of my mouth at that moment shocked me, because what I said, with tears streaming down my face, was, "I have cancer!"

I knew I had cancer.  I had plenty of proof that I had cancer already.  But there was just something about seeing my bald head that drove the point home in a whole new, painful way, and it was at that precise moment that I finally understood that this was really happening to me, that it was not a bad dream, that my life was forever changed.

I feel like the next stage of my divorce might be similar to that moment of seeing myself in the mirror.

After much resistance (a topic for another post), Bryan has finally agreed to go out and get an apartment on schedule for his July 1st move out date.  In so many ways, this makes me happy: when he's here, it is awkward in the extreme, and I never know if he's going to be nice or snap my head off with sharp words; I am always certain that he will leave a trail much worse than breadcrumbs that I will have to clean up.  But the biggest reason of all, is that it allows all of us to move forward, to start the next part of our lives rather than this really difficult living in limbo.

We have been exchanging lists of what to keep, what to give up.  We've got a plan for Katherine's room (and I need to go furniture shopping for a new bed for her).  We're divvying up the kitchen things, and I have a shopping list for that, too.

But despite the fact that for more than a year we've lived separately in this house, that we have had a child custody schedule of alternate weekends, that we are very open with friends and family about the divorce, that many life changes have taken place to move us closer to divorce (including my working outside the home, and him working out of state during the week)....I'm pretty sure that the day he moves out and there are spaces where his things used to be, it's going to be a bit of a shock.

I have no regrets about the decision to divorce.  I gave it everything I had, I played by the rules, and as hard as I tried, I couldn't make the marriage work.  If Bryan begged to have me back - a VERY unlikely scenerio - I would not be tempted, because I know that our marriage was not good for either of us.

But still, some days, it's hard to believe that this is happening, that this is really my life.  Sure, I'm a capable woman who is taking charge of her future....but this is scary stuff.  Sometimes I wonder how I'll make it through.

And I'm really dreading the moment that I look in the mirror in a half empty house, and see the face of divorce.

Note: I will address the parenting aspects of this major change in another post.  Tonight, that just feels like more than I can manage.  Katherine is doing great, but I am not a fool, and every time I think about the changes in her life I feel my heart breaking.




Does this make sense to anyone, or am I truly looney to feel this way?

What has made your divorce feel more real and tangible? 

Do you ever feel like this (divorce, or other difficulty) isn't really happening to you, that somehow this can not be your life?

Thank you, dear readers, for sharing your thoughts.