There have been a lot of changes over the past few months. Finding out my husband of 20 years filed for divorce because he felt his PRIVATE life was more important than our family, our marriage. My daughter's decision to remove her father from her life, needing to get the house ready for sale, the death of a very close family member, having to put my beloved 14 year old dog down and most of all dealing with my father who needed to be moved to memory care as he could no longer take care of himself and finally, my daughter being accepted for a full year study abroad program in England. All of this, in the span of about seven months but a majority of it happening in the past 90 days. It has been extremely overwhelming and stressful and I have had to shoulder it alone.
Don't get me wrong. I have some VERY good friends. Friends who patched the holes in the wall that HE created during a temper tantrum. Friends who showed up on a Friday night, unexpectedly because they noticed I had gone quiet on them. Friends who text me, "Checking up on you." out of the blue to make sure I am still breathing. Friends who say, "Let's go...." and we end up at a movie, or dinner or at their house playing cards. They are there to keep me afloat.
I worry about where I am going to live. How will I survive? I will have to get another job to make ends meet and will I ever be able to own my own place again? Because everything is up in the air, unsure, unknown, I am afraid of what will happen. But I just have to have faith. I just have to believe all of this is happening for a reason. That I have endured so many years of unhappiness, abuse and feeling invisible, that something good has to come out of all this, right? Right?!?!
But there have been some good things to happen too. I have been invited to facilitate a Divorce Care group of my own! I have rejoined my church and church choir. I have a social life again. I am finding things I like to do again. I am finding my voice again.
All these things are great. But I am also very lonely. I realized that I have been very lonely for a very long time. Ever since finding out about my husband's affair in January of 2019 and how he had gone back to her time and time again since then, I have been lonely, alone and in desperate need of love and affection. During those 5 years between discovery and present day, I have been made to feel unworthy, broken, invisible, and unloveable. While he has jumped into his relationship of his dreams, I have been trying to work through all that happened. My part in the breakdown of my marriage and work on myself to be a person who IS worthy, who IS loveable, who is NOT broken. And now, being faced with letting go of all the things that meant anything to me, I find I am ready to let go of so much that I am literally filling garbage cans every week.
But with creating all this space in my life, I am finding I have all this empty space, literally and figuratively which I automatically want to interpret as room for someone. But I also realize that while I am so longing for someone to share things with, to be able to hug on demand or to curl up with at the end of a long day, I am NOT ready. Just the thought of starting a new relationship sends me into a panic mode. Learning someone else the way I (thought I) knew my ex is so daunting and I find myself not wanting to start this journey. The "dating" scene alone has me skiddish. So many scams and jerks out there, I don't know if I could handle that. And the ability to meet someone again? Slim. So I face the remaning years of my life alone...and that scares me.
I don't want to spend the rest of my life alone. I don't want to face the world without someone who means the world to me by my side. but here I am and boy does that suck.
I know at this time, my healing isn't done. Just the fact that the THOUGHT of finding someone new terrifies me, is a huge clue. I have been married twice and both times, my partner has cheated on me. That has to say something about me. That has to say that either I am doing something, or I have REALLY bad taste in men. I can't emotionally afford to have another relationship that I give my all to, fall apart. I don't know that I can go through putting pieces back together, sweeping up the mess and moving through the whole process again. This one nearly (literally) killed me. And it still might.
So what do we do?
Right now, my plan is to just keep moving forward. Keep putting things back together. Keep finding new things. And if it's in the cards to try a 3rd time, then maybe I will. But I certainly won't actively look for it. My heart is still with my ex. Sounds pretty silly and psychotic in a way, but even after all that happened, I still love him. I will always love him. I just don't love what he became. I don't love what he did. I don't love the callous way he hurt me. The malicious way he took himself away from me. What happened has left me skiddish, scarred and afraid to open up and trust. Oh my God, trust! I just don't have it in me to trust anyone again the way I did him and that is not fair to any potential partner. I have so much work to do on that front that I feel that maybe I will be too old to start anything new.
Oh but there is hope! There is the idea that there is someone out there who will find me worthy of love and attention. Who will want to be with me and won't entertain another on their phone. Someone who thinks I am enough and not keep me as a bookmark until something better comes along. Someone who WILL spend the rest of their life with me and not run when the going gets tough but will be a mature adult who will actually communicate with me. There is hope. And that's all I can ask for.
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