Divorce is Hard...I Hope You Never Have to go Through it.

A while back, I was watching someone I love dearly go through a divorce.  He was in pain and I blamed and judged his ex, who I also loved.  I tried very hard not to judge, for a very long time, but one day she asked for my opinion, and I judged, harshly.  I threw things at her that we both knew she already knew and probably regretted and had already beaten herself up about.   And she responded with something like “Divorce is very hard.  And I’ve tried really hard and done the best I could do through those darkest moments.  I hope you never have to go through it.”  I can’t even wrap my head around how much of an understatement that was.  And then I beat myself up a little for kicking her while she was down.  

Years later, I went through my own divorce and darkest moments.  And I let myself crumble a few times and made very painful mistakes, some that I will never forgive myself for.  I was numb for a year, and breathless and dizzy and lost and angry and sad and trying to charge through all of that like a warrior, with my children in tow, determined to get us all through it, not just fairly unscathed, but better off because of it.  It was an even bigger challenge than it sounds.

I apologized to her, and told her how often her words rang in my head every time I tried to talk myself into forgiving myself for my darkest times and weakest moments.  The ones that inevitably come from the devastating failure and heartbreak of shattering your perfect family and giving up on happily ever after.   I felt sincerely terrible for adding insult to her injuries.  She was graciously forgiving and grateful for my long overdue understanding.  And so sorry that I was going through it.  

“Divorce is very hard.”  And for a very long time, it gets harder and harder.  Giving up on my lover was hard as hell.  Shattering my family was gut wrenching and life changing and often, seemingly unforgivable.  It was by far, the greatest casualty of this war.  Memories of our happy family still haunt me every single day.  And in those dark moments of my post-divorce life, when our new family dynamic took my kids away from me for days at a time, and we missed each other terribly, I wallowed in failure and guilt and cold, heartless, bad decisions.  When I wasn’t devastated, I was numb.   

But I have some feeling coming back now.  I’ve seen smiles return on my kids faces.  I’ve heard most of them tell me that they understand now.   I’ve listened to my oldest son vow to find a great love and treat her right so that he never loses her.  I’ve watched in awe as my teenage daughter chose a first love who oozes genuinely good intentions for her and isn’t afraid to tell her.  I watched my children watch and admire genuinely good men and learn the true meaning of selflessness and “love it or lose it”.  And just like that, two years and many regrets later, it was not all in vain.  

I’ve been dreaming about healing for years now.  But I think I’m ready.  I think I can muster up enough faith in my family’s strength and resilience to forgive myself for ever asking them to take on this fight in the first place.  ( And I believe I can thank myself for that.)  I think I’ve finally convinced them that when I said “trust me, we are all going to be ok” over and over and over again (with tears in my eyes), I meant it, and I was right.  I know they know, that in my life, they are first and foremost.  

It is very healing.  It’s much easier to forgive myself knowing that there is a good chance my children will forgive me.  It’s much easier to imagine letting another man love me knowing that my children believe that I deserve that.  It’s much easier to imagine letting myself love, wholeheartedly again, knowing that my 4 little hearts are mending again.  

“Divorce is hard.  I hope you never have to go through it.”  

Butterflies...

We have our first real boyfriend.  My oldest daughter, at the very same age that I was and who has never been one to settle, has met the first boy to put that look in her eye and smile on her face, which I recognize all too well.  This is the real deal.  This is the one who must have that extra something that she has been patiently holding out for since she decided she wanted a boyfriend, but not just any boyfriend.  This is the one that could break her heart.  This is the one that she will learn many hard lessons from.  This is the one who I will be watching like a hawk, making sure he is worthy.  

We picked him up for our first date…I mean their first date. And as we got closer and closer to his house, we were both trying to talk each other out of our tummy aches (which, in the moment, my jaded heart hadn’t recognized as very special and exciting butterflies.).  He was a sweet boy, with a lovely family and their adorable family dog.   I couldn’t help thinking, when I met them all, how lucky they were to meet her. 

I’ve put everything I have into raising her with enough confidence and patience to hold out for extra special and to be worthy of it and appreciative of it when she finds it.  My girl has some sky high standards these days and I knew that boy must be extra special. (He better be. My girl is a gem.)  It wasn’t lost on me, the way he looked at her, like he couldn’t believe his eyes.  And the way he smiled and floated on air around her, just as I have been watching my giddy daughter float lately.  

So far, she tells me a lot about him and them (like when they had the “are we boyfriend/girlfriend?” talk and she reminded him that he hadn’t asked her yet, but that he was welcome to ask her next time they saw each other in person.  My Girl.)  It’s not the usual “Whatever, it’s not important, don’t worry about it” (aka “none of your business mom”).   It IS important.  And it’s exciting and new and a start of a magical/horrific dating lifetime filled with heavenly highs and gut wrenching lows.  It’s a new chapter for us.  And I want to know EVERYTHING.  I won’t know everything.  But I want to.  I want her to not be able to stop talking about him, and I want to hang on her every word.  And in very grateful return,  I will try not to gush and choke up everytime I see that twinkle in her eye (because I guess that’s lame), and I will try to keep my very wise opinions  to myself…as much as I possibly can.  Lines of communication can be very fragile at this age.

A few weeks after our first date… I mean their first date, they went to his Homecoming dance together.  He bought three different ties just to make sure he had the perfect color to match her dress, which I thought was really adorable (and smart, because in all honesty, perfection is pretty much what I’m looking for, for my girl).   We stood in his living room, with his family, and took pictures of our children, who were positivley glowing.  Everytime I look at that picture, I am so thankful for that huge, genuinely happy smile on her face, and so impressed that his smile may be even bigger.  

I've learned to embrace the butterflies I get evertime I see them together.  Now if I could just convince her to introduce him to her three precious little siblings. 

Chapter- Unhappily Never After

Chapter-unhappily never after

He hugged me.  We had barely spoken face to face in over two years, after our 14 year failed attempt at happily ever after, as I have tried desperatly to avoid eye contact with my unrequited love, and suddenly, he walked onto my porch and pulled me to him and hugged me. It was a surprisingly comfortable, familiar hug. It was a tight hug, with every fiber of his also battered heart, and his deep breath quivered a bit.  And our war weary hearts beat strongly against each other. 

I asked him what it was for. He let go and walked away without answering, in his truest style, and then stopped and looked back and said “just because”...with tears in his eyes.  And in that moment, I think we both saw two people who had given it everything we could, and neither of which was enough for the other in the earth shattering end. 

I was shaken...to my core. It felt like I was facing a demon I had long given up on. The one who would NEVER come around and realize how lucky he was to have me.  He is the only one in the world who has ever met that whole-hearted, unjaded, passionate woman. He is the only man who that woman ever gave her all. He broke that woman. And suddenly he was standing on my porch, hugging her. 

 It hurt.  It brought to the surface, all the sadness that my anger had buried.  And then It felt a bit healing. I cried off and on, for days, at the thought of it. The tears feel like a release of a tiny bit of that painful notion that he will never consider himself lucky to have been so loved by me, that he will never be sorry for taking me for granted or  ever appreciate all that I poured into him and our family.  Maybe there is hope that he will one day be very genuinely sorry for breaking me, or look back in awe of everything I gave.  

 That full moon was something last night, after all...

3rd anniversary of all the kids in school...

I just sent my crew off for their first day of school.  Oddly, it did not give me the same euphoric feeling it ALWAYS has.  I didn’t spend this summer on the verge of nervous breakdowns and yearning for the first day of school.   And the summer went by in a flash rather than it’s usual eternity.   Don’t get me wrong, it was rough.  It was it’s typical mix of ice cream and swimming and frolicking and playing and laughing and fighting and bickering and tattling and bickering and fighting and tattling and laughing and bickering and fighting, and whining and the endless, relentlessly exhausting task of putting smiles on my precious, ungrateful children's faces, who, quite frankly were just as sick of me and each other as I was of all of them.  But as usual, we made the best and most of it.  And we survived.  

It helps that they can all fend for themselves (far more than they would ever actually let on).  They can get their own snacks and pour their own drinks.  We can go anywhere now, without strollers.  Everyone can buckle themselves into their car seats.  We don’t need diaper bags and snacks and sippy cups.  

Maybe it helped that I was down one kid most of the time (though I missed her like hell) as my teenager found herself a summer home this year and had a two month “sleepover” at a friends house, in an effort to be anywhere else but a house filled with her siblings (can’t say that I blamed her).  Maybe it helps that my boys took every moment that I didn’t insist on entertaining them to entertain themselves with their video game obsession.  It did get a bit worrisome at times, but I just had to keep reminding myself of the summer I spent trying to save Princess Peach.  

I’m sure it helps that I’m forced to share custody of my kids with their dad half the time.  I never imagined  that would happen, but it did, and in the interest of full disclosure, I needed it, whether I knew it or not.  I remember one time, while I was really in the thick of stay at home motherhood, with toddlers and babies and diapers and he was working 9-5, telling someone “I just worry that he thinks he works harder than I do.”  And he did.  Deep down inside, we always both knew he did.  And I think, deep down, underneath other far more painful reasons that I had to leave him, we both knew that I was never going to get the help I desperately needed with parenthood if I stayed.  Shared custody was a necessary sacrifice.  It takes the edge off, and I still struggle to cope with it.  

My growing, capable children and new found moments of silence and a very quiet house on this first day of school morning, have reminded me how lucky I was to be able to stay home with ever one of my children (and there are a lot of them) before sending them off to school.  It was a genuine blessing and there was never ever a moment that I wanted to be doing something else with my life.  One of my favorite things to do every morning when I have my coffee is check my Facebook memories where I have obsessivley document my journey through motherhood.  And they never fail to remind me how much I have loved this job.  Motherhood is my passion and even in the midst of my occasional nervous breakdowns, I didn’t take a single second of it for granted, I swear.  Those years at home with my babies brought me an overwheling and exhausting joy, great enough to overshadow my unrequited love.  He worked hard enough to afford me an invaluable opportunity of a lifetime, and I worked my ass off trying to be worthy of it.  

It’s not lost on me.  And on this third anniversary of having all four kids in school, and surviving a survival of the fittest type challenge,  I can look back at those very long grueling days that I once believed would never ever end, and I would never survive, and pinch myself at the selective memories of that moment in time.  

If We Knew God’s Greater Plan...

Recently, a  friend presented me with a question; If we knew what God’s greater plan was, or why we are meant to endure such things, would that make it any easier? I have spent countless nights pleading to God, in an effort to change his plan for my mother, but I will never forget the moment my pleas changed from “please God, see my mother through this one more time” to “God, please take her and end this battle”.

 My mother spent years of her life striving for perfection always trying to please everyone. She fought many a losing battle and I remember my father often telling her to “stop trying to save the world”. Life is full of letdowns when you have such good intentions.

She was a dedicated wife who’s only mistake was choosing a mate who had no interest in pretending to be perfect. He tried to teach her to focus on the good rather than dwell on the bad. But she was not ready for this liberating approach and perhaps resented the fact that it came so easily to him.

She was a dedicated teacher in the school district that recognized her special ability to handle the worst kids they could throw at her, only to have them turn their backs on her and accuse her of being too harsh on those kids. I often run into former students who tell me, with a residual look of fear in their eyes, that she was tough. So tough that they wish their kid had a teacher just like her!

And she was a dedicated mother who raised a son who seem to master the art of at least appearing to be perfect, and a daughter who spent her teen years resenting the very idea of such unrealistic expectations and often found pleasure in throwing her rebellious imperfections and her poor mother’s face.

Being a mother now myself, I have learned a lot about just how perfectly imperfect my mother was. It wasn’t perfection she was demanding from others, it was simply her want to see her loved ones, and even those rotten students, be the best people they could be. And she was always harder on herself than she was on anyone else when those people fell short. I have no doubt, for instance, that the lessons in tough love that she was forced to teach her  idiot teenage daughter were far more hurtful for her than they were for that foolish young girl.

In the last leg of her time here on earth, she became a grandmother. Her never ending soul-searching journey to find herself seemed to stop dead in its tracks the moment she met her first grandchild. She was happy to simply be grandma and never seemed to struggle with that role as she did with all the others. Her need to please and appear perfect found the ideal outlet in her grandchildren. In my five-year-old daughter’s eyes, grandma could do no wrong. Madeline is all at once,  the lucky one for getting to know her grandma so well, and the poor little girl who spent the last year waiting patiently to resume weekly sleepovers and camp outs by candlelight in the living room at grandma’s house. And while my heart breaks for the newest grand kids who have been cheated out of knowing their perfect grandma, I am devastated by the thought of my daughter losing her first best friend. I can only imagine the pleas  my mother made to her God, begging him to let her watch her grandchildren grow up and to let her shine a bit longer in the starring role of her lifetime, just as I prayed that all of her grandchildren could get to know the capable woman I still conjure up in my dreams every night; the woman who’s world revolved around them, not her illness.

Just as her downward spiral began, she took a very uncharacteristic moment to sit me down and tell me that she is proud of the mother I am to her precious grandchildren. I believe she is thankful and respects me for breaking the cycle of demanding perfection. I mother with my heart and without regard to how it appears to others. She was grateful to me for giving her grandchildren the kind of peaceful, stress-free, fun filled childhood that every child should know and probably doesn’t give herself enough credit for giving her own children the same. And she was pleasantly surprised that despite my obvious flaws, my children, her grandchildren, are genuinely kind, caring, polite, headstrong, independent, and yes, perfectly imperfect.

It took a while, but my mother did learn to stop taking life so seriously. And perhaps a credit to her “pal Petey” and his odd sense of humor, she learned to laugh, even at herself. We all grew to appreciate my mother more as she grew to appreciate herself. We were thankful rather than burdened by Sunday dinners at mom’s house. We were amused rather than annoyed by her incessant curiosity. We even saught the  nagging, motherly advice that we once resented because it was forced upon us. And my father, her ex-husband, never wastes an opportunity to tell us what a wonderful woman our mother was.

 Her faith saw her through many hard times. And eventually she learned to stop judging her life through the critical eyes of others, and instead begin living and learning through the forgiving eyes and unconditional love of her God. We found great comfort in watching my mother’s faith remain so unwavering during this agonizing process. Who are we to question God while we watched in awe as her faith held up and she still insisted on going to church every week even though it involved the challenges of the wheelchair and the humbling inability to rise with the rest of the congregation to sing his praises and the need to be lifted in and out of the pews, and the special,  doting attention from her loving and dedicated church family, which she once would have found terribly uncomfortable.

 I respect the Lord’s path, and I genuinely trust him. I only ask that he respect us for learning the valuable lessons this type of tragedy is meant to teach us, and to take note that we did this a long time ago, even before we were forced to do so out of fear and that the cost of losing someone we love. And I pray that he shower her with all the praise and accolades her dedication to him surely warrants.

 God bless you Mom. I am certain he will.

Get Over It.

I was told recently, that I really should be “over it already.  It’s been two years, I mean really.”

I have no idea what the reasonable amount of time is to get over 15 years of unrequited love and endless failed attempts to be worthy and 14 years of losing myself completely in the blissful hell of child rearing and happy homemaking, with no one there to love me enough not to let me do that myself.   But I do know that it is not two years.

Add to that, having to shatter my family/most prized possession, and the painful burden of bearing sole responsibility for all of their tears and frustrations, and feeling single handedly responsible for rebuilding us, with all our fractures, strong enough to bear the weight of my guilt and to take anything life throws at us.

Add to that, haunting memories of our perfect family and our happiest times, happy enough to shield me from all my sacrifices.

Add to that, losing a large group of loved ones I once called family.

Add to that, meeting a man or two who couldn’t seem to resist falling in love with me despite all my warnings that I’m hard to love now, and who believed that any man who let me get away when he had an even better, loyal, less broken version of me in the palm of his hand was a fool.

Add to that, knowing that I’m very hard to love now...

and suddenly it feels like a life sentence.

Happier, hopeful, healing, slightly less jaded and bitter? Yes.

Over it?  Hell no.