Taking the Next Step

Little bits and pieces are coming together. Loose ends are getting tied up. I am starting to see a small ray of light at the end of the tunnel. It is the hardest thing I have ever gone through in my life, and if you've read this blog at all I am sure you already know the kind of angst going on inside of me. I was looking at some blog archives the other day and remembered this post and song. That was last April. I'm not going to live another year of my life like this, and no matter how it hurts - I am just going to push forward for a better life.
I got an email this morning from a friend that strengthened me. It helped me know that I won't be lost forever in the muck that I feel is drowning me right now.

So we shall allot the first month for misery & mourning. Then when it is over.... it will be Spring. You will be home. There will be walks at the river, hikes on the trail, lunches & coffee out with friends. Then comes Fall, the time I start missing you the most. This year you get leaves & pumpkin flavored everything, Halloween party & Oktoberfest & bonfires at the river. Then Thanksgiving, Planes Trains & Automobiles & finally Christmastime with you, the way I like it best. You have done this for years "with" him.... now you can do it alone without him. Only you won't be alone. You will be free.

Validation of my pain. Permission to mourn. A future to look forward to.
I'm taking the next step....

Hollow

This morning I feel like one of those hollow chocolate bunnies, the kind you get for Easter. The heat has turned up, as we get closer to the day when I pull away from my home and marriage with my three kids in a moving van to let it all fall apart, it is causing this feeling that I might dissolve, cave in on myself. I am so very sad this morning.
I need a friend. Not a phone call or an email, but flesh and blood to just sit with me in this pain - the way Dwayne reminded me Job's friends did after they ran out of answers.
There is a deep ache. I have this sense of wanting everything to go "back to normal" and yet I can't find a marker in time where that ever existed for us. It was always me, trudging along, trying to appear as if we were like everyone else. Now I find I wasn't even able to fool myself. I have reached the end of my strength, my resolve. Boxes are everywhere - tidy packages of the pieces of my life - a life I no longer know how to go on with.
The desperation threatens to overtake me. I never wanted this. I don't want it now. I want him to be the hero, to come crashing in to save us from this worst moment in our lives together.

The Clearing Wordle

I found this on my friend Cynthia's blog. It's pretty cool. To get your own, go to Wordle.
See a larger version of this one here.

No Miracle

God - I need you.
I am the one leaving, yes. I am walking away. While he talks of miracles and things that might be, I have heard it all before. I am not a stone. I feel it. I want it. It was supposed to be him in the framed pictures of all that I see for the future. Not cracked glass and an image torn in two.
I got boxes today - tidy and neat containers in which to put the pieces of my life if I had the strength to pick them up.
A heavy need to wail overcame me when I started this post and I stopped to indulge awhile. There is no comfort for my pain. I mourn as one with no hope. My prayers for the miracle of his softened heart turned to me fell on deaf ears for far too long to endure. The vow to love hanging over me unfulfilled.
How do you start to see the world again through cracked glass, with only half of what you thought you were? This is a pain that feels too deep to bare alone, and I am left here, crying like a baby for her mother. No mother will come. No miracle.

Remember That

Thanks so much Erin - I think I am going to be alright. Trying so hard to remember that.

Who Would Choose This?

There has been this feeling over the last couple of days that the bottom had dropped out. Everything that was familiar has become foreign, strange. The world looks different as I figure out how to make just Julie out of "Julie and Travis". But now it seems a strange and eerie peace has settled that is a huge relief, and terrifying.
It all hurts, and confuses and muddles. At work I see elderly couples shop together, moving seamlessly as if they were one. Communicating without words. I wanted that for us, the golden years. Then there are the young couples, and I remember us, a newborn between us in that early morning light when all the edges are blurred and all the sounds are softened.
I don't know how to separate it. When my parents got divorced, all the memories of us as a family seemed to have to die with their new relationships. The ones that managed to survive were the bad ones. How do I preserve the dignity of our lives for the last 21 years and not let anyone else define it based on their limited knowledge? Yes, the bad has overwhelmed the good - but there is still good there to find. I want those memories - they are mine.
Yesterday a friend eloquently explained marriage to me in a way she heard it when going through her own painful divorce - and it was so very helpful. (Thank you Becky) A marriage is like a child. It needs physical and emotional care. If you had a child that was sick, you would do everything you could to take care of it and nourish it back to health. On the other hand, if the child were to die, you would not hold onto it and keep it with you. You would bury it and mourn the loss and day by day learn to live without it again.
This is so hard. It is so painful. It isn't what I ever wanted. Who would ever choose this?

A Rant About the Church on Marriage and Divorce, Etc.

Maybe I'm bitter - but I can't stop thinking about this, the bill of goods we've been sold as women. I just finished reading Vinegar Hill and the priest describes to the young woman about to be married her role as the "hearth" and the "home". What if the hearth has no one to stoke the fires? What if the home is more of a house, empty and fractured? What then?
I have been told throughout the years by well-meaning (and much loved) Christian friends that they couldn't condone divorce. They would support me through a separation - hold my hand, help me financially, even give the kids and I a place to live - but that divorce was never going to be an option. I have been in circles before where women who were divorced were whispered about when they left the room, tongue in cheek as one person would lean over and say, "this is her second marriage". Like I needed to know, be warned.
I am in a crisis so perhaps I will look back on this years later and come down on a completely different side of the issue - but for right now I am really struggling. Please filter whatever you read here through that fact. Right now I am angry. The "church" as an institution that would hold to this belief that I am less of a woman if I divorce my husband, that even through all of the hell I've lived and how I've tried to love in spite of it, I have failed. That I am a failure.
God hates divorce. It is true - but I know He sees what my kids and I have endured, and hates it as well.