Six months later--the truth is out there

[hoosiermama]

Yeah, we're kinda all right there, aren't we? So glad I have you guys to walk with me.

One thing I forgot to mention above. I'm still also trying to figure out how I got here. What was my part in this whole disaster. Because if I don't learn from it, it's wasted suffering, and that's a real shame. I'm well past the point of blaming myself (that was a pretty brief thing for me anyway!) for H leaving, it's not that. Yeah, we all know he became alien spawn and had a need to change everything about his life--including his personality; wish he'd bought a red sports car instead of leaving us for wicca woman and all that. And who knows, that may well have happened no matter what--aspects of it are just too bizarre. But how did I contribute to my own misery in the marriage--that's what I need to come to terms with. I'm getting there.

At this moment, it's really frightening to think of starting over financially at the age of 52. I work with kids in a culture of poverty; I know mine is situational and not generational, but to see what it actually looks like not to be able to get out of this is scary. For the past 15 years or so my planning has always been about planning for retirement as a team, raising D as a team--which ultimately meant helping H get to a point in his career where he was doing well financially and I was keeping the home fires burning and not so much building my career. Well, guess what happened once he got to that place of financial success--yep, two months later he was gone and took it all with him. So I'm left with roughly the same amount in the retirement fund that I had 10 years ago (or probably less at this point due to the economy, but NPR says sometimes it's just better not to look when there's a downturn). I think this goes under the "hidden costs of divorce" column, and one of the reasons women have a rough time in their senior years (when working with seniors in the parish, it was very easy to tell which senior ladies were widows and which were divorced just by their lifestyles and resources). No, I'm not there yet, but I don't have a lot of time to make up any difference I need to. Especially living paycheck to paycheck as I am.