...below that a 'title' block said "The 'D' Family'.
They didn't want to hang them up, but instead had me do it and the 'family' one is right in the center of the tree.
These things are tough.
Indeed Frank.
The first Christmas. The first New Years. Hell, the first everything Frank. The year ahead will be full of firsts that you will initially feel no excitement to be experiencing.
But it does get easier. The shock wears off at some point. And a strange thing begins to happen. You find yourself focusing more on the new possibilities than the stinging loss.
Your daughters are very close to the age my two boys were when my divorce happened. Z was 14 and W was 19 that first Christmas. Our kids are strong Frank, because we've raised them well. But they wrestle with the change and the pain it brings just like we do. Once again we have to find a way to deal with our sense of loss while at the same time serving as a leader for our kids in embracing the new possibilities.
I think Amy was very much on the mark when she wrote about your engineering-like approach to dealing with the emotional end of a marriage ending.
You can't plan your way through it. You have to let it wash over you. You need to FEEL all of these things and let them run through you. As men in particular, we struggle with allowing emotions to have their way with us, but I honestly believe that you have to give up control and allow all the feelings to be felt.
I'm not sure that you've really allowed yourself to grieve this yet Frank. You've held on, you've DB'ed, you've analyzed and observed. You've thought out all the possible permutations and considered how various variables would impact the final outcome.
But I'm not sure you've let yourself just feel the hurt.
I'm not suggesting wallowing in the mire. But I am telling you that I think it's necessary to drop the facade once in awhile and be real. You're not ready for Match.com. You're nowhere near the point where you need to be considering a future relationship.
Because you have to let this one go first.
I'll think about you and your girls this Christmas Frank. I will be sharing my Christmas morning with my two boys, giving them our new version of a family Christmas morning. We do things differently now than we did for the first 19 years of their life. I had to do that. It was somehow just wrong to try to pretend that nothing had changed. You need to do the same. Start something new this year Frank, something you and the girls have never done. Don't change everything. Just find something that makes a new tradition for you and the girls.
It helps us move forward.
Blessings,
Bill
"Don't tell me the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the moon."
