Divorce. Thanks Obama

[qt4x11]

I moved back to my old house yesterday, which ends my 4 month chapter of sleeping on my relatives couch. The place is totally empty, my wife and kids have moved out. I’ve moved in temporarily, we’ve listed the place for sale and plan to split the equity. I haven’t seen my kids in more than a week, since things got messed up last week due to their moving schedules and their new school schedules. My brother helped me move back in, and he stayed for a while and gave me the old ‘it’ll get better bro, give it time’. That’s all he can do for me, other than just be there. God bless him.


But now I’m alone again in this house we used to live in. The place is now cleaned out, and ready to be listed for sale. The place feels haunted, after four months away I feel like I’m visiting another lifetime. This may be the saddest I’ve ever felt in my life - to think, a family once lived here, but now they’re broken, and the house is for sale. And it was my fault. I’m struggling to live with that guilt. We live in a hi rise condo - every time I hear people walking outside in the hallway, I think it’s my wife and kids about to come home. It’s like I’m living in a bad dream I can’t wake up from. Doctor says I can’t exercise yet. I’ve been spending most of my time working on this latest iPhone app, because it takes my mind off my troubles. I called a friend, he tried to cheer me up. It didn’t work, but I thanked him and told him I’d call him later.


We had our first mediation session today. That was just another fun experience. I dreaded it for a week, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought - about comparable to getting a root canal. A lady I didn’t know sat there and took notes and basically forced us to agree on which holidays the kids get to spend with which parent, how to divide up time over Christmas break, summer break etc. This is our future now. I sat there and cried and my wife also cried. Afterwards, we walked together for a while and had a fairly long and fairly friendly (!) conversation about the temporary childcare schedule during this interim period while we’re going through mediation. I told her ‘I don’t want to be one of those dads who only sees their kids two weekends a month. I want them to spend half their lives with me.’ I was surprised at how friendly and cooperative we were acted towards each other.


It was all I could do to keep up a casual friendly attitude and not beg her to ‘give us another chance’. If I was still doing the ‘180’ I would have thought that I had ‘made some progress’ in melting some of the ice. But too much has happened, I don’t have hope at this point of reconciliation. I walked home amid all the people on Michigan Ave. and tried to distract my nervous brain from worrying over what is going to become of me now that everything’s changed.