Hi friends! I have missed writing here and thought I was long overdue for an update. I hope to get a chance to post on your threads, but I have been reading along and cheering from the sidelines to your wise words and perspectives on your own and other’s sitches.
It has been a very up-and-down tumultuous spring; there have been so many great developments in certain aspects of my life (professionally, my kiddos, my mental attitude) and some really hard ones (my M). After attempting to go-it-alone with divorce settlement talks, we have finally hired Ls. Collaborative divorce lawyers, which feels very much in line with my values and ethics and I have hope that it will keep things cleaner than they could be with traditional Ls.
I can proudly say I am firmly detached and really ready for the D process to begin in earnest and conclude sometime this year. The further out from my marriage I get, the more I see how much imbalance existed in it and how I have spent the past 10 years merely surviving instead of thriving.
I don’t want to get into details, but H is not the person I thought he was, in any sense of the word. I know that D can bring out the worst in people, so I am allowing some wiggle room there, but there are some deep personality traits that I now see I unconsciously enabled and compensated for in our R. The freedom and sense of peace and happiness I now feel, nearly a year out from separation, as well as the complete absence of some mystery health issues I faced for years is enough to tell me that this is truly the right path for me and my future. All of this notwithstanding, I have had recent bouts of questioning my sanity and culpability, to an unhealthy extreme at times. But having good therapy, wise friends, a supportive community and internet resources such as this community have given me the tools to understand that perhaps I am not as crazy as I allowed myself to believe.
As I begin to work with my L and understand that my rights are (or should be) equal to his in terms of how our life is structured moving forward, I am overwhelmed with such relief. There is a very real possibility that at the end of the day, my life is going to be easier than it ever has been, by order of magnitudes due to our wildly imbalanced professional and personal lifestyle. I wish I had taken all of your advice to retain a L long ago.
Hindsight is of course 20/20 and I hope that this next little tidbit may be useful to a future reader going through something similar. Much of this is an echo Gerda’s post of a few weeks ago, a worthy read for all. But here is my current feelings about what I have experienced in this hard, painful process:
I am a strong, independent woman who always trusted my intuition and felt assured of my decision-making capacity (and my ability to pivot should I make a poor decision). I felt healthy, strong and mentally balanced. I felt like I had internal resources in excess and as such, when H came flying at me with all his accusations about my character, my conduct during our M and my reaction to his blindsiding ILYBNILWY, I listened and internalized them much, much more than I ever should have. He played on my strengths and used them as fuel as to why he had to leave 15 years of misery. I trusted him and allowed him to tear apart everything that made me, me. All the sides of me that I valued, that other people in my life valued, that honestly was what attracted him to me in the first place, became a burned-out village, smoldering in spots and no longer recognizable.
I did this. I allowed this to happen. My eagerness to grow and change, my desire to save my M, and my curious nature, coupled with the codependent dynamics that have existed in our M allowed this to happen. And as I am rebuilding that village, I am able to see where the weaknesses existed, some of the huts were dry tinder begging for a spark. And now I get to rebuild it all of bricks and stone if I wish. Or not. But it’s mine and it’s me and I get to decide what rises from the ashes.
The deep irony in all of this is that I have daughters who are so much like me. Strong, independent, self-assured, but also open, loving, caring and community-minded. If I let H continue to tear down those essences of me, I am allowing him to vicariously do the same for my daughters. Not on my watch. And I will lead them by example. You too, dear daughters can be strong and capable. Don’t ever apologize for that; it is celebrated in men. And you can also be kind and loving and empathetic. You can hold it all, and you will.
The pendulum has had some wild swings in this regard: in staking my claim to what is my equal right, I have experimented with going forcefully in the other direction (‘I have to stand up for myself! Bring out the big guns!’) when a more balanced tact would have sufficed. I forgive myself these extremes, have apologized where necessary; I am learning as I go. And having a compassionate legal team on my side has helped ballast the boat, I don’t have to go it alone.
I am still in the midst of some hard stuff. Triggers occur daily. I am traumatized on a lot of levels. But I am just enough above the clouds to see that this isn’t going to be forever, that time will heal me, H and the children. That H and I will likely come out the other side in a few years and be able to communicate normally, put our children first and both lead successful lives. That’s my north star anyway.
