A special belated shout-out to Trish, Betsy and JinB - thanks for visiting my thread! It's nice to have you here. Jen, I feel like I know you a bit through H2H, who gave me some good advice recently (thanks, H2H) and Trish, thanks for seeing the positives. JenHoco, Ron, and Wonder, and Totally, you are the best friends a girl can have. Wonder and TS, you are so right about the Universe working in my favor when the D papers arrived. Here I have been dreading receiving them for months, and then they are in the mailbox when my best gal of 23 years is here and my other best friend, who just had a lovely wedding after a terrible split a few years ago, comes to visit the next day.
It is so odd, H and I have been having some illuminating talks recently. It seems to have been precipitated by H2H pointing out to me that it would be worth a try to work on removing the banner of sadness, guilt-mongering and anger from my forehead in dealing with H (or ex-H, I should say). Then I offered an apology to H for my part in all our troubles. I had done this before, but somehow he seemed to hear it in a different way, and it set us off on a round of more honest talks. He even called me tonight to tell me his email wasn't working, but that he didn't want me to think that he didn't want to continue the conversation. He put forth the idea that so much more of our problems were due to him, and that he had "tried and convicted" me without ever giving me a chance to address our issues or try anything different. I don't know where this leaves us, but it is good to be talking more honestly about what went wrong. It also makes me feel less crazy for not seeing where things were headed when our marriage was falling apart, when I thought everything was fine. That is a huge load off my mind. I had always considered myself a fairly perceptive person, and when I just could not wrap my mind around what my part in things was, it was a sledgehammer to my self-esteem.
I feel like we've been trapped in frozen ice floes in our conversations, and now there is beginning to be some movement...We'll see how the friendship goes...
