I'm still a bit on a high from the weekend. It feels big. I really don't think it's a small thing to pick up my life as a solo individual and move states. I know the process is far from over but it became really real this weekend. And I realize that I have rose colored glasses on and that I'm sure there will be plenty of challenges around the corner, but it is really, really exciting.
When I walked through the park in my backyard on Saturday, I passed a tennis center. A quick perusal of their website showed they offered beginner adult tennis lessons. Could tennis be my next thing to try? I feel like so much of my journey since the divorce to reconnect with myself has been facilitated by my openness to jump in and try new things. I don't really want to lose that openness, although with time, I imagine I'll become more discerning. I'm not there yet though so I'm excited every time I stumble across new opportunities to consider.
I spent some time this evening measuring all my furniture and drawing the living/sleeping area of my apartment out to scale to come up with a layout that I think will be good. It looks like I'm going to have space to add a second chair, a chair I've had in my Amazon save for later list since the divorce. It's quite compact as a simple chair but then unfolds into a chaise lounge and then even further to lay flat, so it's really versatile.
I still don't have a start date and it left me in a moment of panic about 2:00 a.m. this morning. Fears swirled in my mind that it could all fall apart and I would be stuck with a lease in Atlanta and no job. I pulled out the tentative job offer e-mail which was conditional only on me completing the required paperwork which helped soothe my mind enough to go back to sleep.
I followed up with my new office today to check on the status. And although, she didn't yet have answers, my contact was very responsive and said she would try to get a status update. I continue to be impressed with every interaction I have with my new office which is encouraging.
I wonder a little bit about what I'm walking into. I recently discovered that the woman who got the initial job I applied for last August has since left the office. That means that an office that once had three investigators, currently has none and they are missing their paralegal to support these cases as well. Although, I still am hopeful to have a team of attorneys to work with, it appears the team of support staff I was hoping for may not materialize, at least in the beginning. I don't know what that means for the case load that I will carry but I imagine it will be a lot.
And maybe this deserves its own post, but I recently discovered that my ex-husband's mom likely has gone into some kind of care facility. I don't know exactly where it fits on the spectrum between independent living to assisted living to fully memory care. I don't know what prompted it either.
I only know what I know because his brother posted the real estate listing of his mom's house on Instagram and I didn't realize I still followed him (he so rarely posts and my Instagram account is public so I don't care who follows or notice who I follow) and my ex-husband hasn't changed the e-mail address with his Uber account so I saw the reservation for a pick up from what I assume is her new facility to the airport.
What I wonder is how his mom's deterioration and eventually death will affect him. He had such an intertwined, yet toxic relationship with her that I doubt just disappears with her death. It has to be so complicated, although I'm unsure of how much he will let himself feel it all. But he will have to transfer that energy somewhere. I wonder if him leaving me saved me from the consequences of that as I think it is quite possible, he will transfer that energy, expectation, dynamic, etc. even more onto his current partner.
I also have spent some moments reflecting on all I did to help when his dad got sick. They are on their own now. But I can't help but feel just a little bitterness as I think of how my ex-husband took advantage of my help with his dad while at the same time he was investing energy and time into his emotional affair.
He even got me to the point of considering houses with an in-law suite so we could be more available to help on a day-to-day basis, something that in hindsight would have destroyed our marriage even faster.
To him, I was worth keeping around for my usefulness at that time but a relationship with me wasn't worth actually investing in. I say this not as a measure of my worth but as the reality of how he perceived my worth. It's moments like this that remind me how transactional he saw our relationship. It was all about what he could get out of me and what minimum he had to do to get that out of me.
But let's end this on a high note before I crawl into bed. I am in the middle of a data analysis project at work that is stretching and challenging me in great ways and I'm really excited about the product I'm putting together that I think will make a huge difference in our investigation. There is so much satisfaction I get out of learning new formulas and tools and watching them make sense out of data as if it is magic. And this project is giving me enough repetition to truly ingrain some of these new things into me so that they will be at my fingertips in the future. I'm more energized and excited at work than I have been in a long time.
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