I feel like a fool.

Finally seeing all the red flags I ignored, things I had enough self-awareness about to write in my journal, I feel like such a fool.  Thinking about all the ways I excused his behavior last year and still had good regards for him as I talked about what was happening to me, I feel like such a fool.  Remembering all the ways I bent over backwards to accommodate his Mom, I feel like such a fool.

Rationally, I realize I was young and inexperienced and I realize I was up against some pretty strong manipulation.  What happened to me has happened to so many other women (in many variations) and will continue happening to women.  Rationally, there is no reason I should feel like a fool.  He should be the one feeling like a fool.  But realizing all of that doesn't take away the feeling.

I'll work through this though.  I'll learn from this.

The early years

For some reason, the journal entry from January of 2004 where I realized I would never be his number one priority and I didn't feel I could talk to him about it is very heavy on my mind today.  I wrote about that journal entry in this post.  I think it's because as I read about how the mind works and continue to see things differently, I want to understand where my mind was at that I thought that was okay.  Why did I think it was a good idea to marry someone who I knew would never prioritize me?

So last evening, I went back and looked at my journal entries from those early years wondering if a fresh perspective might see something I missed when I read them last December.

From July of 2002 (when we met) until mid 2003 (before we moved in together), I wrote about a lot of insecurities and doubts.  I talked about having low self-worth.  I repeated several times that I didn't think I deserve him.  I talked about how I need to stop running and that I have trust issues and have not truly trusted anyone since Beth in 8th/9th grade.  I don't fully recall what I meant in saying I need to stop running.

I gushed on and on about his unconditional love and how I don't think I could ever love him the way he loves me (kind of ironic knowing where this blog post is going).  I also thought his parents were absolutely amazing during this time.  They were attentive and interested in me.  They seemed to love and welcome me as one of their own.  At the time, I had this perception that my own parents were uninterested in me so his parents' love seemed like a dream come true.

Within the first two months of dating, he was seriously talking a future together - what kind of house we wanted to buy, what we would do with our degrees, etc.  Within five months, he was already talking about buying a ring and trying out how my first name would sound with his last name.  I mention on more than one occasion that this all feels too good to be true.

Six months in I write about how I feel like my life is spinning out of control and decisions are being made too quickly.  He's decided to forgo an internship with his undergrad degree and instead start his masters the following fall at my university.  So as early as December of 2002 we were securing an apartment together for the fall of 2003. 

We were long distance except summers during this time period.  There are several times where I wrote that I appreciated the physical distance because it gave me space to think and get some clarity as it seems the time together was so intense.

We have one minor glitch when a mechanic does something wrong to his car and he is ready to go out and buy a new one instead of giving the mechanic a chance to try to fix it.  It appears I talked him off that ledge.  (That was my foreshadowing of a life of impulse car buys.  I still remember the time he used the excuse that our car needed new windshield wipers so we might as well go out and buy a whole new car.)

In February of 2003, we took an online quiz "Are you ready to be loved?" and he scored a perfect score while I was embarrassed by my low score.  I sought a lot of reassurance from him in this first almost year.

I still had doubts come April of 2003 when I started planning to propose to him although I had a lot of confidence in the moment of the proposal.  When I got home that summer of 2003, I wrote about not sleeping well and crying but not understanding why.

And then we moved in together before the fall semester of 2003, and there was a huge shift within just a week or two.  He had stopped ever treating me when we went out, each of us always paying our own way or paying out of the household joint account (which I think we contributed to equally).  I wrote about only one time he brought flowers home and how weird the interaction was.  He said someone was selling flowers at work so he bought them but then didn't say anything to let me know he thought of me or that they are for me or that they are because he loved me or anything like that.  Even when I ask what the flowers are for, his only response was that someone was selling them.  It's not that I needed flowers or anything like that, we were fairly poor college students.  It's that any attempt to continue to date me is noticeably missing.

We were arguing about housework, sometimes because he wouldn't give me a chance to get to it and sometimes because he was refusing to do it and the burden then fell on me for a period of time.  We were starting to run into issues where he wouldn't stand up for me to his parents and let them run right over us with each visit.  That was true from their very first visit that October after we had just moved in together.

I wrote about how I felt there was an imbalance in how much emotional support I was providing him (which almost seems a bit of a flip from the time period before we moved in together).  I'm handling all the administrative stuff - the portable dishwasher we bought that didn't work, the newspaper we subscribed to that didn't arrive, the maintenance issues with the apartment complex, the errors on our joint bank statements, finding a vet for our pet turtle (the pet he wanted) and then caring for the turtle, etc.

I didn't write a lot of entries during this time frame and the ones I do are mostly about school but when I write about him, they aren't overly positive entries.  I think there were a lot of good times mixed in but I had limited time to write and when I did have time, it was just to process the bad.  But regardless, the all in, love bombing man (and his parents) of our pre-move in days had disappeared and the man who had replaced him was doing more of the bare minimum.  

Another thing that really stands out is that I no longer write anything at all about my own insecurities,  doubts, or self-worth.  It's like they just magically disappear.  I actually am now the one gushing about how much I love him and how much he means to me.  When things got real for him, he distanced himself.  When things got real for me, I dug in deeper into the relationship.

So fast forward to that journal entry in January of 2004 that sent me down this path this weekend - he had distanced himself enough that even his car was more important than me.  And I was writing that I loved him so much was willing to sacrifice for him.

I don't even know what to make of this.  It just sounds so messed up and I'm not any closer to answering my question as to where my mind was at when I thought this was okay.  Honestly, I'm probably further from that answer now because I think it was even more dysfunctional than I had initially remembered.  

Honestly, before I found those journal entries, I had always believed that our honeymoon phase had lasted well into our marriage.  I had remembered quite a few of those early years as really special and wonderful.  But my journal entries don't quite paint that picture.

What if the magic was always within me, not in the relationship?

As I am now coming up on a year of doing life alone, I wonder how much of our "we did life so well together" was me vs him vs true coordination from both of us.  How much of my fear of handling it all alone is missing his physical presence vs missing his contributions?  And if it's just missing his physical presence, what am I really afraid of?

I remember when we stood up from the kitchen table about a year ago after having finalized a property division spreadsheet, he turned to me and said "I'm going to miss your resourcefulness."  I don't think I really understood what he meant so I just tucked it away to contemplate later.

When I think back to the context of his comment about my resourcefulness, it was after I had done the work to figure out how to value our pensions so that we could find other ways to fairly offset his pension which he didn't want me getting any part of.   I'm happy with the end result but I realize now it was truly on me to figure out how to get to that end result.

When we moved south, I took the lead in finding apartment complexes to tour and then was the one to communicate with the leasing office to secure a unit.  And it was on me to find renters and auto insurance and figure out the process to transfer our cars/licenses.  (It's interesting to realize that despite cars being his obsession, I always dealt with our insurance agent.  They knew me by name, not him.) 

I'm pretty sure I was the one who took the lead on finding a realtor to sell our Wisconsin house and communicating with the realtor we chose.  I was also the one who dealt with the realtor when we sold our underwater condo in Minnesota and brainstormed how to come up with the cash for the closing.

And then I think back to the day I moved into my own apartment.  We both worked from home that morning.  In order for each of us to pick up our respective keys to our new apartments, we needed documentation from the power company that we had put the electricity in our names.  He hadn't received that documentation yet and was panicking.  When he called it turned he had put the wrong date down for the start date.  It was kind of a surreal moment as I sat there calmly watching him fall apart over this little detail.  I remember thinking to myself, "he depended on me more than he even realizes."  As I reflect on it further, it is quite eye opening because my image of him was always of someone who had his shit together, at least on a practical level.

Maybe there wasn't magic in how well we worked together.  Maybe it was me.  He may have been my security blanket.  I'm sure at times he was also helpful in bouncing ideas off.  But in hindsight, I'm now starting to realize, I may have been a pretty significant contributing factor in how easily we navigated life together.

Maybe I was so focused on what "we" accomplished in life that I lost sight of my specific role in all of it.

So going back to the post I wrote two days ago called Emotional Intimacy, this view in today's post really highlights how my perceptions are created and can change significantly with more information, time, reflection, etc.  It's kind of mind-blowing to realize how dependent our experience is on the perceptions we create in the moment.

I'm in the middle of Daniel Kahneman's book titled, Thinking, Fast and Slow that is making me realize how little I understand about how my mind works and thus how little I truly know about myself (as my perception of self is created from that same mind I don't exactly understand).

A day in Atlanta

A tear or two formed in my eyes as I pulled out of the parking garage early this morning and pointed my car towards Atlanta.  There was a little girl in side of me that was scared of change, scared of an unfamiliar place, scared I couldn't do it on my own.  I wondered why the life I had with my ex-husband wasn't good enough, why I found myself in this place of having to forge a whole new path.  But then I looked down at the everything bagel in my hand and remembered I no longer had to worry about whether any crumbs fell.  So I reminded myself of the good that has come out of this and told myself I had proven my strength and could do this.

As I continued to drive east, the clear skies were overtaken by dense fog.  At times, my car's auto steer warned me that it was limiting my speed due to lack of visibility.  What an interesting metaphor for this time in my life!  Here I am forging a path into the unknown with so many uncertainties, not unlike the unknown and uncertainties created by the fog this morning.  I don't know if I will actually get this job and move to Atlanta.  And if I do, I don't know what kind of life I'm going to create there.  But like my car's auto steer, I can slow down when the fog gets too dense while still moving forward.

To be honest, I didn't have a clear plan for today.  I hadn't made any appointments with apartment complexes.  I didn't even have a very complete list of ones I was interested in.  I just knew that Georgia Power's headquarters had level 2 EV chargers in their free lot on the south side of Midtown, the neighborhood that most intrigued me.  So I set those chargers as my destination and headed out as soon as I was awake and ready.

My phone says I walked 21,582 steps today over 9.2 miles.  I spent 5.5 hours in the car - road construction added a bit of time.  I toured three apartment complexes, walked through my favorite parts of the Atlanta Botanical Garden, discovered an art fair at Piedmont Park and watched the ducks in the pond.  I smelled the smells of an Indian restaurant outside one of the places I toured.  I walked across the rainbow crosswalks.  I stopped and observed both a delivery robot on the sidewalk and a driverless car pulling up to a stoplight.  I heard so many different languages and walked among so many diverse people.  And I really enjoyed it all.

I have no idea how this job opportunity will play out but it feels just a little less scary now that I have walked a neighborhood where I think I would really enjoy living if it does pan out. 

Emotional Intimacy

The topic of emotional intimacy came up in therapy yesterday evening - the ways I look back at intimacy in my relationship with nostalgia that I might want to look for if I ever got in another relationship and the ways intimacy was lacking.  And the discussion got me to thinking about how (perceived or real) intimacy may have been what kept me in the relationship for so long.  I realized that perceived intimacies were so intertwined throughout the entire relationship with times that intimacy was really lacking.  The really good was frequent enough to convince my mind to ignore the inconsistency.

In the first three years of our marriage, we had a pretty consistent date night Wednesday nights during the school year at the Mall of America.  We would eat Cousin's Subs in the food court in the park area - this was the years where we watched it transition from Camp Snoopy to Nickelodeon Universe.  Then we would play in the arcade before spending some time walking the mall and talking.  We went so frequently, we even had a favorite spot to park.  

The conversations we had, the connection I felt, the routine time spent together created what felt like a really nice intimacy.  These nights at the Mall combined with all the date nights we had trying out all the amazing Mexican restaurants in the Twin Cities are times I look back on with a lot of nostalgia.  It's interesting that I had to go to my journals to remember the arguments we had in those early years yet this part of those years is as clear in my mind as if it just happened yesterday.

I also remember a time at the Minnesota zoo.  We visited the zoo all the time.  We were at the tiger exhibit, our favorite exhibit - I must have thousands of photos of those tigers.  He was around the corner, out of my sight, at the glass where a tiger would often lay.  I was in an area where I could photograph them without having to shoot through the glass and one tigers suddenly got up and charged towards where I was.  There was fencing and a moat between us so I was in no danger at all but he came running out of concern.  Why does such a little thing stick so clearly in my mind?

Fast forward to about 7 years in our marriage, when the doctor suggested that the birth control I was on could be a contributing factor to my pelvic floor pain, without a hesitation, he went to his doctor and got a vasectomy so we no longer had to depend on hormonal birth control.  And then when in trying to treat my pelvic pain, I developed constant, at times debilitating back and hip pain, I was prescribed an opioid but I mostly avoided taking it because it made me so foggy and I wasn't comfortable driving while on it.  But there were a few nights were the pain got so unbearable but I really didn't want to miss choir practice and so he drove me to practice, sat in the back to wait until I was done, and then drove me home.  It just seemed like he was really there for me during this time.

With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect my pelvic floor and subsequent hip and back pain were my body's way of trying to tell me he wasn't good for me so there is a lot of conflict in me thinking about how much I really appreciated and loved the way he took care of me while I was dealing with a problem that might have been created because of our dysfunctional relationship.

I was still holding on to the way he responded so well to my pain issues when we separated last summer.  It was something that meant so much to me that I allowed it to excuse a lot of in the many years that followed.  I remember it actually coming up in a discussion we had last summer, although I don't recall the whole context of that discussion.

The other way I felt intimacy was the way we so seamlessly did life together.  Whether it was trying to sell our condo in the Twin Cities just after the housing crash, facing his Dad's illness, picking up and moving across the entire country, or one of the other countless challenges we faced together, we cooperated and communicated so effortlessly.  That was even true as we divided our assets and debts in the divorce.  There was an intuitiveness in how we solved problems together that always felt unreal to me.  Isn't that intimacy?  To know someone so well you can work through big things together so effortlessly?  To feel that in synch with someone?

When it was us against the world, there was no stopping us.  It was only when it turned into him (with or without his mom) against me that we crumbled.  I had never thought of it this way before.  When it all fell apart so abruptly last year, I kept telling myself "but we did life so well together."  There was this huge disconnect between all the times we had faced the world together with the times it felt like we were battling each other.  

As long as intimacy wasn't a threat to his own insecurities (and I suspect shame), he was right by my side.  The second he perceived something as an attack on him, a wall went up.  I think I believed that the relationship couldn't truly be bad if we were so in synch that it felt like we could conquer the world together (as long as I didn't trigger his insecurities).

I don't ever want to be a relationship again where there is that conditional "as long as I don't trigger them or their ____" attached to all the good.  And I don't ever want to tolerate a them vs me mentality even if it is just some of the time.

A stranger that feels a bit familiar

I ran into my ex-husband yesterday evening at my apartment complex.  We just exchanged a quick “hi” and continued on our respective ways.

Although I didn’t feel any real strong emotions (I’ve come a long way in my healing), there was just a bit of sadness at the mix of familiarity and stranger his image brings to mind. This was the person I felt the most comfortable with, someone who felt as familiar as myself.  And overnight, he became a stranger to me.  Although, I recognize that process didn’t truly happen overnight, I just became aware of it all at once.

I don’t miss him but I miss that feeling of comfort and familiarity even as I understand it was based on my incomplete perception of reality.

What I know to be real

I've decided that it is more productive to focus on what I do know to be real and how it has formed me instead of worrying about which parts of our marriage were just a pretense.  I guess it goes back to the idea that we never actually experience reality since our perceptions are created.  So there will always be a component of pretense in life whether that be people intentionally pretending to be someone or something they are not or whether that be our worldview and perceptions distorting who they actually are or both simultaneously happening.

So I've been working on this poem below.  I'm playing with the formatting a bit to contrast what I understand now with what I saw clearly within the marriage with what my rose colored glasses convinced me to mostly ignore while we were together.

I'm not sure it all logically makes sense in my brain, that all of this could have occurred within a single relationship, how parts seem to conflict with one another.  But life is just complex.  It doesn't always make sense.  Humans are complex.  And nothing ever completely stays the same so a relationship that spans two decades will change over time.

What I know to be real

My energy and joy today
My happiness throughout
My ongoing growth
as a person
in relationships
in my career
My focus on the good

His adventurous spirt
His laughter and his smile
The physical comfort I felt with him
His trustworthiness with finances and
hardworking nature

Unbalanced priorities 

His insecurities and

my confidence 

His mom’s interference

and his lack of boundaries

a lesson in setting my own boundaries 

The places we traveled
The bird species list we added to
The trails we hiked
The challenges we triumphed over 
an upside down mortgage
ten moves in three states
the death of his father
an amicable financial split in the divorce

The unresolved conflict

"and one-sided "solutions

His unspoken resentments

His unregulated emotions

and the lack of space for my emotions

His drain on my energy

His negativity

and view that the world is out to get him

A perceived kindness interlaced 

with a lack of consideration 

A quiet distance I refused to see

My acceptance of the dysfunction

My capacity for love
My trustworthiness 
My loyalty
My integrity 
My resourcefulness

My resilience
My optimism for the future
My joy
My energy
Me

I am in awe of my strength.

Below is my Facebook memory from a year ago.  Tears rolled down my face as I read it this morning although I don’t think it was pain or sadness causing those tears. It was awe (a very emotional awe!) at the strength I was able to tap into even at my most raw stage and the clarity I already had for the path forward even amidst all the confusion at what had just happened.  It was the moment, maybe series of moments, when I started choosing me.  And this was the beginning of letting my very new community in.

I absolutely love how I ended the post, “I am strong and I like myself so I know I will come out better on the other side.”  FYI - the sermon series in August of last year was about meltdowns (quite timely!), hence the reference in my last sentence.

The other thing that struck me was the fact that I applied for my very first apartment alone on August 10 of last year and this August 10, I applied for my first professional job as a single person, one that might take me to a whole new city on my own.  What a year of growth it has been!

I have claimed this park bench (and this view from the bench).  I really should talk to Railroad Park about having them put my name on it.  😉  It has seen my tears, heard my laughter, and sat with me in silence as peace washed over me.  We have watched sunsets together and just soaked in the vibe of children playing, people gathering, and dogs walking their owners.

I will be starting a new chapter in my life that will follow the uncertainty and pain of today, a place I never imagined I would be in my early 40s.  But here I am.  I really paused to make this post.  Social media is so often a curated version of our lives without all the messy parts.  But I think it is the messy parts that make us who we are.  So I'm not sure what good it does to hide those parts from friends and family.  

My husband and I are separating.  Yesterday, I applied for and was approved for my very own apartment with a move in date set for late September.  There's still a lot of work to do to sort out who gets what and untangle more than 19 years of our lives.  So some very tough months still lay ahead of me.

I am strong and I like myself so I know I will come out better on the other side.  But I'm having my share of meltdowns these days.

I applied for the job and a hummingbird visited my basil today.

I feel really tired but peaceful.  I spent the last four days riding through the emotions tied to the idea of leaving my city, dreaming about what it would be like to live in a new city, analyzing the pros and cons of applying for the job, and then carefully preparing my application.  

And as I was on the phone with my Mom and Dad, getting last minute feedback and advice, a female hummingbird appeared at my window, not five feet from where I sat in my comfy chair.  It paused at each of the flowers on my basil plant before continuing on its way.  I had never seen a hummingbird visit my balcony.  It was a magical moment that made me stop mid-sentence and stare in awe as I tried to then explain what I was experiencing to my Mom.

Some cultures believe that hummingbirds are messengers of joy, love, and good fortune and that they are symbols of good luck.  This little hummingbird was definitely a messenger of joy.

Then I hung up with my parents, finished my cover letter, went through the application, and paused only a moment before I hit submit.  This decision has been made and acted on.  I feel really good at this investment in myself, regardless of how it plays out.  My mind can finally rest at least for now.

I haven’t left him yet (in an emotional sense)

I admitted to a friend at work that as illogical as it sounds, I feel like I’m leaving him if I pursue this job opportunity.  Her response was “because you haven’t left him yet.”  

I moved to this city with him. I initially picked this apartment complex with him.  I’m still in many ways living the life I built with him.  That’s not to say I haven’t grown and evolved and started to forge new paths, it’s just still been within the overall outline of the life I created with him.

Any big decisions I’ve made since the separation were reactions to his decisions.  They were a response to him leaving me.  This would be the first big stand-alone decision that I make solely for myself.  It’s no longer even peripherally about him.

Letting Go

As I sat in therapy last week (or maybe it was the week before), my therapist asked if I was yet ready to let go.  She was circling back to a conversation we had in May that I wrote about here.  

My mind was telling me of course I had already let go but all I could get out was "maybe" before my mind told me to pause.  And that's when I noticed my heart had started to race, my body had tensed up, and tears were caught in the back of my throat.  Maybe my conscious mind is there already but my body was speaking up to let me know my sub-conscious wasn't there yet.

And then this morning with the idea of relocating to a new city heavy on my mind, a panic at the thought of moving away from him quickly rushed over me.  It was a feeling just like the feeling I had in the shuttle van as it pulled away from my city to start the trip on that cruise we had originally planned for our 20th.  In that case, the thought was "he really isn't coming with me."

There is nothing logical about either of those thoughts/feelings.  I'm at the point where I wouldn't even consider reconciliation with him and I would not have welcomed him on that trip so of course he wasn't coming with me!

It's not him though I'm holding onto.  At least I don't think so.  I think it's the dreams we were working towards, the person I imagined I would grow into alongside him, the life I was living and the life I imagined for my future.  I didn't just lose him.  He is probably the smallest part of what I lost.  I lost the woman I expected to become.

Regardless of how boldly and courageously I step out onto the grates of life and forge a new, uncertain path, at least on a subconscious level, I worry about what I'm leaving behind on that path I had to diverge off of.  And every step I take pulls me further and further from that path I diverged from with the big ones feeling like the finality of a door loudly shutting behind me.

I imagine at some point, I'll get to a place where I feel more settled in a new life that I'll barely notice the doors closing behind me (until something big shakes it up again) but will I ever truly let go of that woman I thought I would become, of the dreams I dreamed?  

Starting Fresh in a New City

Today took a twist I didn't expect.  About a year and a half ago, my employer decided not to fill a job I had applied to and interviewed for - it was a job that I have been doing in addition to my other duties since December of 2022.  It would have been a promotion.  And then with the current political climate, we have been on a hiring freeze that I expected could last years, at least in any form that would get them to consider posting that position again.

In the meantime, I've been watching which offices have lost employees in this position across the country.  I'm on a listserv that gets smaller and smaller with each quarterly update.

So this morning, I was surprised to see an e-mail about two job postings a little beyond what I am qualified for on the east coast.  Wondering how they were getting around the hiring freeze, I pulled up the job search site to see if there were any other postings - and there was one other posting - the exact job I want, in Atlanta, a city I have actually dreamed of living in.

My gut says that I will regret it if I don't apply but oh is it terrifying to think about relocating to another state completely my own.  This would be a true fresh start after the divorce.  There would be no chance encounters with my ex-husband.  The places we made memories together would be left behind, mostly - I still see him on one or two of the benches at the Atlanta Botanical Garden each time I visit.

It would also be starting over in building a community, starting over in a new work environment with new colleagues, a new place to live, a new neighborhood to learn, etc.

The divorce forced me to completely rethink my entire future, sending me down a path I could never have imagined.  This feels like an even further deviation from that all and maybe that is part of why it feels so overwhelming.

I did this several times with my ex-husband over the years.  I was reminded today that to just pick up and move across the country like we did when we moved south is not something the average person does.  It's something that takes a lot of courage.

Do I have the courage within me to do this alone?  

Something inside of me tells me a fresh start like this, a further deviation from my initial plans for life, could be exactly what I need.  Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself though.  A job application does not automatically result in a job offer.

He's someone else's problem now

I looked at his Instagram page recently.  There is a woman he is now following (who also follows him) who is local.  She is a member of the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook page.  And she recently changed her Facebook status to "in a relationship".  She looks like the woman I saw on his patio a few weeks ago and the woman who shows up in his recent Instagram reel of the weekend trip they took together.  

I assume they met about six weeks ago when I was on the cruise as that is when the post showed up in the Facebook group asking for red flags or information about him.

She is in a caregiving profession.  It looks like her two-year degree is from 2019, although I suspect there was a gap between high school and college.  One of her few public posts is from late April of this year and it is a meme that says "You glow differently, when no one's dusty ass, undiagnosed son is stressing you out."  So she may have a habit of attracting men that need fixing.

I know I shouldn't have let my curiosity send me down this rabbit hole.  I'm sure it is not healthy for me and my healing.  But it actually confirms for me that this really wasn't about me at all.  He didn't trade up for a better model.  He traded in for one who I suspect he believes will be a better caregiver and mom for him, one who will soothe his ego, regulate his emotions, and listen to his endless list of complaints.  Time will tell whether this new woman is willing to do that for him.

I was chatting with a friend at work this week about her in-laws and a bit about my former in-laws as there are many parallels.  And we were talking about all the traits, illnesses (physical and mental), etc. that seem to be passed down through the generations.  Whether there is a hereditary component or it is all environmental, it seems people so often fall into the same patterns and problems of their parents.  Although I do think we have a fair bit of control over our growth (if we choose to actually self-reflect and grow), we become more and more like our parents over the years.

His mom had an older brother and a younger sister.  I had a chance to get to know both over the years.  I also got a chance to briefly get to know his mom's mom in the early years of our marriage.  The apple didn't fall far from the tree with regard to any of them.  And I don't think my ex-husband fell far from that tree either.  I think I really dodged a bullet.  

I think about the way his uncle treated his aunt as they got older and she developed health problems.  I think about his mom's refusal to care for his dad.  I think about the way all three of them abandoned his mom in a nursing home.  And then I think about the fact that my ex-husband ran from his mom after his father passed away and most recently couldn't even stick around in the marriage he committed to when we weren't facing any real life challenges.

I am so much better off on my own, developing my own community, pouring into myself.  And as awful as this last year or so has been and how terribly he treated me, maybe this was the shake up I needed to get this clarity.  

App Notifications

I thought I had resolved this last fall by deleting and reinstalling the app.  I wrote about it in this post on October 30.  But clearly whatever I did back then didn't fully work.  This morning started with a notification that the plane was on time to Atlanta.  And then I got a second late morning that the plane was on time to Milwaukee.   It wasn't actually all the notifications though.  Usually there are also ones for when boarding has started, when the right boarding zone has been called, and each time a bag is loaded on or off a plane.  So maybe it partially resolved itself.

I don't know what else to try.  Last time I googled it, I found countless stories of ex-wives still getting their ex-husband's Delta notifications and the only suggestions were to delete and reinstall the app.

I believe it is happening because when we were married there were times I logged in as him on my phone (to book, check him in, etc.) and Delta stored something somewhere hidden on my phone indicating I should get notifications.  Sadly, I'm not due for a new phone for another year or two.

I hope he enjoys his visit with his mom.

Loss of innocence

I think what actually bothers me the most about him dating again has little to do with him or how I feel about him. It’s that I know exactly how well he shows up at the beginning of a relationship, the whirlwind of attention, the behaviors fueled by dopamine.  And I can imagine exactly what he is saying to explain his divorce and how convincing it will come across to someone who doesn’t know him yet.

And if he can present that well in the beginning, if he can be that convincing, another potential partner can do the same.  I’ve lost this innocence such that if I ever date, I now consciously know I have to risk the infatuation stage to get to a point where I could start to truly get to know another and even then red flags may be mixed with a lot of convincing pretense. 

The fog has mostly lifted

Last month, I hit a low, probably one of my lowest lows since this all started.  That may sound odd being that a year has passed and I have come so far in that year.  But it makes sense to me.  I was in survival mode last year.  I was distracted with long to do lists.  I held on to hope for too long (that's not a judgment of the me of then - it's a self-reflection with the benefit of hindsight).  I had rose colored glasses on so wasn't seeing clearly.  

By the time last month came, with all the reminders of his betrayal, the rose colored glasses had come off.  I had some clarity.  And with this clarity had come a certain amount of anger as I was no longer making excuses for him.  And once the trip with my family was over, I didn't have distractions.

So I did the only thing I could do and moved through it.  That reminds me of a Rodney Atkins song I really like with this chorus,

If you're goin' through hell, keep on going.
Don't slow down.  If you're scared don't show it.
You might get out before the devil even knows you're there.

Not that I advocate hiding your fear or any of your feelings.  I spent plenty of time sitting with my feelings last month but I did my best not to get stuck there.  I went and found a bird at the park to sit with when I was struggling the most.  And I called my parents.  And I reached out by text to people.  And I wrote.  I wrote so much.  And I kept moving through it.

And now that the fog is lifting, I'm ready for a mindset change.  So much of the way we perceive life centers around the mindset we create and nurture.  And not that it is easy by any means, but I think we have more control over how we approach challenges than we think.

I think there's two central themes that I still feel a bit stuck on that really need a mindset change - (1) the doubts around what was real and (2) finding a way to accept that I will never understand how he could do what he did to me.  I've already got a plan for the first and I'll talk about that in future blog posts.  I don't yet know how I will approach the second but I don't have to solve this all in one day.  And maybe I've oversimplified this all but I have to start somewhere.

Grace

I had the chance to catch up with a friend who was among the first to know my ex and I were having problems last summer.  That conversation reminded me of how much grace (and even good thoughts) I had for him for so many months after it all happened.  There was even a conversation with this friend asking her to have her husband check in on my ex-husband to make sure he was okay (this was a couples friend).  All my friends were joking about how I should get revenge while I was trying to convince them how great a guy he was.

Just imagine how messed up someone must be internally to not be willing to put any effort at all into a relationship with a woman that has that much grace for him even after he betrayed her trust.  That's the part that just baffles me.  

Labyrinth

I visited this labyrinth for the first time on October 26, 2024, just five days after the divorce was final.  At that time I went looking for strength as later that same day I was meeting with my ex-husband to finalize and divide our joint accounts.  I wrote about how that meeting went here.  Mediating as I walked the labyrinth I think really helped me get through that meeting with calm and at least some clarity.

The second time I visited this labyrinth was on December 31, 2024.  That time I went looking for clarity.  I had stumbled upon a journal from our dating/engaged years and was trying to reconcile them with my memories and with the man he had shown me to be in 2024.  The labyrinth helped me clear my mind so that I could start to push through the fog.  Here is my blog post from that day to show where my mind was.

This morning was my third visit to this labyrinth.  Today was about my journey forward.  It was a chance to make a promise to myself to nurture my growth, my energy, and my joy.  It was a promise to myself to grant myself love, kindness, and grace throughout my journey.  It was a meditation on the twists and turns ahead of me and how they might shape me.

The Courage of a Spider

I sit here sipping my coffee gazing out the window.  My eye lands on a spider suspended in air, twenty feet from the ground.  There is nothing above it that it could have used to anchor a web.  The closest object is a tree about 3 feet away.  The next closest objects are my building about 15 feet away and a utility pole about 20 feet away.  The logistics of creating some sort of web that would hold the spider in such a position are beyond anything I can comprehend but what I am most in awe of is the courage it took do so!

To tap into that kind of courage is powerful.  To have the vision to see something that could really add to your life and then to build what you need to make it happen, no matter how scary it may be forging that path.

I think I've found some of that courage over the last year.  I've also found it really easy to fall back on the comfortable.  Now I have a little spider to look back on as a reminder of what courage can look like.

Upon editing a photo I took of the spider, I can even faintly see the web!

An Example of What Not To Do

Today’s Facebook memory includes a selfie of the two of us at sunset two years ago.  It was a breathtaking sunset but what stands out most to me is the disinterested or detached (maybe even a bit sad) look on my ex-husband’s face that I’m realizing is present in almost all of the photos that come up in my memories (which generally cover just the last four years).  In these memories, I have yet to see any joy reflected on his face.  Even the photos from the jeep tour we took at the ranch in Hawaii where Jurassic Park (his all-time favorite movie) was filmed are lacking that joy and have that detached look.

I think this is what happens when you don’t invest in your life, your self, your relationships, your passions, etc.  When you just sit back and let life happen to you, instead of building the life you want.  You become detached from the outcome, the process, and the journey.  It makes it easier to blame the world and forget to look inward.  And in the end, you are just miserable because the world didn’t read your mind and thus nothing went the way you silently hoped it would.

Let that be my reminder and my momentum forward.  It’s up to me to make my life what I want it to be.  It’s up to me to invest in myself and in the relationships that are important to me.

That doesn’t mean it will always be easy.  Sometimes it will be quite scary or overwhelming.  But the consequences of not doing it are significant and the rewards of doing it are so great.

Next on my plate-I’m working up the courage to go to a country line dancing and social swing dancing class at a local brewery.  I was completely on board with the line dancing part but swing dancing with a stranger terrifies me even as I recognize it might be a ton of fun.