I don’t normally post blogs that are this personal here. So I’m not quite sure why I feel compelled to do so now. Anyway, here goes.

“But how was I to know which way the story’d go? How was I to know you’d break….You’d break my heart.” ~Madonna- Take a Bow

Someone recently told me that when life hands you lemons you should find somebody with vodka and have a party. Why do people use lemons as a reference for less than desirable life occurrences anyway? I like lemons.

Anywho, life it seems has handed me something. No, that’s not entirely true. To say that implies that I was unaware. And I was not in any way unaware. In denial perhaps: but not unaware. I was prepared. At least I thought I was. But the initial impact, which I did not feel until several days after he moved out, left me stunned. I felt lost. Kept thinking I had lost something. Kept checking myself. Do I have my keys? Yes. Did I lock all the doors? Yes. Did I turn out all the lights? Yes. What am I missing here? … Oh yeah….

“You said you’d love me until you die and as far as I know you’re still alive…” ~Shakira- Illegal

The hardest thing to accept is that there is no hardest thing: every step is difficult. Each hurdle providing its own obstacles, each blow creating its own bruise. How do you disentangle yourself from someone who has been like an appendage for almost 20 years? Every memory, good, bad or indifferent: containing shadows of the “could haves and should haves”. There is no easy or quick way. There is no band-aid that can be ripped off and discarded, the pain of it quickly forgotten with a Popsicle. It is a long drawn out process in which everything gets divided. These are my things, those are yours: these are my friends, my hangouts; those over there in that box on the left…are yours. I’ll take the kids here on these days; you take them there on those days…and so on, until every minute detail of the life you built together is ripped apart and assigned ownership. Nobody wins and the pain of it comes in waves, overwhelmingly large waves, with an extremely powerful undertow.

“A life goes by, romantic dreams must die. So I kissed mine goodbye…” ~John McLaughlin- So Close

I hate endings. Even the happy ones leave me feeling a bit sorrowful. Like the end of a really great book always leaves me wanting more. What do you mean they lived happily ever after? How? What happens next? Do they have kids? Do they get a dog? What do they name the dog? UGH! Is somebody kidding me? The day he left: my marriage ended. He didn’t choose me. He chose something else because he couldn’t give me what I needed. Hard as he tried, it just isn’t in him to do so. My romanticized notions of what my marriage should have been thrown out the window with the bathwater. Forever was not to be. Making this the hardest of all endings.

In life though, the end of one thing usually means the beginning of another. I’ve never focused on anything but being a wife and mother. I’m still a mom, but there’s a vacancy where the role of wife used to be. What that means is that I get to explore me: what I want, need, hope, expect, etc., for me. Anacris unencumbered: the next chapter. Wait for it…as I suspect it will be awesome.