Monthly Archives: January 2012

”Its gonna be okay. Its gonna be okay,” I tell myself all day long. That lasts until about 8:00 each night until, like a toddler that skips their nap, my too raw defense mechanisms cave and I lose… my… shit.

Tonight I drove around my neighborhood, in circles, crying. I thought being away from Bryan would make it better, but every house I drove by, with their happy families safely encased inside, just made me cry harder. That was supposed to be me, to be us…

So I came home and just cried like a baby in Bryan’s arms. ”Just tell me what to do,” he said. ”I’ll do whatever you want.”

Which is bullshit. What I want him to do is make this better – to fix this. I want him to fight like hell to get better. But he won’t. He gave up hope…

Which is more a commentary on him than me.

Which is where we always end up by 9:30.

So, its back to bed, exhausted, counting down the days until this chapter ends. I look forward to it ending as much as I dread it.

The word for the day is hives. As in I keep breaking out in hives.

I think its more psychosomatic than anything. We can pretend that its all okay as much as we want, but your body always gives you away.

I’m waiting for the miracle that is going to turn it all around. Every so often, like tonight, it hits me that its not coming and I just get so sad. I try to explain that to him, but he just doesn’t get it.

He’s not every going to get it.

Calm day. He’s acting like it is all same old, same old. I guess I’m acting that way too. It is a much-needed respite pretending today that we are okay.

Last night he came home at 3:30, after a night of watching a friend’s band. I was watching tv on the couch. ”Are you coming to bed?” he asked.

I wanted to tell him I was in bed – its where I’ve slept all week. I guess he hasn’t noticed he’s sleeping alone.

Or maybe it was just more pretending.

Emotional roller coaster doesn’t even begin to describe how I”ve been feeling today. I started the day weepy and had a full-on meltdown by noon (just before I had to meet a vendor for a lunchtime meeting – how handy!) and now I’m back to calm.

Bryan can’t move out quite yet. Well, technically, he could – you know, if I was willing to throw him out on the street, penniless (not to be confused with penis-less, which had been contemplated in months’ past). He’s not working right now and his unemployment is being challenged by his employer, so it’s going to be a good month or so before he has income again. We agreed he would stay here until he was working again (assumably, April) or until his best friend (also in the process of divorcing) moved into a new house sans his wife.

It all made sense yesterday, but by noon today, well… notsomuch.

It is hard enough to separate yourself from your best friend of ten years, your spouse and your lover (who doesn’t want to separate) – harder even when they are never more than ten feet away from you at any given time. I waffle between giving in and not following through to raving lunatic consumed with anger. Which would all be just fine in the safe space of my own home if he wasn’t here to witness it all. For some reason I feel like I have to stay calm and emotionless when he is around me.

I don’t want his judgment.

So, I have to maintain my collective calm at work, I have to maintain my collective calm at home. My drive to and from work is no more than 30 minutes total and that isn’t near enough time for me to run through all these awful emotions without someone’s watchful eye.

I feel like I’m suffocating already – and it’s only been 24 hours.

So… I had a meltdown. I yelled, I cried, I screamed, I begged and pleaded with him to find any other solution – anywhere to stay so I could just breathe for a while. He yelled, he cried, he screamed, he begged and he pleaded for me to not do this – to not kick him out, to not end the marriage.

I calmed down and changed my mind about him having to leave right now. He’ll change his mind about not wanting to end the marriage by tomorrow. It is how we operate these days – neither of us knows exactly what we want or how we do this. As soon as I let my guard down a little, he’ll say something to completely cut me to the core. My heart will harden a bit more and he’ll have an epiphany – a complete flash of brilliance about the man he wants to be – that should give me hope, but most likely doesn’t anymore.

We just can’t get on the same page. Well, unless that page is ambivalence. We’ve both done that together, very well, for too long.

So, I took a bit of time out tonight to partake in some retail therapy and dinner with a friend (the same friend who recently miscarried). We walked like zombies through the mall and eventually made our way to a coney for dinner. Our waitress was slow to show up, but eventually made her way to our table.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot I had a new table. It’s my pregnancy brain!”

And then the couple at the table across from us leaned over the table towards each other and started hugging.

My friend and I just looked at each other, neither of us able to comprehend why the universe deems it necessary to remind us at every turn of what we both recently lost… and then burst into laughter.

The universe is a stupid place.

Bryan and I are separating. For those that know us from afar it is probably a shock, but those that know us intimately know that this has been a long time coming. It is not a decision that I made on the spur of the moment or flippantly – I have been contemplating this since last June. Probably longer if I really think about it.

I don’t really want to think about it. Unfortunately I can’t think about anything else.

After months of back and forth, yesterday at 8:30 in the morning, I sat down next to Bryan on the couch and asked him to move out. For a while now I’ve been saying that I thought it might be a good idea. Yesterday, I said to him that I knew – not just thought – it was the right decision. It is time – before any more damage is done, before we end up hating each other, before – most importantly, to me – I diminish back to the scared child I have been for so many years of our marriage and change my mind.

As I got ready for work, after talking with Bryan, I looked in the mirror. “This is it,” I thought to myself. “Day one as a ‘single’ woman.” I felt like I should take a picture to document the space in time, but really I just wanted to crawl back in bed and cry myself to sleep. In the end I did neither – I went to work instead. I know this because I ended up in my office eventually, numb, wondering how the hell I got there. The drive in, moments before, was a mere ghost memory.

I have a friend who recently miscarried. Everything she sees – on TV, on Facebook, when talking to her friends – is about babies, she claims. She can’t escape it. Now I understand. That’s how the rest of my day went…

I attended a noontime lunch and learn on Conflict Resolution. Ten minutes into the presentation the presenter started to talk about email. “Remember that you are sending the email to a person. A person who might be having a bad day, who is going thru a divorce…”

Cue the tears. I tried to hold them back, but eventually left the room and went and sat with a friend. An hour later the presenter – someone who I’ve worked with quite extensively over the past year – stopped me. “What did you think of the lunch and learn?” he asked.

“I had to leave.”

“I know. What did you think?”

“I had to leave because you mentioned divorce and I just told my husband I want a divorce.”

“It’s a healthy boundary to set,” he replied. “You are on a journey of growth and not everyone is going to come with you.”

Funny how a relative stranger knows me better than my own husband. This person, whom I work with and talk to one day out of the month, sees this positive growth, this incredibly journey and supports me. My husband thinks I’m becoming an uppity bitch.

After work I headed to a friend’s house for dinner. She served desert on plates that read, “I truly do!” with caricatures of wedding rings. “Stop it!” I silently yelled at the universe as I held back the tears again.

As I drove home late last night, the tears couldn’t be held back anymore. The closer I got to our home, to our neighborhood, to our town, I started to weep silent tears that eventually turned into sobs that shook me. I’m losing it. Losing it all – my home, my community, my identity, my flippin’ name, my extended family, my marriage… my husband. And I choose this! I choose this because losing all that doesn’t outweigh losing myself, but that wasn’t holding the solace it should.

I came home to an empty house, not sure if Bryan was coming home or staying with a friend. “Well, this is it. This is what it is going to be like. Put your big girl pants on,” I said to myself as I got out of the car. I headed to the mailbox – at 11:00 at night – because no one else had been home to get it. “The mail will be picked up at 11:00 at night now.” A stupid thought – but profound.

There were three pieces of mail in the box – a wedding invitation and two thank you cards for weddings we had attended over the summer.

“Seriously?!” I exclaimed out loud. I text my friend who recently miscarried…. “I… get… it.”

Bryan came home a short time later. “You okay?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. How the fuck am I supposed to be okay?! “You?”

“I am now. I cried so hard at my therapy appointment today that I embarrassed myself. My therapist had to get up and hug me. I just couldn’t stop crying. I kept thinking about how I am going to miss Cain.”

The dog. He’s going to miss the dog.

This might have come too late. I went to bed, alone, on the couch – hating him with every fiber of my being.