I was still reeling from finding out that my 11 year marriage was a complete sham and found myself asking daily: “Who am I?” And “Where in the fuck am I going?”
I was launched into the foreign world of being a single 30 year old with two children. The last time I “dated”, I was 17. Texting had just started being a “thing” and I was still living with my parents. So basically, I didn't know how to date at all, let alone by 2015 standards.
I was now downloading snapchat and googling how to use it. All I had going for me was a clean STD check and my sparkling personality.
I got a crash course on Brazilians and fuckboys, screen shots and underwear not made of cotton. I learned there were rules for how fast you could reply to messages and a cap on the number of snaps you could send to a guy in a day. (As not to look more desperate than a 30 year old Mom can inherently look).
I dove head first into finding myself and who and what I wanted to be.
I spent my weeks with the girls in our family home drinking up every moment I had previously taken for granted and during their time with their Dad, I drank in a more literal sense. I stayed in my childhood bedroom at my parents, I traveled, went to concerts, spent a night puking my guts out on a party bus, slept in spare bedrooms and secretly searched for a permanent place to go.
I did anything to avoid processing what was happening and to take my mind off self loathing and missing my kids.
I said yes to everything and lived spotaneously for the first time in my life.
When I was finally ready to commit, my parents paid for the deposit on my apartment and one summer morning, I woke up with my friends at Lake Rathbun, watched the sun rise and decided that that was the day. I showed up to “our” home with a trailer and a group of friends to grab what we could and make the break. It was scary, it was chaotic, it was ugly, but I was moved in less than 2 hours.
With the help of my parents and friends, I made the little apartment a home and decorated however the fuck I liked. I bought a little each month as I had extra money and collected furniture from my sister and buy, sell, trade pages.
I hosted cards against humanity parties, had friends over, the girls had sleepovers and I started to see what life could be. Not with him, not in the purgatory of the in between, but in MY home, in my way.
August was a hangover of sorts for my summer of change. Life was starting to seem real. I hadn't slept in 8 months from pure anxiety and some nights, even fear. I was still being told that I was ruining our family and our children by deciding to leave. I was reminded daily that I was just like him because of my decisions over the last few months. I continually felt sick with guilt (was I a terrible person?) and fear (What is going to happen? Will I lose my kids? Will my kids forever think this was my fault?). What little sleep I did get was plagued by nightmares.
I was happy, but lost. I was free, but scared.
So, I wrote a blog.
I still sugar coated a lot of shit.
It was a cry for help.
And so many people heard it.
One guy in particular, sent a message that ended in “small town peeps have got to stick together”.
Followed by an “I'm sorry. Was that super awkward?” (You had me at awkward. Signed. Sealed. Delivered.)
It was the same guy, unbeknownst to him, I had called dibs on sitting next to Missy at the bingo stand at the fair a month earlier.
We talked for a week. He drove by and waved at me in my window and the smile on my face stayed plastered there for hours.
The night I finally had the balls to invite him over (with extreme coaching from Missy), I sent a message at 8:30 on a Monday night asking if it was too late to come to town. I told him I was watching Louie and he was welcome to come hang out. (Typing this makes me ask: was this a booty call? Do people even still say booty call?)
He replied quickly- not following the “rules” of replying and was at my door 30 minutes later. Those 30 minutes were the sweatiest, most nerve wracking minutes of my life.
The second he got there, all those nerves were gone. There was something different about this guy- easy. I didn't feel weird about being in yoga pants, I didn't fret about my house not being immaculate, I didn't worry about anything.
Over the next few months, we hung out on my off weeks and he would sometimes come sit on my patio after the girls went to bed because I wouldn't let him in the house while they were there. We talked for hours about anything and everything. He never pushed my boundaries, even when I pushed his. I slept, hard, for the first time in years and on the nights when I couldn't, he answered my middle of the night calls of pressing nature:
Will it ever not be weird not talking to someone everyday who you were married to for years?
Do you think I'm pretty?
Am I crazy?
Do you believe in ghosts?
Things were easy and fun. There weren't rules or judgements. I struggled with whether it was all too soon. I pushed him away. I tested his patience. He was always there. Not in an obtrusive way, but in a “I'll just be hanging out over here when you need me” steady kind of way.
I won't say he saved me (mainly because I read a lot of memes on Facebook that say only you can save yourself), but in the words of Kasey Musgraves, he put me back on the map.
I never wanted to be 30 and single. I spent 8 months cursing the heavens and wondering why life had happened the way it did.
But I see now that everything had to happen the way that it did for me to be this person I am now. I value things, time, people and experiences so much more than I did before. I'm a completely different person. It was definitely a process getting here. Am I super proud of all my decisions? No. Have I made peace with them? Yes. It was part of the process.
Here is what I learned by doing everything wrong (which maybe was right?):
It's ok to feel sorry for yourself, it's ok to make really poor decisions, it's ok to be selfish. It's ok to not have a direction or a plan, It's ok to be angry and act out in some crazy ways. It's ok to grieve for the life you thought you had or a future that will never be.
But at the end of that, most importantly, it's ok to be happy.
You have permission to change and it's never too late to start over.
Everything isn't perfect, but an important shift in my thinking is, I don't expect it to be. Life is messy and sad and scary, but there are moments in there that are pure magic and if you take the time to see it, life is really fucking beautiful.
We've both been here before. We know what is ahead and how much is required of us. One of the things that makes us work is being open and having realistic expectations. All I know for certain is in this moment, I choose happiness. I choose to be at peace with the past and am trying to enjoy the process. I'm releasing all of the shame and guilt into the world so that it can no longer plague me or hold me down.
I'm free.
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