Thar She Blows!!
I think I am doing fine. Swimming along. Sure, sometimes it's against the tide. But sometimes it's on my back looking dreamily up at the sky. Bouyant and calm. And then, kapow. I go kass over tea kettle and I am sucking in water and completey disoriented. Healing is not a linear process. At all. It never is. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who promises that it is. Especially someone who has been there. It is messy and chaotic and as many steps forward as back. There is no finite end and, I have learned for me, no finite beginning. I can point to a moment where I said I was done. Done fighting and sleuthing and hoping and praying and changing. But that was not when the healing started. That was simply when I stopped allowing myself to be hurt.
These past few weeks have been hard. I know that anniversaries are coming up. The first times they texted. The first time I noticed and asked about an affair. All the firsts that, without really knowing at the time, would eventually mark the start of the lasts. I'd like to sleep through the month of May, to be perfectly frank. Never been a great month for me. Last year knocked it down to a solid 11th or 12th place. I know I can't. Even just logistically. But it's nice to think about it.
Maybe it's the knowledge that I have been solo for almost a year. You can be married and cohabiting and still alone. That was a bitch to learn. Twelve months or so in? I am tired, you lot. Drained. Sleeping through the night? Laughable. Tagging someone else in during a tantrum (mine or the kids)? Not happening. Decompressing over a tv show and chatting about my day WITH AN ADULT??? Nope. Sharing a bed not with someone I birthed? And....scene. These things, they compound.
Maybe I am finally breathing enough to process. To have the time and space to be mad and sad and hurt and really, really mad and hurt. The kids are fine. They're doing great. My immediate crisis is over. Is my reward for surviving to actually have to process all this ish? To feel all the feelings and then accept and store them appropriately? Really?!?! Is there a manager here that I can speak with?
I've been having trouble coming up for air. Last year, every time my feet were steady, the rug was yanked out from underneath me and I was upended again. Until I threw that damn rug down our front stairs and at someone's head. Metaphorically. We don't have rugs upstairs. And it was clothes. And after the first few handfuls, which felt so, SO good, I folded them and placed them on the top of the stairs. (I am who I am.) But this is different. I can't explain why. It's much more suffocating than disorienting. (Yes, I am taking my meds. Yes, I am seeing my therapist. Yes, I am journaling and praying and sleeping and manifesting and ALL THE INGs.) But nothing is going to get me through it other than going through it.
It is catching me by surprise. The feelings and their intensity. How frequently they are present and how often I cry. Again. Not for him. No. But for me and the kids and the way I thought it would be. The energy I, seemingly, wasted fighting for someone that was already gone. The hope I had for something that was beyond saving. The belief I had that the love I held for all of us was enough for all of us. Spoiler alert. It wasn't. These emotions are potent and come like waves. Huge tsunamis that catch me off guard and are mostly invisible to everyone else. So while I feel like I am drenched and water-logged and waving for help, people just see me. In line at pickup (or Target), wearing my mom uniform and toting a kid (or two or three). Maybe I seem tired. Maybe they see a tear or two. But they don't see the waves. The relentless drenching. Which is ok. How could they? But if you were wondering, these have been a shit couple of weeks. I am weary. I am beat. I am floating. Until I am not. And then until I am again.
Share. Or don't. That's not snark. It's sincerity. One of my gifts is often not being able to tell which is which. xo