Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Etymology of a Heartbreak...



It's time to pivot.

This blog has been my solace, my voice, my hope in a sea of grief and loss and abandon. It's no secret that the end of my marriage was beyond the most difficult period of my life. The complete tailspin of grief that came after- this blog has become a record of that. Reading back through some of the posts from the first year after the divorce is painful to me now, knowing how hard that girl I was then was trying to hold it together and be positive in the face of this obstacle that seemed the size of a mountain.

January 14, 2016:

I wish I had some sense of direction, some sense of what the heck I'm doing. Trying to convince myself that this won't always feel so heavy and all-encompassing. It's hard to imagine how this ends.


There remain bits of my divorce that I don't talk about on the blog. There are pieces of my grief that lie only with my sister and my therapist, and there are huge chunks of this process that remain on pieces of paper that only exist for my eyes, and perhaps one day for the girls.

February 2, 2016 (the day before my divorce was final):

Please let this be a beginning-a good beginning. A hope, a peace. I pray that for you, dear Joy. I pray for good to come, amazing things you never even knew you wanted or needed. And that you read these words with a smile at the joy you realize only with hindsight that you are about to experience.


My children watched me fall apart. I rocked their already shaken world to the core. It breaks my heart. I can't take it back, I can't do anything other than heal. I hope that I have shown them that as sad and broken as I was, I have managed to grow and learn and create this new life for us.

I know that grief doesn't actually end. It shifts and morphs and becomes a part of who you are and what you present to the world.

April 13, 2017:
Life is so much bigger than me and my melodrama that only lives in my head. And yet, and yet, and yet...whenever I hear bad things, this is where I go. This is the hub around which all of my understanding of pain swirls.


That will forever be true.

It will also forever be true that I am grateful to be divorced. There was a time when that wasn't true, when I honestly believed that I was never going to genuinely feel happy again-when I believed to my soul that there would always be this hole in my heart that no amount of tears or anger or smashing dishes (at the suggestion of my therapist) would ever be able to heal.

But heal it has.

I'm not saying that I'm completely cured by any means. But I do know that I'm at a place where it no longer pains me to say that I'm divorced. Bit by bit I have released that feeling of shame that I carry over allowing my marriage to end.

January 16, 2018:
Life is so much better than it ever was. That's a blessing, Joy...if you had planted your feet and refused to move, none of these blessings would have been able to move.


And so, we pivot. We have indeed reached the bend in the road. The grief is still there, wound inside my bones and blood, as real as anything I've experienced. But it's purpose has shifted.

There are pieces of me lying inside of all I have written, seen and unseen. My goal moving forward is to embrace all of this joy for what it is. I want to continue to write my truth, but from this new perspective. From a heart changed and shifted, from a hope I honestly thought I might never hold again.

This new bend is scary and unknown and glorious.

"So this is what the truth feels like
This is more of what I had in mind"
-Gwen Stefani

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Love is an Abyss...





I used to believe in soulmates.

Honestly, deep in my bones, I believed that there was one person in the world that was created as basically my other half, the person that would bring out all of my best qualities and make me a more interesting person.

I called him Joe Garbarini.

Joe Garbarini was, of course, a character in a book that I read my freshman year of high school. He was a cool, motorcycle riding, Shakespeare loving, Catholic Italian boy, who naturally fought all the time with Debbie Lesley, the spoiled, rich girl whose parents divorce necessitated her becoming a waitress at the restaurant that Joe's family owned, The Heartbreak Cafe. Never fear-all of the verbal sparring was merely foreplay for the genuine feelings of love that Joe and Debbie discover for each other by the end of the six-book series.



Naturally, I am Debbie. Especially when I was a geeky 15 year old who hadn't quite grown into my nose (I know, I still really haven't grown into my nose).


In any case, Joe Garbarini held my heart for 6 years while I waited for whoever it was that my soulmate was going to turn out to be. For a dorky, shy girl who desperately wanted to fall in love but who had not the slightest clue how to actually go about making that happen, making up a romance in my head was as good as it was going to get.

In reality, I'm still pretty head over heels for Joe.

This is where all of my blog posts tend to delve into the shattered pieces of my marriage and how I haven't the foggiest idea how to move away from that person that I used to be crazy in love with. But that's not exactly where this one is going to go.

No, this blog post is actually about The Time Traveler's Wife, which is my favorite book that I have read as an adult. The main plot of the novel is that Clare has known her husband, Henry, basically her entire life, as he is a time traveler and has appeared to her since childhood. When Clare finally meets Henry in real life, he is this young, twenty-something boy pining over a lost love.


The plot obviously goes in many different directions than just that, but the reason that I love it is for that single point alone: she has been in love with this man her entire life, and when she meets him, he is not the man that she loves. She has to wait for him to grow into the man that she adores. She has to patiently bide her time while he grieves the loss of another love. And he is constantly leaving her, not because he wants to, but because that is the hand that fate has dealt him.

It's really no wonder that this resonated so deeply with me, reading it for the first time while my husband was deployed to Iraq, a 23 year old boy at the time, me a 24 year old military wife, thrust into a life of decisions I was ill equipped to make, buying a house all on my own, trying mightily to pretend that I wasn't scared out of my mind for a million different reasons.

I've thought a lot about that girl-that 23 year old girl who knew nothing what she was doing but who had grasped onto the idea that Nick was her soulmate, and that was her lifeline-everything else could fall to bits but she knew to the depths of her soul that Nick's jagged edges fit inside of her broken pieces and so everything would be okay.

Honestly, when you begin your marriage there, is it any wonder I fell so far apart at the end of it?

I carry these girls inside of me still-the 15 year old me with the pretend boyfriend, the 23 year old newlywed, the abandoned 36 year old woman-and I wonder what that idea of a soulmate even means.

What I do know, what I was telling myself the other day when I finished a book that reminded me of The Time Traveler's Wife and therefore started my mind down this particular rabbit hole-I know that one of the best things about who I am now is that I have no expectations of that. Falling in love-as all encompassing and amazing and wonderful as it is-is only one small part of what it is to be someone's soulmate. In truth, it's about understanding that someone is coming into your life with all their own baggage and experiences and hurts and joys, and perhaps, they will provide solace for your own hurts and joys.

It's nothing and everything more than that.

Last time I saw you
We had just split in two.
You were looking at me.
I was looking at you.
You had a way so familiar,
But I could not recognize,
Cause you had blood on your face;
I had blood in my eyes.
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine.
That's the pain,
Cuts a straight line
Down through the heart;
We called it love.
-The Origin of Love

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Let the Words Fall Out...





I'm trying something slightly new this year: I'm not making a "resolution" for the new year.

My resolutions have always been more geared toward changing some aspect of my life for the better (and yes, that always involves reading) but this year I decided to take a different tack.

I adopted a word.

I heard about this on the Elise Gets Crafty podcast (I follow EliseJoy on Instagram and enjoy her immensely, despite the fact that she is the craftiest person ever and I am most decidedly not.)

Elise chooses a word every year, and this year her word is reach, as in getting out of her comfort zone.

I loved that idea, but I wasn't jazzed about that word. In typical Joy fashion, I pondered and wrote and bounced the whole idea off of someone who looked at me like I was loony, and I just couldn't figure out what I was wanting to say.

I wanted to say that I want to try new things, that I want to keep proving to myself that I can do things that I completely believe myself incapable of doing, I want to fall on my face and pick myself up and do it all over again.

I want to figure out how to work at this job that I love, and come home to my kids and not just collapse to the couch, but somehow still be that mom that used to occupy all of my time. That's a hard one-the girls are getting older, and while we still have so much fun together, they are completely resistant to the super fun games of clean your room and let's see how many vegetables you can eat.

I want my family to understand that I love them, that I am well aware that they make my life possible. I want to make time to spend with my friends, which has become somehow more difficult as our children have aged, which makes no sense but is still true.

I want to keep clearing out my house, shedding all of these things that we have somehow amassed, and be able to actually feel that my home is a sanctuary of things I love and cherish.

I mostly want to feel such joy in my life, I want to feel like every day is full of fun-there was such a stretch of my life that felt like existing without feeling, because feeling was just much too overwhelming-and having finally shed that weight, having embraced that grief for the healing and grace that it brought, and feeling like there is finally a new bend in this road just ahead of us-it's a bliss that I don't want to take for granted.

So, finally, after all of the overthinking that I do about everything, I came up with a word to encompass all of that.

Brave.

That is what 2018 is going to be for me. Brave. Every time I think that I'm going to look like a goon, or that I'm scared because I don't know what the heck I am doing, or that I'm overwhelmed by the idea that I am the only adult in my house, I am going to be brave.

I spent the past two years living, growing, and blessedly thriving through something that took me to my absolute nadir. The next bend in the road may be full of roadblocks, but so be it. 2018 is going to be glorious. Or not. But I can promise, it's going to be full of new adventure.

"She was brave and strong and broken, all at once." -Anna Funder