18 years ago today it was raining (not quite as dreary a day
as today, but it was raining). My grandma told me that was good luck. (It wasn’t,
obviously, but when I am a grandma, I will say the same thing.)
Every year, on this particular day, I write a blog post that
mostly I don’t post.
5 years on seems like a good time to let them live.
From 2017:
“The thing is, as I have mentioned, I waited a really long
time to meet someone and fall in love with them. I didn't wait patiently. I
prayed and wished and hoped for love to hit me over the head like a
sledgehammer and I exasperated everyone around me because I was forever talking
about wanting to fall in love and get married and that's exhausting and boring
after a while. I didn't have a plan for my life.
Enter Nick.
Enter exactly everything you ever wanted all in one fell
swoop.
It was so very fairytaleish.
It makes everything much more complicated than it surely
needs to be.”
From 2018:
“I had a revelation today.
(To begin, I talk to myself in the car in the mornings,
unless I am on the phone. Most days, I actually am on the phone. But when I’m
not, I yammer to myself.)
Anyway, a revelation.
I said, “I am trying to learn to love someone without losing
myself in the process.”
And then I just sat there for a minute.
Because, you know, what the heck?
I know all of the correct things to say about this-things
that I say to my girls, about being strong women, about finding their passions.
I have spent this past year doing all the brave things, trying new things,
falling down and getting back up and all the things.
But here is a brave thing: I’m going to be very honest in
this space. When I met Nick, and he fell in love with me, I tangled myself all
up in that feeling, that idea that someone wanted to build a life with me,
wanted to have children with me-and that’s as it should be, of course. I
married someone who was my very best friend at the time, who I just adored-I
had never been in love before and I found it intoxicating.
My marriage came apart in pieces. You know that metaphor
about boiling a frog? How, if you want to boil a frog, place it in the pan and
let the water slowly rise and it doesn’t know to jump out? That is the best way
that I know of to describe how my marriage came to be in pieces without me even
completely realizing it. Because, of course, looking back everything seems
obvious.
But somewhere recently I read something that said, if you
don't feel safe enough to yell back, you're not safe enough.
It all dovetails-my personality is that I want to be the
best, so naturally I wanted to be the best wife. Mix that with genuine
adoration and trust and faith in happy endings, and just what I always
wanted, always, for as long as I could remember, and my beautiful
girls and our family, and it just”
(That’s where I ended it.)
From 2019:
“I don’t know how to teach Betsy how to navigate dating-how
to flirt, or how to figure out if a boy is interested in you, or any of those
things. I feel completely useless to her.
The lack of instincts that I have around any of that is
somewhat astounding.
In the before, I would have simply told her that when you
actually fall in love, everything just falls into place. That was my
experience. Nick Johnson came along and swept me off my feet and life was never
the same again. It didn’t matter about flirting or dating really or any of
those things-because I met Nick and I just knew that he was who I had been
missing.
In the after, I am left with this notion that mostly that
wasn’t the best way to go about falling in love. I should have questioned more,
I should have concentrated on figuring out who I was instead of just who I was
as Nick’s wife.
Divorce is just such a tangle of emotions-it’s like living
beyond the end of a fairy tale into the cold light of day, and realizing that a
lot of what I believed to be the truth that I built my life on was a lie. It
takes all that I have not to go into this explanation every time I tell anyone
that I’m divorced-we did all the right things. We had date nights, we were best
friends, we were all the things. And it still didn’t work out.
My marriage taught me that there is no guarantee to love. We
wake up every morning and chose to love that person that we are with. Which is
an amazing notion when this other person is choosing to be with you, and”
(That’s the end of that one. No idea at all what the rest of
that sentence was.)
In the end, it’s just that I want to remember. I didn’t post
these at the time because my feelings are always so raw around this particular
memory. Even as it has changed and evolved and twisted into what exists today. I can't put to words what it is today. Maybe next year.
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