Sharing

I wish divorce meant everything was finished. I wish the feelings you had for the good memories, the things you loved about that person, left when you signed the papers.

They don't leave though, well, they don't leave if you refuse to hate the person or put an easy sticker of "bad" on them. There were things I loved about him. Those things are still there. The entire person isn't bad. It's tragic when you love someone so much, and love so many things about them, but you just can't stay together anymore. Friends, lovers or enemies....he can't be any of those. It makes my brain hurt trying to figure out how to relate to him. He is my children's father, he is my past, he is my present when I see the kids, he is my present when music we used to listen to comes up in the mix. So much of me was built with him. I wish I could erase it all. I've had to listen to all new artists to escape pain. I can't use certain colors in my home. I feel a huge sense of self betrayal for feeling this way at all.

So what do you do with the love? How do you dismiss all the things you liked? How do you handle sharing the best of him with someone else?

I accept it. I sit around in the grey until it clears. I let the memories visit, I smile thinking about him asking me to take a nap with him and then I can't because of his snoring. I let the Fray play thinking about Wasband by my side as I delivered Christian, I cry looking at pictures of our empty foreclosed house now on the market. I squeeze back the tears as I make another mark on the wall to show how tall the kids are.

The memories. They were great. They are done. And now I'll pray for his life and bless the good and choose to be sincerely happy for the great parts of him that will be appreciated by another.

And for myself, I'll take to God this ache. Dealing with this can only bring me closer to the other side. I know that all this hurting, all this pouring out to God is making change in me. I'm becoming more and more dependant on God for my emotional stability and to take care of my pains. One of my failures in our marriage was expecting wasband to make me better. I would spend hours after arguing just revisiting crap because I couldn't let go. The pain of the divorce is teaching me to look to Jesus for my needs. I see these areas of weakness in my life being replaced with a knee jerk reaction to turn to God to help me handle things right.