I've been asking myself that question for a while now. But first, where's "here"? I'm going to be 36 years old in a couple of months. I have two beautiful children; a 2.5 year old boy who is the most loving person that I know and a 9 month old daughter who is a firecracker and just learned how to clap today. And I am getting divorced.
I married a man whom I was certain was the right person for me. Our marriage was incredibly easy for several years. And shortly after we had our first child, the cracks began to show. But I wasn't willing to see them. I was certain that we were just... right, that marriages are difficult at times and that we could work through anything. This is a man whom I told, at one point, that I would stick by him even if he cheated on me because I loved him so much and couldn't imagine my life without him.
When my son was a few months old (during the summer of 2011), my husband and I began to fight. The responsibility that I was taking on mostly by myself was getting to be too much. Before I knew it, we were becoming distant with each other and eventually we were at the point where I told him that I couldn't live that way anymore and insisted we see someone for help. But let me back up a minute. In retrospect, I can now see that the cracks in our marriage existed long before we had children. But everything was easier before we had children so the small cracks weren't that big a deal.
So back to the ultimatum, if you will, about seeing a counselor. I got a referral from a trusted friend and we began to see a marriage counselor. Things seemed to get better but looking back I realize that the entire time, I had this lingering feeling that we weren't getting to the root of our problems; that we were just putting a band aid on them. But because things seemed to be getting better, we decided to stick with our original plan of having two kids about two years apart in age. I got pregnant right away (during the summer of 2012) and we continued to see the counselor occasionally for a couple months. After a short while longer, it seemed like we weren't doing much during our counseling sessions so we stopped going. And of course, things got exponentially worse. And we let them be worse for quite a while.
Finally, four days after my daughter was born, my husband told me that he was done after a very minor fight. It was April 20, 2013; I will never forget that date. I was shocked and shattered and incredibly hormonal and exhausted. I was angry and couldn't understand how he could possibly be ready to give up. This all happened literally about an hour before he was headed to the airport to pick up his mother, which was not going to make anything any easier. To put it kindly, she is a pretty difficult person. But I don't want this blog to be about talking trash so I'm going to leave it at that. She stayed for a week, He didn't tell her anything, and it was the most incredibly awkward, insanely difficult week of my life. The night of the twentieth, as my beautiful baby girl was falling asleep, I cried and cried and cried and I apologized to her for bringing her into such an awful situation.
About a month later, he decided that he wanted to try a little harder. But he didn't want to try because he loved me so much and couldn't imagine his life without me; he wanted to keep trying because he didn't want to spend less time with his kids. Out of desperation, I agreed to see a different marriage counselor to see if we could somehow work things out.
This second marriage counselor got to the root of the issues between us immediately. She helped us realize that we are basically a Perfect Storm of bad attributes colliding. Initially I thought that we could both work on our past luggage and be a stronger couple in the end. In fact, all along I believed that we were going to get through it and look back on that time in our lives as something that bonded us together even more. But eventually I realized that he wasn't willing to do the personal work that would be necessary to make our marriage work. It was devastating and it took me such a long time to come to the conclusion that we had to call it quits. I held onto hope for such a ridiculously long time. But I'm glad that I did because I have never doubted my decision after making it. I know that I couldn't have worked harder or held on any longer than I did.
So that's what "here" means for me.
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