Endings, Beginnings, Endings, Beginnings

I am a Work in Progress

I've been virtually silent, literally. I have kept my virtual voice to a whisper for several months. My journal still sits on my night table gathering dust.

I was/am in the process of ending “our marriage,” or do you say, “my marriage?” The papers were signed and filed so it is Final, Legal, done. We/I am divorced. I am learning the semantics of divorce are tricky. I am still stuck in the “we” and it is not the royal “we.” How do you change from saying “our son” to “my son” when we (see?) are still parents? How do you refer to the person you were once married to? Ex sounds so, well, crass. I think that “Former” might work, maybe that makes him like Prince, the man who was formerly known as husband.  And I am no longer known as a Daley, “one of my former’s conditions.” Now I can go back to saying, “Leslie Miller… like the King of Beers.”

It has been a long year. The man I was married to actually follows my blog but I am not sure he actually reads it anymore. I haven’t been able to write about this ending/beginning in my life. I, one who is never at a loss for words, still have so much difficulty verbalizing the emotions that are associated with ending a marriage. The other reason is that my attorney told me to go on social media silence. I will agree that this process is like mourning a death. I stumble back and forth through all the phases of grief and while I believe I invented a few new phases, I am sure that many have gone before me and more will come after me.

The emotional me still grapples with the feeling at some level that somehow I failed. The realist in me knows that this is not true. That’s new for me… I still have optimism but I learned to be a realist. The fact remains that I cannot pin point an event, an incident, a moment in time when the ending began. I once told a friend that marriage is like the ocean, it ebbs and flows with the tide. I mused about this in another blog entry titled "Twitter: A Writing Exercise" so I suppose I have survived a shipwreck. It is not all smooth sailing. I suffer the memories both good and bad. My heart aches still and always will on some level. The friendship that I always cherished is battered, bruised and may not be able to be saved. This man is the father of our/my son. My/our child, is truly the best thing I have ever done in my life and would not be without his father. I just couldn’t be his wife anymore.

I have learned that nice divorces only happen in the movies. Ask anyone who has been through one and they will tell you that there is no such thing… unless your marriage was for legal documentation, you don’t have kids or pets or community property. My attorney told me he has actually written visitation orders for dogs. I never imagined just how ugly things would get. I will not recount the insanity as it would make a public record of the events that I have no need to record. These things are burned into my soul. I am a veteran of the divorce war. Those who have been there know what I mean.

The good news? Each day is truly a new beginning and I am “enjoying the process” as my dear friend Cat would say. I realize I am closer to me than I have been in a long time and I am proud of my journey.

“I am proud of the scars in my soul. They remind me that I have an intense life.”
Paulo Coelho

Frogging...

Not to be confused with gigging frogs. For all my non-knitting friends, this means that point where you have been happily clicking away on that knitting project, perhaps for hours and then you look down and realize something is just not right. After counting rows and stitches, recounting rows and stitches, you realize this is not a simple fix, you cannot simply unknit a few rows and this is something that crochet hook will never repair. You bemoan the fact that you have not utilized the life line. There it is, the issue at hand, perhaps a gaping hole, or twisted stitches. The decision is yours. 

Do you continue on as if nothing has gone wrong? Or... do you decide to (gulp) frog?  You hear the every increasing loudness of the "rip it, rip it, rip it, rip it" froggy chorus and you have the decision of your life ahead of you... Are you prepared to tear out rows and rows of your meditative knitting?  

Knitting has helped me to put my life together when it was unraveling and now that I have worked on this UFO (unfinished object) for years, I see the dropped stitches, the miscalculated rows. part of me kept knitting along unaware. I have measured and contemplated long and hard. Finally, I have mustered the courage and I am frogging with determination knowing that I each time I start over, I understand the pattern better.