Crazy Time

This November, after 4 years, I finally got a divorce. I thought I would feel relief or freedom or terrible sadness, but what I felt was a big ole' fat mix of emotions so complex that it just felt like a black tar. I didn't even open the final decree. I filed it with my divorce papers from marriage  numero uno and then I swept the living room. 

It is strange how far my life has come since the moment that my husband looked over at me and said, "I don't want to do this anymore." That statement propelled me into Sassy Queenpin Mamahood and opened my life up to such a beautiful garden of pain, pleasure, beauty and fear. That sentence saved my life. It forced me to grow up, it forced me to find acceptance in who I really am, not in who I think I should be. It forced me have faith in myself.

Soon after the husband left my mom bought me a book called Crazy Time by Abigail Trafford. I'm not much of a self-help book reader.  I start out strong, but can never read the whole thing, however, this book (which I still didn't finish) said somethings that I have carried with me and repeated to myself over and over for the past four years. After your marriage falls apart, it is going to get a little crazy. And you my friend are going to be crazy for 2 - 5 years. Re-read. Yes, you read it right......What the fuck?????? At first that made me sick, and then my ego took over and I thought, "Abigail, my dear, you have never met me. I am an exceptional healer. I am great at endings and beginnings, but not so great at in betweens. I will be beyond this pain in 6 months tops."  Hahahahaha, I had such high hopes....

Year four has come, and finally, finally, finally I feel peace, and purpose, and settled. I feel pretty nice in my skin. I love being home with my beasts. I have goals and dreams that fit our lives. I am not searching as much anymore, I'm living.

My crazy time was not super crazy, crazy. I did not run anyone over with my car, or take off for days on a coke binge. But there were times that I wasn't a great mom. There were times I drank too much, I slept too much, I yelled too much. There were times I didn't take care of myself, or I over took care of myself. There were many times I was so self-centered I lost sight of everything but me. There were times when I became so obsessed with my children it made me sick. There were times I became so enraged with their father I wished the world would open up and swallow him whole, and I let the whole world know it (except my beasts).

When I was first separated I did not understand how much marriage had shaped me. I hadn't noticed the subtle ways that I had let my personality meld into my husband. I had not realized that, though I was still a whole person, I had strangely morphed into a person with this large appendage called a husband that I had adapted my life to accommodate. It was like Sissy Hankshaw's thumb in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins, except she was born with her appendage and I chose mine.

Anyway, when the appendage fell off I didn't have to make accommodations for it anymore, and I was amazed. I was amazed at how lost I was and by how large my life felt. I was amazed that I had been so defined by the role of MARRIED WOMAN. I was amazed at how profoundly being left by the man that I married and who fathered my kids changed who I was and where I thought my life was going. I was fucking LOST.

So for awhile I flitted about searching for what I wanted now that my dreams had been rerouted and my definition of myself had been stomped into little pieces. Sometimes I looked like a butterfly and other times I was like a month continuously banging my head on that stupid light trying to find heaven. Damn, it was a crazy time, and it was a painful time, and it was a hilarious time, and it was a beautiful time. And now it's time for something else.