Second Year…
Today our two year anniversary. Today is also the day I made our first marriage counseling appointment.
No one puts on their wedding dress and thinks, ‘In two years from today, I am going to be making an appointment for counseling.’
No one expects the “Happy Anniversary” email to be followed up with an email for a therapists.
I know, I’m suppose to be happy today. This day is suppose to mean something, be an accomplishment. It just feels sort of hollow. And this is where I pep talk myself into saying, “this is a journey and it’s a rough one and you have to work for it and life is hard…’ and all the other stereotypical expressions that have stuck to the wall all these years.
Thinking back to my first marriage and the final days of excepting the fact that it wasn’t going to work was the same phrase running over and over, “I’m going to be ‘divorced’. My kids are going to come from a ‘broken home’. My kids were going to say, “our parents are divorced.” and all those words felt so dirty and the thought of them saying them broke my heart into a billion pieces.
When I finally excepted the fact that I was going to ‘re-marry’, another ‘bad word’ in my vocabulary, I guess I figured it was going to be ‘right’. I mean, if I screwed up the first one so badly, maybe it wasn’t meant to be and the grand plan, big picture of things this one was my do-over and because I had walked through the fire and survived it, this one was going to be easy and right.
God, I am so young and naive. I figured people that got married the second time around really had all the answers and that marriage would last forever. Then of course you hear about second marriage ending and you rationalize those; ‘got married to soon.’, ‘got married for the wrong reason.’, ‘too much baggage’… they are damaged and should stay single then.
Yes, again…young, naive and let’s add stupid to the mix.
Are there people out there that don’t live in their head all the time? Do people not sit and get so twisted in the responsibility of being themselves that they want to vomit?
You know those commercials for like, Tide or Bounce when they have the white sheets hanging on the line and the wind is blowing through them and there is that woman standing in the middle? She’s probably wearing white capri’s and a bright yellow shirt. She’s a perfect size 10 and she’s holding up her arms and spinning around in circles with a big smile on her face?
To understand what it’s like to be in my head take that scene, make the woman not so svelte, hair in a pony tail, voices of children yelling at dogs and each other and instead of standing there spinning with a smile on her face, she’s caught in the sheets and thrashing around. She knows in order to be able to get out she’s going to have to slowly unwind from the sheets, but the more she turns and pulls, the more one sheet overlaps with another. At the end of the day, when the sun has gone down and instead of the sheets nicely folded in a wicker basket by the door… The backyard is a cold mess of sheets, dog prints and a very exhausted woman still caught in there somewhere…sobbing.
And why did I stop taking medication?
I’ve now got to call my ex-husband and tell him to quit telling the children about our finances because Shea came in and informed me that Dad should get a break on child support because he has them more than when the court ordered. SHE IS TEN.
“No one said it would be easy, but no one said it would be this hard “- Sheryl Crow