feels like home

This weekend has been beautiful. The weather has been a bit on the crisp side but the sun is bright and the air is fresh. This was the first weekend since sometime in August we did not have a scheduled activity outside of the house, not counting church. The freedom to relax has been so nice for all of us.

Our days have been full of curling up on sofas with good books, taking naps, building lego and Polly Pocket towns, orchestrating concerts and adapting plays. Just plain playing that every kid needs and my kids don't get often enough. We even have our first fire going and it's just so peaceful. :)

All divorce papers are officially filed, we've begun adhering to the custody agreement and I'm looking for a place to live. I was originally going to stay in the house, but I've decided not to for more than one reason. First, if I stay here, I don't believe G will ever actually move out of the upstairs. I'm all about compromise, but it's been over a year now and I need some space. In addition, this is not the house I want to grow old in or even raise my children in. It's big and rambly and just not me. I need a little cottage with nooks and crannies and if I'm lucky a sweet little porch. I'm not counting on getting that the first time out, but just taking a step toward being somewhere else gets me closer to that reality. G has decided he will keep the house so the kids will at least have the home base they are used to for part of the time.

There's been little bump in my road of perpetual happiness. It seems not all "friends" are "friends" at all and even some of the ones that are, sure know how to resent you when you would expect them to support you. Something I didn't read about in all of my divorce preparation books was advice on what to do when your friends totally diss you. What do you do when rumors abound and you find out one of your supposed closest friends started them? What do you do when suddenly your friends tell you flat out not to be around their husbands? What do you do when your devotion to mothering is questioned because you allowed the children to visit their father per a parenting plan you co-wrote and support? I'm not sure what to do, but I'm working on establishing boundaries and murmuring weak words of, "Um, that hurt my feelings," when I can muster the courage. You know, we women suck at being friends sometimes.

And oh yes dating. Well, add the fact that I'm even entering the dating scene and that's more ammunition for the above paragraph, but whatevah! I've decided two guys is all the more I can keep track of at one time and so that's where I am. Coffee guy is still around and we do a great job of keeping one another guessing, yet we just smile when we're together. The new guy, the Republican, is someone I (ssshhhh) met online through an actual dating service. I feel like I need a shower just saying that out loud. The two of them could not be more different and I can't imagine dating more than one person for very long. But I'm giving it a bit of time and we'll see what happens.

tomorrow, tomorrow, i love ya tomorrow...

Patience is a virtue and good things do come from it. Tomorrow my divorce papers are being filed. And within two to six weeks, it will all be final. F.I.N.A.L. For absolutely freaking real! It's not that I'm thrilled to have a failed marriage behind me. As long as I have these four beautiful children and seventeen years of wisdom to show for it, I refuse to consider it a failure.

But I am so very much looking forward to being free as an individual to embrace this new phase of my life. I'm getting control of my life back, heck I'm getting my name that I loved back. I am woman hear me roar and all that sh*t. I am taking a moment to be free of the guilt and just feel the joy of something I have worked steadfastly toward for three years now.

Life is good.

the real slim shady

I am happy to report the bulk of my divorce guilt has evaporated with the news that EXTB has been dating someone since at least August. (He told me today since I had told him about the coffee guy and he felt less than honest for keeping it from me.)

I'm happy for him, which I see as affirming this split is the right decision. And I'm happy for me because I feel like I've just been set free in a way I just didn't feel before. Awwww...

Really, eventually every single post will NOT be about this d thing.

done, i'm done

You know what I am tired of? Really, truly, endlessly tired of? Other than ending two sentences with prepositions and then following that up with a compound fragment? I am so very tired of this separation and divorce process defining my every living moment. I'm honestly consumed by the whole of it. Everything I do every day is under the umbrella of "the divorce." Every thought I have is filtered through "the divorce." Admittedly, this is a huge life transition, one made even larger because of the four children involved in the process, but for goodness sake, I'm done. I want to breathe and not have it be air full of guilt. I want to wake up and not think, "Oh gosh, what do I have to do to deal with the divorce today?" I want to be able to just plain go to sleep at night and have normal happy thoughts instead of tortured images of how my particular divorce is going to bring down civilization.

I am the first to admit I don't know what the heck I'm doing or what the heck I want out of life most days. But this process of wallowing in the what ifs is not getting me any closer to answering the big questions for myself. For better or worse - what an appropriate way to say it - this divorce needs to be put behind me so I can try to start finding out who I am.

I am just as guilty of not getting those papers filed as he is. If there is information I need from him, then there are ways of getting it if asking politely isn't working. And let's be honest here, if this is still dragging on, there is some part of me that is encouraging or enabling that. So. New deadline for myself. Get whatever needs to be filled out, filled out. Answer whatever questions need to be answered or find someone who can. File whatever needs to be filed. Attend whatever classes that need to be attended. Get through this already so we can all begin to live our life out from under this cloud.

The good news is the one area I've been very proactive with has been helping the kids to adjust. We've talked endlessly and they know I'm available to them. I've bought every book out there for every age group on dealing with divorce. We've read them together and I've left them casually thrown around so they can read them on their own. I have one little in individual therapy and am scheduling some group sessions for the rest of us to attend as a family. Huh, as is the custom with everything in life, I manage to prioritize the mothering part above all else. I suppose I need to imagine the paperwork as my children and I would have it taken care of immediately.

So here's to a real live deadline, or can I call it a real live lifeline. Paperwork people, it just needs to get done. Halloween sounds like a good as time as any to me.

sometimes you get what you need

Yesterday was a good day. I spent the day moving into my new apartment. And my address is still the same. :P The soon to be ex-husband and I have been going round and round in our heads trying to figure out what to do with "the house." Trust me, with the drama we have experienced over this issue, the quotations are warranted. For various reasons which I will be magnanimous and quiet about now, our house was not put on the market and sold this summer as we (I) had planned. That's a bit of a bummer or maybe a blessing in disguise, but now it's the reality we need to live in - literally. Putting it on the market right now is really a non-option. The winter in northern New England is no time to sell a house, especially a big one like ours. Dh swears he can not afford to move out and I can't cover the mortgage alone, so we're kind of stuck. I struggled with coming to this conclusion because I wanted to sever as many physical ties with the husband as I could and I wanted immediate independence. But hey, life is all about learning to live in the real world, right?

So we had this crazy idea. Let's just share the house for a while. The deal is the bottom floor of our house consists of three bedrooms with two full baths, a small eat in kitchen and a large area that splits up into a living room and family room (or dining room, but I really don't get dining rooms and to me it just means one more place out of the kitchen my young ones can drag food and feel justified.) Upstairs are three more bedrooms, another full bath and this weird little extra room. So we've decided to split the house into two living areas. The kids and I will take the bottom floor and he is going to take the top floor.

He'll create his bedroom, a family room with two trundle beds and an extra bedroom. He's going to take the weird little room and create a kitchenette. He doesn't need much in that department since he doesn't eat all that much at home because he's really not here much and when he does eat in, the kitchenette he's putting in will be plenty for him. And then he has a full bath up there. We're blocking off the front foyer with locking (from my side) French doors and he'll use the front door which leads right to the stairway going to his level. He also has a locking door at the top of the stairway for his privacy. I'll have the mudroom/sunroom entrance to use for my section. Money wise we are splitting the utilities and I'm going to pay him rent from the child support once we finalize the money that far.

So crazy huh? I have no idea how this is going to play out, but it's an interesting social experiment if nothing else. When he has the kids for his visitation, they will actually stay in his area for the weekend and not only will I have actual private time in my own living area, I won't have to come home to the consequences of him having let the kids run wild and destroy the house when I'm not here. Ha, ha, ha, ha...oh, I'm sorry, I just can't quit laughing at myself and my naive notions. Where was I? Oh yeah, when Spring arrives here in the northern tundra, we'll evaluate where we are and where the housing market is. The best possible scenario I can imagine right now is that the market will have held up or gone back up and we will sell the house for a small profit, split the proceeds and go our merry separate ways. I also hope to be gainfully employed in some way and have a bit of money that feels like my own and perhaps that will impact my choice of living a bit more.

Even though the split cannot take immediate place because those two full baths of mine that he gutted in July are still not put back together and all six of us are using one bath upstairs right now - gosh, where did I leave my mantra about being magnanimous again?? But I have faith, yes that's it, I have faith those bathrooms will be completed soon and we can put the new plan into action. I've already begun claiming the floor as my own, though. I've been moving furniture and I'm going to paint and just do things my way with no questions of or explanations to anyone else.

I don't know if I will ever want to be married again. I'm craving freedom like a starving person.

a long day's night

So my very first post is one in which I commend my soon to be ex husband on his sensibility and willingness to think of his family as we negotiate, mostly without lawyers, our child support settlement. Although the divorce has been looming for nearly a year now, I only recently decided it wasn't going to do itself and saw an attorney to make sure the papers I have are the correct ones and indeed we are on our way to filling them out in a way that will render us amicably divorced. The phrase child support had been bantered around a bit, but it wasn't until my visit with the attorney we began to actively look at spreadsheets and budgets and the cherub faces of our children who would like to continue eating that we entered the land mind filled area of support negotiation in divorce.

I am pleased and proud to report we have reached an agreement. An agreement I feel is generous on my soon to be ex-husband's part, though I'm sure my attorney would like to see even more generosity. But hey, I live in the real middle class world. Neither of us are walking away millionaires here. In fact, both of our standards of living will decrease, and with that our children's as well. What we are trying to protect right now is not the lives of me or their father, but the childhood's of our children. Not only their emotional, spiritual and physical lives, but their economic lives as well. God help us do this right. He's certainly given me hope with this start.