Exes and Ohs

What is the protocol for how divorced/separated people speak about their former spouses in public spaces? I am still not sure. Recently I unfollowed a divorce blog that I used to enjoy when I found myself becoming increasingly irritated by how the author wrote about her ex-husband. Her blog was written under a pseudonym, yet carried photos of her and her children and stories of her neighbourhood which would have made it quite easy to identify the ex that she complained bitterly about; how difficult he was, how much the kids hated him, how careless he was of her feelings.

Whatever we feel about our exes, ranting about them online in a manner that gives them no right to reply just seems so unfair. I was the subject of someone's not-very-disguised blog posts some time back and felt deeply hurt by the descriptions of actions that were supposedly mine, but even more hurt by the comments of this person's friends, who most definitely hadn't heard my side of the story.

So what I mean to say is this: I will never write in this blog about my ex-husband because it's not right or fair and I wouldn't like if he wrote about me.

I hate men

I'm wearing that hat again today. It's an ill-fitting cheap, red nylon baseball hat that has 'All Men Are Bastards' printed across the front in grubby white letters.

Of course I don't hate them all, I just hate some of them, or a particular type of them. Ok, ok, ok... I hate the ones that *I* attract, which of course is another way of saying that it's actually not them, it's me.

If I had a euro for every married man that has hit on me since I've been single, I'd be able to upgrade my car. And the amazing thing is that THEY DON"T SEE ANYTHING WRONG WITH IT. The worst thing, it would appear, for a married man sniffing around a separated woman, would be to get caught by his wife. Apart from that it doesn't seem to matter to them, They often say '...but there's nothing wrong with my marriage..., I love my wife, we're very happy together.' As a male friend of mine says 'we are able to compartmentalise that sort of thing.. so what if we are cheating as long as we treat our wives well.'

The stories, the stories... soon I will write the woeful tales of my on-line dating experiences. Oh God, there's a book in there somewhere. There have been one or two nice men, and I've even made one or two good friends, but the rest of them (shakes head slowly).

This episode has been brought to you by the letters S, A and D.

I once kept another blog, a couple years ago when I was trying to pluck up the courage to leave my marriage. It took a long time, a VERY LONG time to leave, but I got there in the end. It is now eight months since I have been single again and all the manic diaries I used to keep still sit mutely in the anonymous Gmail account I set up to hide stuff away.

I’ve written very little over the past eight months, mostly because I’ve been so darned busy getting on with life, I barely have the time. The parenting of children, the dog I adopted, the running I took up… all neatly slotted into the spaces that used to be filled with solitary sobbing and bashing out painful words on the laptop. I typed so much I wore away the keys. About a year later, the wear was most visible on the letters “S”, “A” and “D” (along with "E", "O" and "L"... go figure).

The trouble with filling up the spaces is that there is no time for pause or reflection and life passes far too quickly which, the older you get, is not a good thing. In the marriage I felt like I couldn’t breathe and I told a therapist I was “waiting to exhale”. Well now I am exhaling and need to allow the space to see how that feels. Creating a new blog is one way of doing that.

Even after all the couples counselling had been done, I wept and tortured myself and pummelled myself into the ground over the decision to leave. The therapist suggested that I draw up two lists of bullet points: one was a description of what my life might look like ten years from now if I stayed, the other was a description of what my life would look like if I left. I spent days agonising over how to be fair to each 'life' and, at the end of the exercise, both imagined lives contained good and bad points. But there was no denying which one I wanted. Even though it was like leaping into the complete unknown and terrifying beyond belief, the mere possibility of not having to live with the deepest discomfort and unhappiness at the core of my being was far more important than deciding the price was too great, staying, putting on a happy face and making the best of it.

"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."
~ M. Scott Peck

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~ Mary Oliver ~