Hello everybody. Yes it’s saturday night and I’m beat, bushed and exhausted. We are moved into our apartment now. All major pieces of furniture are up the flight of stairs and all that’s left at the house are odds and ends that just need to be dealt with.

I want to thank those who helped move us into our apartment. Thanks to Greyduck for connecting all the electronics, and to Dead Marlowe for making me smile whenever I was feeling down. Not that he was here helping, as he lives in England, but I got a couple of choice phone calls that made a world of difference to my additude.

So now I’m in my new apartment, just the kids and I. They have their own rooms while I sleep in the living room on a hide-a-bed. The kids both tell me that they love having their own rooms, and for now, it seems the novelty of having privacy makes up for the fact that their dad isn’t here. However, my son constantly comes up with reasons why living here is a benefit and my daughter is very clingy and affectionate. Clearly showing their insecurity. I also have had a old childhood habit show up in my sleep. I’m hoping as we transition things will get better.

My ex’s great-grandmother gave us several pieces of furniture for this move, one of which was a hide-a-bed that would fit down my pokey little hallway. So I have someplace to sleep now. Its much more comfortable then the other hide-a-bed I was going to use until we realized there was no way to make it fit down my pokey little hallway. It’s going to work out. The kids woke up this morning and got into bed with me to watch cartoons. It was a great morning.

I just have a couple of more things to do to the house to get it ready for inspection and take a few things to the dump for a last run. We have some donations that will be picked up on wednesday. Then I’ll hand the keys over and say goodbye for the last time I think to that part of my life.

I feel a sense of freedom as I start this next chapter. I can feel all sorts of things letting go now that I’m not living with Greyduck on a daily basis. I look back now and can see the stress we were both living under. When I was packing up some stuff I found a stack of cards and whatnot that he had left behind. I knew better then to look inside as I did that last card I read. I knew it would just make me upset to read again, to see again the infidelity that made a mockery of the last 12 years of my life. There is some healing that needs to happen now, I need to forgive myself and let all this crap go.

I had someone tell me that I had no reason to be mad at myself, as I hadn’t done anything wrong. But I couldn’t make them understand the responsiblity I felt to the choices I made. There were several things I did or chose to do in relation to keeping a happy marriage. Things I put up with, or allowed to happen so that my marriage would run smoother. I gave up alot of stuff for my marriage. Many things which caused me to be hurt, but in the long run kept my marriage functioning. But you do that, when your committed to making a situation work, you make sacrifices for the long term health or smoothness of the relationship. At the time they seemed like good choices to make, because I was opporating under this idea that I had a decent marriage, just that my husband didn’t have a very good clue on what to do or how to behave because he never saw a good example growing up. So I needed to be patient, understanding, not nagging, be supportive as best I could….thinking that eventually Greyduck would get a clue and finally start being an active member of the marriage. And around year 5 that’s what happened. All of a sudden I went from a bad marriage, to a decent one. Not great, but soooooooo much better then what it had been. And slowely over time it kept getting better. It gave me hope that what I had been doing was the right thing.

But it wasn’t. What a complete joke my choices have been. I know in my head that my choices were made in good faith. And I wouldn’t be the person I am now without the last 12 years. I have an unshakeable testimony of the gospel because of them. I have two amazing children because of them. I’m able to weather so many storms of life because of what I’ve gone through. There are soooo many blessings, I can’t even begin to count them. Yet, because of one aspect that was a lie. I can’t seem to forgive myself those choices. I asked him once how he justified it. He said that he bullshitted himself into thinking he wasn’t hurting anyone. I used to be one of the most teased kids in any school I went to. I had kids say terrible things about me and to me. I used to tell myself that I could put that all behind me because I had someone who believed in me, who loved me and who cared about me. But I didn’t. When you care…you don’t cheat, you don’t bad mouth your spouse to your friends, and you don’t allow them to badmouth your spouse in return. I shouldn’t care. But I do. I was humiliated so many times that I never knew about, by people who knew all the bullshit going on and were okay with that. I still shouldn’t care, but knowing that it happened, even after the fact is a terrible thing.

I don’t know why this is bothering me now. I’m sitting here crying and I couldn’t even tell you why I went off on this tangent. Maybe it’s because I am free now. I can finally let go. Maybe it has something to do with all the memories I had to deal with as I packed. Maybe it’s all of the above.

But now I need to concentrate on getting unpacked and getting that house cleaned up so I can hand over the keys. Hopefully I’ll have my apartment put together in enough semblance of normalcy that I can have a house warming. That would be good.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2004 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.