O-mama - Opinionated Moms

Dear Diary, I spent most of the day yesterday lanquishing in self-pity, heart-broken, filled with pain, regret, loss, crying until I thought for sure that all the fluid left inside me was on my pillow or streaming down my cheeks. My facebook page reads like a bad teen novel, complete with sad love song links to youtube, stabs at poetry, and comments by friends who don't know what to say. I even had a chat with my husband via Skype, and he tried to console me from afar, which only served to make me feel even more confused and torn to shreds.

It was a terrible day, and I started today out in much the same fashion. I got up at 6am, got my son up for school, then after he left, I went back to bed and didn't get up until he got home from school. Depression is really a useless, sucky emotion. So I decided to get my butt up and took a shower. And as the water washed the dried tears away, it also washed away the sadness and depression, at least for now. And I started thinking about my marraige, why it failed, and why I can't go back to it, even though I have those old fashioned ideals of what marraige should mean. Here is my moment of clarity in a hot shower in the late afternoon:

Marraige should not be entered, or left, lightly. Marraige is important for society, for people, for kids. But life is short. Life is a precious gift that only comes around once, unless you believe in reincarnation, and even then, each life is supposed to teach us something. Anyone can "succeed" in a bad, unhappy marraige, if success is measured in years and "putting up with". But then, what about that life? Isn't my life worth something other than years of putting up with?

No, I do not think that people should just get out of marraige if it makes them uncomfortable, if they hit a rough patch, or if they see something special in someone else other than their spouse. If you enter a marraige, you owe it to your spouse to work your way through it, until there are no more things to try, unless one person is abusive to the other, of course. In my marraige, I worked and worked and worked and worked... I put up with, listened to the empty promises, tried to be supportive, waited, tried, and then tried some more. But it takes 2 people to work through a marraige. I can't force him to do anything. I can't make him be the man I need him to be. I can't do anything other than what I can do, myself. Just me. That's it. And I'm tired.

I realized that I am just as important as he is. I am just as important as my kids are. I am just as important as any other human being. So I am going to try to find my happy again. I am ready to let go of the hopes and dreams and wishes of a future that he is incapable of making come true. Yes, I blame him, but some of it isn't really his fault. He is who he is and who he has always been. I simply chose to ignore it for too long, hoping my love could somehow make him become something else. Rule number one on my new journey: see reality and don't ever ignore it. It won't change no matter how much I wish it to do so.