Today my divorce became final……

I wrote that sentence weeks ago and couldn’t go on. I really don’t know what to say. Every time I told someone, the usual response would be, “Congratulations!”

However, I don’t feel like being congratulated, nor do I feel celebratory.

Every time I hear it, I feel sad.

Granted, a final divorce means I can go forward with my life, at least on paper.

Before my divorce was finalized, I couldn’t apply for health insurance or a mortgage, I couldn’t work on changing my name, I had no rights outside of my marriage. It was frustrating and disheartening, but now that my divorce is final, I can “move on.”

Over the past few weeks and maybe for the next following months, or for the next year, I am going through a period of mourning. I don’t want to be divorced, I don’t want to be living in a rental and not the home I worked so hard to own. I don’t wanted to be tens of thousands of dollars in debt to lawyers who don’t give a flying fuck about me. I don’t want to be without the friends I had in my marriage, the family I had gained in Georgia, bottom-line, I don’t want to be alone. You know the kind of alone I mean. I know I can pick up my phone and someone will be there. This alone is different, darker and depressing

I am suppose to be married, in my home with my husband, my dogs, cats and, if I got lucky, a baby. It wasn’t suppose to be like this, but after what he did, what choice did I have?

Yet again, I chose the wrong person to let into my life. A man who didn’t respect me and violated my privacy and my body in a way that never even occurred to me until I saw the videos with my own eyes. Now I get to spend the rest of my life wondering, who has seen me like that, who has those pictures, the videos, how much do I really know, how much more is there? The questions are endless.

As I mourn my marriage, I have to make the decision of how angry will I be. Angry enough to pursue this to the full extent of the law or just angry enough to realize that my sanity may not be worth the court battle. That decision is still far from made.

Now here I am, 40 years old, divorced, with a rental house full of furbabies, who are my sanity, and I have to start over, again; however, five years has passed since I last did this, I am tired and not as full of hope and determination as I was back then. Maybe it’s just the looming grand jury, maybe its divorce, COVID, debt, moving and restraining orders all in a seven month time span, maybe I’m just old. Who knows, but I do know, I am sad, this isn’t what I wanted for my life. Over the last few days I’ve often wondered if we just would have waited a few more months or another year to get married, maybe none of this would have happened, maybe it would still be great and there would still be love, but maybe not….

I guess it doesn’t matter now, the moment I opened that “Home Stuff” folder,

every

single

thing

about my life changed,

forever.

Now, I mourn and I move forward, a little bit more broken than before, but as Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Maybe, just maybe, I’ve been broken into better shape.