“Remain calm in every situation because peace equals power.” – Joyce Meyer
In divorce, it is often our children struggle the most. Their lives are disrupted, they go from home to home, and likely have completely different sets of rules and expectations at each house.
Adults that are going through a divorce will also have their own set of trials. However, unlike children, adults have a better-established set of coping mechanisms that children have not yet developed.
“Yes, she is just a mother. Which is sort of like looking at the sky and saying, hey it’s just the sun.”
The job of a mother is at times unrewarding, unrealistic, and unimaginable. Everyday dawns with a new set of challenges, that many of us are not equipped with the tools to handle. This job comes with no manual, no requirement of prior experience, and absolutely no sense of direction.
We’ve all heard that the first year of marriage is the hardest. In my opinion, for couples on their second marriage this is even more true. The second round of marriage, for myself, gave that statement a whole new meaning. The beginning of my marriage felt much like an ending. I began my post nuptial life in a state of regret, and fight or flight. I felt like I was going through the motions every day. I was married to a man who I felt was more distant with me than he had been when stationed halfway around the world while deployed to a combat zone. “Were we even in love?” I asked myself that question every single day, and yet every single night we would crack open a bottle of Jack Daniels and drink until some sort of passion or tolerance was ignited. Doesn’t sound like much of a marriage to me, what do you think? If you had been around us during this time, or had seen us out with friends, you would have never even known we were married. We were strangers, simply playing house in an unfamiliar world.
We all make mistakes, make bad choices, and miss judgement calls. If we didn’t, how else would we learn and grow? The affair I had with a much older man when I was 21, impacted my life and my perspective on love forever thereafter. It was a judgement call that I am only now speaking about publicly. I aim to be as transparent as possible, and in telling the story of John and I, there is no way around the truth of how we met, fell “in love”, and grew our family. The way in which we began our love story foreshadows the events that followed into our marriage and divorce.
