“You are terrifying and strange and beautiful, something not everyone knows how to love.”
Being a woman who has been deemed by others as “difficult” to love may hold a weight that not many will understand.
You may have been labeled as the “crazy chic” or the “Ice Princess”, and perhaps you have even started to believe these titles and accepted them to determine who you are.
“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.
“It takes someone really brave to be a mother, someone strong to raise a child, and someone special to love someone more than she loves herself.”
It has been said many times before that divorce is like a death, both need to be grieved. One of the major differences in the two, is in death, people expect and almost force you to grieve. However, with divorce, people often do not understand the grieving process. The truth is, there is no right or wrong way, and there is no time limit on how long you must wait before you move on after divorce. We all handle things differently, and mourning a divorce is no different.
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.
After eight very long and traumatic years of marriage, and one week after my divorce was final, I thought it only appropriate to get married again. Don’t judge me just yet, there will be plenty of time for that later.
Yes, I got married one week after my first divorce was final. In my defense, we had been legally separated for three years. I cannot recall why it took us that long to get a divorce. If I am being honest, we may not have even been able to afford the divorce, or we were just stubborn and not willing to give in to the requests of the other party. I know for certain that it was not because either of us wanted to or thought we would ever get back together.
