Last night, someone commented on a picture I had posted sometime back on Instagram. I didn't think much of it because it's not the first time and to be kind of honest, one of my least favorite things about Instagram, you can't seem to get more private of a setting and for some odd reason, I seem to have quite a few men following me. I posted another picture, this one more recent and one where I'm not wearing make-up. I had posted it on Facebook because I had recently dyed my hair but beyond that, it was pretty much me. And a little while later, I'm engaged in a conversation with the someone who commented on my other picture.
It's weird because just over 20 years ago, I engaged in a conversation with someone due to his profile, and he didn't even have a picture. It was just a goofy username with gender and location and two lines from a poem I'm very familiar with: Robert Frost's "Stopping in the Woods on a Snowy Evening". That's all it took for me to meet my future husband. I was 18 years old, less than a month from graduating high school and I was home on prom night. We met in person 13 days later and the rest, as they say, was history.
Twenty years later, I'm not so confident in myself. I wasn't entirely confident then either but more so then than now. Now, I'm a bit heavier, a bit older, and have a lot more grey hair (because yes, I did have at least SOME grey hair at almost 19!). I was starting to wonder just what in the hell I was doing and told my daughter that I'm probably going to end up being one of those crazy cat ladies. Her response was that she could see me more as the crazy corgi lady. Either way, the thought of even going down that path to another relationship terrifies me.
And then the grief hits a little, grief that things didn't go the way they "should have". There's grief in the fact that I miss him but at the same time was lost and couldn't even remotely be myself with him here. And worse, that my oldest daughter could not be herself with him here. But 20 years makes for a difficult habit to break and I have to say it's a good thing he's 6000 miles away.
It was this time last year that I was getting the process going for the divorce. He was actually served the papers the day after my youngest daughter's birthday (since he was looking to leave for Korea at some point, we had to move and get things going so that it could be mostly done before he left). There were definitely a lot of what ifs and fear and things I wasn't sure about and there's been a lot I have dealt with and made it through the other side of. While at times this amazes me, at other times, I feel like I've been on survival mode, not really sure where I'm heading.
Again, I have to figure out what I want out of my life, what I want out of a relationship, if I even WANT a relationship. Getting divorced seemed to have been a breeze in comparison. And dang it, it really doesn't help when he pays bills for me and sends me flowers, a bear, chocolates, and a smiley face balloon for Mother's Day. Why does it have to all be so dang complicated?!
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