The Big D

I am 47 years old.  For at least the past five of those 47 years, I have lived with a recurring mantra of sorts.  Maybe it was more like a silent threat.  Or was it a reassurance?  Whatever you want to call it...it sounded like this: I'm getting a divorce.

Like the Wasatch Fault Line, it lay hidden under an otherwise peaceful environment.  I heard it's rumblings several times a month but spoke of it to no one, ever keeping up the peaceful, happy landscape that was to everyone the essence of who I was.

Why?  You want to know reasons.  I have reasons, three of them to be exact, but for the time being...they are not what is important.  In fact, I would discourage you from asking the reasons for a divorce of anyone unless you are yourself entering a relationship with them.  They just took giant, courageous steps to leave their yesterday so they could have a healthier today.  Meet them where they are.  Help them now.  You can gawk at their back then's later...when they are ready to bring it up.  Instead, just know that it was a heavy, painful decision and one that, just like any natural disaster, will alter the landscape of multiple lives for a long time.

So the thing with mantras or promises or whatever it is, the longer you listen to them, the bigger and more powerful they grow until they manifest themselves like a magnitude 8.5 earthquake.  All the dirt, homes and streets will move aside to loose the monster.

And that's exactly what happened in my case.  I took the echoing four words that rang inside my head from ear to ear for years and I invited them to come out of my mouth.  I invited them to leave. They left my head and entered that of my husbands.  And of my children.

That was a year ago.

We have all since walked through the rubble.   This is critical information.  We WALKED through it, which means we are NOT lying beneath it.  We were not buried or destroyed.  Our futures are still wide open and ready to be whatever we decide to make them.  The pieces of yesterday stare back up at as we kick them around, but we decide if and how to use them and then we move on.