“Grief seems to create losses within us that reach beyond our awareness – we feel as if we’re missing something that was invisible and unknown to us while we had it, but is now painfully gone.” – Brené Brown, Rising Strong

This is a re-post from early January 2019. I have some amendments to make, some updated commentary a little more removed from the most painful parts of the divorce.

In January, I was only a few months separated from my wife and I was in a lot of pain. Less than three months later, I find myself in a much better place. At this point, we are just days away from finalizing the divorce.

As many have said before, it gets better. It takes time. Take it one day at a time. I do find myself on some days “excavating” the past and trying to figure out what went wrong. There was a lot that went wrong. I will own my part in it. The situation we were in was “co-created.” It wasn’t one party that caused it.

In some way, the relationship veers off-course and then the other party reacts to that shift, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. I think that there were lots of instances when we got off-course that we both reacted in a bad way enough times that we ended up miles away from where we wanted to be and where we were headed. Then after almost ten years, we realized, “That’s it. We are not getting back to where we want to be. That place isn’t somewhere we can get to together. Let’s go our separate ways and chart a new course apart.”

This is all kind of a roundabout way of saying that it was time to end the relationship and move on. The fact that we have three kids together makes the future more complicated, but that does not mean that this was not right for us, and for them. We still can only take this one day at a time.

Here are some thoughts no matter where you are in the divorce process:

Healing is possible after a divorce.

Sometimes healing is only possible because of a divorce.

Divorce is not a “death sentence.”

When the relationship has become irreparable, divorce is freedom. It is a new lease on life. It is a new start.

There are sad days. There are hard days. The first few days after being served divorce papers, I cried daily, sometimes hourly. It was painful. The grief was crushing. There were times to reflect on the past and appreciate those days for what they were, but you can’t go back.

I watched “The Office” tonight alone.

It used to be a funny diversion for my wife and I to laugh and fantasize about our own relationship. Watching Jim and Pam’s fantasy relationship tonight made me sad and angry.

I scoffed at them. Honestly, I was upset about my own marriage and how it failed and how it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I wasn’t who I wanted to be. I couldn’t be who I wanted to be. I wasn’t who I thought I was. It is a place of deep regret for me.

After having dinner at a friend’s house with their family of four, I grieved the loss of eating a meal together with my family, cooking for them, being together, talking, relaxing.

Nostalgia is a trap. You can idealize the memories from your past and your grief-stricken memories paint your situation in a different light than the reality of how things were. Your hurting heart tells itself that it wasn’t that bad. Or it protests that this pain it feels is much worse than the destructive parts of this relationship that is ending.

Nonetheless, the family dinners, the hours snuggling on the couch watching TV, the mundane moments of being together all of us, those are all still losses. I had to grieve those and work through the new reality I find myself in today.

Change happens one step at a time. Day by day. Things do get better.

– Jason