Hinged At The Heart

This is how my mind works about divorce: you’ve done all you can do, nothing is working, you’ve outgrown one another or someone hasn’t grown at all, and it’s time to move on. Now I will acknowledge for all the people who believe in for better or worse til death do you part, that I understand your commitment, your belief in the truth of those words, and I applaud those who live those thoughts until the end.

I also believe that sometimes, things are not just meant to be, including some marriages. I also don’t believe in the theory of “staying together for the children”. I divorced from my first marriage in 1996 and I promise you, my children had already seen and heard more than they needed to and our home afterward was free of tension and all the problems that came with trying to repair something that was terminally broken.

But I also believe that if you have tried your hardest and taken all you can take, that once that marriage is over, you’re not particularly ready to jump out there and do it all again. I’m really just not sure how you could just turn those feelings on and off like that, unless they had already been dead for a lot longer than you ever admitted to yourself or anyone else.

Late 1998 I would meet what I call the true love of my life. He would become a part of our everyday lives, every school event, my son’s tee-ball games, baseball and football games, building barb-wire fences in the freezing cold to protect my children’s baby puppies, and teaching them both lessons and advice about everything in life that would transpire and need explanation or conversation. He would attend family holiday dinners, some of our vacations, and every 4^th of July in the back of a pick-up truck.

But that man and I would not marry for another eight years, I wasn’t ready, he wasn’t ready, and it just worked better that way. I made a good living and I could afford, without monetary pressures, to raise my children alone, in a home that I could provide myself.  Nonetheless, he was a huge part of our lives and my children leaned on him for all the things a father is for; and he provided all of those things without blinking an eye.

On July 2^nd, I will have been married to that same wonderful man for nine years and a part of his life for almost seventeen years. When we would finally marry, we knew we were ready. That eight years or so of dating, yet spending an immense amount of time together as well as alone, gave us both an opportunity to see each other in almost every light possible, which for me, gave a much truer and more clear meaning to “for better or worse” than all those years ago.

Happy Anniversary to the missing piece of my complicated puzzle – you’re permanently super-glued into the big picture now; our big bonus-united as one equals all, family picture.