Praying for a Guru
September 18, 2008
The paperwork is filed. Divorce is on it’s slow, indirect, pokey way. My soon-to-be-Ex returned the papers, all filled out, within a week of receiving them. I was so shocked at the quick turn around I had to get them out of my hands and filed them the next day. I completely turned my head inside out in the process.
Do people actually celebrate after filing for divorce? It’s what I imagined I would do. Nice lunch, glass of wine, flirty waiter. Instead I left work abruptly, came home, and laid on the couch for 6 hours. There might have been beer involved, but definitely no flirting. I basically freaked out. My anxiety was completely unexpected.
It has to do with the split in my life, the chasm, the emotional freefall that has accompanied leaving my husband in a place where I have no support network. No one to catch me, hold me, comfort me, help me close what feels like a torn apart, gaping chest wound. The bleeding heart, the darkness of depression, the ugly process of ending a marriage.
This is where the divorce gurus come in. They reassure me that I will feel better. They tell me that it’s OK for me not to be ready to date yet, but that I will be someday. They acknowledge the confusion, accept it as normal, suggest it will recede. They start to heal the torn heart, they calm the splitting head, they put the feet back on the ground. Everyone needs a guru. Or two.
So now I wait for the state to determine a date for my marriage to be over. I wait for a judge who doesn’t know me to decide if I can keep my house or if it has to be sold to split its meager value with my husband. I wait for the time that I can hand over the wedding ring that belonged to his family. And I talk to my gurus. They are the only clear path that I can find.
Limbo is the worst. I told my mother that being married to someone you no longer live with, and being in that dreadful not quite married, but not quite divorced stage is like being chained to a dead person. You just have to lug it around and there is not much you can do about it. When all the papers were signed, I celebrated. But the day the judge actually granted the divorce was pretty terrible–I was sooo happy to be free, but upset because I didn’t feel any different and I felt like a failure. It is different for everyone. Celebrate when you want, cry when you want! And if you want to do both, do both!
I’m doing a lot of both, randomly! Hopefully this in-between stage, “transitional” as my friends call it, will be over soon. It’s really awful, and hard to explain why. But it will all be better someday!