Getting Too Honest: Processing Through Post-Divorce

I have decided to simply show up here in my little corner of the internet world again. As I am. Today. Right now.

When I was newly married, I blogged A LOT.

I just sifted through many different posts and archived/hid them from those years because it feels too raw to keep them available — I have lots of complex feelings about it all. Tears welled up and memories coursed through my head. I felt sad for both of us, like I do pretty often. We were so young, entirely groomed for dysfunction, fully ignorant, very good at going through all the right motions and doing the Right Things but never actually knowing the other person intimately. We missed out on the true sacredness of what marriage can offer, and didn’t even know it… that will forever be sad to me.

Like, I really thought I was an all-star at marriage. I packed his lunches and even sent them with little notes for years. We had a garden we built and nourished in the back of our tiny APARTMENT patio. When we got into arguments I would step into another room to pray for him and ask God to soften my heart. I tried the whole lingerie thing for a year, you know, dressed to impress the man I was married to. One day he got home from work and I was IN AN APRON ONLY — like how lucky for him you know. You’re welcome for the visual grandma and mom’s husband.

There were way too many blogs about How to Respect Your Husband and one was cringingly titled Dress To Please Him. Ew. What. I don’t even know.

When I think of my young married self, I am sad because she really wanted to be known in intimate ways, partake in the most sacred and supposedly safe union; she wanted to be seen and loved anyways. She wanted to be adored and cherished for all the bits and pieces of her that were a mess and also beautiful. I mean, I still want those things. And I do believe my (former) husband did adore me.

Our marriage itself just… it got so… shitty. Which I get that all marriages have their multiple trenches and “I would never be divorced because divorce isn’t an option” and all marriages are hard… but.

But damn.

I got married without even knowing how to love myself.

Our divorce is obviously far more than that, but we’ll get there one day maybe.

Here I am…eight years after saying I Do…divorced and still not knowing how to love myself. I think I’ve taken some really big steps towards loving myself in the last two years, but I have a lot further to go than I wanted to realize.

I said in my blog post yesterday “Healing means forgiving myself, which is a road I can’t seem to even find on a map anymore.” It originally said “…which is a road I don’t know how to walk down.” But then I stared at those words and sadly thought, “Hell I don’t even see that road, I can’t find it.”

I think I might love myself again through writing. It’s a gift, and I want to accept it.

I stopped writing around the last time I got miraculously + unexpectedly pregnant in 2018 and then miscarried that baby.

I stopped writing because that pregnancy and miscarriage did something in me. When I found out I was pregnant I about fainted because I didn’t want or desire another biological child with the man I was married to. But I couldn’t figure out WHY. I was someone who longed to experience pregnancy and birth. So what was wrong with me?

Until one night in August I voiced a whole lot of honest things out loud in front of a friend for the very first time and she named it.

It’s an impossible journey to unpack and share, especially on the face of the internet. What I will say is there was lying about certain things for years, and then there would be help/healing. Then more lying and hiding. This turned into some real dysfunction in what should have been our sacred and intimate married life, but was instead trauma compounded on trauma.

All this to say… blogging through what I thought was a nearly perfect marriage and then realizing how much of a fantasy I had worked up in my head to survive hidden trauma/abuse/dysfunction really made me sit down in the whole blogging realm of myself.

But I am still really stuck and stagnant in my healing process and I am going to try to writing through it.

I mean…

I blogged through the grief of spiritual abuse and transitioning communities.

I blogged through the sorrow and mess of my parents divorce and remarrying new people.

I blogged through our domestic adoption process.

I blogged through adopting while pregnant.

I blogged through miscarriages and trying to get pregnant, wanting to experience it fully just once.

I blogged through my traumatic home birth cesarean story.

I blogged through the IMMENSE and impossible-to-understand — unless you’re in the trenches too — journey of foster parenting.

And now here I have been…trying to walk through this new ridiculous identity and reality of being divorced. A “single mom.”

I shared yesterday I still feel weird saying I am a single mom because
1. it implies I am the sole parent — I’m not
and
2. it’s just not at all what I wanted or envisioned or could have wrapped my head around. Still apparently can’t wrap my mind around it.

Clearly I have a lot of work to do. I thought I was doing it but really I was doing what I’m good at and that is just pushing on and through and creating another beautiful yet subpar + deceiving-to-even-myself life while secretly hoping it’ll just fix itself.

You know what I miss? I miss being a foster mom.

There is a part of me that sometimes thinks about how…if I just trudged on through the sexual dysfunction happening in my marriage, continued dying inside, it would have been worth it because I’d still get to be living a pretend fantasy life. I’d still be fostering and adopting, I’d just be pretending through it all that I was okay.

This is unhealthy and shameful to admit, but it’s real: having kids with immense trauma demands A LOT and it can be a great distraction from your own shit. And it worked for about a year and a half. Kind of. I mean, my former husband and I barely spent time acknowledging the other, we didn’t touch and if we did it felt weird and awkward and uncomfortable, and I felt so lonely and unseen and hated myself…BUT I LOVED THOSE KIDS DAMMIT.

Obviously I KNOW it isn’t sustainable or even loving to live that way.

It wasn’t loving of me to focus so much on their needs and trauma that I ignored my own. Because it still leaked out in the confines of our home and we weren’t at all displaying a marriage I would hope they’d model.

PLUS the reality is, trauma has a way of blindsiding us when we least expect it. The kids themselves did not cause our divorce or lead us to it — it makes me ANGRY…so so angry…to know we are part of a stupid statistic where they say Some # Percentage of Marriages End in Divorce When They Decide To Foster.

Kids in general, foster/adoptive/biological, have a way of illuminating dysfunction that had already been growing loooong before they even showed up. Ours was just really confusing while it was happening, hidden, and I was an all star at repression and lowering myself.

Because that is what we are taught as baby Christians who grow up in the Christian community with people who do love us and do believe what they’re teaching us, but damn do I think they got a lot wrong and effed a bunch of us up.

laughable pic of my kids (well, Ira is laughable…Sage is being cute) to break up the text

We were taught to deny ourselves, to take up our cross and to value others above yourself. DO NOT read me wrong here: I love and value these scriptures and believe they were God-breathed. They are Truth.

But what happened to me and too many other girls growing-into-women is that we were essentially taught that our experiences don’t matter. Our hurt doesn’t matter. Our dignity doesn’t need to exist.

AS LONG AS we are denying ourself, laying down our life for others, and valuing others above ourself, then we are like Jesus. The End. Periodt.

So as I was being “accidentally” sexually traumatized for years within a marriage and also lied to my face while also being totally gaslit without knowing what gaslighting meant… I was also trying to figure out how to be the beautiful woman of Christ I am during that time and “deny myself, take up my cross, and put my spouse and his needs/interests first.”

I’d sit on the edge of our bed crying… It isn’t his fault. It isn’t my fault either, but I seem to be strong enough to handle it, so I will just keep soldiering on and even though I am crying, even thought I am saying things that should break a husband’s heart and he should listen to, even though this and that… I still felt this very real responsibility to somehow make it make sense in my head and just keep going, making less of every thing I felt that was not pure or holy or safe or sacred.

“Somehow someday it would be fixed,” and even though it wasn’t at all even with counseling, we’d made a beautiful family and were doing beautiful things and his career was starting and maybe we’d be able to buy a house soon ya know, and really just settle down and I can write a bunch of books while mothering a bunch of children from other wombs because that is what I want to do.

I want to make it very clear here that I care deeply about all the souls I’ve ever met or known. Even the ones who have hurt me the deepest.

I know for a fact I have hurt them too.

And we weren’t the people for each other, sincerely. Also it’s okay for you to roll your eyes at that statement, I get it. I do.

It’s that thing of walking the tension of sharing the broken truth of what our marriage was, while also being honoring to the human lives involved. I don’t see my children’s father as my enemy or as someone I want vengeance against...I see pretty damn clearly that he is broken and has deep wounds like the rest of us, bleeding all over everyone else. But out of those wounds we get to decide how to live our life, and I have come to the point where I believe certain lines shouldn’t be crossed in marriage. And some damage simply cannot be undone here on earth. Even in marriage. Even as a Christian.

I’m really bad at valuing myself in an intimate relationship. I think a lot of women are. And a lot of men too.

Like, I think I am so spectacular and unique and special — I am gracious and patient and understanding. I can work through anything with you, as long as you’re honest and wanting to also create connection instead of disconnection.

But part of what comes with this beauty in me is an unhealthy habit of dismissing myself and what I need emotionally/spiritually/physically, lowering my standards, enabling you.

I enable in intimate relationships, calling it grace and understanding and compassion. And this isn’t love. This is not me loving really well, this is me naming a habit that will continue to create unhealthy cycles if I don’t work against it.

It’s also a form of codependent — I STILL want/try/habitually protect my former husband and his feelings and his ego. I also want to protect the man I dated for nearly a year after my divorce. But protecting other people to the extent that I am shut up and stop using my gifts and stop helping other women get unstuck or out of unhealthy/abusive cycles… well that’s not worth it anymore.

All of this is hard to figure out how to work through for ME, but I am determined to do it so I don’t keep repeating this horrible cycle.

Yes to the book Boundaries, I need to re-read it. Yes to the book The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown, I need to keep reading it. Yes to working through abuse-healing and grief and trauma. It extends into childhood, where we were groomed for dysfunction.

For now, I am doing my reading and my journaling, and I hope to keep showing up here. As I am. Right now.