Disappear.
I know, right? Super annoying.
The truth is, I've just been down. Ish. Not sad, exactly, but frustrated. Kind of ticked. It's March, and I'm sad and I'm remembering New York last year and how much fun I had there with my family, and that made me think of the phone records I have showing that John talked to his current girlfriend several times on Eli's birthday last year, in New York. On our family vacation. Which kind of ruins my memories of the whole trip, and then I catch myself wondering when he talked to her, what he told me he was doing when he snuck away to speak to her. Kind of puts a bad taste in my mouth, and no matter how well I am doing today, I still hate that his birthday was tainted that way.
I was reading a friend's blog, one I haven't been able to catch up on in a while, and it turns out she is going through a divorce, too. I was totally sucked in and reading and feeling terrible for not knowing, and as I read the thing that hit me the hardest and made me strangely jealous is that she very openly writes about how she feels and the marriage and the divorce and it seems to help her.
I'm guessing her ex-husband and his girlfriend don't read her blog on a daily basis. Okay, I don't think her ex has a girlfriend, but still. Just saying. It's pretty awesome that she can actually write whatever she wants. When I write about anything pertaining to...well, pretty much anything, I have to write knowing that every word I say is going to be picked apart and read into and then complained about, not to mention the fact that it's always, always misunderstood.
Last week I got questioned because in my post about Haiti I referred to John as my husband. One freaking sentence in a post that was about much bigger things, and that's what got latched onto. A lot of times, as much as I'd like to share what I'm actually feeling or thinking I don't do it in the way I want to because it seriously messes with my head that someone who is sleeping with my husband insists on reading what I write.
Oops. That's not going to go over well.
But seriously.
On the one hand, I'm mad at myself for letting it get to me enough to water down my posts. On the other hand, it boggles my mind that someone would want to read the blog of their boyfriend's not quite ex wife and who has the audacity to get offended when the people who comment on that blog don't think she's awesome.
I'm probably so up in arms because when I get mad at John, I tell him. We talk through it. We've worked through an insane amount of issues in the past eight months, and I'm not mad at him anymore. I'm disappointed in him, I'm frustrated with him. But this girl, I've never met her aside from one email exchange and I am mad at her. I'm mad at her, yet I feel sorry for her, both in equal measure. I can say without a doubt that every time I have prayed for John since the day he left I have also prayed for this girl.
Because the thing is I think that everyone is redeemable. I think everyone deserves a second chance, no matter how hard it might be to forgive them and try again. Just like I believed so strongly that John and I could rebuild our marriage and make it something better and fuller than it was before, for ourselves and our kids, I actually believe this girl deserves a chance to be someone who didn't help end a marriage and a family, someone who gets the privilege of being with a man who is doing everything with her for the first time, who is going to be as into weddings and morning sickness and babies as she is She deserves to be with someone she won't have to second guess, who she won't always think could be cheating on her. She's just starting her life...she's the same age I was when I married John, and when I think of how young I really was then, despite how much I thought I knew...
It's just sad. For all of us. Me, John, her, her ex fiance. All four kids. Our families. We can move on, survive, maybe even thrive, but it won't change the fact that this shouldn't be happening, that there was a better solution for every one of us in this situation and no one was strong or brave enough to follow through on it.
My friends just went to the Focus on the Family marriage conference, and someone, Jen I think, quoted that every marriage has an ebb and flow, and that getting divorced during a hard time is like cutting off your foot because you have a hangnail.
And no matter how much I recover, how much I know that I may very well be better off, at my core I still believe that we're cutting off our foot instead of going for a pedicure.
