True North. Returning to Me.

 I've found it harder and harder to write lately. When I was raging, the feelings and therefore the words were easy. Because it was justified rage and that's all it was in the moment. I always say that anger is nearly always a mask for other emotions. As rage does, it started to fade into more honest, and far more complicated emotions.  I found myself in an alternating loop of writings that felt like petty drags on someone who doesn't care and baring deep wounds to my core, inflicted by someone who doesn't care. Maybe he cares, you say. Maybe he too is struggling to navigate this new normal (that he created by pretending he didn't have his girlfriend living in our house with him until I figured it out via texts to my kids, Instagram feeds, and kissy videos)!  I say nah. If he cared, he would have kept up with the two weeks where he texted our daughter daily (though not our son because that's not as satisfying because he isn't as interested in the brag photos...

 In the beginning it all felt very intense, like betrayal and lies and drama. This new information made me feel unsafe. How could someone I considered part of my circle have a whole life we were told nothing about? And how could it be SO public without us having known? How did we not notice? Looking back, I did notice. There were small things. I just couldn’t imagine it any other way than I had always seen it. As the weeks pass, I realize that for our lives here at home, it’s just the same old normal with a bit of new information. We’re back to once a week texts, if that. The kids are done talking about it. I’m the only one still checking in to see if they’re okay. They are and they aren’t, but since no one with any ability to make it better is trying, we’re where we are going to get. In the meantime, it’s back to out of sight, out of mind. I suppose it will flare at Christmas when their dad will resurface and expect them to have “processed” and they will have to decide what they w...

After I knew I was leaving my marriage, after I had told him, but before I figured out what the coming weeks and years would look like, I tried to start to heal. Healing when you're living in the thing that broke you is...challenging. I kept two jars on my desk, one tied with twine, open at the top, and labeled "truths," the other covered in dark tape so I couldn't see inside it, with just a narrow opening at the top, labeled "lies." I spent the weeks quickly filling those jars with tiny folded pieces of paper that told the story of how utterly broken I was by the emptiness that was my marriage. Truths "I deserve to be happy." "My children will understand one day." "We will be okay." "I am loveable." Lies "This is all my fault." "I am destroying my children." "I am unlovable."  Sometime around this time, I began reading Glennon Doyle's book "Untamed." I had no idea how much I...

Today is one of those days.  My children's 46 year old father is posting pictures of his 34 year old girlfriend posing on a bed, the bed my16 year old points out she used to sleep in as a child. It's not nefarious, no. Just her surrounded by some running shit I presume she got for free or that they're using to try and get other shit for free. Or money. Whatever. It honestly doesn't matter to me anymore. I see him for who he is choosing to be. Mostly, I'm embarrassed for him that he's acting like someone who doesn't have children, property to pay for and maintain, responsibilities, a job, etc. All of the things he's apparently turned his back on to play house like a teenager.  I saw it, I made fun, rolled my eyes, and moved on. Until I saw my (actual teenager) daughter's post today. Despite his claims that he will do better when he's "back home" in Colorado, where he's lived this blissful new existence for a whole 2% of his life, and...

Home means so many things. Home is, of course, the building where your stuff lives and where you lay your head most nights. It's where your children live and come back to someday. It's where you return to rest, reset, feel safe. It's your people. It is a feeling of peace and calm, and a sense of identity and a place you can most gently exist. And it's a thing you can lose and mourn and rebuild.  "Outside" has always felt like home to me. I grew up in the woods, building forts, following game trails, sitting on the banks of ponds and rivers. Outside still feels most like home to me. It's the only place I breathe deeply, where time slows, and worries eventually drift away on the breeze instead of trapped inside my head.  But like nothing else, I love the mountains! The mountains stole my heart from the first moments I spent in New Hampshire's Whites to my solo time deep in the rugged Montana Rocky Mountain range and every mountain trail and peak I've...

Time doesn't heal. People don't need it to process. That doesn't actually make anything better. In fact, like a thousand cuts, time without care, action, effort, and changed behavior just allows a thing to fester.  I'm straddling the chasm that time without effort has created and on one side, I'm leaning toward gratitude. I have spent the last four years living behind glass. I couldn't take a deep breath and my vision was cloudy. I lived within boundaries that I felt I had no choice but to accept because, when I made an unbearable choice, said the hard words, moved my entire life for the second time in six months completely alone with two hurting kids in tow, it took less than a month for the encroachment to start. It was less than a month before my house was no longer just mine, where my kids' vacations were no longer ours to plan, where the lines I had drawn where stomped on and ignored. I was still trapped.  So I made the best of things. I chose acceptanc...