Continued...

Let me say this: I despise blamers. I think the blame game is a weak and cowardly way to explain things. When you learn to live with the hand you've been dealt is when you will learn to live, period. I spent many years of my life trying to figure out exactly who made me such a fuck up, which parent I got my short attention span from, my slow metabolism, blah blah. My parent's divorce was my blanket-blame excuse for most everything. It's only been in the past few years that I discovered how freeing and absolutely liberating it is to accept YOUR part in how you've ended up.

Is it Big Daddy's fault that I'm divorced? Well, he was the one who left, so in a way, yeah. But why did he leave? Obviously needs weren't being met. Bottom line: he didn't want to be married to me. That hurt, at first, to even think those words. It meant that I failed. No one wants to fail at anything, and especially not at something so massive as a marriage. The fact that he was nailing a secretary a decade younger than me most likely wasn't doing squat to help our marriage, but again, it just means that something was lacking from me. Ouch.

I spent countless hours mulling, obsessing over what I did/didn't do...I gained weight, yes, but a cursory glance around any big gathering of people shows me that women twice my size are hanging onto hubby. My skills as a housekeeper are legendarily laughable. I am not Typhoid Jenny but you probably wouldn't have wanted to eat off my floors. Again, I watch Hoarders and a good percentage of those chicks are married. And what about the stuff I put up with? God forbid I say anything that may imply anything negative about a certain someone's prowess (or lack of it) in the boudoir, but I will say that I spent twelve years of my life pretending to have my socks knocked off in one minute and hearing "I'm sorry" at the end. I guess you just never know at what point your negatives will overshadow your positives, or more importantly, how much or how little negative stuff your spouse can handle. If I ever do get married again, I think the biggest difference will be better communication.

The thing I love most about life is that you really do get second and third and two-hundredth chances. I lived so much of my life under a cloud of woe is me, when I finally found the strength to step away from it, I was almost blinded by how much hope and good there is out there. And yes, I am puking a little in my mouth reading my Pollyanna tripe, but that's how I feel.

Before I step down from the pulpit, I will say that there are things I still struggle with. I struggle daily with forgiveness. Part of me wants to forgive Big Daddy for what he did, but a small, bitchy part of me wants him to someday feel the pain and anguish that I have felt. He never had to sit with a sobbing kid in the hallway at school, a sweet kid whose world was falling apart and couldn't get through a school day without breaking down. He never had to bear the brunt of a young girl's anger, a girl so pissed at the universe that she had daily meltdowns which shook the walls of the house. I went through all of that, and go through things with the kids to this day that would not have happened if their parents had stayed together. But again...it's all part of how we got here. I am hopeful that the way I am learning to deal will rub off on the kids and that they will be able to live a freer life than I did. So the battle with forgiveness continues.

But I still have "You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch" as his personal ringtone on my phone. Baby steps, right?