It's been a long time, some of you have heard the news from family members, though I've talked to very few people about it...these last months since Spring 2013 have been painful and traumatic and hurt filled for the whole family. The title here isn't a clever play on words, after over 22 years of marriage and raising two beautiful children, my husband and I are going our separate ways and have been working through separation and are in the process of divorce.
Don't get me wrong in thinking I blame my various inherited disabilities and the associated levels of grinding pain I'm living in to have been the sole, or maybe not even the main cause of our divorce. I seriously offered my husband a divorce for the first time when I realized just how far our lives would be from anything either of us had planned, and just how grim it was going to get to live with someone who was in constant agony, as if a dentist's drill were going after 1 quadrant of their head 24 hours every day with no let up, while the ground glass feeling in all the joints on my extremities that had been my version of fibromyalgia and flaring was flared at the same time. It was pretty horrendous. If I didn't have a throbbing piercing pain stabbing from my eye back through my head in tune with my heartbeat like an ice pick was being hammered through my eye, I was feeling the back pain from multiple sports injuries or the grinding glass over raw hamburger torture that assaulted my ankles, knees, shoulders, elbows, and wrists. Rick and I didn't have to be told about gateway pain, we lived it. And I never lived very far from my syringes of migraine relief, message, and acupuncture in those first years after I had my kids and sent my body chemistry and our lives into purgatory.
Rick and I both believed and believe in marriage though. 22 years is a statement in that. He was my best friend for all of those years and my biggest cheer leader, the person who supported me the most. He was also one of the people who needed the most from me that no matter how much I gave always needed more to feel loved. And for someone, me, who was lucky if I had three hours in a day that I could spend outside my bed, or the atmosphere of my home which I'm accustomed to, a husband needing reassurance that he's loved, children needing the same, a house needing to be at a level of clean that doesn't make my now additional lifelong medical conditions worse, and trying to squeeze out any alone time in the midst of all this didn't happen. I was being run into the ground further physically and emotionally. My doctors' had all hoped that menopause would make things better. It didn't.
The doctors just let me go back to medicines that had worked for a while in the past until my body builds up a tolerance. It's a pretty common thing to do, especially for preventative medicines. You hope you can come around in a few years and use them again when the tolerance might be down. I could. I got lucky.
Then I found out that time marches on. Arthritis has taken hold pretty strongly in my back and hands, where it used to just be muscle and tendon damage from old injuries and fibromyalgia...my thyroid which had been chemically burned out when I was younger and had Grave's Disease to protect my heart, was now under attack by my immune system, and I had to face that the auto immune's like my mother had died of, must run in families, like all the rest of it. Then the immune system went for my eye...those who follow this know that months of retinal cysts and inflammation finally led to a replacement lens and eye sight not quite up to par. I've been told that it will be 18 months at the outside before the lens in the other eye will need replacement.
All of this, here, now, takes so much energy. I hardly have energy to spare to not be selfish. It's taken me almost two years, and I'm still not quite all moved in and set up to live independently without one of my conditions kicking off and causing major problems. Everything has to be arranged just so. I can't even smell other peoples' perfume or dryer sheets without it setting me back for days. I wish I had a bubble to live in sometimes.
Marriages take two people working to make them thrive. Rick and I communicated, but we stopped being able to be or give the other what they needed. For some weird reason my kids keep trying to make me a saint in all this. I can't accept that. Even though it was fallout from some actions of Rick's that finally splintered the family, the problems were there and were things I've always tried to work on to make better. But in real life some things don't get better, some things just are and you can exhaust yourself trying to change it as much as you want but until you find the grace to accept what is you will continue to feel buried alive and burdened.
from a puzzled goddess taking stock and figuring it out...blessed be.
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