On snow day #3…after a 3 day weekend to begin with…
…have enjoyed the time with the kids. They are doing all the things kids should do on unscheduled free days…playing in the snow, having fun with neighbors, spending WAAYYY too much time looking at screens of various sorts, preparing treats of various sorts (including snow ice cream, meatballs, and banana bread), playing games, and using the extra time to cram for midterms that were scheduled for this week.
In my last post I think I may have presented that I feel people should feel sorry for me…My post made it seem as though I lament a life not lived that I should be able to create if I just “sought it out”…I know that’s the way it reads, because I know that is what I often feel. “If I just _______ ,then everything will be as I hoped/would like/desire” and it should just be that easy…
Trust me…I know it ISN’T that easy. I know, because I have tried. My ex always believed that you could “behave your way” to being…the “fake it till you make it” mentality. Though I don’t completely disagree…unfortunately there are circumstances where that doesn’t work. Sometimes it is still just “faking it”.
I faked it for such a long time…people may have believed that I had an idyllic family…my kids are well behaved, intelligent, outgoing, and well rounded. My husband had an important lucrative job, while I took care of the home front. From the beginning in the Midwest, to our relocation to the east coast, I was involved with the kids’ schools, sporting events, community volunteering, working part-time, and had a healthy, wide stretched group of friends and acquaintances. My husband was the peripheral to the whirlwind that was our family life. Always hovering around the edges. Even today, the kids remark about how “Dad just wasn’t around that much” so it must have been more evident to outsiders than I imagined at the time. Not that I didn’t take note, because I knew that work came first. I ALWAYS knew that work came first. I often begrudged my ex for being #3 on his list of priorities. There was no lack of desire, nor lack of requests, to be more important to him. I WANTED him to be involved. I WANTED him to be invested. I WANTED him to WANT to be a part of our family in a big way. I just didn’t see that HE didn’t want that…and I don’t know that he ever had, though he SAID he did. Or maybe I just didn’t make it alluring enough for him to want to be included? Or maybe it was something about my personality that made him feel shut out of it all…
I ponder my part in the demise of my marriage and the ultimate disintegration of my dreams for my family daily. Even though I know I have it pretty damn good already anyway with the four of us together. Unfortunately I vacillate between anger that I CAN’T create the life I desire for myself and my kids that includes a father/husband and remorse at the failing of my own attempts…a life that I envisioned…A nuclear family. A patriarch that would be a symbol of strength and resilience and pride to look up to. Maybe it’s my own shortsightedness that doesn’t allow me to see my ex as encompassing those characteristics in this current state. Maybe accepting him being those things under these new circumstances is what I am supposed to do…
Making Sense from MY Perspective 
I grieved the lost family unit and the lost soul-mate until fairly recently when I accepted the reality that he was not who I thought he was and what we had was not what I thought we had. I could not mourn any longer for what had not existed (or at least did not exist at the time the marriage ended). The accepting of my husband for who he is, rather than for what I wanted him to be has been uplifting. In other words; when I had the image in my head of this person who loved and cared for me, it was SO painful accepting what he had done. It really hurt. Accepting that he was not the caring person I thought he was but rather quite selfish, puts a different perspective on things.