It's Time

This year has been like being born.

After my ex-husband moved out, my aunt and her children came to spend a week with me, and she compared me in my hurt pain to the new flowers she planted in my garden. "You are new now, like the flowers," she said, "and like them, you are going to require a lot of care and time. You are fragile. Eventually, you will grow strong." I thought she was out of her mind. I was not a flower, I was a sniveling mess, and I hated myself for it, although I did know that her words had a ring of truth. I agreed that in time, I would be fine. At the time, I figured that in two years, I'd be myself again, so the mantra "two years" ran constantly through my head. "In two years, I'll okay. In two years, I won't be panicking anymore. In two years, I'll be myself again."

The reality is that two years later, I was entrenched in a relationship that I may as well call "Marriage, Continued" in that it was as emotionally unfulfilling and eerily similar to my marriage. Though I was involved with a man, he was reminiscent of my ex-husband and therefore familiar to me... totally a lateral move, not a step forward. I was not "better," I was merely "swimming in the river of denial." Even after an additional year, having extricated myself from that post-marital relationship, I was paralyzed about dating, furious at my ex-husband, and emotionally stymied by the future yawning before me -- alone.

Then 2008 hit. I spiraled downward. My close friend's marriage tanked. I spiraled faster. The hurricane. The weird year at work. Getting sick with a lung infection. Flooding. My uncle's death. Myriad car problems. Illnesses of friends of friends... deaths of friends of friends. The depression fell into a controllable situation, but it never departed completely, and honestly, it's still there, waiting for a vulnerable moment to leap out from the bushes and beat me down.

However, in the past few weeks, I've recognized that I really am like those little flowers my aunt planted so long ago. I've grown green little new shoots. I've even grown thorns. I've borne new blossoms. I have skills, defenses, wisdom, and hope -- hope! -- that I didn't used to have or haven't had in a long, long time. I can see, as clearly as with a new pair of glasses, that the world I've been watching all of my life is not the world in which I am living. I don't mean that as I've said it in the past... I never knew a husband could just leave... I never knew people really died... it's not that kind of realization. It's dawned on me, quite literally, that I can be both aware and have hope. Simultaneously.

In the past, hope meant being naive. Hope meant youthful optimism. Hope was something I lost in the divorce, as I lost my chance to grow old in my marriage, and as I lost my chance to marry as a maiden and live forever in the bosom of love.

In the years after the divorce, merely dating wasn't an option, because I knew I was was damaged goods as a divorcee. Rationally, it's just true that people divorce. They make mistakes, and they move on. However, I was damaged goods on two levels: I couldn't imagine the kind of faithful, steadfast, honorable man wanting a woman who'd failed at her marriage already. I saw my divorce as a "black mark" against my name, labeling me as unworthy. Also, I was literally damaged. Broken. Indeed, I was weak, vulnerable, and fragile -- just like those flowers. Instinctively, I knew one man's inadvertent misstep on my feelings or on my heart would crush me, as I wasn't strong enough to bounce back from even the most innocently thoughtless remark.

Safer to stay away.

But those green buds have grown bark on them and have become true branches of a much stronger plant than a mere flower.

I resent having had to grow these muscles, but the resentment doesn't undo that I do, in fact, have them. I am strong. I am a new person than I used to be. While I have so many fears, my friends tease me to no end, I do know that I am stronger than anything that makes me afraid, and with their help, I will stay strong. I have my faith. I have my family. The past is the past, and it has made me a better person than I used to be. Ripped from the cocoon-like womb of retreat, I understand now that how I spend the days is how I spend my life, and I won't spend them hiding from that yawning future. I am emerging from the safety and security into the bright light of the rest of my life. It starts now.

To quote Alice Cullen, "It's time."