Unsad

I keep wondering how long this little dark raincloud of sadness is going to linger about me. I'm not a sad, wallow-y person and so this all just feels wrong to me. Wrong, strange, uncomfortable. I feel like I'm an observer watching myself go thru this whole experience.

I can't talk to much of anyone without starting to cry. It takes everything I have to hold it all together. I was walking out of a store yesterday, a beautiful, sunny Seattle day, and I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes and I thought..."When am I going to get unsad?"

My friend Rich told me that the emotional impact of divorce is really the same as the death of a spouse. He was right. The life you once knew is over. And while, for me, that is a very good thing in many ways, it also means giving up the dream of what I had always hoped that my family life would be. It's also a hard reality to deal with the life that I thought I had wasn't real. It wasn't real at all. You think of all the bad times and you're relieved to be free of them. You think of the good times and feel a sense of sadness that those kinds of times will never happen again. And then you start dreaming about rebuilding your family and what your "new" family is going to look like. I'm scared. The challenge of raising 4 children primarily by myself is scary. I know I can do it, but it's still scary.

For the last two weeks I have been with my kids pretty much nonstop, until a little help arrived this weekend for a few hours (thank you Brittany!). Going thru all of this and trying to maintain some sense of sanity for my kids has been challenging, to say the least. Some days I would go so far as to say impossible!! It breaks my heart that Hannah wakes up every morning now and asks me..."You sad or happy today?" I wish I could shut it off and protect them from seeing me like this, but I don't know how to do that. Again...isn't there a pill for this????

This last weekend was moving weekend. There are lots of gaps and holes in my house now where furniture used to be. There is nothing in the den but a flatscreen tv sitting on the floor. It's all just stuff and I don't care what's gone, but it IS hard to see the holes. So, I've been trying to find ways to fill the holes, move stuff around and make it homey again. Just another step in moving forward on this journey to my new life...