I am just another divorced woman now.

These are the words that sit on my chest like bricks when I try to breathe.

I am just another divorced woman, another single mother, another failed marriage.

He told me he wasn’t IN love with me anymore, and that he hadn’t been in years. I had thought it was another challenging time in our marriage and that we could make it through this tough spot like we had so many times before. I had taken comfort in the painful challenges we overcame as proof we could survive anything. It turns out all of those painful experiences had only broken down our love over time. Staying together through them was just putting bandages on wounds we failed to heal. We had failed and it was over.

Marriage is work right? It’s the story we’re told. And if we both work at it then it can’t fail and we will be together until death do us part. I thought it was normal to feel like it was an immense effort every day to be married, and that us still being together after 14 years was proof the work was….working. Now in hindsight I see how the narrative I told myself about “working on our marriage” was to justify how unhappy I was. My heart loved him, my ego loved resisting defeat, and together they convinced me to stay too long.

I always crushed on the brooding misunderstood antihero in stories, so it is no surprise I was head over heels for him from the start. He is a complex human who wants to be a good man, but struggles to maintain it. He is difficult, but in his gentle moments he is the most loving man I’ve ever met. He is a self loathing, judgemental, and critical man that is also ambitious, considerate, and tender. Sprinkle in an anxiety disorder, PTSD, and an inability to self regulate. It was impossible to get through an entire day without triggering him, even though most days he tried really hard to manage without lashing out. His fragility overcompensated with a temper. He struggled to be vulnerable, which made emotional intimacy impossible, so we never really felt understood by one another. I learned to make myself small to keep him comfortable, and I called it love. I poured myself into fixing his unhappiness, and called it love. It was codependency. No wonder I lashed out in my own ways and no wonder he stopped loving the woman I had become. I hadn’t been me in a long time. 

I carry a lot of guilt and shame for the ugly parts of me that came out looking for ways to escape and cope. I am facing parts of myself I don’t like very much. After years of watching my marriage crumble I tried to find comfort in other people, avoided feeling the voids our marriage left, and avoided truths. I was a coward when things came up that I needed to tell him, because I wanted to avoid the fighting and didn’t feel confident I could communicate in a way that was understood. I forgave his transgressions, addictions, and explosions because I felt we loved each other enough to know we could be better and would not be those mistakes forever. I loved him, I loved being a family, he loved me, he loved being a family, and I thought that would be enough to keep us “working” on our marriage. We tried marriage counseling on and off for years, I read books on marriage and being married to someone with anxiety, I followed podcasts and blogs, and I tried to use all my skills as a counselor to repair the broken parts I could see. I tried to focus on myself by working out, building my career, staying social, and being the best mom I could be. I thought I was doing good “work”. But I was mostly still avoiding truths and hard feelings. It caught up with me and I ended up another divorced woman.

I won’t tell myself this divorce isn’t a failure. It is a collection of many failures. 

Being another divorced woman doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I don’t have to focus on the things I’m losing that hurt. I don’t have to remain the woman I was in the marriage. I’m not damaged, weak, or bad. I am learning. And I am not defined by my mistakes.

So far things are being handled with grace and compassion 90% of the time, and we are amicable. I am finding strength I didn’t know we had, and it brings me optimism. 

I am another divorced woman.

I am another divorced woman who turns their divorce into a new beginning full of growth. Another divorced woman who let herself expand unapologetically to transform into her best self, let herself forgive and shed the parts of herself that need to evolve, and let herself find happiness even when it makes others uncomfortable.