Tag: divorce

Posted on

The Doctor is in.

This past summer, I went to see a psychologist of my own volition.  I have lived a crazy roller coaster of events over the last three years…career change, divorce, promotion at work that was ANOTHER career change, and a romantic relationship that challenged me at every turn.  So, I decided to consult a professional to see if I did indeed have a few screws loose.

My reasoning was this:  If you think you have cancer, do you wait until it’s eating away at your flesh to call the doctor?  No.  Likewise, I figured it was better to seek professional help BEFORE I went too far off the deep end and wound up at Walmart at midnight wearing nothing but a chicken costume.

When I began this blog, my main goal was to smash stereotypes and negative connotations.  Therapy and mental health both carry with them such a stigma, and IT SHOULDN’T BE LIKE THAT, FOLKS.  For too long, seeking the advice of a counselor has been ingrained in us that you have to be “crazy” to ask for help.

NOT TRUE.

I have to stop here and admit I am much more fortunate than most.  I have an amazing support system…so amazing, in fact, that when life hands me lemons, my biggest challenge is deciding who I should reach out to first to help me slice the lemons up to make lemonade.  I’m not exaggerating, either.  My “tribe” stretches from my workplace to my own ZIP code, from Tennessee to Missouri, from seventh-grade friends to people I just met this summer.  Believe me when I say that lack of support was not a driving factor in my decision to ask for help.  But friends, no matter how well-meaning, are unable to be one hundred percent unbiased, because they have your best interests at heart.  (Duh…otherwise, why would they be your friends?)  No, I sought help because I wanted a professional, evidence-based, unbiased opinion.  Enter Dr. Rogers.

As a side note…before my visit, I kept picturing the scene in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” when the doctor wants the patient to tell him where he dreamed the Wonka bars are hidden, complete with a chaise lounge and a doctor with a bad hairpiece.  Dr. Rogers and her office were none of the above.  First of all, it was more like being in someone’s well-decorated living room.  Second of all, she had short hair, tattoos, and took off her shoes and tucked her feet up as soon as we started talking.  Finally, she let me talk…and talk…and talk…and when I finally came up for air, she told me point-blank:  “You don’t need to see a therapist.  What you’re looking for is a fortune teller with a crystal ball.”  Wow. Hit the nail on the head with that one, didn’t she?

…she also determined that I am, in fact, very sane and NOT crazy, nor did I have a need for any type of medication.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things, believe me.  We each find healing in our own unique way.  For some of us, that healing comes with medication; for others, it’s talk therapy, or EMDR, or a litany of other methods). For me, the “cure” wasn’t going to come from a bottle of pills.  Instead, I had to reach deep within myself and find the ability to forgive myself for my mistakes and shortcomings.  I had to learn to give until it hurt, and then give some more.  In fact, the only “prescription” she gave me went like this…

As humans, we yearn for a life that looks like we EXPECT it to look.  We might expect at age 40, we’ll own a house with a yard and have 2.3 children.  We might expect to still be able to fit into our high school-sized clothing (yes, please!)  Some of us might expect that by age 40, we will have paid off all our student loan debt (another yes, please, from this girl).  Others of us expect to have raised our kids to an acceptable age where we can travel with our partner while the kids frolic at home. We have expectations of others, from how our coworkers treat us to how our children should behave in public.  The hardest ones are the expectations we have of ourselves that we fail to live up to…the expectation that things SHOULD be different than they are.

Having said that, here is the “prescription” she gave me:

Every day, I am to take my daily expectations and realign them.  That is not to say I should LOWER them per se, just realign them.  I start at the bottom and choose the one, ONLY ONE, thing I have to have.  For me, I know what the answer is…I have to fall asleep curled in my partner’s arms. Always.  He is my safe harbor, the source of all quiet energy in my soul.  So, I start there.  And anything — ANYTHING — else is just a bonus.  My realigned expectations can only include my bottom line, my one non-negotiable.

There have been days since she gave me the prescription that it has worked miraculously.  I get all the grocery shopping done, my kids don’t draw blood from one another, my boys lift up BOTH SEATS every time they pee, my hair doesn’t frizz, and I catch every light green on the way home from work.  But there’s other days when every shirt I put on shows all my fat rolls (front and back), I have no tampons in my stash at work and then the machine in the bathroom eats my quarter and I have to track down the maintenance man to ask HIM to retrieve the tampon from the crummy machine, my leather seats burn my legs because I leave the sunroof open in my car, and I get behind a woman in the self-checkout who wants to write a check for her groceries.  And on those days…the prescription works even better.

I no longer see the therapist, not because I feel as though I have been “cured,” but because I now understand that it is up to me to work with the tools — the prescription, if you will — that she provided me.  We are, each of us, a work in progress.  If the progress of your work includes seeking counseling or outreach for mental health struggles, there is no shame in that.  Help me shatter the walls that have caused us to think we have to be “nuts” to ask for help.

And if you happen to see someone in Walmart at midnight dressed like a chicken, well…

 

Posted on

let me bake you a cake.

Imagine the dinner guest of your dreams is coming to your house, and you want to make a perfect meal for them.  What is an amazing meal without a delicious dessert, full of peanut butter and chocolate and sprinkles?  In my opinion, dessert is the cherry on top of a great meal (pun intended).  You’d work for hours to make sure that dessert was worthy of being presented to the guest of honor.  Not only would it be pleasing to the eye — like a photo right out of a book — but it would be all gooey deliciousness inside, too.  Your guests would oooh and ahhh over the pure delight they took in partaking of such an amazing treat.  They would surely be very impressed with all the time you took in creating such a treasure, with all the hard work and love you poured into making it just right.

…but what if the dessert more closely resembled the Jello mold that Aunt Bethany brings to the Griswold’s house for Christmas, complete with cat food as a crunchy topper?  What if all you had to serve your guests was last year’s fruitcake?

How would that change their opinion of you?

More importantly, how would that change your opinion of yourself?  If your cake wasn’t picture perfect, would you beat yourself up? I mean, how could you be so inept to present such an esteemed guest with store-bought cookies from Aldi, for heaven’s sake?

There are many ways in which life delivers us desserts.  Not all of them are picture-perfect, either.

For example, if marriage was a cake, mine would be like the one in “Great Expectations,” full of maggots and crumbling apart.  The layers would not be icing and fondant; instead, they would be regret and tears and guilt.

Three years ago, I got divorced.  There were a lot of factors that contributed to the demise of my 11-year marriage, but the end result was the same.  And although both of us added, both knowingly and unknowingly, to the the pile of straws that broke the camel’s back, it was me who finally sent the camel to pasture.  I ended my marriage.  Me.  This is a fact that I have always owned up to.   This is the first layer of my cake.  This is the layer of failure.

The divorce wasn’t messy, per se.  I stayed in my house with the children, the same house they had always lived in.  I found someone new to love, and so did my ex-husband.  He’s been remarried two years now.  He always loved the idea of marriage.  He loved being a husband.  He once told me that the hardest part of us separating was the fact that he lost his friend, too, and not just his wife.  Add a layer of guilt to the cake.

My children were younger when it happened — five and three — and while my oldest has lots of memories of us as an intact family unit, my youngest do not.  The life that they now have is really the only one they remember.  They don’t remember Christmases with Mom and Dad together, or family vacations, except in photographs.  This is the layer of sadness.

I have been in a relationship with my current partner for nearly four years, but that relationship has not been without struggles of its own.  It was two people coming from failed marriages, each bringing truckloads of baggage, both literally and figuratively; two people who had to learn how to navigate the nuances of a new relationship with six children underfoot; two people who may have been labeled adults according to their birth dates, but were newborns in the life of single parenthood. This layer would be the one of uncertainty.

I always wonder what life would be like if only I had tried harder…if my ex-husband had agreed to go to counseling when I begged him to…if I myself had agreed to counseling at the end when I told him it was too late…if we had planned more date nights…if he didn’t change jobs so much…if I didn’t think the grass was greener…if only he had helped out more around the house.  These feelings add the layer of regret to my cake.

I stand back and look at what my life — my cake — has become.  It started out white and perfect, just like a wedding cake from a bridal magazine.  It was beautiful and full of hope.  It was something I could be proud of.  It was a dessert worthy of the most honored dinner guests.

The cake I have now would impress no one.  If I served this decimated cake to my guests, they would shake their heads and laugh and whisper to each other, “Look at that horrendous creation!”  It is nothing to be proud of.

Wrong.

The first cake, the picture-perfect cake, had not been touched.  It was brand-new and shiny, exactly the way it came from the bakery.   It hadn’t experienced life or love or heartache.  In a word, it wasn’t REAL.

Friends, don’t allow the picture you have in your mind of what is “perfect” or “expected” to permeate your heart and distort what you know to be true.  My second cake, the cake that is now my own life, is far from perfect.  It was built with layers of learning and failures and attempts and tears, but it’s MINE.  It’s my very own, very real cake.  And it’s missing a very vital part to any fancy cake…you see, this cake is unfinished.  There is no icing or swan-shaped sculpture on top.  The layers have all been put together, but the cake is not complete.  There is still more work to do to build my cake….and I’m proud of that…and you should be, too.

So come on in, y’all, and pull up a seat at my dinner table.  Tell me your stories.  Let’s share some dessert.