Take a trip and people will ask how it was?

Choose a different profession and they will want to know if you love it.

Date some new hottie and they will ask if you are happy.

Get a divorce?

Oddly, no one seems to ask…

Are you glad you did it?

Are you happier?

Would you do it again?

Divorce is universally considered so appallingly undesirable no one even thinks to ask.

And those who might be fearing divorce themselves are too trepidatious to verbalize the frightening question. In case the answer could be yes. It would mean they don’t have to stay fearfully unhappy. That the grass is in fact…wait for it…hold your breath…shall we say greener? Or at least growing back in?

Instead, they focus on the hell of going through it and not the healing after it.

And who could blame them?

After all, it’s not literally hell, but close to it – what I call ’emotional purgatory.’

What people WILL say when you are finally rebuilding your life is ‘you look happy.’

In a Southern well-meaning, ‘Bless Your Heart’ kinda way.

Like it’s still too bad and too sad, but she’s made the best of it…Bless Her Heart. Lord have mercy thank goodness it wasn’t me!

So here goes…

Am I happy I went for the divorce?

The truth? I tell people I wish I had NEVER done this!

I wish my kids did not have to experience this traumatic nearly four-year fiasco. 

I wish I had been more prepared less naive. 

I wish I had listened to my marriage counselor instead of believing in someone even in divorce.

I wish I hadn’t left myself so financially vulnerable to another human being.

My marriage counselor once said I lived life through rose colored glasses and they had temporarily turned black.

In truth? They had not turned black enough. I was still too trusting in divorce. I thought my husband would do the right thing. I thought we were raised the same way. I believed we had the same value system.

If I had it to do again, I would be shrewd not sobbing.

Yet, ask me if I am happy?

And the answer is YES!

I made the decision to leave and start over. I made sure my children regained the mother they always had and not the unhappy woman I had become. I faced fear. Unthinkable fear, anxiety, stress, chaos, unpredictability and uncertainty.

All things which forced me to grow up in mid-life and humbled me. 

Believe me, no one was more afraid to do what I did than me! And that was before I knew the battle before me.

But the tears HAVE dried.

Bless their hearts.

And I AM HAPPY. 

I don’t nearly have it all figured out. But Lord have mercy I thank God I believed and I knew I deserved to be happy.

 

(Photo courtesy of Pexels)

Follow me on Facebook @Colleen Orme National Columnist on Twitter @colleenorme
on Pinterest @colleensheehyorme
E-mail: Colleen.Sheehy.Orme@gmail.com
www.colleensheehyorme.com