I'm 22 years old in this first photo and it's my wedding day. Who on earth gets married at 22 im not sure! But I did and I felt so grown up and wise. I already had 3 kids, so why not get married?
So before I start this story .. l want you to know that worry can caution me around telling this story, as it says it's not just my story, that there was someone else in this wedding picture. However there is a much bigger part of me that thinks that just because something finishes or changes (death, divorce etc) it doesnt mean life before that point didn't exist. Geez if I can't tell my story from before that point, then that may actually mean my history has been erased and I didn't exist. And stuff that.. That was alot of work!
So this is MY story.. that young woman in the photo is 22 year old me and she deserves to have her story told. We all do. We all have the right to tell our stories. We have the right to own them, share them and yell them from roof tops, if we please. We have the right to stand in our own truth and tell it exactly how it was for us. I tell this story with love for the very young person I was when I got married. This story isn't about "how bad were they!" because as Maya Angalou says "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better"
So.. worry can just sit back, relax and drink a long island tea!
So story two...
I always thought I knew what pain was.. But it wasn't until I seperated from my husband of 15 years that I think I truly experienced a heartbreak pain that shattered my entire world. It was a kind of pain that had me sobbing on the shower floor .. and all the way to work.. and all the way home again...for what felt like years!
I met my husband when I was 17 years old, we fell in love (or whatever it is that you do when your 17! ) he embraced parenting my 1 year old son with me and we set about building our lives together. At this point in my life I thought I would definitely have the Huntingtons Disease gene and I would die at 40. So we quickly got to work creating a very full life. As 40 is not very many years!
Over the years we had 3 more kids, brought land, built a house, planted hundreds of trees, I finished my University degree, we got married and it probably looked like we had the ideal life. And in many ways we did. We lived in a beautiful beachside village, we rotated our work rosters so one of us was always with our kids and we created a loving family home. I worked days, he worked nights and we worked incredibly hard to raise 4 little people together. We laughed, cried, pissed eachother off and we loved each other.
We were so committed to giving our kids everything we could. Due to our opposite work rosters one of us was always with them. We never needed to use day care, or ask for much help, as we always had it covered between us. Nights were often hard on my own with 4 kids, at one stage I had a new born baby, toddler, preschooler and 8 year old! But it all seemed very worth it. I would look forward for 2am to come around, when my husband would get home from work, as I would often be awake breastfeeding a baby or putting a toddler back to bed, and feeling pretty lonely. I would wait desperately every week for Fridays, which was the one day we always spent together, to connect and share our stories about the kids. We ran a great house and we were a great team! (and we were perhaps slightly overworked! )
After many years of building our life together we eventually decided it was the right time to do the gene testing for Huntingtons Disease (which is a whole other story I can tell you another day) After a grueling process we found out I didn't carry the HD gene. We cried for the future we now had to grow old together, which had never been apart of our story before. We celebrated deeply in our hearts for our 4 kids, who were now free from the risk of inheriting the gene and for the fact that they would never have to watch me get sick with this disease.
Slowly as the years went by, the day to day dishes piled up, work loads increased, and the usual disappointments and let downs of life and relationships set in...and things started to slip. Cracks started to form in our connection, questions about whether this was right crept in, and resentment and frustration found its way into my heart. I had a deep longing for a depth of connection and freedom to do the things I loved. This environment was greatly limiting for that part of me to grow, which caused an intense feeling of suffocation.
The vibrant and adventurous me was often screaming to break free.. but she just had to wait. We were on a different path for now. She would get out where she could but she knew this wasn't really her time. This was a time of sacrifice, hard work, adult responsibilities and commitment (no wonder she was screaming!)
I would calm her down and put everything I had into my family. I gave my heart and soul to making sure everyone was taken care of. I accepted the challenges that arose in this environment because that's what I thought we did in marriage!! We commit, sacrifice and work very very hard ....
Um.. no, no, no. So what happens next was never apart of the story I had planned or imagined for my marriage or family.. But this is the story that unfolded.. So before I start this story .. l want you to know that worry can caution me around telling this story, as it says it's not just my story, that there was someone else in this wedding picture. However there is a much bigger part of me that thinks that just because something finishes or changes (death, divorce etc) it doesnt mean life before that point didn't exist. Geez if I can't tell my story from before that point, then that may actually mean my history has been erased and I didn't exist. And stuff that.. That was alot of work!
So this is MY story.. that young woman in the photo is 22 year old me and she deserves to have her story told. We all do. We all have the right to tell our stories. We have the right to own them, share them and yell them from roof tops, if we please. We have the right to stand in our own truth and tell it exactly how it was for us. I tell this story with love for the very young person I was when I got married. This story isn't about "how bad were they!" because as Maya Angalou says "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better"
So.. worry can just sit back, relax and drink a long island tea!
So story two...
I always thought I knew what pain was.. But it wasn't until I seperated from my husband of 15 years that I think I truly experienced a heartbreak pain that shattered my entire world. It was a kind of pain that had me sobbing on the shower floor .. and all the way to work.. and all the way home again...for what felt like years!
I met my husband when I was 17 years old, we fell in love (or whatever it is that you do when your 17! ) he embraced parenting my 1 year old son with me and we set about building our lives together. At this point in my life I thought I would definitely have the Huntingtons Disease gene and I would die at 40. So we quickly got to work creating a very full life. As 40 is not very many years!
Over the years we had 3 more kids, brought land, built a house, planted hundreds of trees, I finished my University degree, we got married and it probably looked like we had the ideal life. And in many ways we did. We lived in a beautiful beachside village, we rotated our work rosters so one of us was always with our kids and we created a loving family home. I worked days, he worked nights and we worked incredibly hard to raise 4 little people together. We laughed, cried, pissed eachother off and we loved each other.
We were so committed to giving our kids everything we could. Due to our opposite work rosters one of us was always with them. We never needed to use day care, or ask for much help, as we always had it covered between us. Nights were often hard on my own with 4 kids, at one stage I had a new born baby, toddler, preschooler and 8 year old! But it all seemed very worth it. I would look forward for 2am to come around, when my husband would get home from work, as I would often be awake breastfeeding a baby or putting a toddler back to bed, and feeling pretty lonely. I would wait desperately every week for Fridays, which was the one day we always spent together, to connect and share our stories about the kids. We ran a great house and we were a great team! (and we were perhaps slightly overworked! )
After many years of building our life together we eventually decided it was the right time to do the gene testing for Huntingtons Disease (which is a whole other story I can tell you another day) After a grueling process we found out I didn't carry the HD gene. We cried for the future we now had to grow old together, which had never been apart of our story before. We celebrated deeply in our hearts for our 4 kids, who were now free from the risk of inheriting the gene and for the fact that they would never have to watch me get sick with this disease.
Slowly as the years went by, the day to day dishes piled up, work loads increased, and the usual disappointments and let downs of life and relationships set in...and things started to slip. Cracks started to form in our connection, questions about whether this was right crept in, and resentment and frustration found its way into my heart. I had a deep longing for a depth of connection and freedom to do the things I loved. This environment was greatly limiting for that part of me to grow, which caused an intense feeling of suffocation.
The vibrant and adventurous me was often screaming to break free.. but she just had to wait. We were on a different path for now. She would get out where she could but she knew this wasn't really her time. This was a time of sacrifice, hard work, adult responsibilities and commitment (no wonder she was screaming!)
I would calm her down and put everything I had into my family. I gave my heart and soul to making sure everyone was taken care of. I accepted the challenges that arose in this environment because that's what I thought we did in marriage!! We commit, sacrifice and work very very hard ....
I will never forget the day my husband told me he was in love with and having an intimate relationship with one of my closest friends. My world stopped, spun, and a tsunami swebt through my life. It brought with it an intensity of pain that I had never before experienced in my life (and I'd had some shit!). I always described it to people like someone put my heart in a frying pan. It's seared with anger, rage, fear, abandonment and betrayal that completely took over my body. I didn't even know anger and pain like that existed. I'm a pretty calm person. But I really wasn't calm at all. I was devastated.
I did everything in my power to try and stop it. But it was too late. The tsunami had been through and there was no way to control it once it started, as hard as I tried. All I could do was watch the destruction, find protection and make sure I fed my kids and kept them safe. I felt like a lion mother who needed to protect her kids from the heart ache this was going to cause to them and their lives.
I really didn't even really know this stuff happened. And I really wasn't very well equipped for the immensity of it. I got married to someone I thought was beautifully stable, loving and very family focused. But in that moment all of that disappeared and my life changed dramatically. I had a whole new reality to deal with. One that was an absolute mess. I would look at my husband some days, in the midst of it all, and feel like I was looking and talking to an absolute stranger (and after that song by Goyte came out... Somebody that I used to know...I now know that feeling is normal and common ..thank you storytellers!)
My life with my husband was shattered. The loss of all the hopes, dreams and our future plans was devastating. I would do anything I could to get rid of the pain in my heart... drink alcohol, take pain killers, ask the Drs for valium, scream, smash things...
After 6 mths of backwards and forwards, as we made the very hard decisions of what to do with our marriage (which now felt more like a toxic war zone), I weighed about 45kg, I felt like I was going crazy and I made a very hard decision to move. I think this was the hardest decision I've ever made in my life. To pack up my life and kids, move away from our family, friends and my mum.. to start my life over. It was the only thing I felt I could do to save myself from being swamped by the ongoing waves of destruction. All I had the power to do was focus on what I could recreate, what I could rebuild and what actions I could take to be well enough to take care of my kids. I was determined to give them the best possible childhood I could, despite this.
As I packed up our lives, so many regrets would come flooding in around how we let our relationship get to the point where this could happen. What didn't we do? What could I have done better? But really.. We all do the very best we can. And those questions are good to learn from. But they can also destroy us. Because Im not sure there is ever an easy answer to the complexity of marriage and long term relationships. Reality is, sometimes people do shit.. And sometimes people leave.
The kids and I moved to a new city. We found a house, my kids started a new school, I got them into sport, dance, music and I started a new job. I slowly, slowly sorted out the practicalities of our new life.
I then started my intense search for anything that would help me ease the pain. As really alcohol was only going to get me so far! For a very long time all I could do was take one day at a time and get kids to school and go to work. My life was in survival mode. I gradually started to add other things. I would run, go to meditation/yoga classes, I attended some pretty interesting spiritual centres, saw many counsellors, doctors, naturopaths, massages therapists, I joined dance/movement groups and eventually new experiences and friendships started to grow, along side the grief. I would often look back on the life I once had and wonder what on earth happened and be in shock at where my life was now.
It was honestly an incredibly long, hard, slow journey of recovery from the very dark depths of grief and betrayal. It was so hard to comprehend that two people I loved would choose this. I'm sure we all have that little person in us that doesn't want to be "left" who wants to be seen and considered. To feel invisible to people I loved felt like torture. But sometimes.. like many sometimes .. things just don't go the way I'd like them to. And sometimes, no matter how many loving/kindness/forgiveness meditations I did, it just hurt and it was very, very hard to accept. It was the perfect environment for very intense anger and conflict to grow.
For a very long time every text message was a panic attack. Every argument was days of recovery. It's was absolute hell. There was so much wasted energy, so many times I was hooked, triggered and wasted my time protecting my story from someone else's version. But really.. It was all just crap. I eventually learnt that people are always going to say stuff that hurts. All I could do was protect myself from it and choose how to respond to it in ways that didn't hurt me.
So my next challenge was to find a way out of the ongoing conflict before it destroyed me. I needed to take control of my new life by finding my self-worth (as nothing will kill that better than this scenario!) and self-protection. As much as I wanted to be super woman and create something that would work for everyone (because I always love keeping everyone happy!) I discovered I really wasn't Nelson Mandela!
I can remember so many times wanting to be just like him and "love my enemy," and "talk to the enemy" (because you know I am so cool, calm.. And wise like him! ) I wanted to be all kind, loving, forgiving, peaceful and compassionate. But reality is my pain had other needs. It needed safety, gentle care and a space to heal. All the things I was trying to give outward I needed to turn inwards to myself. I needed to build a very strong boundary around my very broken heart. I eventually learnt to love myself enough to give myself that time and space to heal.
Boundaries saved my life. I set boundaries about what energy I would let flow into my world, what I was willing to do for others and what I would respond to. I had to protect myself from the very traumatic emotional triggers. Because really, I am worth more than a life of pain, conflict and anger. And my kids deserved a mum who had a clear loving energy.
So I stopped feeding the angry monsters and learnt to love myself enough to protect myself from it. I nurtured my pain until it eased. I probably still have some pretty deep scars.. but they are OK..and I survived. All of this relearning, rebuilding, recreating and restorying took me years. But I did it.
I embraced my new life and the freedom of divorce. When the man turned up on my door with my divorce papers to sign, I don't think he had ever heard someone so excited! Remember that little dynamic, adventurous me who was waiting patiently for her time.. She found her voice and yelled yes, yes, yes!!!! He looked rather shocked. I could have hugged him! The release from the suffocation of marriage has been a huge relief for my heart and soul. That part of me is so happy she is free. She high fives them daily. She reclaimed her life back and she now gets to sing, play, grow and dance every single day.
And when they got married...
She went travelling ...And she lived happily every after!
"Boundaries boundaries boundaries.. Don't leave home without them! " Jeff Brown