Travel and the Single Man

For most of last year, I was on the road with my job.  I figured I was away from home 40-45 weeks out of last year.  I have previously surmised that I felt the traveling played a significant role in why I am no longer with my wife and daughters.  It’s a somewhat ironic thing because it wasn’t that I was out messing around when I was traveling which is what breaks up a lot of marriages.  In fact, it was quite the opposite.  When I was away, I missed my family and thus I spent the majority of my evenings in my hotel room.  Sure, I would go out to eat but I was pretty much back in the room by 8 or so.  Even if I had to stay over the weekend which happened a few times, I still wasn’t out partying at some bar.  I’ve never been the type to do that anyway and even more so when I was married. 

Now that I am single again, I thought that traveling would be a more exciting proposition.  Granted, I don’t travel near as much as I did.  As I’ve said in previous posts, I changed to a job that kept me home more.  This was a valiant (although futile) effort to save my marriage.  My first big trip post separation was a trip to Prague in the Czech Republic (mentioned in the last post, Tales of Beards and Bracelets).  This was for my company’s sales kick off and I thought “Man, this is where I am going to make my mark on being single again.”  You see, at events like these, there are a lot of meetings and presentations but there are also a lot of social events.  The company would tell you it’s a chance to network with your peers but most of the company’s employees will tell you it’s a great chance to get really drunk. 

Seeing as how there would be several hundred employees there from all across the world and that I would be in a foreign country, I was ready to do my share of mingling and maybe even have some “fun” while I was there, if you know what I mean, wink-wink-nudge-nudge. On the plane over, I got my man-bracelet and had a few drinks to prep myself for what was sure to be a few nights of frivolity.  I was excited.  I was ready to do this thing known as being single.  I couldn’t wait so much so that I couldn’t sleep on the plane. 

This excitement and readiness for living the single life at its fullest didn’t last long.  The first social event was after the first day of the meetings and there was a happy hour that went well into the night at the bar in the hotel.  Plenty of women and conversation but I was somewhat off to the side.  Not alone, though.  I had a few of the folks I work with who I should actually refer to as my friends but I wasn’t in the middle of chatting up some woman.  I felt out of place.  I felt like it was wrong.  I couldn’t shake the fact that I had just gotten out of the most important relationship I ever had in my life and trying to dive into the single life at that point was like diving into a pool that had no water.

Still, I tried to be as sociable as I could but the flirty single man wasn’t coming out.  At one point, I was showing the man-bracelet that I got on the plane and said it was something to replace my wedding ring.  One woman who was in our group laughed and said, “Oh I know your type.”  I looked at her quizzically and asked, “What is my type?”  She proceeded to describe me as the man who cheated on his wife and now left her and his children behind in order to pursue a mid-life crisis as a single man on the prowl.

The words stung even though they were very, very far from the truth.  Whatever winds I had flowing through my sails were suddenly stopped.  I politely (okay maybe not so politely, I had a few drinks in me after all) advised her that she was wrong and that my wife lost interest in the marriage and I wanted to work things out.  I never cheated on her and I couldn’t wait to see my daughters again.  She quickly shut up.

The rest of the trip was fun but there was one evening where the guys I was with were busily trying to find something to buy their wives and stopped at several stores to haggle for the best deal.  Another moment where my ship stopped dead in the water.  I didn’t have anyone to buy something for.  Oh sure, I did get my daughters some souvenirs but it would have been nice to have someone special for which to buy something special. I would have been right there with my friends in the haggling arena if that were true.  Instead, I stood outside the door and watched people walk by letting that all too familiar buzzing of “whys” and “what happened” dart around my head.  I tried to hide my depression from the guys but I’m not sure I did a great job at it although I hope it wasn’t too obvious. I didn’t and don’t want to be a downer around everyone just because life shit on me a little bit...okay so maybe this blog goes against that thought but I’m not forcing you to read this! :)

Another aspect of traveling relates to those little moments I talked about in The Little Things.  Whenever I used to sit at the airport waiting to board the plane or as soon as I got off the plane, I would call the MMC (see sidebar) just to talk for a bit or let her know I arrived if that was the case and ask how things were going.  I would talk to the girls as well but a highlight was just talking to her.  Like I said, I missed my wife and family when I traveled so making even short phone calls helped to ease that bit of loneliness.  Now, I don’t have that option and when it occurred to me the first time I stepped off a plane, it felt odd…weird…different.

One more story of travel and being single and then I’ll let you go.  When I was returning from going to Seattle for my niece’s wedding (see An Open Letter To My Niece), the girls and I got upgraded to first class on the flight back.  They sat together in the first row and I was behind them in the aisle seat, ready to spring up if they started acting up.  A woman sat next to me in the window seat.  The girls were absolutely perfect the entire flight and it certainly helped that it was a red-eye because they slept the majority of the time.  Those first class seats were practically beds for them.  When we landed, I was getting the girls up and their things together when a woman who was seated across the aisle remarked to the woman who was sitting next to me that she has never seen such well-behaved children on a plane before.  My “seat mate” said that she could take no credit for the girl’s behavior which I thought was a great response.  The other woman said “But you’re with the man who has the good little girls so you should be proud of that.”  We looked at each other, smiled, and let it go.  No sense in trying to explain, although it did kind of bother me that this woman across the aisle made no attempt to give the compliment to me, the father.  Like fathers have nothing to do with the behavior of their children!  Oh well.  Maybe I should have gotten the phone number of the woman who sat next to me but this was before the Prague trip and if I wasn’t ready for single life then, I certainly wasn’t ready for it at that time. 

I said I was going to let you go after that story, didn’t I?  Well, one more thing.  I’ve noticed an evolution with these posts as I have been writing them and I wondered if it was noticeable to anyone else but me.  I started out with the hurt and pain of losing the woman I loved.  I spent a few posts noting (hopefully humorously) about some facets of being single again (specifically in Bed, Bath and Bothered) and how I will be a single father (as in Parents, Inc.) but I spend most of my time on the divorce and the emotions around that.  Still, I do see that the posts are becoming less about her and more about not having someone, which I believe is signficant in that I am probably getting over her but not the situation.  I think loneliness is part of the “suddenly single” package, isn't it?  While it doesn’t have to be a sad thing, it is a major part of getting through all of this.  The end of this may be when I meet someone but I think the end will be when I am WITH someone. 

Okay, you can go now. Thanks for listening.

 

Next time:  The lessons of life

What to Call the Woman Who Is No Longer My Wife

For those who are regular readers to my blogged babblings, I have been struggling for some time now on how to refer to the woman who is no longer my wife.  I’m sure it must seem silly to spend as much thought on this but as I have committed myself to writing this blog; I am stopped down each time I needed to make reference to her.  I have made it a point to not write out her real name although a good portion of my readers know it. This blog is about me and my feelings and while I need to talk about her, I don’t need to personalize it by including her name and thus I have kept it out.  I also think that at some deeper level having a pseudonym for her helped me to not get too emotional while writing these posts.

Maggie Stiefvater wrote in Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception:  “Names are a way to keep people in your mind.”  It may not seem it considering how much I write about her but I don’t want to really keep her in mind so I don’t want to state her name.  A name gives someone life and feeling and within these “walls” I don’t want to give that to her.  I’m not trying to be mean; I just would prefer the “distance.”  Using a name is too close.

Calling her my wife certainly didn’t fit any more even though at the time of this writing, the divorce was not officially final.  Others have used the acronym STBX which stands for Soon To Be Ex but what do you call them once they are no longer “soon to be?”  Plus I didn’t care for the sound of it.  “Stabuhex.”  Sounds like a creature from the Lord of the Rings.

The other option and one that I have been using is “Ex” or “the Ex.”  I’m also not crazy about this endearment either as it sounds too menacing: “Enter: The EX!”  Another problem I have with simply referring to her as the Ex is the negative connotation it has on me. I mean, I get it already! 

I have “struck out” once again in marriage. 

“X” marks the spot of failure. 

“Cross” another one off the list. 

I know it’s supposed to refer to her but it also acts as a constant reminder to me.

A friend on Facebook posted: “How about the “X-Wife” since she’s the super villain in this story?”  I’m not saying my wife (or ex-wife or soon to be ex-wife…see why I need a specific term??) and I are great friends right now but I don’t like referring to her as a super-villain (although X-Wife does have a certain amount of flair to it).  Another suggestion was the Evil Queen but again, “evil” is a bit much. 

No, she’s not a villain, she’s not evil and she’s not a Tolkien creature. So what to call her?  I didn’t know but then inspiration hit me when I read this blog: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-gilad/ex-husband_b_1762302.html

You can read the blog yourself (after you finish mine, natch!) but basically the guy writing it has been divorced for several years and bumped into his former wife at a party.  She kept referring to him as his Ex.  “Here’s my Ex!”  “That’s my Ex!”  He got perturbed by the term being applied to him as much as I don’t like applying it to my wife.  As he stated:  “I do not identify myself as her ‘ex.’ … I feel, in all ways, utterly current.”  He went on to write:

Let's all let go of the past, as surely as the future will let go of us. I, for one, would rather be introduced by my name, with an addendum, that "we were married once." Or as "the father of our children."

And there it was.  While reading that, I realized that the best term, the most accurate term I can use to describe my Ex, my STBX, my X-Wife and Evil Queen is … “The Mother of My Children” or MMC for short.  It fit.  It felt good writing it.  It wasn’t negative and 100% factual.  I mean in some weird soap opera twist it could come out that one or both of my daughters were not biologically mine but since I’ve been the only father they have ever known and my name is on the birth certificate, they were still mine.  But you can’t say she wasn’t my daughter’s mother.  I was there.  I saw their birth.  I held her hand as she had each one and complained about how badly my feet hurt from standing there the whole time like she was perfectly comfortable the entire time.  So, she IS the Mother of My Children.  She is the MMC.  No doubt, no denial, no problem using that term from here on out.

Still, I have some regret not being able to use a Tolkien reference but maybe “My Preeecciousssss” would have been a little too creepy.

 

 

Next time:  What’s on TV?

The Next in Line

And now let me enter waters I shouldn’t even go into…

I don’t know if it’s too early to think or worry about when the “next in line” comes along.  You know, the next date, lover, fiancé, and/or spouse.  Oh and just so we’re clear, I’m talking about my ex-wife’s next date, lover, fiancé, and/or spouse, not mine. 

There’s a part of me that’s saying, “Uh, Kevin?  Do you really want to put yourself through this type of torture?”  And since I’m writing this, I guess there’s another part of me answering, “Yup!”
 

Here’s why this topic is somewhat heavy on my mind.  I still don’t know the exact length of time my wife was checked out of our marriage but I guesstimate about a year or so; possibly a little less time but not by much…eight months maybe.  So, it’s somewhat natural to think that she would be ready to enter the dating scene much sooner than me.  I am only two to three months removed from the realization that my marriage was over.  She’s had plenty of time to get used to the idea and move on.
 

Stupid side note: “Guesstimate” did not come up as an error on my spell checker which means it’s an actual word.  When did that happen? Can I get on some distribution list when words I thought I made up became real Webster-qualified words?  Just asking…
 

For all I know, she’s already started dating.  I mean once the divorce was officially filed, what would there be to stop her?  I know that, for the most part, this is none of my business anymore and I’m not bringing this up because of jealousy…well, maybe not entirely. I’m primarily concerned for my kids.  I don’t know what mind-state my ex is in but I have seen all too often the recently divorced woman who starts going party crazy:  out at bars every night, applying more make-up than they had previously, dressing a little more “showy” than they were before, and cycling through boyfriends like they are changing channels on the TV.  I’m not saying my ex will do all or any of that…those traits don’t really fit in with her personality but I didn’t think giving up on a marriage fit in with her either, so what do I know?
 

In the interest of not sounding like a Rick with a “p”, let’s put aside the possible “party girl-ness” of my ex and take a look at some statistics.  I read that the majority of people who get divorced get remarried within ONE YEAR!  One year!  Can you believe it?  I know I can’t.  What makes that statistic even worse is that more than half of those will end in divorce (because more than half of all marriages, whether it’s the first, second or otherwise, end in divorce).  Go marriage!

I can only assume this part of the population is glomming onto a new love because they just got out of a particularly bad one.  I just wonder how much thought is given to what they are putting their children through.  These poor kids have just gone through the experience of their parents splitting up, living in separate houses and them being shuffled back and forth according to the “visitation schedule.”  Now they must endure someone else stepping in as the new man in their mom’s life (or a new woman in their dad’s life…hey, I can take on some of this).  Even though my kids were made aware of the divorce early on and that Mommy and Daddy wouldn't be living together anymore, just recently my oldest daughter made reference that Mommy was my girlfriend.  They still don’t completely understand.  It astonishes me that people would then knowingly make it harder by bringing in the replacement partner/parent too early.

 

 

When we were working on our separation agreement, I came across something called a “Paramour Clause.”  No, this isn’t a sexy Santa but rather a statement that could be put into the agreement that stipulated neither spouse was allowed to have a romantic partner stay overnight with the children present for a specified period of time or even open ended…no real stop date.  I think having that in there forever is ridiculous but I considered adding the clause to prevent it for 6 months to a year.  To be honest, at first it was mainly out of the jealousy of my wife being with someone else and here was my chance to try to sabotage that.  Then it became consideration for the girls’ mental wellbeing.  Ultimately though, I decided not to include it.  How would I prove such a thing other than hiring a private investigator to sit outside her house all the time or, even worse, grill my girls on it when they were with me?   I think my ex and I have done a pretty good job at keeping the whole divorce process civil and, more importantly, keeping our kids out of it.  The last thing I needed to do was ruin it by manically questioning them on who Mommy might be sleeping with. 
 

Even if I was independently wealthy and could afford the private investigator, what type of penalty could I impose on her?  A deduction in child support?  Take full custody of the girls?  No.  Those penalties strike at the girls as well as my ex.  When we started the divorce process, I always knew the girls would stay with their mother.  It would have been cruel to them to do it any other way.  I still believe that.  Regardless of how crappy she was at communicating and keeping up her end of the marriage, she’s still a good mother and the girls need that. 

Truthfully, the idea of the Paramour Clause and me even writing about this to begin with does lie in jealousy, but not of my ex being with another man; it's with my girls being with another father.  I worry that whoever is next in line will be a better dad than I am or that the girls will like him more than me.  Is this a silly fear?  I wonder how other divorced dads deal with this situation.
 

In the long run, I guess there is nothing I can do about it other than try to be the best dad I can be and hope that my ex doesn’t position Mr. Next in Line as being the better choice.  I do think it will be challenging but having children in the first place has been challenging; realizing your spouse no longer loves you has been challenging; going through a divorce has been challenging…  It’s just another challenge in the long string of challenges that make up our lives.

 

 

I just hope this one turns out to be a very small challenge and not a big one.

Next time: What's in a name?
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Moving Daze: Part 2

Previously on Went From Being Married To Single:

All moves into houses start with one significant event: the closing…

So, if all of this is required to get the loan and I want the loan, why can’t I just sign in one place and give me the damn keys, already?

Even with everything going on, I’ll take the girls when I can…

... the bed of my truck sticks over a foot out from the garage opening …

As exciting as it was to have a new place to call my own, I would trade it all in to go back to the life my wife and I once shared... 

Regardless of whatever I was feeling at the time, I still had moving to do.  With the girls in tow, I was able to get one load over to the new house on Friday night.  This was mostly the items that went into the garage: tools, various boxes filled with junk I may never actually look at again, and more tools. 

My original plan was to rent a U-Haul on Friday night, start loading it until I could load no more, go to bed, wake up early on Saturday morning and continue to load until it was full or all of my stuff was in there, whichever came first.  Unfortunately, U-Haul had other plans.  The place I called and reserved my 14’ truck said “No problem!” but U-Haul Inc. called Friday afternoon to inform me, “Problem!”  There weren’t any trucks to rent at that time from that place.  “What times and places do you have?”  I asked, a bit perturbed I even had to ask.  Several options should have been ready to go. The only thing they could find was an office 20 miles away from my new house that had a truck that was only 10’ long without a loading ramp and I could only pick it up at 2 pm on Saturday for four hours.  That wasn’t going to work so I went with Plan B…once I figured out what that was.

Actually Plan B was what I did when I was single:  I loaded up my truck as high as I could and moved the stuff myself, taking several trips instead of just one.  Kind of fit, didn’t it?  I was single and thus I return back to the ways of the single man…well, almost.  I still had movers coming to get the big stuff on the following Monday.  I wasn’t that single. 

I decided to take the plan change in stride and made the most of it.  Saturday morning, while the girls watched TV waiting for their mom to pick them up, I loaded up my truck, covered up my possessions with a tarp because it looked like rain and bungee corded the hell out of it.  I mentioned in Packing It In that I wasn’t sure if the money I spent on bubble wrap was worth it.  Well, the $7.00 I spent on a new set of multi-length bungee cords was totally worth it.  Not only were they useful in keeping my stuff from flying out of my truck and along the roadways of Northeast Pennsylvania, they were also handy with my hand-truck in securing the heavier and bulkier items to it so I could move them around more easily.  “Nothing like a good set of bungee cords,” I will now be saying to my children every chance I get.

The truck was loaded but no Ex in sight, so I started to dismantle my office.  It was the only room I hadn’t done a whole lot of packing in since I work from home and I needed most everything in there.  My desk has a matching printer stand and a two drawer file cabinet and both of these have hutches with glass paned cabinets on the top.  I really like them but the hutches won’t make it into the new house.  The office there is one the previous owners built above the garage.  It’s basically a long, “A” shaped room.  It’s going to be a cool place to work but to use the hutches in there would mean putting the printer stand and file cabinet in the middle of the room since the walls start to pitch inward about 30 inches from the floor.  While I’m all for adventurous furniture placement (and who isn’t??), that didn’t seem too practical.

Anyway, once the Ex arrived and I said goodbye to the girls, I ran my truckload over to the new house. I decided to unpack what I unloaded immediately after I unloaded it.  In the past, I would have brought each load over, stacked it up in the garage and then went back for the next load.  Once everything was at the new place, I would then spend the next 14 months unpacking it.  Not this time. With the exception of stuff I was storing in the basement, I put each box in the room it should be in and then unpacked whatever was practical for me to unpack.  This mainly meant the kitchen which, let’s face it, is the most unpacking intensive room in the house.

I was faced with a quandary at this point: how to organize the kitchen.  Since my new house is quite a bit smaller than my old house, I don’t have certain amenities like a pantry so I needed to use cabinet space for my non-refrigerated food supplies. This meant a strategic storing of my dishes, pots and pans and plastic ware. Quickly, I devised a schematic that would incorporate proper storage and the ergonomically sound “kitchen work triangle.”  The schematic was perfect, the execution, not so much.  I think I ended up with the ergonomically un-sound “kitchen work trapezoid” but that’s okay.  I got everything as organized as I could.

That Saturday, I was able to make two big truckload trips, got several boxes unpacked and cleaned up the old house.  In the late afternoon, I was laying on the floor in my new master bedroom, sweating and exhausted from the frantic pace of moving.  I was contemplating a nap when…the doorbell rang.

I was about to meet my new next door neighbor.

Next time: I meet my new next door neighbor.

Moving Daze: Part 1

All moves into houses start with one significant event: the closing (unless you are just renting, then it’s mainly pick up your keys at the office).  I have been to four closings in my lifetime and I generally dread them.  My first one took three hours because some of the paperwork was wrong and needed to be corrected and while my second and third went relatively okay (especially the third…when you are having a house built, the closing takes almost no time), I was still dreading my fourth.  Leading up to the closing, all of the work was done through e-mail.  I think I actually spoke to my mortgage company three times on the phone over the 45 day process.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved that.  Give me an online option over an in person or phone option any day of the week.  Still, with something as big as buying a house, I trepidatiously entered the closing expecting the worst. 

I shouldn’t have worried though; I was in and out within 40 minutes with only a slight cramping of the right hand from signing the phone book…I mean the pile of papers for the loan.  I do wonder when we will get to the day where all of this will be on an iPad-like tablet and all you have to do is sign and initial once and those will automatically populate to the places they need to be.  I swear a lot of the forms were introduced to me as “And again, this is just to say that you confirm you are buying the house as-is with no warranties.”  Again?  Did I already sign something to this effect?  I was dizzy from paperwork so I couldn’t remember exactly but if I did, why am I signing it again?  I did ask after the 40^th signature if anyone ever refused to sign any of the forms.  The closing agent and my real estate agent just laughed.  “If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be getting the loan!”  So, if all of this is required to get the loan and I want the loan, why can’t I just sign in one place and give me the damn keys, already?

I really shouldn’t complain, though.  It went by very smoothly and my closing costs actually ended up way cheaper than originally estimated (although by their own admission, they over-estimate the closing costs so the buyer is prepared.  Fine with me!  I would rather be surprised in not having to pay as much as opposed to having to pay more).

With the closing completed and me armed with a file folder full of mortgage documents as well as a small catalog of the bylaws of the community I was moving into, I took my new set of keys and garage door openers and bolted to my new house.  I had a busy day and it already started with having the girls in the morning and then tending to them in the afternoon.  Even though technically the girls were supposed to be with their mother this weekend, she had her cousin’s wedding to go to and they did not allow kids at the wedding.  I thought that was odd.  I always thought weddings were fun for kids…anyway, I guess they thought differently.  Not a problem for me, by the way.  Even with everything going on, I’ll take the girls when I can.  I just needed to juggle the closing with picking up the girls, taking them to gymnastics class and being on a conference call for work.  Fun times for what should have been my first moving day.

I already had most of my clothes in the back seat of my truck.  I suppose that was opening me up for something bad to happen at closing but I took the chance.  Getting a sticker for my truck to allow me to get in and out of the community was first on my list and I got that marked off in no time.  When I got the sticker I also received yet another folder full of stuff about the community.  The reading requirement for living in this place was like studying for the SATs.  I drove over to the house, pulled into the garage after opening the door with my newly signed for garage door openers and discovered my truck doesn’t fit all the way into the garage.  The back end sticks out and would definitely prevent me from closing the door.  A bit annoying but I needed to trade my truck in for something smaller and with four-wheel drive anyway.  Living in Texas without four-wheel drive is okay but it’s been a struggle up in snow country and now that I have a driveway that has an incline as sharp as some New York Cheddars, I really needed something different (plus I no longer had the backup of my Ex with her four-wheel drive Jeep).  Add into the fact that the bed of my truck sticks over a foot out from the garage opening and automotive shopping was in my immediate future.

Undaunted by this discovery, however, I pulled out the various pieces of luggage I had my clothes hastily packed in.  Remember, I used to travel quite a bit so my luggage collection has grown quite a bit as well.  I threw all the suitecases into my master bedroom and then meandered through the house.  I had already been there once that morning before the closing to do a walkthrough…just make sure a tree hadn’t fallen into the living room or that the owners hadn’t decided a kitchen sink was no longer necessary…stuff like that.  It was a short visit, though, and it was with my real estate agent.  This time, it was just me and I walked slowly through each room, thinking about where furniture would go, how I would use a particular room as my office, this other as a guest room and that room would be where the girls would stay when they were over. 

I took some time to soak in the beautiful hardwood floors that were stained a deep cherry, the arched openings to the dining room and kitchen, the vaulted ceilings in just about every room and the unique light fixtures that were dotted throughout the house.  I sighed thinking this house was perfect for me and then I sighed again with a little bit of regret that I had to find the house in the first place.

As exciting as it was to have a new place to call my own, I would trade it all in to go back to the life my wife and I once shared.  Not the life we’ve been living for the past year or so…back to when our second daughter was born and our first just became the “big sister.”  When we knew we were in love and we didn’t have to prove it.  When it was her and I and our girls against the world, living in a small apartment waiting for our house to be built and exploring the new area we had just moved to. Before work got in the way and before the reality and distractions of everyday life took that love away and we just became two people living together who happened to have children.   

Yes, I would gladly give up my new house, the nearby beach and lake, hiking trails, and all the other amenities the community provides to get back a normal, loving family; one that isn’t separated by plots of land and emotional tension.  I know it can no longer be that way.  We aren’t the same people we were and while I try to not think about why that is, significant events like this seem to bring that out.  I have probably written in this blog about a half a dozen sentiments that seem to bring a close to all of the sadness about this divorce but apparently it isn’t fully closed. 

It’s kind of like my truck in my new house.  I can get most of it in but not enough to shut the door. 

Next time: More moving stuff and I’ll try not to be so depressing about it!

The First Visitation

This past weekend marked the very first weekend visitation I had with my girls.  Since the wife (or the ex…or soon to be ex?  I’ve seen people use the abbreviation of SBTX but I don’t care for it…I need a unique reference to my ex…some heavy thought will be given to this topic).  Anyway since SHE moved out last week, we started on the documented procedures set forth in our settlement agreement with visitation, child support and all that.  I have the monthly amount worked out for child support and I created a Google calendar for the visitation schedule straight through until they both turn 18.  This way we both know the schedule and can make and document adjustments as needed.  My hope is to never have to actually look at the settlement agreement again.  We are both adults and should be able to work out whatever we need to work out.  If we can’t, then we’ll pull out the agreement and if that doesn’t settle it, I guess we pull out the lawyers.

Normally, I will get the girls starting on Friday afternoon through Sunday at 6 pm but I kept them over Sunday night this past weekend.  Like I said, my ex and I are adults and we’re okay with adjustments…especially when those adjustments mean I get the girls an extra night! 

In some ways, that first weekend almost didn’t count because I was still at our old house which was mostly empty since the Ex left.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I had nothing but three people’s worth of stuff out of a house that held four makes for a mostly empty house.  The only room that was pretty much untouched was my office.  Still, I had a couch, the big TV, dining room furniture, a bed and dresser.  What else did I need?  Well, turns out an inflatable bed was necessary for the girls to sleep on.  They’ll have their own beds in my new house but for this weekend, the girls slept in the middle of the living room on an air mattress (a big, queen sized one).  They loved it and after they were asleep, I went up to my room.  They slept through the night without any problems.  I was expecting some crying in the middle of the night but, for the most part, my girls are troopers or just heavy sleepers. 

Friday night was spent going to the grocery store and getting supplies for a movie night.  I didn’t have a TiVo/cable box due to a mix up in the moving but I did have a PS3 console so I could stream Netflix through it (this will be a blog topic coming soon).  We set up the living room to be as comfortable as possible and the girls fell asleep watching Stuart Little.  As I got up to go to bed, I discovered that the couch I was going to use in my new house was not so great for my back.  It was the same couch I had before I got married and either it got old or I did.  Either way, a new couch was needed.  Possibly an orthopedic one if they happen to make such a thing.

Saturday morning was spent getting the house cleaned in case anyone wanted to come see it.  It was up for sale although the only way you can tell is by the sign in the front yard, not the steady stream of people looking at it (fail). My Ex and her mom came over to help with the cleaning while the girls played.  Once we were done and I took a shower, the girls and I headed out to lunch and then a movie (Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days).  We played a couple games in the arcade at the movie theater and had a good time.  My girls love to go to the movies, which is great because I do too.

Afterwards, we did what all kids love to do, furniture shopping!  Since I knew their attention spans were limited, I grabbed a salesperson and had her walk me through all of their couches at a Usain Bolt-type pace.  Luckily there was a special event going on in the store which included a guy playing piano for the customers.  The girls hung around him, asking a million questions and did a little dancing to the songs he was playing.  I felt sorry for the piano player but his loss was my gain. They were occupied.  In about 15 minutes, I narrowed my choices down to two couches and ten minutes later, I was out the door with a receipt for my new couch to be delivered on the Wednesday after I moved in. It felt good to get that done as quickly and as efficiently as I did.  Maybe I should take the girls with me every time I go furniture shopping? Hmmm…probably not.

It rained when we got home, so Saturday evening was dinner, some game playing on the PS3, and another movie (the Eddie Murphy version of Dr. Doolittle).  Sunday morning was a bit lazy as it looked like rain…a little TV watching, a little breakfast, some blog writing, and a round or two of the card game War with my oldest (she loves the game).  Then it was off to run some errands.  The list of things I needed for my new house was growing.  With the Ex and all her stuff out, I could more easily see what I needed.  When I was at my niece’s wedding, my family threw me a Divorce Shower just like the one I talked about in Bed, Bath and Bothered, so I had a handful of Target gift cards to use. 

Once that was done, we went back home just in time for a terrific storm to hit.  It got so bad; we went down into the basement.  My oldest daughter is petrified of storms while my youngest would probably go do cartwheels in them if I let her (I didn’t).  When it finally blew over, we came up from the basement and checked the outside.  A tree blew over and another tree shed a rather large branch…all missed the house, thank goodness. 

I don’t know if it was the storm or just being over-tired, but the girls woke up in the middle of the night screaming so they came up and slept with me…which was fine. Usually I don’t like it because they sleep in such awkward positions (as discussed in Making the Spare Bedroom Your Bedroom, Spare) but since we were down one person in the bed (re: the Ex), it wasn’t bad at all.  In fact, it was nice. 

So nice that when the morning came and I took them to my soon to be ex-mother-in-law’s house, I was sad.  I knew it would be two weeks before I could enjoy them staying the night again and the reality of the situation sunk in. That night found me sitting in the middle of that empty house wondering what went wrong once again as a depression storm took down my relatively sane mood much like the rain storm took down the tree in my backyard. 

I took some deep breaths and tried to get past it because that’s all I can really do.  In Parents Inc., I wondered what type of dad I would be now and how I would handle my time with my girls when I had them.  I’m still not sure I have that answer but I think it’s something close to what we did this weekend.  Activities we can do together but nothing too spectacular.  Just spending time with them and giving them as much attention as I can. 

It wasn’t like it was all butterflies and rainbows while they were here.  They’re still children and children can be a bit frustrating at times but that frustration goes away quickly when you know there’s an even bigger frustration just waiting for you when they leave:  The frustration of being alone.

Next time:  The big move!

Priorities

I don’t spend a lot of time in this blog talking about specific problems or issues my wife and I had. I prefer to touch on my thoughts, feelings and observations without airing any of our “dirty laundry.” Allow me to make an exception with this post but I promise this won’t become a habit. This topic, however, is one I feel strongly about and I need to process it on digital paper.

During what I would consider the beginning of the end of the marriage between my wife and me, it was brought to my attention that I was putting work before my family.  While I was surprised to hear this, I could also see that it was true. I was traveling a lot and even when I was home, I wasn’t “at home;” my mind was often on work matters and not family matters.  I have no excuses for it.  I should not have done it but once it was brought to my attention, I took strides to change and I believe I did (just too late, as I’ve stated before).

During this time I began to think about how I was feeling when I came home from a trip.  A lot of times, it was like I was just a roommate in the house.  I wasn’t in with the routine, they would have plans I didn’t know about and if I tried to discipline the girls for doing something wrong, I was either told to calm down or my wife would just take over as if I didn’t have a say in the matter (not always, but enough times that I noticed it). 

It all kind of boiled down to my wife putting the girls before me.  I didn’t like the way that sounded though…I thought I was being a bit selfish.  After some introspection, I came to the conclusion that, on a broader scale, my wife was putting our children before our marriage.  This fit better.  It was rare we ever had a “date night.” Any conversation we had was about the girls and not about us.  When we would try to have a conversation, the girls would often interrupt and she would tend to them.  Once they were settled, though, we never went back to what we were talking about. 

Still, I felt guilty about thinking this.  Shouldn’t she be putting the girls first?  Shouldn’t I for that matter?  Confused, I consulted my therapist, Dr. Google and was surprised to find that this conflict: “What should be first, the marriage or the children?” is a common one.  I was also surprised to find that the majority of the articles about it were in favor of putting the marriage first and the children second.  Heck, the first 20 results were all in favor of putting the marriage first. 

The bottom line message to all of the articles I read (which must have been about fifty of them), is that when you work on the marriage and the marriage is strong, the children benefit.  It really makes sense. The children see their parents in a loving relationship and feed off of that.  The family unit is stronger and thus your kids will be stronger because of it.  Here are some quotes I found to back this up:

“We believe firmly that raising and nurturing Clara to be a happy and secure child lies in the strong foundation of our own relationship,” says Janine. “The stronger our marriage, the easier and more joyful it is to be a family.” 
(Which Comes First: Marriage or the Kids?)

"Psychiatrist Michelle Goland agrees: "The mistake many moms make is they believe that if they are a good mother, their husband will be fine and he will understand, but in reality, the husband may feel pushed out of the parenting role and begrudgingly gives up trying to have a relationship with his wife."
(Stop Putting Your Kids First)

"I would even go as far as to say that you are raising your kids with some serious deficiencies if they are the center of your universe.  If you don’t show them what a healthy marriage looks like, where will they learn it?  If dad doesn’t make it a priority to spend time with mom, then why would your kids do anything different?  Our kids need to see that our marriages carry the weight of the family.  If that fails, then the family fails."
(What comes first? Kids or Marriage?

I tried to talk to my wife about this but I failed at conveying what I meant.  Because I was stumbling around the topic or just poor communication skills in general, I think what came out was that I put her above the girls.  That the girls were always second place in my book.  Not exactly what I was trying to say and I can see why she may have lost respect for me by hearing it like that.  What I meant was that we needed to put ourselves and our relationship before the girls because a lasting relationship can only be beneficial to our children.  If we don’t have that, we end up…

…well, we end up with a blog like this and a family broken apart.

The point of this blog isn’t to say that I was right.  The point is to send a message to those who are still married and might need this information to help guide you.  I wish this was something I had thought of and researched more thoroughly early on in my marriage.  It’s an easy thing to think that children should be first.  What else would they be?  I prefer to think of putting the marriage first more in line with putting your family first, which includes your children but also includes your spouse. 

Next time:  My First Time

The Emotional Forecast

“…And that’s why you should never mix gardening with nude acupuncture!  Ha ha!  Now let’s turn it over to Kevin for the 5 Day Emotional Forecast.  Kevin?”


“Thanks, Chip.  Well, folks, after a series of nice days, it looks like we’re in for a day or two of deep depression and why wondering.  After that, we’ll see a clearing of false hope followed by a bout of ‘I’ll never marry again.’” 



Ah, if only we could forecast our emotions like this.  Going through the cycle of being okay to depressed to really depressed to feeling pretty good can be exhausting.  If we knew it was coming we could at least be prepared for it.

Initially, my depression days were pretty much every day.  On a graphical representation of my moods, dark clouds with lightning bolts would have been heavily used for at least the ten day forecast, if not the extended one.  I don’t believe there was a sunshine icon used until a month or so after the decision to get a divorce.

Beyond then, it seemed like every other day was a down day and then that turned into every three days, then four, then weekly until finally I was at a point where I would have a morning of depression every couple weeks.  I chronicled the last one in The Healing Walk.  It was during that walk that I thought maybe there was a pattern to my emotions or maybe to everyone’s emotions.  If I could figure out how that pattern worked, document it and then publish that baby, I would make a quadzillion dollars in no time.

Initial analysis made me think that the emotional downbursts were a buildup of sadness over time.  At the start, there is so much sadness that it’s always raining.  Later, as the soul starts to heal, a weak acceptance high pressure system helps to block out the depression but that depression continues to build as its fueled by questions and memories of the good times until, at some point, it pushes out the system that is keeping you moderately sane and hits you like a tornado hitting a trailer park.  Then, like the tides, it ebbs away leaving clear skies of moderate happiness or at the very least, overcast skies but no rain.

The general pit in your stomach that pretty much doesn’t leave for a long while is kind of like the humidity of your pain.  It’s there and it’s bothersome but it doesn’t stop you from living your everyday life.  Unfortunately, that humidity is just the precursor to the sadness storm that’s coming.  I think until you get rid of that constant humidity, you are still in the depression cycle.

If I was more conscious of this while going through it, I would have logged my emotions each day or maybe several times a day just to see if there was a pattern.  It would have been hard to translate, though, since, just like the weather, my emotional state was fairly unpredictable.  I can’t tell you the number of times I felt somewhat normal only to see a picture or hear a song that brought on an emotional outbreak like an afternoon thunderstorm in the Spring.  Having a log may have helped me to track my emotional states so I could see when a downward spiral was coming and then I could batten down the hatches and put plywood up on the windows of my heart.  For me, that would have been putting on my walking shoes and shorts and hitting the pavement.  Walking turned the tumultuous storm into a steady rain and then to a sprinkle and then to complete sunshine.  The longer the walk, the better the outlook.

I’m sure there would be no way to accurately predict when the emotional bad weather would hit much like there’s no way to accurately predict the real weather.  There are, however, people getting paid big bucks to try to do it and they use a model to follow so why not me and the emotional forecast?  If I had an emotional forecast model, I could provide a personal service to help someone each morning predict just how crappy their day is going to be.  Wouldn't that be a nice service to have? 

"Back to you, Chip."

Next time:  Which came first? The marriage or the children?

Soul Music

When the problems with my marriage started to become more reality than paranoia, I began to get fearful that it would affect my music.  Weird statement? Perhaps, but read on, true believer…
I love music.  I love to listen to it.  I love to sing it.  Many a concert has been given for none but me in my living room.  I believe songs are the placeholders in our lives.  As we go through significant periods in our life, the music we listened to during those times become associated with the memories.  A sound track, if you will. 


For me, I’ll hear a song from the early 80’s and instantly be transported back to my high school days.  I think this probably happens to everyone.  You have songs associated with each girlfriend (or boyfriend), proms you went to, break-ups you’ve had, even new jobs. 


So I was afraid of two things:  new music I was listening to during my divorce becoming associated (and forever tainted) by the divorce and music I listened to when my wife and I were first falling in love becoming too painful to listen to now. 


For today’s music, that isn’t too hard because there have only been two new albums I’ve listened to since this started:  Counting Crows Underwater Sunshine and Train’s California 37.  I was more concerned about Train because that’s been a band both my wife and I have liked and listened to together quite often.   I guess only time will tell if I associate the songs from those albums with my divorce but there is one off California 37 that will probably touch me in the future,  When the Fog Rolls In:

I take a deep breath with my hand on the door
Afraid 'cause I'm not gonna see you anymore
These were our tender years, this was our street
All of our stoplights and all our concrete
Now it's all somebody else's to take
Until the fog rolls in

Oo oo oo and now we're through

I am happy to report that, so far, the songs I was listening to when my wife and I got together haven’t been impacted by the divorce…well, almost.  There are two songs that I cannot listen to yet but hope to in time.  One was our wedding song, Don Henley’s For My Wedding.  As I have expressed before, Don Henley is one of my all-time favorite artists and having to avoid something from his body of work will be a crime.  I’m sure I’ll be able to listen to it again as some point but for now, I’ll leave it as a blog quote (from Open Letter to My Niece).  

The second song I won’t name here but it was a special one my wife and I shared and I really don’t think I will ever be able to listen to that one again.  That’s sad because it’s a good song but there are too many memories wrapped up in it from the time we were falling in love.  The song even has lyrics that apply to our current situation, which taints it even more.  In some ways, I feel like I’m losing just a little bit of my soul by not having that song in my life anymore.  Yes, it held that much weight. 


There are others that make me pause when they start playing but I’ve been able to listen to them.  One I mentioned in The Discord of the Ring, The Heart of the Matter, also by Don Henley.  Since the divorce, I haven’t been able to get through that one without tearing up.  It’s been a while since it’s come back up on my shuffle playlist and I’m hoping I’ll be okay when it does rotate through again.


Even though I thought it would be tough to listen to my music for fear of dredging up sad emotions or tainting it, I forced myself to do it and I’m glad I did.  Albert Schweitzer wrote:  “The only escape from the miseries of life are music and cats…”  I don’t own a cat (yet…potential blog topic, btw) but I do own music.  The music did help me escape and at the same time cope with what was going on. 


I’ll end this with yet another quote from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K Rowling : 

“Ah, music!  A magic far beyond all we do here!”


Magic indeed.

Next time: What’s the emotional 5 day forecast?

The Two of Me

For me,  the idea of divorce at first was a hope that the threat of it would bring out counseling and therapy to help save the marriage.  You see, I was the one who asked for the divorce, not my wife.  This may not have been clear in my previous blogs.  As I have written before (most notably in Why? and Relationship Update), I could tell she no longer loved me.  We already had one incident some months back where we said we would work on what we were doing wrong in the marriage.  From my perspective, that really turned out to be just me working on what I was doing wrong (working too much, traveling too much, not being there for her and the girls).  I’m not sure what she did during that time but truth is she was already gone by that point. 

Anyway, I popped the question of divorce hoping it would kind of slap her into the reality that she was letting her marriage slip away. 

By the way, you never see videos of people asking for a divorce.  Once again, we are inundated with videos of men asking their girlfriends to be their wife but I don’t remember seeing one where a couple is at a game and on the Jumbotron the husband asks his wife to not be that anymore (or vice versa).  Another service for the Divorce Shower, perhaps.

Back to me asking for the divorce:  Maybe if I had done it a year earlier, it would have helped, I really don’t know.  When I did ask, she was initially shocked but never fought it.  She basically said OK and off we went.  It was at this point, the “First Me” came out.

First Me was a sniveling, selfish, whiney, “Why me?” wreck of a man.  For the first two weeks after, there wasn’t a day he didn’t cry.  He spent time shouting at his wife wondering how she could have done this.  It wasn’t his fault they were where they were, it was hers.  There was one time First Me was on the phone with his wife and insisted she tell him what he did wrong even though she was with their youngest daughter at the time. “So what?” First Me shouted and was, rightly so, hung up on. 

First Me was also the one who came up with the brilliant idea to just move away.  Again, this was all the wife’s fault.  She didn’t want to work on the marriage so naturally, he had to move back to Texas where he used to live because he moved to NEPA for her and the girls and now that was all gone so why stay?  He had friends back in Texas.  He needed those friends.  He was leaving and it was her fault he would never see his kids again.

Sigh.

I deeply regret ever becoming First Me and I would apologize to my wife for the way I behaved but she has told me she doesn't read this blog, so instead, I will apologize to myself.

<Side Note>  If I knew my wife was writing a blog about her divorce experience, I would be reading every last word of that thing and trying to read in between the lines to find a hidden message.  I would even read it backwards to see if there was something subliminal in it just like they did back in the day with record albums. </Side Note>

I suppose, though, when faced with this type of life changing event, it’s somewhat natural to lash out.  Perhaps it’s even healthy to a point.  Still, it bothers me that I fell so low.  But when you reach such a low point, all you can do is go up and that’s when Second Me came out. 

Second Me was the much more thoughtful and reflective side of my post-divorce persona.  Second Me realized that while she had a fair share of blame, he also had responsibility for things getting as bad as they did.  The divorce wasn't this one thing or that one thing, it was a combination of different things that wrapped itself around the marriage until it choked the life out of it.

Second Me also spent time not as much wondering why but wondering what’s next?  The Second Me started this blog to help cope with what was going on in his head.  He tried to be as civil as he could when around his wife and also tried to spend as much time as he could with his children since he knew that time would end up being limited very soon.

Confident that his life wasn’t over was another trait of Second Me.  Finding a house, knowing that he will still be a father to his girls in the best possible way he could, and establishing a new life as a single man helped get Second Me through each day.

Unfortunately, there were times when First Me made an appearance and took down Second Me (one such time detailed in The Healing Walk).   I think back to the Incredible Hulk TV series from the late 70’s/early 80’s.  First Me was my Hulk and I needed to find a way to control the raging spirit that dwelled within me. 

So far, I think Second Me is maintaining control.  Even if First Me comes out, I know how to deal with it to put him back inside.  I don’t begrudge First Me.  He was a part of the process but he was the first part…I’m now in the second part and looking forward to the third, and hopefully last, part of the ordeal where First Me is but a memory, Second Me is a comforting friend and Third Me is the one the world sees. 

I look forward to meeting the Third Me.  Hope everyone else will too.

Next time:  I didn’t have to throw away my iPod

Packing It In

I really hate to pack.

If only I had come up with my Pre-Boxtial agreement (as described in Storage Wars: The Divorce) before we moved into our house.  The packing wouldn’t be so bad.  Alas, I did not so hand me that bubble wrap, would you?

Who came up with bubble wrap anyway?  I have this giant roll that I paid $15 for and once I’m done unpacking, I will no doubt throw it away (okay, maybe after I spend 45 minutes popping the bubbles).  Is that a good deal?  I guess if all of my stuff makes it over to my new place without being broken; it will be a good deal.  I think the items I am wrapping in the $15 bubble wrap are worth more than that…collectively at any rate.

When I bought the bubble wrap I was hit once again with the “consumer choice” dilemma:  Do I get the small bubbles or the big bubbles?  Do I buy the small roll or the big roll?  Do I want it clear or  green or blue or red?  Although now that I think of it, having the color coded bubble wrap would fit in nicely with having the husband’s stuff separated from the wife’s stuff.  I must make a note to update my legal document.

Armed with bubble wrap, boxes (which also aren’t cheap) and tape, I started taking down pictures, getting stuff out of closets and cabinets and drawers and from the various places we put stuff.  The late, great George Carlin once said: “A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”  That is no more apparent than when packing your stuff.   We did a darn good job in going out and getting more stuff.  I wonder how many more times I can stuff the word “stuff” into this paragraph?

The other part of this particular packing event was the fact that I was only moving 20 minutes away.  My wife was moving less than 2 minutes away.  Did we really need to go crazy with all the packing?  Experience says yes.  My luck travels along the path of whatever can go wrong will go wrong…I think it’s like a law or something.  So while I may think I can stack up all my framed pictures, put them in the back of my truck and get to my new house without any problem, the truth is I will get to my new house with a million shards of class and ruined pictures.

Thinking I was making things easier, I got one of those tape dispensers that allows you to apply the tape in one deft motion across the box and then cuts the tape cleanly and quickly when you are done.  Yeah, right.  That works about once every three attempts.  Most of the time, the tape doesn’t cut and you have a rolled up, stuck together tail of tape hanging onto the side of the box.  Either that or the tape sticks to the metal guide.  And when I say “sticks” I mean bonds like a leech to the soft underbelly of one of the stars of “Swap People.” 

Since I’m not physically moving for another couple weeks, I have been storing my boxes and some of the furniture I’m taking in the garage.  This meant I parked my truck out on the driveway and my side of the garage slowly filled up with possessions being moved from one stage of my life to the next stage.  Actually, it’s interesting because a good portion of what I am taking away from the marriage is stuff I brought into this marriage. 

I guess that’s somewhat fitting, isn’t it?  I’m traveling this highway of life with certain possessions and even though I may take an exit that diverts me for a while, I return carrying much of the same stuff I had before. 

Except for the bubble wrap.  Always get new bubble wrap because if you don’t and it becomes a while in between exits, you’ll essentially have only wrap with no bubble.

Next time:  Two Face