It’s been a while

 

I admit, its been a while since I wrote. It’s been a LONG while. It’s been a long, complicated, frustrating, lonely, rushed, anxious, tearful period of time… and I just haven’t known how to write about the things that are going on, the movements forward and steps backward and the quick slips sideways that have been occuring in my life lately…

 

It’s like the times I most need to write, I am most paralyzed with fear of actually writing things down, facing them.

Things are… complicated.

 

I am in love with a wonderful man… but I have to face the fact that right now I can’t really see a way that we can have a future together. The fact that I can’t say that there is NO way, that things might change as we both manage to get our lives back in order and our divorces finalized is the only thing that has kept me from breaking my own heart into a million peices and starting over. There is slight hope, it isn’t totally impossible, its just very difficult, very uncertain…

 

I am struggling to be patient with life… I really am. But I keep getting the feeling that I am 35 and as I get older I have less and less chance to find a life partner or someone to share my life with. At the same time, I have a great guy right now, we get along, we love each other and we are working on uncomplicating our lives…

 

Still… I don’t even KNOW if he sees a real future with me, or what he wants anymore… it seems to have changed in the year we’ve known each other.

 

I am still working on getting my divorce. Every time I think that I have done everything that I need to do to get the paperwork filed, my lawyer tells me that I need to get him something else, or call someone else or do something else. Back in January we all (my ex, his lawyer, me and MY lawyer) that after the separation agreement was dealt with and all conditions were met MY lawyer would do up the divorce paperwork.

 

But he dropped the ball on that. The conditions were met, and he just did NOTHING.

 

And I poked him and was told that now I needed to do THREE more things, that I needed to meet THREE more conditions to get a divorce granted. And I told him that he needed to start this and work through it, because we had agreed that I was going to do it (little did I know how much MORE my lawyer would make me do, since he made it sound like it was a simple matter back in JANUARY)…

 

I had to get my ex OR his lawyer (if she was still acting on his behalf) to agree to the divorce. Which I thought we had already done.

 

 

We had to revise the child support agreement into an ORDER OF SUPPORT… which is further complicated by the fact that my ex got himself another job in July and since I couldn’t get in touch with my lawyer I was unable to get the original support agreement revised to reflect his new income… and now my ex is being a total wanker about the fact that he will have earned 45% MORE income in this calendar year than was claimed when the support agreement was issued, and legally I have a right to have that adjusted (and morally, he admits he knew he should pay more, but there were things he WANTED to do and WANTED to buy, so he felt justified keeping money from the kids)…

 

Now, my ex is a jerk most of the time, and a bully at the best of time. He uses his money and power, his education, and his sheer SIZE to intimidate me and has for the past 15 years. Its a strategy he utilized from the time we were merely dating through our engagement and our ENTIRE marriage. It is a tactic he has used against me from the time I first questioned and stated I was leaving, and how he’s gotten away with not doing what is right during this whole separation and divorce process. He knows he does it, he does it consciously… which is why he objects to having lawyers involved (he also has spending problems and ego problems that make his spending worse)…

 

His intimidation and unwillingness to treat me fairly in the separation was what FORCED me to get a lawyer and drive up the expensese in the first place. And his failure to do what he admits he KNOWS he has to do, or what he states he should do to make the process easier and less expensive for BOTH of us, has been what has driven up BOTH our expenses AND kept the lawyers involved.

I still have the right to pursue a revision of the order, because its not a paltry amount (the amount we’re talking about is actually about the AVERAGE for a DUAL income family in our province… for HALF A YEAR for ONE PERSON… about $500/month MORE that he should have been paying for the months of July through December 2009)… but because I am afraid of what he will do to me or the kids if I DO go to court over this, my hands are tied until May… and then if theEx will not see reason, I will have to deal with the court and he knows it. Its not GREED so much as if I let him do it this time he will do it to me again and again and again, whining about imagined “poverty” and of debts that he blames on me, and trying to pass off portions of income as one-time unexpected winfalls… he has to learn that he (like myself) have to be LEGALLY fair in this situation, and that what he THINKS is “fair” to him is not legally “fair” to either myself or our children…

At this rate my divorce is going to cost as much as my first degree did!! 

I am SUPER busy. I still work 40-50 hour days at my office job. But on Monday nights I am now GirlChild’s Beaver Leader so I am generally with the Beavers and waiting for BoyChild to finish Cubs until 8pm Monday nights. Tuesday nights I have my Beginner Irish dance class until 8:15pm. The weekends I have the kids BoyChild has Tae Kwon Do for part of the morning, trying to get all the errands done, have some down time, and relax and play with the kids. Sunday GirlChild has her Beginner Irish dance class from 3pm to 4pm… 

And then it starts again…

I’m finding that sometimes I am exhausted at the end of the week. Last Saturday, not having to get up to take BoyChild to TKD, I slept in until 9am. And the next day, snuggling with Reg, we slept in until noon! I was completely DEAD-TIRED (okay, the sex helped too)… 

Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in a day, or days in a week… with work and housework, errands, kids, volunteering, and activities it always feels like I’m rushing to do something, be somewhere, get something accomplished…

I want to stop that feeling and just allow myself to like what I do get done, where I do accomplish things… 

I have decided to make a commitment to myself:

I am restarting Goddess School. I am redoing the Making Space for your Inner Goddess eCourse for a second time, and I’m slowly working through the activities again (I first did it in July this year the first time and kinda got stuck with a bunch of things going on in my life at that time and having a hard time getting past some of my issues with where I live)… I am going to keep going and slowly work through this course this time, no matter how long it takes… 

I have booked my flight and my hotel room to go and visit Pace and Kyeli. This is a HUGE thing for me… 

I am going to find a way to start being creative, to find some time in EACH day that isn’t JUST work, and that fuels my exploration of who I am.

I am going to stop being afraid of my ex, I am going to let go of his expectations of me… although I don’t expect that it will be EASY to do.