And so going through my divorce process has really been stressful on me. Not only do I not have the ability to come up with a reasonable Master Plan of how things are supposed to go (becuase i have not been able to get a good feel of the complexities of the laws and such) but I have to rely on a douche-bag lawyer who seems to be attempting to milk me of every penny he possibly can through his ineptitude, inefficiency, and poor communication with me… 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I mean, I could SEE what they cost, right? I could go to an open house, right? No one could fault me for that.

 

And so the kids and I went (on a supremely COLD afternoon) to an open house…

And we SEEMED to qualify for the program…

 

So I contacted a mortgage banker… and I sent her all my information…

 

AND I GOT PREQUALIFIED for a MORTGAGE!!

 

So I went and looked at a few units in my price range…

 

And I made an offer on a 1048 square foot three bedroom townhouse “condo”…

 

And now I’m waiting to hear back if the city will approve my application into this program (the city is paying the 5% down payment if I qualify)… and if they DO…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

April was a month of pretty spectacular suckitude… I went from feeling pretty good about myself after having a bit of a health scare (or 2 actually, as the attack of the aspertame caused me to have several weeks of skin irritation with no real defined “cause”) and realizing that my finances could be back in order due to investments, tax refunds, and budgeting…

 

To feeling like I was going to lose my children because social services decided that they were going to investigate me for what amounted, in the end, to having tapped my kids on their behinds with a wooden spoon — in JEST — one day when I wanted to get them out of the kitchen and away from the hot stove while I was cooking.

That’s right. I was put through the wringer because I had teasingly tapped my children on their clothed bottoms with a wooden spoon! I was accused of “inappropriate discipline” and had to have 2 nosy CHILDLESS social workers come and look through my house to make sure that I was living in a clean environment that was not endangering my children.

 

Wow. When I think back to the conditions that the Stalker had HIS child living in — a house where you could not see even a square of the floor for the papers and garbage strewn about, where the bathroom and kitchen hadn’t been cleaned in MONTHS, where boxes were stacked about so high in every room that there was no longer room to MOVE freely, where walking on the floor often resulted in cuts or splinters, where many weeks the Stalker had to go without eating because he didn’t have food in his home, and where both Stalker and his son had to share one ripped, stained and reeking mattress (which the child regularly wet) even though the child was 8 years old at the time — I wonder why no one bothered to call child protection on HIM.

 

And to end the month I reached one of those age milestones that no woman wants to have to reach, nevermind trying to reach it GRACEFULLY. Generally my age has not bothered me in the past, getting older was just another thing that happened, but added to that the stress of suddenly realizing that I am at an age now where statistically I am likely to not be able to start over again in love and marriage… its kinda scary.

 

I don’t want to be alone the rest of my life… I want to rebuild a life with someone else. And its kinda scary to hear that women older than 35 have a lower chance of being able to find love (and marriage) than do younger women.

 

But… that’s not something I am going to stress about anymore.

 

Because there are good things going on in my life that I need to focus on (instead of worrying about drowning in the loneliness of being single at 35)…

 

1. I have a great boyfriend.

Yes, he needs to be poked a lot to communicate with me on a regular basis, but he does try. I get one text a day most days, and while he might not think to call me or chat with me on MSN right now, since he’s preoccupied with the crap that is going on with his estranged wife. 

 

There are things I wish that would change — I wish we lived closer to each other or that it was easier to communicate (I can’t afford to call him much and he doesn’t consider calling me most of the time)… but right now we are both going through a lot of crap in our personal lives (divorces, financial pressures, and dealing with lawyers and hopefully-soon-to-be-ex’s, kids) and so I am willing to be patient and work more on who I am. I know, despite the silences, that he loves me and cares about me. I don’t know if we will have a life together, but what we have now is satisfying when we get together and that is enough for me for now…

 

 I am not so much of a leaner… I mean, I will lean on my friends if I with them, but I do have a very VERY hard time reaching out to people when I need help the most. I am getting better (although it might be hard to see that).

 

Serin has been rather invaluable throughout the entire mess of the last 10 years of my life — the tumult of my marriage and the fight to maintain my marriage through the loneliness of a situation when my husband was DETERMINED to stay in a job that tore us apart, through having 2 kids and losing my SELF to a situation that I didn’t know how to control, through leaving theEx, through clawing myself up out of the shadow of my marriage, through the crap with the Stalker, through the process of serving and going through the legal bs to PREPARE for the divorce, who listened to me through the angst of dealing with lawyers, through my learning to deal with finances, through the Stalker becoming a STALKER, through my stint in online dating, through my silly twitterpation with Reg, and through the BS that contines with theEx, the Lawyer and the divorce. And I don’t doubt that we’ll continue to be friends for the foreseeable future… Too bad the damned boy lives so far away, there are a lot of times it would be nice to just have someone around to talk to or geek out with…

 

G has been there for me for most of my marriage and was the only person who was not driven away by theEx’s need to keep me from my friends.

 

C has been my friend since grade 5… and although we have less in common now than we did in our past lives, we still manage to get together for a movie now and then. I do know I should try to get out with her more, though.

 

MyssK has helped keep me afloat through the divorce process as she, and her sweet man in Ontario, have gone through their own separations and divorce dramas. Sometimes just knowing that you’re not the ONLY other human being in the world going through this stuff helps a LOT.

 

The problem, however, has just been that the people I would like to talk to or spend time with the most aren’t usually the ones that are available. While I would like to spend time with Reg, he is both out of my range (phone wise) and out of town and very distracted by his personal issues right now — so I don’t feel right bothering him right now. Serin lives SOOOO far away (damn him) and MyssK also lives so far away that we can’t just get toghether to have coffee (laugh). And while I could spend more time with G, there are other issues that make me want to not lean so heavily on her either right now.

 

I make enough money that, if I budgeted correctly, I could get by and pay all my bills without having to rely on child support. The fact is that I am not a great budgeter, and that means that I do not have as much savings as I could have, had I been more stringent. I get a decent wage and that is good.

 

My job offers me flexibility to get things done around work hours. If one of the kids (or both) have doctors appointments or school events in the daytime, I am able to take time off for part of a day or a whole day. I am able to take vacation days when I want them, working around the constraints of my job, and I am able to accrue days if I don’t take all my vacation over the year.

 

I would like to have a job where I do have the ability to move up in the company, which I do not have here. There isn’t anywhere for me to go in this branch, and due to the constraints of my separation agreement I can’t just leave the confines of the city without having a court battle over who the kids get to live with. So I am pretty much to stay in the Saskatoon area, where my growth is limited, if I want to keep my children in my life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am happy that my life is no longer in a permanent holding pattern, and that there is an end date to this process. I am starting my life again, in a very real sense, and I am feeling so much better about things now than I did 3 years ago, 2 years ago, 1 year ago, even 6 months ago…

 

So much has changed, and, especially in the last 3 months, changed for the BETTER. I have been doing a great deal of personal WORK, quietly, privately, and with passion and enthusiasm, which is getting me over the blocks that I have been holding me back for the last few years. I have worked consistently on getting back on track with my personal goals, I have been looking into my values, I have finally let go of other people’s perceptions of me, and I am HAPPY.

 

 

 

The next few weeks I am sure I will have more information on the agreements from my lawyer, as they have to be written up, reviewed, and signed off by both parties (likely in triplicate or more) and then sent through the court process. I am lucky in that we agreed that the divorce will trump the separation agreement (in that I don’t have to wait for the court to process the separation agreement BEFORE I can apply for the divorce paper) and that it might be well and truely done (at least in that aspect) in a few weeks.

 

After that… well there is only the glorious hope that the house sells and that I can get out from under a bunch of debt… rather than walking away with more debt than I can ever support and hoping that I can avoid bankruptcy. I don’t know the liklihood of that. All I can do is hope that eventually people want to buy homes again and that there is less pressure on top of me.

 

I am hopeful that there is freedom on the other front as well. I know that the person in question has a relationship right now, and I think i have made it clear that I do NOT feel that I am comfortable hearing his version of how things are going have gone, should have gone… etc. I know, from the few emails I have had from him lately (on the nice side of things) that he feels that he has been wronged because he wants a friendship and I do not want that right now, that I feel that his view of who I am and what I want, my values, my ideals and really my interests are skewed. It’s so awkward for me, because I want to believe… but the games that have been played on his side to get my attention have driven me further away from EVER wanting to talk to him again.

 

I won’t respond to him. I know better now. I just hope that the last phone conversation, in which I stated that I did not want to be his friend and that I didn’t want to talk to him would have made that clear. But I don’t think that it does.

 

I do wonder, though, what someone like that thinks they are accomplishing when they are unwanted or they start to become unwanted and they STILL push for “friendship” or something of the like? When you need space and someone doesn’t give it to you, but instead asks for you to listen to them discuss all the reasons why you are 1) a bitch, 2) wrong, 3) failing, or 4) a bad person/friend over and over… well… what does it give them?

 

I think that if I had been allowed to grieve for my past — the failure of my marriage, the failure of my ideals, the reality that I am NOT a 23 year old girl anymore and I can’t just go back to being that person in ANY aspect of my life, that I have done wrong by myself and other people, and that I have fallen into something with someone who makes me UNCOMFORTABLE – I might have been more able to come back and try to be his friend after the process of grieving was worked through.

 

It isn’t that I don’t realize I did things incorrectly with Stalker… its that I felt extreme PRESSURE when I was with him, and the communication was not what EITHER of us needed.

 

 

So, why do I even LOOK at what went wrong there?

 

Well… because I find myself in a NEW relationship, with a new man who is completely unlike anyone else I have ever dated and whom I KNOW I have shared feelings with. And I don’t want to start off with bad communication patterns. I know that I have tended to communicate on a different level or just shut off in stressful situations, and because I want this to work out, I am woking on getting my communication patterns in a better order.

 

Pam’s Life Lessons…

 

 

 

 

Seriously bloggable…

 

So… I have been spending a great deal of time doing the introspective thing lately, even more so than you can see here (laugh). I am a naturally introspective person, and changes in the year and seasons tend to get me all “thinky”, and that natuarally comes out of me at these times.

 

 

So far 2009 has started off way better than 2008, and I am certain that the reasoning for this is that I have changed my outlook about my life AND I have been finally able to decide on a plan of action for a few things that I have been putting off in my life. I have cut out a lot of the negativity in my life, I have changed my thinking patterns, I have been focusing more inward on getting my soul together, I have been working on getting my thoughts in order, I have openned myself up more to the good things in life, and I have been back to writing.

 

I am feeding my soul more, I am starting to feed my spirit more, and I am working on getting my physical on track as well. I wake up feeling EXCITED for what my life holds for me. I reach out to my friends and family more. I go OUT. I take my kids out. I create! I am feeling great about my life and what is coming to me…

 

And even when someone tries to dampen that down it is impossible for me to stay down too long… because there is too much in my life that I have to look forward to:

 

 

And so I KNOW that 2009 has a lot of GOOD things in store for me.