Yesterday I woke up early and I had my phone charging by the side of my bed. You will remember that some months ago I committed myself to the Shadow Weave project. But I have decided that with everything that has been going on around here that I just can't and so I have agreed to sell the warp to a lady in my guild. All I want is to get the money back that I spent on the damn thing in the first place. So I knew I had discussed the price of the yarn with the lady I ordered it from via email. I decided to look back through all of the "sent" messages to find that particular one and see what the price of the yarn was. As I was scrolling through the messages I discovered that there are several there from Michael to his girlfriend.... love letters... poetry.... God it was enough to make me want to puke. Why oh why do I have to keep getting slapped in the face with this. Alright already.... I've got it... really... I do... and it's just barf!!!!
Later in the morning I called the Fairway Divorce Solutions people in FSJ. Our divorce will be a mediated divorce rather than taking it through the traditional system of lawyers and courts. It is faster and cheaper and for me it is the right way to go. I want to come out of this on the other end with as little psychological damage as possible and I want that for the girls as well. So far it is an uncontested divorce. He is being very accommodating and I hope that continues. The girls, thank heavens, are old enough to decide for themselves where they want to live. For Daughter #2 there was no question. She has decided that her father is too untrustworthy to live with and she has lost a great deal of respect for him. For Daughter #1 it was much more difficult. She has a much better base of friends. She is a western girl in that she loves horse back riding and all things horsey. She also loves the Junior Canadian Rangers and will miss that as well. She feels like she belongs here in BC because it is her home... it took her a while to decide to come with me and for her it is a real act of bravery. She will be leaving everything she knows and loves behind her. But eventually she came to grips with it and part of it was the fact that she would have a hard time with her father having a physical relationship with another woman other than me. Part of it is the trust issue as well. Michael has decided that, though difficult, it is probably for the best and that the girls should stay together... at least that is what he is saying. For the girls it will be an opportunity to experience a new way of life. Another culture might not be a bad thing for them. So when there is no contest over the children and when there is no contest over finances then there is no real reason to hold up a divorce. Yesterday I got the ball rolling.
While I don't believe that divorce is a good solution, sometimes when there is no other choice then it is the only option. Now that I have discovered Mike's alternate life I have come to the conclusion that our marriage was a farce from the beginning. I made my vows faithfully. The person I married was the person he showed me and what he showed me is not who he is. (We won't touch on the remarriage thing since that touched a hot spot yesterday and no I am not thinking about remarriage in any way other than the most unconcrete way... as a possible "what if" at some point down the road... it is all theoretical at this point)! Still a divorce will spell out Mike's obligations to me and to the girls for the next years without him. Divorce to me is a civil contract and nothing more. It is a way for a woman to know that she is not going to starve in the hedgerows. That wouldn't happen to me anyway. But still it is a way to know that life is not going to dump you on your ass and with nothing, nadda... nary a ting. Remember I said yesterday that civil law cannot overthrow God's laws. All civil law does, is put in place a way forward, and defines your relationship in another way. I cannot totally shed him... he is the father of my children and we will always share that connection.
Still, yesterday was a day of angst. I knew that the mediator would require me to rehash everything... and I did. And it was tough. But it is done and for the better. There is nothing that can be done now until he comes back from Vernon. At which time he will meet with the mediator and then we have to get our financial records in order. After that it will be a back and forth between me and him via the mediator until we have an agreement in place that we are both happy with. In between we will have to attend separately a couple of seminars on financial counselling and co-parenting. Once we have the agreement hammered out we take it to our respective lawyers to get some advice on it and then it gets filed at the court with our signatures and the lawyers signatures... and then we are free to do whatever we want in the eyes of the civil court. Remarry whatever.... for me that will be a hard day. I will be letting go of my childhood dreams of love and marriage, of old age with someone you love. The mediator expects that our divorce, being uncontested, will probably be done by the time Christmas rolls around. All I could thing was our anniversary is the 28th of December... with my luck that will be the day that we file. For him I'm sure that would be a great anniversary gift... for me.... well I'll leave that alone.
Today I am going to try to get some more of the boxes in the shed opened and organized. His stuff for him and my stuff for me. Slowly I am seeing the piles in the shed get lower... the ones in the house get higher, mine and his. It is going quicker now because mostly it is books, but there is a box coming with the girls school work and drawings as little girls. I will pack that away in boxes for them but I will keep one or two things for him and one or two things for me. There is also the box of Valentine's and love letters he gave me... I may just burn them unopened.... too hard to reread. After the boxes of personal effects are done then it is a matter of taking out the rest and deciding what's worth a trip to the dump and what's worth trying to sell. Our furniture is very little... the beds are coming with me... the computer is coming with me, (he has a personal laptop). The TV is coming with me though I may buy a Blue ray player and give him the surround sound stereo since he likes CBC and it picks up CBC very well. Bureaus and things like that can be sold, my antiques go with me since they have been in my family for a very long time. Dishes I don't care about. Camping stuff he can have including the old canoe he carried across a lake in a wind storm on the ice and almost blew away with. Gardening stuff is his since I will buy new when I get settled. Scooter is Daughter #2's and the Kayak is Daughter #1's. The rest is small appliances which I will replace when I get where I'm going. My chair will go with me and his chair will go with him. I will take all my spinning and weaving stuff including fleeces if there is room. It is not a lot to show for twenty years of living together... but then my needs are quite adequately cared for in the simple. A small house, little or no furniture other than what we need absolutely. A nice deck for summer time living and occasionally a canoe trip or camping trip.... I thought I was fairly easy to please... apparently that's not enough or maybe it is too much... I don't know but for whatever reason we are finished. Almost....
No comments:
Post a Comment