The Letting Go

It's a song by Melissa Etheridge. It came across my Pandora station tonight and struck a chord with me.

I've been thinking over the last few days about marriage and Michael. I've never doubted my decision to marry him. I've never doubted that I love him and that we're fantastic partners.

I've also had to acknowledge that the man I dated before him was one I was sure down to my bones that I was going to marry. Not marrying that guy was the most spiritually disconcerting thing that has ever happened to me. It threw me farther off course than any other event in my life. It was terrible. And it's possibly it was also exactly correct.

"Still it comes so slow, the letting go."

Tonight I was bored and running around the internet. I saw the Face.book page of the woman ThatGuy married. Their wedding photos were out there along with some vacation photos. I took a moment and looked through them. Then I sat with my feelings for a moment. The melancholy of that lost love was there but it had faded, changed.

The anger and resentment I felt toward him, toward God, has passed.

"Piece by piece I take apart this complicated heart and I hope to find something I can prove is real, I can feel is truth, I can say is mine."

Dark days followed our split but in those dark, twisty days I learned more about myself than at any single other time in my life. I discovered parts of me that I'd never surrender now. I can't imagine living without them.

Those days, those revelations led me to be on the path where I met Michael. When asked, and if I'm feeling serious, I tell people that the reason I married Mike is that I was walking along my path and then I felt our paths merged and, for the first time, I didn't have to change or alter my gait. We just fell into step together. It was effortless. It was right. And wonderfully, restfully, perfectly comfortable. Some may contend that comfort shows a lack of passion or some such nonsense. The comfort triggered a monumental relief and showed me a refuge I'd never sought, perfectly tailored for me.

As we're walking this path together now I've discovered that every day, every experience makes me more married to my husband in a way I wasn't capable of understanding before allowing myself to be in a constant state of togetherness. With that state, that melding, I'm finding that my old hurts, my old imagined life is leaving. And tonight I imagined myself saying to ThatGuy, "I came here to let you know the letting go has taken place."

Purging

Mike has been gone for just over a week now and it's official--I'm not cut out to be a military wife. I'm sure happy that's not a decision I made!

The office, the most dense of our spaces, is nearly done being cleared out. The books, seven boxes in that room alone, have been packed and all the pictures taken down and wrapped, tucked into their totes for safe transport. I still have some final bits to sort out but at least the room is ready to show now.

Today I start clearing out the garage to make room for the stacks of boxes. This is my least favorite part. I can start to see the transfer from living to that terrible transition time in between. On the up side, I am going to indulge and not pack a single Christmas decoration. They're all going to be on full display for the whole season and then, at the last available moment, will be tucked into totes on which the pugs will sleep while we make the final trip to SAT.

In my wildest dreams I never dreamed I'd be sad about leaving Utah, about leaving this ward. It's a haven for me. Sunday these crazy/delightful twins, Daisy and Azela, sat next to me in church and were wonderful and wiggly. I doubt there are another pair like them in the whole world. Part of me would like to stay here forever and just watch them grow.

It's the little things.

Today, after a long week, the garbage man came again. I missed him last week so we've had bags of garbage hanging out on the garage floor all week.

I considered running to his truck and giving him a big, sloppy kiss.

You must be polite with yourself when learning something new.

I'm sitting on the couch in the waning hours of the second day of a long absence from my husband, my partner and my lover. Yes, I intended you to feel the weight of my maudlin energy with that statement.

Yesterday I went back to work for a shift, enjoyed an early morning breakfast with my blossoming girlfriends and then, I crashed.

Today I have stopped to be sad. I've been in my pajamas, on the couch, trying to see my path again. I paused to acknowledge that I'm terribly intimidated by the amount of work the coming weeks are going to bring. To really feel the sadness of leaving the budding, happy life I saw here in honor of the life and happiness I know is to come. It was a day of pause, of refocusing to understand how I can be polite to myself without dropping into days like this too often.

So, as soon as this movie ends I'm going to get up and clean this house to some happy music. I'm going to make a list for my week and start making sure I savor these final few weeks with this lovely place. Then I'm going to pack up, put the pugs in the car and reunite with the other part of my soul, glorying in our togetherness.

That didn't last long.

Chaos has returned. Just as I though we had everything settled and were staying in Utah things turned on a time.

Mike's old company came back to us with one of those offers you just can't say 'no' to, so we're moving to San Antonio.

Moving means that all hopes of my working and foster care have been put, basically, on hold. I'll be the one staying in Utah until the house sells or after the holidays--one of the two. I wouldn't mind it except it means being apart from my partner for weeks at a time.

I have no idea what we're doing for housing in SAT yet, I'm sure we'll work it out. I can tell you that it will be significantly smaller than what we bought here so that we can be all on one level and have a pool in the back yard. I'm not a princess about many things but humidity...well, we'll go with 'princess' because this is a family blog.

I'm quite nervous about the move. This will be the first time since I was 18 years old that I haven't dictated the time and location of a move. Mike pointed out to me that it will be the first time since he was 18 that another person will be totally in charge of all his worldly belongings. I feel like it's a fair swap.