You might wonder what I did those first few months. To be honest, looking back, even I wonder what I did.
There was a brief, fun, but ultimately ill-advised reunion with an old boyfriend. It started a few days after the divorce was final, when he moved back to my city. It felt so normal, so natural! It was great! I was thrilled to find out that D had not actually broken me, I had just felt broken.
But then I came to realize that the person that I had re-found was ultimately the same one I'd split up with nearly a dozen years ago. And there was nothing left there but memories - I needed to either have something new, or nothing at all. So I chose nothing, and in doing so, chose myself and Little One. But I didn't figure that out until much later.
[Sidebar. I don't want to diminish the importance of this particular romantic venture of mine. It was cathartic, and romantic, and altogether validating. It was sweet, but too intense, and I found myself scrambling to incorporate this new/old man into my new life. It felt good to have someone take care of me for a change, and it felt great when he was there and D was there too. But after a month and a half, it was too much, and I realized that there was no way that he and I could be together. Somehow, no matter how hard we tried, we just weren't right for each other. Me being me, and him being him - neither one of us ended up feeling very good about ourselves, for various reasons. The hardest part was, I had this figured out within weeks, and now it's nearly a year later and I'm not sure he's ever going to really understand it. He's a wonderful guy, terrific in fact. He's just not for me, and I hurt him, and therefore I don't want to draw out this section in case this story ever gets further than you, dear readers. He deserves happiness, and he will not find that here, sadly. Fini sidebar.]
So, I will fast-forward through the spring, and will give you a sense of what I did, outside of the aforementioned brief affair.
I slept.
That's right, I slept.
For months, I would do the following:
Wake up. Get ready for work. Get Little One ready for daycare. Pack lunches. Drop off Little One at daycare. Go to work. Work. Come home. Pick up Little One (or not, depending on if it was D's day). Bring her home. Have dinner. Bathe, brush teeth, put on pajamas, read a book, Little One's asleep by 8. Take one or one-half of a Xanax. Spend an hour doing chores around the house. Go to bed. Sleep hard.
Blather, wince, repeat.
On some level, I knew that I was going through a phase, or process, that I needed to go through. I also knew that I was just dead tired from years of D, and from months of trying to extricate myself from a horrid situation.
I also knew that food was a wonderful way to cure my in-the-moment blues and anxieties.
So I made a deal with myself: just get through to June. June has always been my month. It's my birthday month, I love the time of year it represents, and it's my birthday month. (Yeah, it's worth mentioning twice, it's that important to me.)
My idea of getting through was to a) sleep; b) take care of Little One and be completely devoted to her; c) show zero interest in being with the opposite sex; and d) eat whatever the hell I wanted, but figure out an exercise regimen. I pretty much did all of those, though not in equal measure all the time.
But the ultimate point was this: I had to just cut myself some slack.
After a lifetime of trying to be perfect, and failing miserably, I had the ultimate black mark: a divorce on my record. Therefore, anyone who might know me, or might ever know me, would know one very important thing about me: I...am not...perfect. ThereIsaidit.
And hey, maybe that - in retrospect - might not be - a bad thing...? Could it be? Could it possibly be that not striving to be perfect might, in the long run, actually prove a healthier, more fulfilling posture for me?
Well, hell, I thought - anything's possible, might as well try this on for size.
Armed with an ongoing prescription to Xanax, lots of new sheets and pillows, junk food, and a treadclimber, I jumped into the breach with both feet.
But then came May.
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