Almost Divorce- Prologue
Posted: 2011/06/23 Filed under: Ramblings | Tags: my personal catfish story, Relationships 40 CommentsSomehow even with all of my childhood issues I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 15 and a half or so. I discovered early in my life that sex can be used to get boys. You can convince yourself that if they want to have sex with you it is because they do like/love you or that they will like/love you. This is not a new tale. Too many of us know this pain in some form or another. I’ve had lots of men in my life and more than a handful of relationships along the way. There are exploits in those years and those are largely the stories my friends are looking for. As soon as my inner Chelsea Handler is ready I’ll tell them. The point is by the time I met and married The Husband I had serious Game and the confidence that went with those skills.
I love fiercely and used to hate just as fiercely until I discovered that I was only poisoning myself with that hate. I’m independent yet can be very emotionally needy when my heart is involved. I am an extrovert who requires copious amounts of alone time. I have a mind that remembers what you said or did like a steel trap. I’m very good at seeing into others and knowing what’s really in their hearts, but I can be so blind when my own heart is engaged. I (used to) have a tendency to see things as very black or very white. I can be impulsive, I’m not good at telling myself no. I have an addictive personality. I am stubborn and refuse to take crap, unless I love you (friend or otherwise) and think you love me too and then it seems I will put up with almost infinite crap. Yet I have always been one to do nothing but exactly as I please. I am comfortable with most of my opinions, and others are welcome to their own but it’s no matter to me outside of what I might learn from their POV. I’ve always felt like I was very very strong yet capable of being very very weak. I often have to learn lessons the hard way because you cannot tell me what to do if I have my mind set otherwise. I’ve experimented with these traits and others, cultivated some of them and tried to squelch a few or dial them down. I needed a middle ground, a lighter shade of gray, hell I needed to discover gray even existed. I sought individual therapy during this time and learned I could recognize behaviors and thought patterns that I considered dichotomous and work to manipulate myself into a person of a more centered spectrum. This is called working on yourself and tho it is so worth it when you can pull it off, nothing sucks more or is harder than actually DOING that work. Unpacking all your demons and living with them while paying attention and trying to learn how to be different is not easy to do. Making it stick is also sometimes no fun. Those knee jerk reactions we have that are deeply imbedded in us are hard to break and easy to quickly recollect and use when “needed”. At the depth of my pit during the almost divorce I had an entire queued up list of things I had no choice but to work on. This was a sucky place to be, but it has made me a better person and made my life and marriage stronger. The thing you need to know about me is I’m really good at getting back up, squaring my shoulders, raising my head and eyes and saying fuck you, I won’t allow this or you to break me. I’ve been practicing it since I was a child.
When I say almost divorce I mean The Husband had moved out and later I filed. We had custody and child support etc.. already in place. Had met with the mediator and the financial planner and had the divorce decree all ready to be taken together to a notary public to sign. All we had to do was go to the notary and I would take the decree to the courthouse and file it, the judge would of given it a look see and declared us over. We were living as a divorced couple and pretty amicably at that, getting along was never a problem for us most of the time. The Husband and I were both resolving ourselves to the new chapter in our lives and trying to make the best of a very ugly situation. It was 3 days away from our waiting period being over and mere hours away from our scheduled trip to the bank for the notary when I got back results from degreeverify.org that PJ had been lying about who he was and where we went to both undergrad and grad school, at a minimum. His response, vanish into thin air. Poof. Gone.
We put the divorce on hold. I literally had to rethink, reprocess and reexamine everything that had happened in my life, my head and my marriage from the moment I met the boy until he vanished.
Everything
I had no solid ground to hold on to for any decision I had made during that time. It was like the world sucked in around me and then vomited back out again in some kind of horrible unsolvable puzzle. The Husband and I took our time putting our life back together and even that had near misses. We are the same people at our core but we are also very different, transformed by the journey. The marriage I have now is not the marriage I had then. It is not perfect but it is ours.
I’ve been working on this in pieces, it takes a lot of time and often emotional energy and I don’t want it taking over my life (1.5 times was enough thanks). But it is also freeing, and calming and awesome. I’m looking back to review with the eyes, head and heart that hind sight and time has provided. To have a clearer big picture look and color it with humor and wisdom gained though living it. And to share with you the lessons I learned so you don’t have to learn them the hard way like I did.
The next installment of this series will be published next Thursday,
Closer to Lola 
So, you’re a goddam narcissistic, histrionic, irrationa, shrill idiot. Good to know.
[…] Almost Divorce- Prologue […]
[…] This series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] on me. I play this game all the time at work, it’s my job. I used to do this all the time pre AD. The major difference between then and now is now I get help making that magic happen at […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] that are truly raising kids on their own. I became very humbled by a lot of things on my almost divorce journey and single parenting was one of […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] led him to deeper research and Radio, his I should fuck off and die song during the worst of the almost divorce. He later turns me on to This Addiction album. At some point I tell him about how much I […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] The Prologue for this series can be found here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] As always if you want to start at the beginning that can be found here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] This series is published once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here […]
[…] I’m super stoked to have my summer 2011 play list for driving all worked out. Last Spring I experienced a reawakening of my voracious appetite for new music. It was a shared interest that PJ and I discovered very early on and is one of the reasons I felt so close to him. He began to “song me” ; shoot me links to songs that were supposedly things he wanted to say to me or thought about me or whatever, a wooing mechanism if you will. And it worked very well for him. Except for that one time he sent Something Corporate’s Konstantine with the comment of “this ought to keep you busy for awhile”. This was proliferated by the add-ons to Google and Skype that can show what song you are listening to via your status. When we were in periods of trying to stay away from each other each of us would often still show whatever it was they were listening to and it would be implied it was meant for the other one to see and understand. It was sort of a not so secret code of communicating our feelings when we were not supposed to be communicating directly with each other. That and being under the same sky, but that is all coming later in the Almost Divorce Story. […]
[…] portions can be found in Prologue and Part […]
girl, I juv yuo! you’ve come a long way baby, don’t stop now!
[…] Almost Divorce- Prologue (closertolola.com) […]
I juv yuo! Keep the faith girlfriend….and remember, just BREATHE!!!! Now bring on the BGC blog!!!
Juv yuo too. I’ll do BGC soon, promise!
I ❤ you. Thank you for sharing.
I ❤ you too! Just knowing you understand at a deeper level is an amazing comfort to me.
I think this is all very brave Lola…you are showing your weak side, and I think that makes you very strong.
Thank you sweetie