Since I’m currently underemployed ( oh, by the way, there’s a fire sale at my house), I picked up a book to kill the time between laundry loads.  It’s by Laurie Perry, or as she’s known on the blogosphere and to the knitting community, Crazy Aunt Purl.  It’s called Drunk, Divorced, & Covered in Cat Hair. 

I’m on chapter 22, but I highly recommend this book to any woman going through the process of separation and divorce.  Laurie is funny and candid.  She shares the process of her separation and divorce, with all the pain there for you to see.  She’s really brought back memories for me.  Laurie doesn’t have children, but I can relate to her story.  She does find knitting as a hobby and a way back from the dark side, but I knit, so there you have it.  You can ignore those parts and insert your own bit of heaven there if you’d like.

In the beginning, you fight it as hard as you can.  I remember begging and pleading my ex not to leave.   Promising I would change.  Swearing I’d do anything he wanted as long as he stayed and our family was kept together.  The first few days after he left were a haze.  I don’t know how I got by.  I went to work.  I took care of the house.  I fed the kids and got their baths and tried to function as normally as possible for them.  I took phone calls from my family that I don’t remember.  That’s how out of it I was. 

At first he stayed with his parents, but I remember the crying and begging I did when I found out he’d got his own place.  Laurie shares all of that with the reader, too.  But as you progress through the book, she slowly makes the same realizations that I did. 

She and I both gradually, as the pain and brain fog lifted, started to remember how long it had been since the marriage had been good.  The evenings spent in silence together(if my ex even came home at all), trying to reach out to someone who just wasn’t there.  Trying to please someone who couldn’t be pleased.  It’s odd to me how we forget the loneliness we endured before the split when he says those two words, “I’m leaving.” 

It comes back though, eventually.  The fog will lift and the pain will ease a little.  You’ll remember cooking meals for him that he never ate and start cooking what you like just because you can.  You’ll remember standing over the washer and dryer doing his laundry and feeling like nothing but a maid to him.  And one day, you’ll find something, for Laurie it was knitting and for me it was returning to writing.  You’ll find something to make you smile.  You’ll feel a little happy.  You’ll be scared by the feeling, maybe even feel guilty.  I’ve been left by my husband because I’m a failure as a wife and a woman.  I shouldn’t feel happy.  But you will.  And the feeling will grow.  The fog will go away.  You will live again.  If you don’t believe me, read Laurie’s book.  She’ll tell you the same thing.