What Happens When You Look Back? 

I see both, especially when a certain song or two come on the radio. I remember a lot of our good times: Mr. Ex bringing me dinner at the office when I had to work late, the first time we went hiking together after I had lost more than 100 pounds, him holding my hand the night before gastric-bypass surgery, back rubs, foot rubs and the bubble baths he used to draw for me. But then there are the bad times: His regular habit of spending bill money on beer and cigarettes, the yelling because he wanted Donna Reed for a wife, the cheating, the drugs, the lies.

I choose to remember the good times, because I don't ever want to be bitter. But the fact is that the good times were merely brief breaks in a decade of bad times.

Before his affair and our subsequent divorce, I only remembered the good times.  Now, I just look back and see all of the times in our marriage that I stood beside of him, held him up, sympathized with him and it makes me sick.  Love IS blind.  We choose what we want to see, accept things that maybe we wouldn't normally accept, and make concessions, because that's what we think we have to do to make our marriage work.  I makes me sick to see how naive I was.  I believed him when he had his first affair when he said he had only met with her the one time because she just needed someone to listen to her.  I kept on believing what I wanted to believe after that.  He was always able to explain away anything I questioned and I believed it because to do anything else was unthinkable.  My two adult children told me they are grateful that we didn't divorce while they were growing up.  They are both married now with their own children.  I don't feel I sacraficed myself but I did stay in the marriage longer than I should have.  I loved him.  I hope that as the YEARS go by, my resentments and the bad times will fade and I will be able to remember the good times that you are remembering.  Right now though, that seems light years away from happening.