18 Years Ago - Divorce -

This week I am reminded of two major steps I made 18 years ago - fall in love with myself and ask for a divorce. 

I've read two bits this week that have made me reflect, again, on my choices: 

From Anne Patchett's book, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and the short story in it by the same name: "I understood that I had avoided catastrophe by the thickness of a coat of paint. He had done me the two greatest favors that anyone had ever done me in my life: he got me out, and then he let me go." I often send silent prayers of thanks to Crisfield, MD, for this. 

And this, from the Cup of Jo blog, a post "How I Made Peace with my Divorce," because I occasionally do look back, and wonder: 

What if my husband and I could have made our marriage work? If so, we might have spared our children so much grief. Imagine if, now — more than halfway through our sixties — we were living together on our old farm, welcoming our grandchildren there. Gathering around the big old trestle table where, long ago, we once rolled out the cookie dough and made potato print holiday cards. What if the whole thing — our years of doing battle with each other, the money spent on lawyers, my move to another town, and then another town after that, and another after that — had all been unnecessary? What if, instead of shuttling between our two houses all those years, with their brown paper bags of clothes and baseball gloves and school projects and stuffed animals — our three beloved children had gotten to grow up with their two parents, together, under one roof?

My sense of grief over the picture I’d made in my head that night lasted only a few days. Gradually, it came to me that the story I’d allowed myself to fall in love with — of the characters who might have resolved their problems — was a work of fiction. The real characters who had in part inspired it — my children’s father and I — could never have lived out our lives happily and lovingly together. We were too different. It wasn’t even about a shortage of romantic kisses like the one I used to study on my postcard. That’s the Hollywood version of what keeps a couple together. As hollow as that phrase may be — irreconcilable differences — it applied to us.

I do wonder "What If," to both of these musings, and yet . . .