My heart is racing.
Ready to beat right out of my chest!
For so long…
For so very, very, very long now…
All I have wanted is my own house!
A house that is warm and comfortable in the winter, cool and inviting in the summer.
A house where there aren’t half-finished projects everywhere. Broken this and that else where.
A house full of color and joy and loud, obnoxious laughter.
A house where I went to bed at night without a flippin’ fan blowing for white noise and the bed is covered with sleepy pets.
A house I couldn’t wait to come home to.
A house that was mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.
All.
Mine.
No, I have not bought that house.
Yet.
But what has me so excited is today, it finally became clear to me.
Actually buying my house will be the easy part!
As they say, it’s all down hill from here!
It’s not an easy thing to end your marriage.
Even one to a verbally abusive alcoholic.
And so today, realizing I am 100% committed to recreating my life, building a new future different from the future I was expecting, was liberating for me.
All this time, it hasn’t been the mechanics of getting a divorce or making enough money that has held me in my marriage.
It’s been my – rightfully so – ambivalent feelings.
It’s been my – justifiably – doubts and wavering conviction.
It’s been my – understandable – grief over losing the future I thought was to be mine and my children’s.
In other words, it’s been the completely natural progression and process of ending one’s marriage.
It’s been a “long time” coming.
Not just time wise, but emotions-wise.
I remember writing with such conviction I was “done” only to watch another six, 12, 18 months tick by with seemingly no change on my part.
But today I saw, felt, all that change that has been happening.
Within me.
When you decide you’re going to build your dream house, there is first the not-so-exciting, not-glamourous stuff. Finding the site. Getting a “perc” test. Closing on the site. Clearing foliage. Digging the basement. Laying the foundation. It can seem so trivial and tedious. Like nothing is happening except a big hole in the Earth where you beautiful, sun-light breakfast nook, master bath with a Jacuzzi tub, gourmet kitchen house is suppose to be. Septic tanks and rebar. Backhoes and cement mixers. A muddy hole and waiting for the rain to stop hardly seems the stuff dream houses are made of.
But then “suddenly,” the sun comes out – both literally and metaphorically – and like a colony of perfectly synchronized ants, workers are raising walls, hanging kitchen cabinets and caulking around the Jacuzzi tub where you will bubble away the day’s cares as you sip wine and gaze out at the view you’ve dreamed of, longed for and waited on for so very long.
I thought buying a house would be the hard part.
I thought packing and moving and just dealing with all the STUFF would be the hard part.
I thought the mechanics of divorcing would be the hard part.
But I was wrong.
The hardest part of creating any sort of great change or personal metamorphosis is the journey you must first take.
Within yourself.
