I want to go home.

Photo attribution here. 

My parents divorced when I was eight. My mom took my siblings and I out of school early one day after they separated and we left on a "vacation" never to return. We stayed in California for a bit with family, then moved to Utah for a year or two. After that, the siblings that hadn't chosen to move back to my dad's house, my mom, my step dad and new little brother along with two of my five step sisters moved back to California into a place where there are three types of people. 1. The law. (Cops who don't want to raise their kids in LA so they make the 2 hours commute daily) 2. Those hiding from their past or the law. (Can't tell you how many kids from my high school there have died of an overdose. So sad.) and 3. Members of the witness protection program. I wish that was a joke, but it's not. Rural and isolated don't even begin to describe the bizarre universe that was my home for seven years.

By the time I hit my late teens I decided I would be better off living with my dad again. On my 17th birthday I packed up and transferred schools in the middle of my junior year of high school. It was not a smooth transition. I kept telling myself that I was just going to leave for college soon anyway, so I didn't want or need to make any connections there. After that phase there has been ten years of bouncing from one idea, one place, one school, one beach to another. 

Being quite unlike most Mormons I know, but loving the gospel with gusto, I have always felt an intense longing for my people. This coupled with my transient past made for an intense desire to find my place in the world. The long story short of that saga culminated (or so I thought) in my marriage to The Mr. and moving into our apartment in Long Beach, CA. I had finally, finally, finally found my place in the world. For a short time I lived this moment where I was satisfied with the life I'd created. I had found my home. 

Part of grieving my divorce is reconciling the loss of that brief moment of my place in the universe being found. I spent last summer in California with Sassy McLadyBoots and, after my first day of work as a nanny for the summer, felt this intense urge to drive "home" as I had hundreds of times after my nanny job in the neighboring city during my married life. I braved the traffic and spent the 45 minutes in the commute I made daily as a wife. I pulled up and parked next to the apartment complex I left my heart in and sat for a time. I then spent an afternoon walking the streets of the abandoned foundation of my marriage. After that, I wrote this:

July First, Twenty Thirteen

I am in love with the city of Long Beach

This one time I was married to a man who couldn’t see me. I’m tall and bright and was standing right there, so by all accounts it doesn’t add up. When we married we settled in Long Beach, California. To him it was rough enough around the edges and equidistant from our places of employment. To me it was everything that’s right with the world. The third day of house hunting he told me to make up my mind already. God picked me up that day after work and set me down on the corner of 3^rd and Junipero and in that moment, I knew.

Constructed in the 1920s, Spanish tile roof with hardwood floors, crystal doorknobs and quirky neighbors. When I brought him to it that night in spastic adoration the courtyard was lit with twinkle lights and inhabited by lovely lesbians sipping a red wine over cigarettes.

After moving in I at first mistook my enthusiasm for the city as just another element of the blissful sneaker wave of matrimony crashing down around me and turning everything upside down. This satiated longing in my gypsy soul explains at least partially why it took me so long to notice and accept that in the beginning he was just “tired”, then distant, then angry, then mean. He moved back to his neck of the woods, and in an ultimately self-sacrificial demonstration I pulled myself, kicking and screaming from the only place I could ever, in truth, call home.

Today I walk the streets heartsick and sobered, but inescapably on the verge of an orgasm of the soul at the sheer perfection that is my city. Ocean waves, calm and gentle lapping at the shore; kiss after kiss after caress the sea makes endless love to my city. Latin lovers have salsaed themselves into tree nymphs. Her leafy hair still holds the blossom. His skin on the branches that suspend her in perpetual elegance is smooth like glass. Stained glass in the windows of the churches of every denomination.  Tibetan Christians, Lutherans, Muslims. Thick air settles in your car, your hair, your skin – sticky, like a memory you just can’t shake.

The buildings are corporate and creaking, stable and filthy, artful and average, because here in my kingdom by the sea, you can be anything you want to be. Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles and yoga in the park, open to the public and interrupted by a pickup game of soccer. A sexy, sweaty, stinky group of dark eyed Latinos at home scoring goals in my city.

The birds of paradise and palm trees are jazzercising in fluorescent purple, green and orange; sweating it out with the rest of us. The air is dirty and the cars are clean and glistening in the sun – or they’re not. The food is unapologetic in its -love me or leave me- essence and the freeways mock your impatience and lazily roar curses in stereotypically colorful language. Even the garbage cans lining streets are purple.

And everywhere I go in this town, so starkly juxtaposed, I see him and me. That endlessly awkward night at dinner. The time he slept in the car. The long walk I took down the pier when he started to change, desperate to clear my head of early signs of warning. The alley where we both giggled and kissed for the engagement shoot, and loaded up the moving van. The place I stared while we sat in our car and he told me he couldn’t love me if I couldn’t start being happy.

These memories, these blackened, charcoal, cancer coated moments growing stale in a dying corner of my mind—these are the only things I do not love about my city. These are the only things I would change.

I was married only a moment compared to the average divorcee, but I understand at least a taste of the sense of loss of place. I went to a support group once where a woman talked about the hours she'd spent driving around in her car, not wanting to return to her disrupted home and life. That's an element of this road we walk. Will I ever return to Long Beach to build my life again? 

Maybe. 

Or maybe not.

So much there I love and so much there I can't recover. I'll tell you what though, wherever I end up, however it goes, I'll make a life worth loving. I'll find my hardwood floors and crystal doorknobs in a brand new city full of streets I haven't walked, food I've never tasted, challenges yet to be discovered, miracles I have not yet fathomed, dust that's never settled over my not-yet-discovered vintage treasures, and people I have not yet had a chance to love, but I will love them. I'm going to keep loving, looking for and building the good and the best. Because despite the way I've been hurt, that's still who I am. That's who I choose to be.  

It's hard not to have sex, said the Mormon girl.

Photo attribution here. 

And that Mormon girl would be me.

*Note: as you may have guessed, this post is about sex. It's not explicit, but it is direct. If that makes you uncomfortable, you probably shouldn't read it. 

Recently I got my first ever request for a post on a particular topic: post marital sexual deactivation. This is a post I've been wanting to write for quite some time because, frankly, I love sex, and it's really hard to go from having semi-regular access to it to zilch. Second, this is something every divorcee faces but no one talks about, and by now you know how committed I am to talking about the important things that make your average Molly Mormon/Peter Priesthood squirm. On that note...

First of all, I want to kick this off my saying that I know it's, like, a thing to run around saying we feel sorry for men and their ginormous sexual appetites and how it's not their fault and it's all evolution and they have a biological need to spread their seed and all, but I just want to throw it out there that there are many, many women--LDS and otherwise-- with healthy libido, and plenty of men I've met that can either take sex or leave it. So men, you are not alone in the struggle to fly solo after your companion has jumped ship. And women, you are not weird for liking, loving, missing and/or needing sex. So when we all got this letter tucked in with out divorce decrees...

Dear no-longer-married-person, 

Don't have sex anymore. Not with your former spouse, not with your (not yet married to) "future spouse",  not by yourself, not with an elf... Do not have sex here or there. Do not have sex anywhere. 

Good luck with that. 

Love, God


...it's safe to say that men and women alike had issues.

We all have different attitudes, experiences and opinions about sex, but no matter where you fall on the spectrum, if you are recently divorced you will have to reconcile your sex life (or lack of sex life) in some way or another. We as LDS people have an interesting, complicated relationship with sexuality to begin with. We are taught to fear it, but look forward to it. We love it, but fiercely try to control it. We have rules dictating our sexual behavior a mile long and we are accountable for our actions. In fact, it is not only considered appropriate, but it's expected that our leaders will ask us probing questions about our sexual conduct at any moment. Our eternal salvation is perpetually at stake.

With that magnitude of significance and consequence lacing our biological, God given desire to procreate it's no wonder that we get spazzy about sex. As for those of us who have experienced sexual intimacy, we find ourselves in an even more complex position where we did our best to transition from forbidden to sacred and bonding (or at least just plain fun) and now, not only are our souls torn up from the dramatic shifts in our lives, stress levels high, moral compasses whacky and ideals all in question, we have the task of un-familiarizing ourselves with a notoriously relaxing, pleasurable, relieving, happy making activity we once enjoyed. Oh yeah, and we're so lonely we can't watch an insurance ad without bawling.

All that is to say, I hear you! I know. It totally sucks. I hate it, and I'm sorry. Unfortunately, this, like many other things in our lives right now, doesn't have an easy answer. God loves us, is aware of us, grieves with us and ultimately, so far as I can tell (because there really is no literature on this that I've been able to find) doesn't make any moral exceptions for us. We are commanded to be abstinent once more. That's the long and short of it.

That being said, I do have a few thoughts and tips for those of you who feel similarly to the way I do about this issue. Having made it nearly 18 months now without a gentleman caller knocking at heaven's door, this is my advice:


1. Embrace and accept it. It is what it is. No amount of suppressing, avoiding, fixating, indulging, blaming, guilting or denying will make this go away. Craving sexual intimacy is not weird, it's not wrong and while it will likely vary in intensity from time to time, it's not going to go away, and that's okay. This is a moment in time. Sometimes the best thing we can do is to step out of its way and let it happen.

2. Remember that acting on impulses will likely bring momentary relief or enjoyment, but ultimately, when that fleeting experience is complete, we are where we left off, but with less of God's Spirit. I think we can all agree, we could use as much of God's Spirit as we can get these days. Premarital sex is still (now to me, having seen first hand what the bonding power of sex can do) terrifyingly dangerous, especially in the state we're in, and pornography is a cheap counterfeit that sincerely has the capacity to dramatically distort our view of this sacred thing we crave. (Click here for a great website with more on this.) Ultimately, no matter how much emotional pain and turmoil we're in, it's just not worth it. It's just not. 

3. Closely related to #1, try not to beat yourself up about it, because things do happen. Guilt serves one purpose and one purpose only: to motivate us to change. If it's not motivational, it's just another tool in Satan's kit. Accept and love yourself, no matter what you're going through and how close you currently are to following Christ's gospel perfectly. The love of God is endless and cannot be withheld from you if you will look up.

4. Do your best not to dwell. We all have memories of the past and hopes for the future, but letting them run rampant in our minds can only bring us down. Acknowledge that there will one day again be a time and place for that, and allow your mind to be freed by any one of the following:

-Climb a tree and see what you can see.
-Dance with a child, or have her tell you a story from her imagination.
-Take up a sport or some sort of physical fitness hobby. There's more than one way to release endorphins ; )
-Look outside yourself to see the needs of those around you. Help someone in some small way.
-Read a (wholesome) book that takes you somewhere new. The library is full of cheap vacations.
-Make a bucket list and start crossing off adventures.
-Write out how you feel. Sometimes just writing it out, then chucking it will get unhelpful things out of my system.
-Make new (platonic) friends.
-Join a club - hunting, knitting, cycling, dancing, you name it. The more foreign to your regular routine the more brain capacity it takes to learn, the less brain power you have to spare for unhelpful pining.

You get the idea.

I'm not saying it's easy. Heaven knows the struggle I've had and still have with engaging fully in the present life I live. So much time missing and wishing. I am saying, however, there is a high road. In all of the deluge of confusion, pain, grief, frustration and heartache that comes with the end of a marriage, I have found that the most long lasting satisfaction comes when I do my best to take the high road. It's hard, but we can do hard things.

Keep your chin up. Like everything else it gets better with time... sort of : )

my side of the bed

Photo attribution here.

I don't know if this is something all divorcees do, but I like to mark milestones. I still remember congratulating myself for making it ten minutes in to my first day back at work the morning after the bomb dropped. I counted days up until I hit six months and I counted months 'till I hit a year. Now, I count waves crashing, beautiful boys smiling and hours remaining 'till my homework is due. Today, however, I would like to pause to note and commemorate, as of early this month this blog is officially one year old.

Congratulations, blog. You made it through your first year!

In order to celebrate this occasion I want to share with you a post I wrote just before this blog was created on another, more private blog I'd been keeping. It describes life in the early stages of recovery. I want to share it because I was remembering today how desperately I wanted to know, in that time, how long my life was going to look so much like the seventh circle of hell. Often times when I am feeling sad I convince myself that I am the only one who could ever possibly understand or experience the pain I feel. This is just not true. While I haven't felt everything you've felt, I do want to offer you this glimpse (and believe me, it is a very small, watered down glimpse) into what life was like in January of 2013.

This is my life now.

I wake up at 6:30, fall back asleep till 7. Freak out that I'm late and jump in the shower. Eat a PB&J on my way to the car (have I mentioned I need to go grocery shopping?) before slapping some makeup on my face as I drive. I then spend 4-6 hours with a five year old boy. His mom is a stay at home mom, and does indeed stay at home while I am there, at times. I don't blame her for needing the break. He just got kicked out of his third preschool. 

After job one I head into town (a 45 minute commute) where I spend the rest of daylight nannying two considerably calmer children. After job two I come home to my apartment where it is cold and dark and there I meet some mail addressed to someone I don't know, mystifying stale smells, and my disgruntled Siamese. Everything in the house is exactly where I left it. Not one thing has changed or been touched by an outside force of any kind. All that's there is me. 

I find anything mindless to do for the next few hours, then I go to bed.

I sleep in the bed The Mr. and I bought with some of our wedding cash. That bed, my newlywed and recently divorced bed, has many, many memories. The relationship in all its extremity was experienced here. Giddy. Love drunk. Elated. Orgasmic. Exhausted. Optimistic. Confused. Concerned. Cuddling. Compromising. Talking. Fighting. Fearing. Feeling. Praying. Pleading. And oh good God, so much crying. This is where I was sitting when we decided to separate, and this is where I crawled moments after he walked out the door.

I still used to sleep on my side, in the beginning. I found that I would turn over in my half sleep and find myself alone. That's no way to start or end a night. Now I sleep in the middle. I surround myself with pillows and my cat hops up to join me, whether I like it or not. I bought new sheets and a new duvet cover. I painted the bedside tables, right over the back sides where we'd painted our initials in hearts at The Mr.'s suggestion. I put a new skin on the bones of my life, but it doesn't change that the flesh is all still missing. Empty. Quiet. Calm. Free of the chaos that was killing me, but... dead. Just a little bit dead. Painted and spruced, clean and calm and... unrelentingly heartbreakingly wrong.



And now,  a brief synopsis of what my life looked like today.



This morning I woke up around 8:00 to the sound of tropical birds and lawn mowers. Oh, Hawaii-- how you can have such a laid back attitude about pretty much everything in life, but such an affinity for ear drum blastingly loud lawn care equipment in the wee hours of the A.M. is beyond me. In ceramics I turned in my latest two creations. The teacher was clearly impressed, because I am a pottery ninja. Sheri Dew came to speak at devotional today. Sweet of her to drop by. Book of Mormon class was thought provoking, as usual. Our teacher loves a good question, and you know how much I love to ask a good question. 

I ordered some new t shirts from my favorite site because they are having a sale and then hit the grocery store with Sassy McLadyBoots. The lime Tostidos were on sale, making them almost the price they would be when I'm not shopping on a remote island. Clearly, God loves me. A woman from my mission is in town, so we met up for the night show, which means I spent a couple hours watching my adorable roommate perform the hula and countless dudes from my classes whoop and holler and slap themselves and play with fire... shirtless. 

After the show I stopped over at Hukilau beach and did a little yoga, stretched, prayed and took some deep breaths while the wind fussed with my hair and did her best to tip me out of tree pose. Then, back to my twin bed in a shared dorm room which, I realized last Sunday, is starting to feel impressively and unexpectedly like home. The Padre asked me today if I'm coming home for summer break. For the first time in my life I could truthfully say, "I don't know, I think I might rather stay."

Perhaps you're tired of me saying this, but I need you to know--things do get better. The painful things diminish and new things steal your focus. Mundane things. Scary things. Exciting things. Things so unexpected and hilarious you almost forget you ever had a no-good-low-down-rotten-or-at-least-not-ideal spouse in the first place.  Life may not be extraordinary every day, but you have within you the power to move in a positive direction. You have within you a way to make it through.

30 Things to do Before I Turn 30

The first 28 years of my life have been eventful. I've lived in 30 houses in 7 different states, attended 4 universities and a trade school, seen Paris, Mexico, Canada, visited 20 states in the US and served a mission. I've fallen madly in love a few times and had my heart brutally broken once. I've met and made better friends than any person has a right to. I've given up and tried again, discovered talents I didn't know I had, and weaknesses I didn't want to know I had.  I've worked as a teacher, pizza maker, shelf stocker, deli slave, personal assistant to a boutique owner, campus bouncer, a special needs nanny, an RA, a waitress in a tapas bar, and now a cotton candy spinner extraordinaire. I've skinny dipped, road tripped, yelled at the ocean, stared at the moon, laughed so hard I've cried and cried so hard I've had nothing left to do but laugh. I've seen vibrant rainbows, more beaches than I can count, new babies and old ladies, big cities, small towns, gorgeous countryside and trees that tower so tall and majestic that I would dare anyone to not be overcome with a sense of awe at the sight of them.

And now, I'm almost 30. I'm 29 in fact--today.

To give you just a small glimpse of what it's like to be "almost 30" and a student at an LDS university that only offers undergraduate programs I will relate the following: A couple days ago I was sitting, sketching and a guy I'd talked to a few times around campus came and sat to make chit chat. We exchanged stories  and laughs for about half an hour. By that point I'd calculated that he was probably 21 years old and I could see he was getting curious. I always ask people to guess my age when they ask and he came up with the usual guess of 23. When I, half grinning, knowingly revealed that I was just about 29 the guy hilariously half choked, then caught himself and tried to recover with, "Oh, congratulations" and a handshake. 

When a woman gets this far past the ominous, "menace to society" label she has two options. She can either bury her head in shame and spend her days pining for a man to make her an acceptable member of Mormon culture-- a wife, a mother, an adult--or-- she can fully embrace the exceptional thing it is to be so free, to know herself so well and to have so many doors open to her and enough sense to go explore them. When put that way it's hard to understand why so many of us settle for option A. 

I've decided the best way to celebrate the year twenty-nine is to cram thirty more "to do"s into my eventful twenties. They've been good to me, and when they haven't been good to me, they've taught me oceans of lessons I benefit from daily. I want to give them the fine farewell they deserve.

I have one friend I reach out to in my blackest of the black moments. She is infinitely patient, kind, positive, and gently nudges me in the best direction-- even when I don't want to hear it. She intuitively contacted me moments after The Mr. walked out of my life for good and never seems to tire of my sometimes spastic pleas for help in moments of desperation. In recent conversation about the demise of my marriage she said, "I don't feel like it was the end of something. I don't even feel like it's now a new beginning. I feel like it's the beginning. The start of your beautiful life." I feel like I am in a place in my healing where I am ready to more fully look forward. I can feel a shift in me where the healthiest thing to do for me now is to look ahead and build, and the best way I can see to do that this year is to work my way through the list I've compiled of thirty things to do before I turn thirty.

"I'm blessed."

Tomorrow is my birthday, and I'm turning 29 years old. Twenty nine. The number that comes right before thirty. I spent a couple years living in the midwest of the US. When you ask someone how she's doing today in Missouri she'll reply, "I'm blessed." Today I have to say, there is no more accurate a description for my current state.

It's funny. When I got home from my mission and immediately threw myself headlong into The Mr. (who was leaving for his mission in 30 days and counting) I was 23 years old. I spent two years waiting for him, three months dating/engaged to him, two years married to him, one year grieving him, and now... I'm here. I applied to this campus fresh out of high school. There was nothing discernibly wrong with my application, but they firmly bid me good day, even after petitioning my rejection letter. Not to be deterred I applied again at the age of 20, and was likewise rejected. This third application to get my education in an isolated, paradise, safe haven was the the dialysis treatment that allowed new hope to start pumping through my crusty old cat loving, divorced lady veins. When I got my acceptance letter I literally, immediately dropped to my knees and cried and sobbed and gushed out thanks to my benevolent God for my chance to start this new life.

When people here guess how old I am, I find it an interesting coincidence that they almost always guess 23 years old. It's like I've been transported to another universe where I applied to Hawaii instead of Provo when I came home from my mission and the whole thing with The Mr. never even happened.

But unfortunately, it did happen, and sometimes I get really stuck in the sadness of it all, the wrongness, the injustice, the tragedy. I find myself re-impailing myself over the same broken, distorted memories again and again: trying to discern where it started to go wrong, wondering if there were things going on I missed, recalling the way his voice sounded when he called me to say, "I don't love you anymore," wondering how I could have ever been so stupid.  This is a terrible habit that I do not recommend and lately I've gotten almost overwhelmingly fed up with the deep mental groove this pattern has worn in my synapses and psyche, and I've been making my most conscientious efforts to change it. Today I experienced some success.

I've mentioned this before, but it's in one of the first posts here, which was almost a year ago now, so I feel like I'm justified in revisiting the concept. It's something I need to be reminded of again and again. Sometimes we get so caught up in the wrongness of what happened. I find I can almost feel guilty or inauthentic being okay, healing, moving on, even being glad or grateful for it. Today was a beautiful reminder that it's okay to be okay. As I walked to class today instead of fretting about my long dead love life with The Mr. and how I might have saved it if I had only…I thought about how he was strongly opposed to me going back to school to finish my bachelors degree. I thought about all the times  he was completely emotionally disconnected when we had sex and how empty I felt after. I thought about the time I got pregnant, how I was going to tell him I was expecting, but before I could he sat me down and told me he was almost at the end of his rope in our relationship. I thought about how the stress, panic and anxiety I felt during that pregnancy was so palpable it may as well have been a bowling ball, unexpectedly careening around my world. I remembered the cruel way he responded to me in my desperate loneliness and depression during my miscarriage, and then I thought about how that baby would be just over one year old now, and how different my life would be if she were.

After all that I thought: Thank God. Thank God I went through a divorce. Thank God I don't have that kind of life irrevocably laid out before me. Thank God I get a second chance. 

I am 29 years old in one day and counting and I get to spend hours a day with charcoal and clay, learning chants in Hawaiian and planning trips to leave the country, learn languages, build businesses and dream as big and as free or as small and as me as I want. I am the luckiest girl. The luckiest, and it's okay for me to feel it. It's okay for me to let it be.

I still get sad sometimes, and that's okay.

Photo attribution here.

I spent a lot of my childhood riding in the back seat of a car, watching the road--quietly contemplative. Speeding along the freeway I would watch as the pavement holding us would silently split into two lanes--one with a brand new destination. We'd cruise along, parallel with the new road. Two that had been made from one. I'd watch as the new road rose or sank, then took its own turn and silently peeled away from us and disappeared from my view. I'd wonder then for a moment where that road went and how it could disappear, so smooth and silent. When I think about The Mr. now, I think about the roads. One road split into two, silently going their own ways.

When I first got back into classes here in Hawaii I was completely immersed in the healing that comes with creativity. Particularly there was a drawing class that took all the time, attention and focus I could afford it. I loved it. My professor was excellent in pointing out where I was going wrong and teaching me how to fix it. I marveled at the return I got on my artistic investment over those few short months.

In this class an interesting thing would sometimes happen. I'd be so lost in trying to capture the core shadow on the sphere I was drawing that I probably morphed into a full on mouth breather and didn't even know it. The kind of concentration it takes when you are first learning this stuff is nigh unto Jedi Master in training concentration. I'd be full on in the throws of mastering the force of my charcoal pencil when all of a sudden, a still frame from my former life would flash through the feature film of Frowfrow Goes Back to College and Loves It. It was such an unexpected juxtaposition that the first time it happened it almost knocked me over--it was so dizzyingly disorienting.

When I take stock of my life, the things I want to be and the things I've accomplished, the phrase, "divorced" inevitably filters through. Every time it does my brain does a double take. No, I'm not divorced. I'm not the type. I wouldn't let that happen to me. I'm not stupid enough to marry someone I would have to divorce. I wouldn't break that promise to God.

And yet, I did.

I am.

I can't take it back or unmake the decisions that brought me to and through that. I can't know better in time to not make those mistakes. I know God doesn't hold it against me, but I still can't help feeling like I can't ever get my slate completely clean.

I'm divorced.

In my memory bank there's ring, a proposal, a wedding day and a wedding night. There's a family ward I attended and an apartment I decorated. There are plans I tried to make and promises broken. There's the first times and the last times, the endless efforts of making it work, the cruel things that can never be undone and the way it unrelentingly would not renege until my soul was lying motionless on the floor, bereft of any ideas for what I could try next. There's a foundation--laid and abandoned.

I'm divorced.

And now I'm in my second chance at life, and it's a nearly surreal life at that. I put an ocean between myself and anything I'd ever known. I indulge every creative impulse that flits through my mind. I spent an hour today lying on a private, aqua beach reading for pleasure. I sleep in on Sunday, go out on weekends, skinny dip in January and have nothing I can logically complain about in this freshly constructed world I've built for myself. But there is always this part of me that is somberly saying, No, you don't understand. You don't know what it was like. 

I'm divorced.

I was married. I took a full on face dive leap of faith into the tea cup of a quick marriage. I make my conscious efforts to move ahead, to live in the present, to embrace the now, to learn from my mistakes and to cultivate gratitude, forgiveness and love--but I will never not be divorced.

That makes me sad.

So please, when you meet someone who has been through it, withhold judgement for a moment or two. Give the person space to be who they are--now. Let the divorced people you meet know that it's okay to be okay, that they are not categorically dismissed because of life experiences, and that life is full of tough choices. None of us get out unscathed. There's a unity to be had in sharing our stories, regardless of the source of the scar.

The voice inside that never lies, and is never wrong.

Photo attribution here. 

Do you remember a few entries back where I illuminated the benefits of breaking all contact with ones ex if at all possible? And then a couple entries later The Mr. called me just to see how I was doing? It was almost like God was testing my ability to walk the walk of all the talk I do. Well, my time with Captain Amazing has reached its end. We are broken up once and for all, and in grand summation of the whole situation, I would say that I'm pretty sure this, like the phone call, was one big test/chance to grow from God to me--like a Christmas present. A painful, excruciating, disorienting, soul stretching Christmas present from God to me. Refresher:

On August 16, 2013 I wrote the following:

There's a voice inside me that never lies and is never wrong. When I met The Mr. that voice said, "No thank you." But I kissed him anyway--a lot. When he proposed that voice said, "You do not know this man. How can you marry someone you don't know if you can trust?" But I told the voice to be quiet or we'd never find love. When The Mr. and I would sit in a room together, 15 months into our mistake that voice would say, "He's not here in the room with you. He's already gone." I would tell the voice, "No. He's the one who loves me."

I met Captain Amazing the day before classes began, the beginning of September. The voice kicked in about a week into our time together. I was waiting for him to stop by to pick me up for what I knew would be a very romantic evening on a Hawaiian moonlit beach. I was sitting in the courtyard of my dorm, chatting with him on the phone, arranging the final details of where to meet and when. The voice said, "Don't you go with him. Stay home. I mean it," but having been completely alone for the last 10 months and desperate (key word there) for some kind of something to take my mind off my past, infatuated with the exoticness of the potential of dating a tall, handsome African man, and with a soul so parched for affection the substance with which it would be quenched made little difference to me, I went anyway. I did not listen to the voice.

The next morning I awoke with memories of what I can only, in all honesty, confess to be among the most romantic nights of my life, I went outside to the Hawaiian sun and started reading my scriptures in preparation for church. I picked up my patriarchal blessing with a secret hope that maybe this gentleman could put an end to the eternally daunting task that is once more before me of dating and being single. Again, the voice was clear--this time almost fierce. "Let me be perfectly clear. Captain Amazing is not the one for you." But desperation dies hard.

I spent the next three months trying every angle I could think of to convince myself that this upset stomach was a result of my scrambled egg divorce brain. I was being overly cautious, defensive, unwilling to relax and neurotic. I told myself these things again and again and again. Why? Because I hate being alone. I hate being alone, and Captain Amazing was cute, romantic, funny, scholarly, devoted, a convert, a psychology major, an AP in his mission, a temple worker, a Sunday School President, was the CEO of a nonprofit for crying out loud, and a damn good kisser. But the voice was right all along. He is not the one for me. The voice inside me never lies and is never wrong.

After at least four attempts at breaking up the voice adopted subversive tactics, embedding herself into a muscle on the left side of my neck 'till it began to spasm. I'd gotten to a place where my brain was 68% devoted to anticipating and meeting his needs, which were often cryptic and unmeetable. I was eating too much, sleeping too little, not making time for myself and, by the end, incapable of holding a fully upright posture. Every day I wondered what I could do to make it better. I was apologetic, open, eternally available and losing myself bit by bit by bit...again, till the moment came where I'd had enough.

Breaking it off for good was hard because I, like my father, am intensely uncomfortable inconveniencing anyone. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but once things got bad enough that I no longer could see the situation for anything other than what it was, I couldn't go back anymore. He was determined not to end it, and I had to become even more firm. It wasn't pretty, but it was the right thing to do, and there is a peace in that.

Lessons to extract from this experience? Red flags:

1. If the person you are with makes you feel less like yourself they don't love you for who you are.
2. If you feel like your partner can't live without your help. Walk away from projects, no excuses, no exceptions.
3. If you cannot tell what you want, how you feel or what you think in the presence of another, you are having enmeshment issues and the relationship is not a healthy one.
4. If the person you are dating makes you feel bad on a regular basis -- bad about yourself, bad about your values, bad about your body, your taste in movies, your job, your major, you passions, your friends, anything really-- no good.
5. If your relationship with God suffers because of your devotion to your partner, run.
6. If you find yourself saying, "Things will get better when..." They won't. People have patterns. They can be broken, but usually are not.
7. If fighting with the person is overly dramatic, childish, or immature leave them in the past. You both have some growing up to do.
8. If the relationship feels unbalanced--like one of you is investing significantly more time, attention, effort and love into the relationship, it will not get better. It will get worse.
9. If you find yourself continually lowering your expectations, week after week after week. Some compromise is necessary, but we've all got to draw the line somewhere before we become shadows of ourselves and what we once were and wanted.
10. Just because a person looks amazing on paper, it doesn't mean you have the right to stifle the voice inside. I'm telling you, guys. She never lies and is never wrong.