3. Out of the Fog: there is a road up ahead!

Tonight is the eve of the five year anniversary since we first met. It's not a night to go into details of that first glimpse, date, walk, or anything like that. Phooey to all that, it was all a lie anyway, just neither of us knew it at the time.

What tonight IS is a time to rejoice in the fact that my God has decided that through all this pain I shall grow strong, tall, and bold. Tonight I decided, after reading the fabulous, life-saving book Life, Laugh, Love Again: a Christian Woman's Guide Through Divorce, that I would write my own story. Like authors Michelle, Connie, Rosalind, and Carla I too will put to pen my experience, my highs and lows; the story of how my Prince Charming galloped up on his white horse (or in this case, wearing his white engineer's hat) and whisked me away, stealing my entire heart, mind, and soul. It will tell of red (or at least yellow) flags, some of which bore a great big black diamond in the center, but which blew so fast in the breeze of blind love that they were blithely ignored.

Like Michelle and her book, this is not about bashing Rob, and the intent of this journal is not to make him a monster. (In fact, his name, along with the names of his family members, was changed once I decided to publish this blog).  This is something I do to cope with my tremendous loss, and hopefully it will help me find my way to the end of this cold, dark tunnel, the most agonizing heartache imaginable. If that means writing about the scary, the embarrassing, the abusive; it's certainly not something I'm doing with any malice. It just is what it is.

I'm still too tender around the ears to go into any detail about the beginning; the how-we-met and when-he-proposed moments will have to wait until after I've cleared the Acceptance hurdle and am happily on my way to Life After Divorce.

Tonight I'm all about the negatives: the tales of woe (which should have been whoa!) the red flags, the betrayals, the signs, the hmmm that's odd behavior moments. Those are what strengthen me now, while I'm still swimming in this sticky tepid pool that lies somewhere between the third and fourth phases of grief. We all know those, right: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance. The five golden steps. Tonight I'm lolligagging between anger and depression. I'll be honest. I like the anger a lot better. Srsly. I gotta say I really have no use for this depression thing. Anger kicks ass. It gives me strength, and, very non-biblically, it gives me peace. I could camp out on the Anger step for EVAR.

I'm still standing pretty firmly on that step, but today, eighteen days into this, my little toe on the left foot took a tentative little poke out onto the Depression step. I didn't love it. I had to take a pain pill in fact. When it kicked in God said Write. Write it all down. Journal, Blog, whatever just put it down somewhere. So heeeer we go.