I’m starting a new series today – My Life Incomplete. Meet Lauren, who’s been divorced for two years now. She was with her husband for ten years (married for five) and they split up when she was 28. Together, they have a son who was two at the time of the divorce.
A couple of ladies I’ve interviewed have shared how there was a single event or moment, in which they knew their marriage was over. Emma, who blogs over at Divorced Before 30, shared how her divorce was triggered by just one word. Lauren had a similar epiphany. Here’s how she tells it.
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There was one night that triggered all the thinking that led to the year of marital decline until we split.
It was one August night. My mom had come to visit. I left the baby at home with my husband and my mom, my sister and I went to a comedy club. Afterward, we met up with this guy my sister was dating at the time and we had pizza and some beers outside in the city. We had a BLAST!
I had never met my sister’s boyfriend before and we were just on a roll, playing off each other and everyone was cracking up. I was so ON that night and it was so fun.
Then, when I was driving home, both my sister and my mom, who did not leave together, called me on cell phone and said, “We had so much fun with you! It was like the old Laurie was back. Who was that? That was a blast!”
(My family always calls me Laurie) I was like, “What are you talking about? I was just being me.”
I hung up the phone but I could not stop hearing it like a broken record in my head.
The old Laurie was back.
The old Laurie was back.
And that was it. That particular night is forever going to be a big memory for me. That night made me decide I’m going to pay attention to my feelings and I’m going to respect myself. I don’t know where that’s going to lead me but I am going to be me again.
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I wrote before that there were two particular events that caused me to think that divorce was actually an option – before then I hadn’t seen divorce as a possibility. It’s hard for me to talk about those events, not because they are heinous but because of the public vs. private dilemma. When I started this blog, since my identity is public and I have two teenagers, I said I wouldn’t write about anything I wasn’t prepared to discuss with them. And I haven’t shared those two events with them yet and I’m not ready to, so I hope you understand why I’m not sharing them now.
However, I did have a dream I want to share with you. It was very vivid and the images still are. I dreamed I got a glass milk bottle out of the fridge and put it on the wooden chopping board on the counter. As I placed the bottle down, it cracked and I tried to hold the crack together with my hand. then another crack appeared and I tried to hold that together and so on until finally I couldn’t hold it any longer and I let go. The bottle fell apart and all the milk gushed over the counter.
Everything about the dream was as it was in real life – we were getting our milk delivered from a local dairy and it came in glass bottles, the chopping board was real, the counter was real. It was so real it startled me. I interpreted the milk and the bottle as my life and my marriage. I had been trying to hold it together and that wasn’t going to work anymore. It was definitely a wake up call.
Was there a particular event, like Lauren’s evening with her mom and her sister, that brought clarity to your thinking?
I’ll be continuing Lauren’s story tomorrow with her journey from that evening to the decision to divorce. Lauren has a fabulous blog at My Life Incomplete – hope you’ll visit her there.
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