Thankful for My Divorce

I came across an article on the Huffington Post website that was posted on Thanksgiving day. It was a compilation of rather heartwarming twitter responses to the question, "What are you most thankful for about your divorce?"

Find the article here.

If I had to put it in 140 characters or less, I'd say, "that it will allow me to be loved and respected and show my kids what that really means."

Or maybe, "That it's finally almost over."

My husband and I have been physically separated, states apart, for almost two years at this point. For almost that entire time (minus a month or two), we've been at least talking about divorce. it all began with me going to a counselor on a regular basis for a while. In his office, I found I was digging up and discovering a whole range of deeply negative thoughts about my husband and our relationship.

It didn't take long for me to ask for a divorce, and I tried to be honest about why. In the beginning, he was more than a little hesitant to let me go. That turned into bitterness that I would, "just give up on us".

I started the process trying to be considerate of his feelings, knowing that he would be dealing with a lot of pain. But it felt like he was trying to make me feel guilty... like he was trying to hurt me. I quickly turned to just being uncaring because I was honestly hoping that he would give up on me if I acted like a callous jerk. But I hated being that person, and eventually relaxed into a fairly neutral position.

After months had gone by and I had had my fill of crying, I wasn't interested in listening to him tell me what a horrible person I was anymore. On the other hand, I didn't want to hear about how much he missed me, either. Most of all, I tried to establish that I did not, by any stretch of the imagination, have to deal with his flip-flopping and never knowing, when I picked up the phone, what I was in for. When that didn't stop, I blocked his calls and accepted only his text messages because I was better able to ignore them until I was ready to read them, and then calculate my responses. It helped that I didn't have to feel guilty about that because he rarely ever answered my calls, and often only called back days later when he missed them.

I tried a few different angles to the divorce process. We originally agreed on divorce mediation because it seemed like it would be cheaper than hashing it out with lawyers, and easier than trying to figure out all the paperwork for ourselves. But every time I came up with what seemed to me to be a reputable mediation service, he would get irritated with them not calling him back on time or not receiving his faxes, call them unprofessional, and refuse to work with them.

Finally, it was decided that we would just gather all of the paperwork and instructions online, fill it out ourselves, and I would file it in Colorado. Fine. But instead of just following the steps and answering the questions on a nice, automated website I found, he wanted to have it reviewed by a lawyer. I'm okay with covering your bases, and I'd much rather have a professional look at it early on than find out that we left a gaping hole somewhere. Unfortunately, it took him an incredibly long time to have it reviewed.

Everything had to be signed, most of it notarized. So there was a lot of passing back and forth and then crunch time at the UPS store with a notary. And, as a result of all of his foot-dragging and a lot of things going on in my life, I will admit that I didn't feel a great pressure to get to the court house right away to file the stuff.

I finally got the first portion of the paperwork filed and the divorce process officially started after a doctor's appointment  (12/11/12) and found out we had one form missing. Thankfully, it wasn't essential to start the process, and I have two weeks to get it back in to them. So, again, I've mailed him a manila envelope with a couple of documents that aren't fully completed. This is a familiar process because it happened more than once when we were trying to transfer the title of my Buick from his name to mine. He seems to like to do things the "easiest possible way" and avoid "unnecessary extra steps", but always ends up falling into the category of "sloppy work" and "I need you to redo this." Which resulted in dragging my kids to the DMV three separate times.

Anyway, since I mailed him the paperwork, I haven't heard from him at all. I'm really crossing my fingers, here, that he will get it back to me in time. He does know it needs to be filed next Tuesday.