This Too Shall Pass

Well, the winter holidays are here. My first Christmas in eight years alone. I will celebrate with my mother and brother and a home-cooked feast. I haven't done any decorating at home, except a few little snowmen, Santa Clauses and other Christmas knick-knacks my mother brought to spruce up the placefor holiday visitors looking at my house to consider buying it (I have an open house every Sunday since it's gone on the market).

I haven't written for a while in this blog. I've been busy with my usual stuff, including therapist, 12 step meetings, work, a book proposal for a book I hope to write, keeping the house tidy for visitors, an occasional date, etc. Today I took some time to pick up Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones where I left off a couple weeks ago. Alice's non-fiction book, Lucky, about her own rape and recovery, was very cathartic for me when I read it a month or so ago. I've never been raped, but the intensity of her feelings of shame and anger and the clarity with which she expressed them in that book really helped me get in touch with some anger about my divorce that I had been unfairly directing at myself (relentless self-blame is common when one is abandoned).

I read that it's normal for it to take one-and-a-half to two years to completely recover from a divorce. Certainly I have been through the worst of it -- I no longer feel suicidal (a prescription antidepressant helped me survive the worst phase, where I teetered on the brink of losing my job and my sanity). It's been close to two months since I had any contact with my spouse, which seems to make a big difference. I blogged a while ago that whenever I talked to her I would just come away hating myself and feeling like the scum of the earth. It's not good for you to listen to someone pour blame and shame and anger out on you. It can really do a number on your mind if you take it personally, which I did at the time.

My divorce hearing is scheduled for January 3, 2005. I know my recovery the past couple of months has had a lot to do with not having anything to do with her, so I dread seeing her. But I have to go through it. Hopefully it will be brief and I will have some kind of mental preparation to help me through it.

Meanwhile, Christmas and the New Year are coming. On the one hand, I rejoice and celebrate a new life. On the other, I mourn the old. I think it's healthy to do both right now. Walk the middle path. As that old story goes, some wise men gave a king a ring with an inscription that would make him happy when he was sad and sad when he was happy: "This too shall pass."