My journey past divorce

My divorce is final today. Just one month short of my 31st wedding anniversary. I bet you thought from the title this would be funny. Maybe filled with recipes. Some of it is funny but much of it is heart wrenching. I think a lot of it will be helpful to other women going through an unwanted divorce at age 55.

My husband left me for a lesbian. Excuse me, I meant to say "former lesbian". There, that's funny, isn't it? It was two days after Thanksgiving ( my favorite holiday ). We had been going to couples counseling for seven months because Dave was "unhappy" in our marriage. He choose to inform me of this in our driveway as we were leaving for Easter weekend in Manhattan. You can see he has a thing for holidays. Although he claimed "it was a long time coming" I was completely taken aback. He insisted there was no one else. "I'm just not happy." And I believed him! This IS starting to sound humorous.

Anyway he agreed to commit 100% to therapy. I thought things were going well. Until of course the day before his birthday in July (see what I mean about special occasions?) He told me he was going to Home Depot. He called to tell me he wasn't coming home. We were planning to go out that night to celebrate his birthday and the fact that our daughter had received her nursing license that week. I begged him to come home. I didn't want to tell my daughter that he had left. I desperately wanted to spare her the pain of rejection that I knew she would feel. That I was feeling. He hung up the phone and didn't answer or come home for four days. I believed him when he said he was in Fire Island with gay friends form work. Staying at their house and walking the beach, "thinking about us."

This same drama happened several times that summer. Each time I believed he needed "time alone." How naive. We continued therapy. He insisted there was "no other woman." I finally found a credit card statement with proof of his infidelity. While I was gone on a medical mission to Columbia he took his lover to see Rent on Broadway. Rent was one of my favorite plays. We had seen the original many times together. He also took her to a restaurant we had been to several times. The week I came back he met with her in a motel in Long Island where she lives and works. He eventually admitted to many motel trysts, most of them while I was at work. I thought that was the lowest they would stoop but I was wrong. There were many more levels of pain for me to experience.

So today, instead of planning something special for my anniversary I left Superior Court a divorcee. Not a word I would ever have thought I would use in reference to myself in a million years. I hope some of my experiences can help others who are coping with the same indescribable pain.
Not a word I would ever have thought I would use in reference to myself in a million years. I hope some of my experiences can help others who are coping with the same indescribable pain.