You want a what?!

I am a divorced grandmother.  Something I never expected I would be.  I am writing about it in the hope that I can offer support and encouragement to others who are on the same journey.  It’s a rocky road.  Especially if you are an unwilling participant as I was.  Many friends and acquaintances told me that time would ease the pain.  Oh, how I hated to hear that.  But it’s true.  In the course of almost four years now I have gone from victim to accepting and more recently to happy (well, most of the time).  I encourage you to drop the “victim cloak” as soon as possible.  It holds you back.  Now that I can look back, I’m grateful that I got very angry and was able to use the anger constructively.  It gave me energy to get a lawyer and to do the research I needed to protect myself and my share of the assets.  I will talk more about that another day.  But first, I’ll tell you some of my story.

On December 29, 2006, my husband D and I had just finished dinner.  I thought he had somewhere to go and I was expecting him to tell me that he was leaving.  Instead he sat down on the couch and “out of the blue” told me he wanted a divorce.  At the time we had been married for 29 years.  He had a history of depression and had been pretty remote for some time.  I thought he surely didn’t mean it.  That he was just depressed.  I asked him, “Are you sure about this?”  He told me that he was “pretty sure.”  Pretty sure?  I told him I thought we should think about it a bit.  I didn’t want to believe that he really wanted to divorce me.  Our youngest daughter S had recently divorced.  I reminded him that her three children were still confused and unsettled.  What would they think if their grandparents divorced as well.  I said to him, “Please, D, don’t do this to our family right now.”  He seemed a little unsure of himself and muttered something like, “the children will be fine.”

I asked D whether he had another woman.  He answered and I’m quoting exactly because I remember it clearly,  “Oh, hell no.  That’s the last thing I want.  I just don’t want to be married any longer.”  I wanted to believe him.  Unfortunately, I have a number of girlfriends who have divorced under very similar circumstances.  All of their husbands were about the same age as D and every single one of them “just didn’t want to be married any longer.”  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I don’t want to be married is code for I have another woman. And he did.

I will talk later about how I found out and how I reacted.  Some of it I handled well enough.  Some of it wasn’t pretty.

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