Is There Anything I'm Going To Miss

This will be a rough week for me. I am moving on Saturday morning.

Poor V. He's looking forward to this and mentioned to me this weekend that he would never have believed that when we met nearly 20 years ago that someday he'd be my roommate. Unfortunately V doesn't realize exactly how much he will take the brunt of whatever grieving I do. My moods may make him uncomfortable and he may even get the feeling that I don't want him around. At times, he'll be right.

Speaking of that, I've noticed how much I've withdrawn emotionally from my friends. I've noticed it for a while but now that the time has come for me to actually do what I've decided to do, it's become exponentially worse. It's as if I feel somewhere deep inside that I'm pedalling backwards trying to find my 20s again but that they don't exist. Try as I might I can't seem to fit them into this so-called new life of mine because right now they feel like replacement parts -- things I'm using to occupy me so that I don't have to think about the real things.

That's really it. Though my reason tells me otherwise, my heart feels like I'm giving up the only real thing I've ever known. I'm choosing to be a part-time mom and an ex-wife and not because I have to or that I have no other choice, but because I'm weak. Incapable. A failure.

So yeah, maybe I'm not quite at the "I accept myself as I am" part. Not there yet. And so in the meantime, my poor friends are the recipients of my apathy and shame at myself.

I tell myself, "This too shall pass."

In other news, I got my full-time status here at my current job though it's not really the job I wanted. It'll do for the time being, though.

Ah yes, moving out. My life this week has been filled with packing, putting things out in the garage, asking hub if he wants this or that and talking calmly and reasonably about so many things. He wants a divorce in six months or so, he said in response to my query. I said all right, I understood.

He won't be there when I move out on Saturday and has made plans to take the kiddo with him out to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I think it's good that he's taking her along but this is more for him than for her, of course. He's been really quiet and distant. I'm not surprised but I can't say it doesn't bother me because it amplifies my guilt. But I have to soldier on.

And now for my obligatory narcissist moments. I've realized something over the course of my apartment search and subsequent analyzation of my financial situation. I'm finally realizing how much I've grown used to being spoiled rotten.

Rotten, I tell you. Leaving a household making 80k a year and going to one making barely 24k? Yeah. Vast difference. Doesn't matter that we've managed to save only around 10-20k in our 17 years, or that we're just about that in debt. Simply put, if something unexpected occurred a couple hundred dollars here and there was something we could manage. That's not going to be something I can do now. A couple hundred dollars will mean something.

The lack of money is going to bother me on so many levels, some of which are more noble than others. They vary from the practical (what happens if I get sick, or the car keels over?) to the purely vain (I can't go get Starbucks without calculating my monthly net worth when other women my age are contemplating luxury cruises?) Add that to the fact that my hub can do these things and make sure that our kiddo can as well? There's a hefty amount of jealousy there. My freedom is costing me much more than it does him.

He has his own 401K. I don't. I have been working seven years at a job part-time, no 401K, nothing. And I am 40 years old, 25 years from retirement, and I have nothing. Short of making sure some of my hub's social security benefits and 401K will accrue to me since we were married over 10 years, it's all up to me now, baby.

This petrifies me. I know -- rationally, that is -- that it will all eventually be all right and I'll manage to save a bit, maybe even more than my hub will. My frugal soul will re-emerge from the pod of suburban comfort like one of those seventeen-year cicadas do. I'll remember what it was like when I didn't have much, but all of it was mine.

Makes me remember something though. A woman I used to know, a number of years older than me. She was working taking care of plants and singing and making albums in her spare time, all while being a single mom to a young son. I admired all these things about her. But what I didn't admire was her deep sense of cynicism about all the things everyone else had that she didn't. She was bitter over the fact that she had no significant man in her life and that she had to scrape by hand to mouth. It made her a sour person in many ways, and I don't want to be like her. I'll try like hell to look at things differently than she did. Perhaps I met her those years ago so that when I was in her position, I would remember her and determine my own path based on my learning. If so, then I'd best do it right.

Right now, though, I am just nervous, sad, angry, sick to my stomach with stress, guilty......the list goes on. I want to run back into the shelter of the financial comfort that my hub provided. I am mentally castigating myself for my idiocy, for the fact that here I am wanting to leave, making the steps to re-enter my ultra-poor college-hand-to-mouth days, when I'd moved past that already and "grew up" and got comfortable and had it good. Good, I tell you!

Maybe I did. But perhaps I should stop trying to predict things and just wait to see what comes out in the wash.


((Song: "How's It Going To Be?" by Third Eye Blind. Lyrics here:
http://www.geocities.com/thirdeyeblindlyrics/3eb_lyrics/hows_it_going_to_be.html ))