Holding on and letting go

How do you separate stuff from sentiment when starting a new life?

It’s so weird to have to start again at may ripe old age. It’s weird even having to think about these things. Up until the beginning of April this year I assumed my next 30, 40, 50 years were in the bag. I’d carry on plodding through life, pretty content with the slowness of it, I’d grow old with my husband, there’d definitely be more dogs, maybe grandkids, maybe we’d move to a bungalow by the sea. I was fine with that. Then everything changed and so did the planned trajectory for my life.

The shocking change of circumstances is not all unpleasant. Bits of it are desperately sad, but it’s also loads of other things - exciting, invigorating, liberating.

If this had to happen to complete the trifecta of disappearing men in my life (losing my dad to dementia, losing my son to his own independent life and then losing my husband to fuck knows what) this was exactly the right time for me. At 50 I have already encountered all sorts of Big Life Shit - love, loss, grief, shock, fear, disappointment - like almost everyone else has when they get to this age. Life isn’t straightforward for any of us. And while the hard times are well… hard, the building blocks of resilience that the previous hard times leave you with, don’t necessarily show themselves until you really need them to. And I have needed them.

The first six months after my husband left have been just about survival for me. Doing what I needed to do to get out of bed and get through the day. I’ve written before about how I find comfort in scheduling feelings as a way of controlling my emotional response to events that are way out of my control. But now I’m passing through that six month mark my thoughts have turned to building a functional, sustainable new life. And though I’m necessarily creating a new definition of who I am now, and a new identity to go with it, the central tenets of what make me who I am haven’t changed one jot. My values haven’t changed. My personality hasn’t changed. My humour hasn’t changed. It’s more about action. What I do with my life now it’s a clean slate and a chance to start again. My needs are different and so are my ambitions.

I spent all summer distracting myself by going on every adventure that presented itself. Solo travels, holidays with mates, fun nights out with pals and trysts with a gentleman caller or two (not at the same time I hasten to add. I haven’t reached that level of adventuring just yet). But now I’m hankering after ordinary times, routine, the security of predictability.

As my six months of new life is up (and I’m doing so much better than I would have ever hoped) I decided to think about what I want my life to be like six months from now.

A practical question to solve is ‘what do I want my home to look like?’.

One of my biggest fuck ups, at the beginning, when I was in pacing the house in state of shock, was my attempt to renovate the whole place all at once. My only other significant fuck up in those early days was to bullishly proposition a mate, who thank God, clocking that I was a terrifying mess of vulnerable, batshit crazy and surprisingly frisky, he ran as fast as he could - it would have been an enormous mistake for both of us. What an absolute twat I was and thank Christ my pal forgave me for my dreadful behaviour. But back to the house…

It’s taken me a while to make the rooms liveable after my days in a grief stricken hurricane of ripping off wallpaper, clonking wardrobes down the stairs and dragging furniture around. Now I’m thinking about what my own style actually is. This is no longer a family home. It’s a haven, a sanctuary, a suburban retreat for a grown up woman and her two daft dogs.

But clearing out my house is more difficult than Marie Kondo-ing the fuck out of a load of excess junk. Letting go is hard. The stuff that we owned, that now I own, has echoes of love in it, just as my ring finger has a lasting indent of where my wedding ring sat for more than two decades. It’s hard to separate the stuff from the sentiment. And I am trying hard to let go.

But trying to let go of love is hard. The love I have for my soon to be ex-husband is habitual. I will never have him back (I’m sure he wouldn’t want to return anyway) but I can’t imagine that I’ll ever not love him. I suspect I should feel angry all the time. I wish I did feel rage. I just don’t. I feel disappointed and I feel sad, sometimes desperately so.

Most days are okay now and I genuinely believe that our marriage ending is for the best. It will give us both chance to flourish as individuals, in different directions than we would have done if we’d have stayed together. But some days are still hard. Living alone in this house where our family was made.

There’s all this residual love hanging in the air; it’s resting on the kitchen table where we gathered together as a family, just the three of us, to laugh and to eat and to build each other up; it’s on the huge sofa where we all used to snuggle up together to watch a film, both dogs barging their way between us and turning us into a strange clump, like a line of weirdos sitting on the back seat of a bus; it’s in the first steps I take into the kitchen when we looked round the house before we bought it, knowing at that moment that it was the home where we wanted to raise our little boy and all those other babies we were going to have, not knowing at that point that none of them would make it to term; it’s in the Marmite t-shirt I found, which he was wearing the first ever time I laid eyes on him, in a theatre foyer back in the summer of 1997; it’s in the shelf full of complicated board games I never got the hang of; it’s in the heavy turquoise pan he bought me one birthday.

I want to deep clean my memories that are associated with our home, my home. Or at least move them to an emotional place in me that doesn’t make tears lazily plop from my eyes and puddle down my cheeks as I think of them.

I might have underestimated my required timeline. From devastation to everything is completely fine might take a bit longer than six months. In the meantime, I’ll get myself down the DIY shop and hope inspiration strikes.

Bear with me, pals.

xxx