Maybe it was during the night; perhaps it occurred during the day when I wasn’t paying attention. In all likelihood, it may change back. Whatever! It happened. I realized this morning that I was thinking like a person who was living on my own. There was no one to blame, no one to call to task for being responsible for making my life different than it had been. I wasn’t in a funk. I wasn’t necessarily ecstatic. But I was singing a trumped up tune I enjoyed humming over and over again until I got the final note just perfect.
This understanding came about as I was closing drawers, closets, and cabinet doors after me without thinking about what Y would say if he came behind me and closed them himself. I chose, this morning, to answer the alarm clock with a sigh, reset if for another hour of sleep, and turn over. I had no guilt and didn’t even feel a guilty pleasure in the action. I just did it.
The laundry was in a pile so I started the water heater and the generator without first wondering if it was a good time to make all the noise.
A breakfast of apple crisp didn’t bring with it the need to carefully take my portion and set his aside so we’d have equal sharings. One weekend morning I played Sudoku in bed on my Iphone from 5:45am til 7am then went back to sleep til 10am. The next day I was up at 7am organizing a drawer.
I’ve never lived only in relationship with myself. I was either in my parent’s home and going to school and junior college (20 years) or married to two different husbands at different times (total of 39 years) or living in a dorm (3 years) or divorced with two children (4 years). That’s 66 years. That’s exactly how old I was when this entire disaster engulfed me. Now at 67, I can say I’m merely a woman on my own.
Sometime ago I pasted a few days one spot in my life and two weeks from another spot, and so on, into a lump that reported I had been sporadically on my own for a total of 8 months out of those 66 years. Now I see this current experience was way past due, and I also recognize I have had no idea how to handle it, let alone the idea of being a widow with grief.
So it had to be one thing at a time.
Up until this week, I’ve handled the whole affair as a widow, giving a smattering of attention to thoughts of bills and expenses, bank accounts and CDs, how to purchase wood for the wood stove and dig ditches. Somehow in the beginning I felt as if all I had to do was tread water, and he’d come back, or someone would come back, and I could return to living my life as part of a twosome. Then I began to take classes I’ve always wanted to take like herbal salve making and acting, etc. I’ve driven an hour on a whim to shop or called a friend and talked for an hour over dinner time. I’ve had scrambled eggs at 2am because I was hungry and overbooked myself for volunteer work to the point where the house was a disaster, and I ran out of underwear. I never would have done that married or as a mother.
Just recently I’ve been like a little kid with a new toy, and I can truly say I’ve been enjoying a new kind of freedom. However, always in the back of my mind, I’ve held the belief that this wasn’t permanent. Somehow my old life would come back, except now, I know in every fiber of my being that it won’t.
Selling the tools and machinery is easier this way. Just as it’s less hurtful to clear out his drawers in the roll top desk we were refinishing on our first wedding anniversary. I’m saying words like ‘mine’ now instead of ours. If I slip up and do say ‘our’, it’s no big deal either. I understand what I’m meaning, and it’s finally OK to be with just me.
