Thanks Zartheit. It does sound like a trauma right? Looking back, this always happened every time my d anniversary was approaching. I was not even thinking about it. For me it’s just any other day. But somehow my body reacts when it’s approaching. That day when I was in court, it was so traumatic, I felt like a criminal. I had never been in a court trial until that D day und worst was I was in a foreign country with a language I could understand that time around 60-70%. I couldn’t work the next day. My body suffered so much from it.  After all these years I could still feel it in my mind and physically. Now, I understand why I had been dreaming about my ex 5 nights in a row now. It’s like my brain was replaying everything and trying to find reason about everything that happened. Really strange dreams.

Yes, I do believe that we store trauma in our bodies. I could not go into the room in my house for over a year where his stray dog bit my lip off- the lip would just start tingling. Even now, a decade plus later, thinking about it triggers a physical reaction. Please consider looking into the book The Body Keeps the Score.

If there is one silver lining to all this it’s the children. My relationship with the kids is so much better than it was before all this. Enjoy your time with the girls!

SS-

Always glad to see your updates. I got to look into that food for Baxter!

Thank you for coming back to share your sense of where you are. As you know, lots of folks read without posting and your reflections may help someone else just put words to theirs. And for your honesty…so often in life we feel we need to put on a ‘fine’ face and it’s good to be reminded that we don’t, especially in this place.

First of all, thank goodness that your son’s injuries were not even worse and a big hurrah for all the happy news of all the different joys and successes in your kids’ lives. Their success is their own, of course, but it is likely that you were the sane steady solo parental rock for many years. That’s far from nothing and it is a huge testament to your ability to create a good platform for them to launch from. Worth at least a few pats on your own back, I’d think, so I hope you pause to appreciate that.

To me, you just sound tired. Really tired. Tired of being the filler of other peoples’ empty broken spaces. Tired of carrying monkeys that you don’t own and can’t corral. I often see that in quite a few mature women, that sense of ‘enough with this’ after years of caring for others and perhaps a feeling that it hasn’t always served us well or been reciprocated in the way we’d wish. You don’t need my validation of course, but you have it anyway. Your thoughts and feelings make sense given how you describe your path to here.

It can be quite liberating of course to give very few f**ks in the way we once did. I think that’s why so many older women start saying No and F**k Off more 😜 or just refusing to play 😜 But also perhaps a bit scary to realise that we don’t look at the world in the same way we once did and that this might bring us to a point of changing some things about how we operate in the world. There’s a brewing time, I think, isn’t there? Or maybe it’s a stewing time? And that can feel quite scary in and of itself bc it leads towards some unknowns perhaps.

I am sorry that you feel how you feel bc I imagine it’s a bit of an uncomfortable place to be at times. I agree with UM that your h  has an unhealthy relationship with alcohol and there is nothing at all you can do to change that. Even if all the other things had not happened, that renders him at least partially unavailable emotionally and brings its’ own twists into your family life. Tbh, from the cheap seats, I don’t see his not drinking around you as a compliment or act of respect….it reads more like an old song of you somehow playing some part in his drinking or not drinking, some replacement of me with we that really isn’t true or accurate. He drinks - or not - entirely for his own reasons and has his own feelings about it which have absolutely nothing at all to do with you (well unless you are his enabling drinking partner but it doesn’t sound like you are). Please don’t pick up that monkey even a little bit; it truly does not belong to you.

I have no advice or great wisdom about you could/might do moving forward, only good wishes and a reminder - bc we all forget a little bit, don’t we - that you have already survived and evolved through much worse than this. It’s a sad reality that some big life experiences change us in ways we can’t always foresee and that, regardless of what happens with our marriages, our spouses acted in ways that broke important things, perhaps even in ways they didn’t foresee either. But they did and you had to find ways to navigate that the best you could. And you did. And your kids did too. You all found ways to protect the most important things that you could and to reshape your lives. So you can trust that you have in you already whatever you might need next.

Hugs from a sunny autumn day here in the UK. Xxx