Middle Age: The Worst of Times - and The Best!

People ask about success stories and yours is a different type but potentially even more potent one. I know what you mean about the knees, I was training for Ironman #6 and out went the knees. My tip, which others have written about as well, is to seriously consider adding swimming to your workout regimen.

Thanks for being part of the community.

Wesley Hein Wesley [at] lifetwo [dot] com Sign up for the LifeTwo Newsletter!

Buddy, thanks for all of your posts on here. You and Jim have been great support.

sam_in_la

As I posted in the "My wife is having a MLC" forum, my divorce is final. People said that a weight would be lifted once it became final and - they are right. It's like all of the anxiety of wanting to know how all of the chips would fall just disappeared. The best and the worst of times. Yes, that about sums it up. I'd have to ask myself if I was just staying in the marriage for the sake of the kids (which that thought had crossed my mind a few years back.) But I was committed until the end - the way a marriage is suppose to be. For better or for worse, richer or poorer, till death do us part. However, one of us decided that there was more to life than the 'mundane' life of being married, so what was done was done. The onset was horrible. As everyone who has been posting on here experiences, the shock of it all, the endless nights of crying and trying to figure EVERYTHING out. You search for answers and reasons, more often than not looking at the person in the mirror and wondering where it all went wrong. But then you start to put pieces together; some pieces to this finale were put in place before the two of you met. You drug hurts from childhood and past relationships into something that was suppose to last forever - then some of those hurts started to creep into your new life. You don't see it when it happens because you think that it's just part of being married - that disagreements happen and you move on. However, as my Pastor said in one of his sermons about marriage and divorce, "It's the slow leaks over time that takes their toll - not so much the blowout." How true. But I sit here and I still wonder why some of the things ended the way they did with her. I am talking about her last minute decisions in the divorce decree. Not wanting alimony, assuming ALL financial responsibility for the house that would soon fold in on her and leave her filing for bankruptcy. These decisions puzzle me. She was already collecting the court ordered temporary alimony. However, I heard that she listened to the wisdom of those "divorced friends" telling her that it was taxable income. Strange - but I am not complaining. A few other things come to mind as well. Her attorney writing in an e-mail to my attorney, "I don't want to see Jim get screwed in this deal." My paying a significant amount towards her attorney fees because she could not afford it, which, in all honesty, literally shifted her attorney to lean towards favoring my outcome. I think what hurt the most was going home after a year and seeing the house in disrepair. I had a garden growing in the rain gutters and the inside was horrible. Doors ripped off of hinges, moldy carpet in the basement because a window was broken and never replaced, the smell of cigarette smoke and the nastiness of a house that seldom saw the clean side of a dusting rag. It showed me how much she appreciated what I was doing for her in regards to the house for the past seven years. Tens of thousands of dollars wasted. She was shocked when she stopped by the house one day and saw that I had only brought a pickup truck to get my personal belongings. I knew that I wanted to only get those things that had meaning to me; everything else was replaceable. I remember going down to the basement and seeing a large plastic trash can with items my oldest son had thrown away. I was curious so I dumped out the trashcan and, at the bottom, he had discarded his soccer team trophies and team pictures from when he was in youth soccer. Unknown to him, I have those items in my possession now and I plan on hanging a few of those pictures on my wall with a shelf for his trophies as well. One day, when he gets older, I will surprise him with a gift from a father whose love will never fail. She did not care to claim anything that might be of any value to our boys, like the photo albums, so I grabbed them as well before they hit the trash too. I think it is just baffling that someone would want to just throw away memories from a period of their life. She wants me out of her life, but she stated on the phone yesterday that she wanted to be friends. Confused? I confided in my mom today and asked her how I should handle this. She told me that the only thing we have in common is our boys. Those conversations should be based around them and nothing of our personal lives anymore. I can accept that. She also told me that it will be much easier to completely shut the door once someone else enters my life. I know the kind of relationship I want and I will wait as long as it takes to find someone who shares the same values. No rebound for this guy. I certainly hope everyone else comes out of his or her 'crisis' stronger, wiser, and with a refreshed sense of purpose. If one of you wasn't willing to try and work through the troubled areas of the marriage, you have to ask yourself, would it have been worth it to try and drag the other person along in a lifelong hopeless pursuit of marital bliss?

-Jim