And time moves on....

I won't say that I'm completely healed. That would be lying. I'm not ready to date anyone, and the things hubby does or doesn't do (leaving his junk in the house or keeping one of the dogs from me) can still make me fairly angry and hurt. I also don't know how I'll feel on our wedding anniversary next month or the anniversary of our first date the month after that.

After almost six months, though, I will say that the routine has become a balm. I don't miss him because out of habit I don't expect him to be there. I no longer expect, even out of the corners of my mind, for him to be home when I return. I don't scan the street for his car as I turn into it. It's becoming less and less often when I notice something in the news or read something that I instinctual want to tell him about. I expect it to become easier (after the bump of leaving) when I no longer inhabit our house. Moving furniture has helped some, but unfinished home repair projects of his, scratches he put in the wall, and the general uneasiness that he has the keys still occasionally grate on me.

I'm going to try to stop complaining about moving in with my parents. I should be grateful I have loving parents who at least have some small area in their house and are willing to shelter me in this time of need. At least until I am actually staying with them, at least, which is when I plan to grumble quietly to friends about every fundamentalist holier-than-thou comment they make and every Sunday they force me to church. However, I will take advantage of their generosity to save as much money as I can to get myself an ideal new place.

For now, I have to finish the semester. Although at present I am a tad distracted by the job interviews I had yesterday. One of them was at a lovely private girls' high school. It seems to be the kind of institution where I could focus more on teaching and less on the administrative details I hated so much during student teaching. Possibly I could even expect the students to read more than 4 pages a night for homework. The campus was beautiful, and it is four miles away from the condo village I like. Keep your fingers crossed that they liked me as much as I liked them!

Don't take this wrong- I'm not loving life, I'm not estatic about "starting over" and "moving on" as people sometimes prompt me to be, people who I may add have never been divorced. For a long time I had felt so tired, so hurt, that each breath and each step was taken with the utmost force and care. Now I can only say that I'm more than coping, but that's as far as I'm willing to take it yet.

I like solitude, but he gave me so much of it in the relationship. I'm lonely. I miss having someone around to share the little things with.

Busy Season

I promise to write more soon- and I meant to write more by now, but I have 3 projects and one paper due over the next week, and 25 papers to grade. In addition, I'm working both days this weekend.

It seems a sheriff was hanging around my house before I got home from class today. Could it be that hubby has filed already? I told him to please not do anything drastic over the next ten days (a few days ago) because I had enough stress to deal with finishing my schoolwork for the semester. I don't think being served will hurt me that badly, but I don't want to run the risk of feeling emotionally wrought in addition to working on way too much school work.

Until then, wish me luck. I have 2 job interviews on Friday. One of them is for a really cool private school with small classes and a women's studies course.

One of the Best Dogs in the World

I say "one of" because I can't pick between them- both my girls are wonderful in their own way. But I am writing this day in honor of my first puppy ever, Darcy, who came into my life almost 5 years ago.

When we brought her home from the Humane Society she was only six pounds and eight weeks old. She was fuzzy, and still is black with tan markings. She has brown eyebrows on her black face which she twitches up and down when she's listening to someone talk. It makes her look as if she is puzzling out what we're saying to her.

I had moved in with my fiance the week before, the next week I was graduating from college, and the week after that we would be getting married. This particular weekend, however, was our puppy weekend. I had never had a puppy- only a 3 year old dachshund when I was 3 myself who went to my grandparents' house when my infant sister started crawling and eating her food. Other than that barely remembered time I had never had a pet. So fiance and I had made a deal that each of us could pick out a dog. We weren't planning on getting them both at once, and he said I could get my dog first.

I had a misguided idea that I needed a dachshund and, wonder of wonders, the Humane Society actually had a full-blooded doxie waiting for adoption. I was flabbergasted and excited. Then I attempted to move towards the dog's crate. I was met by one of the meanest growls I've ever heard. If that dog had been just a tiny bit nice, it would have had a home. Thank goodness it wasn't, or I would have not only missed out on Darcy, but my dog Chloe as well.

Fiance wanted a German Shepard mix. He'd done a lot of research on them, and had a course of planning laid out for his new puppy. He was specifically looking for a puppy, so he could make sure it was conditioned exactly the way he wanted and trained from an early age to follow his commands. Yet he did not see a single dog he was interested in.

I, however, saw a crate with a couple of German Shepard mix pups. One was male, and his sister was hiding behind him. Fiance wanted a female puppy because he had read somewhere that female dogs respond better to men, and he hadn't noticed this puppy behind her brother (who looked decidedly much less like a German Shepard. Oh, the randomness of genetics in mixed breed pups!) I brought her to fiance's attention, and it was love at first sight.

My relationship with her was decidedly fraught with more difficulties. Oh, she was cute all right. And fuzzy. And sweet, when she was just about ready to fall asleep. But this puppy had her issues. She chewed my ankles raw, nipped at my nose when she licked my face because she was so excited to see me. She was also fairly mean whenever she wasn't exhausted, growling and snapping at anyone who got on her bad side. In addition, the role of puppy-mom fell to me. Somewhat like the mother of a new infant, I was suddenly in charge of getting up with a baby (baby dog that is) in the middle of the night, at five a.m., and every few hours throughout the day, sleeping when the baby slept, and carefully supervising her every move whenever she was awake. I won't say fiance left the care entirely to me, because that would be a bald-faced lie, but I'm sure most mothers will understand when I say I, as mom, got the lion's share of the responsibilities.

When we had had her for about two months, fiance went to summer military training for two weeks and I was left alone to take care of her entirely on my own. She was still figuring out potty-training, still teething fairly fiercely, and still fairly growly. I was in the middle of my first class at graduate school, and had to try my damndest to finish my schoolwork while keeping her entertained. Have you ever tried to read 4 scholarly (long) books over the course of 10 days while a puppy chewed your ankles? Let me tell you, it's not an easy proposition. When she finally grew enough to jump up onto our tall bed by herself, I also lost my last place of respite. I cried.

The funny thing is, by the end of the two weeks I had trained Darcy to ring a bell on the back door when she needed to go outside. Reliably. She still rings that bell when she needs to go to this day, and she is strangely enough, pretty truthful. The only time I have to doubt her rings are when it's snowed outside since she loves to play in the snow. She had also changed into a much sweeter dog as well. She's really quite a giving and laid back dog, completely different from the pup I used to squeeze "growly juice" from just weeks before.

Hubby (soon to be ex-hubby, of course) believed then and still claims to this day that his two-week absence after one of her routine snits the night before convinced the misbehaving mini-pooch that she'd better behave or he'd leave her again. I'm not so sure about that.

In honor of the two best dogs in the world (if you believe yours is one of the best don't be insulted, I am a bit partial) who are both black, adopt a black shelter dog if you are in the market. Black dogs get chosen less than other colors. I'm not sure why- I think it's because people have some instinctual, primal response that makes them fear black dogs just a little bit more. Black dogs can be some of the sweetest, best companions. Just as good as the other colors, and possibly better!

Back in the Saddle

I've been spending some time reading some of my favorite blogs and I decided that I needed to post a better update, since I have been gone for over a month.

I'm really feeling for cmhl. She's been going through a rough time and seems to be coping fairly well at this point. I really feel for her and understand in some ways what she's going through. Yes, she's a decade older than me and has 2 kids, but I too am struggling to cope with a marriage that was less than stellar. I too had a hubby that allowed me to (or required me to) do everything to keep the house going, to keep the bills getting paid on time, etc. Who didn't seem to recognize that his actions had an impact on people other than himself. And he continues to do so as I make a fourth mortgage payment by myself.

I hope that everything works out for the best for her, but I have come to the realization that the best, for me, has nothing to do with the man I've spent the last decade with. Now I just have to get the resolve to make it legal.

I still miss the person he was, the friend he used to be to me. I don't think that at this point I could ever forgive him enough to live with him again unless he could take back all the crap he's put me through since he left that message on our answering machine almost six months ago telling me he was leaving.

A couple of days ago I was feeling bad, depressed about how terrible a person I must be if my husband can't even love me, and I realized something that made me feel proud of myself. I've made it through hell.

My great-grandmother died, and hubby left 2 weeks later over the machine. He was hospitalized a little later. I've paid for almost all our bills while cutting back on my work hours to student teach. I kept my heat at 52 and still paid over 200 a month. My toilet broke, my car was hit in front of my house overnight. No one left a note. I bruised my tail bone. I unexpectedly had to buy two new tires. I hated student teaching- I operated on 5 hours of sleep most nights, and worked at teaching and planning and grading from sun up to 11 pm. Hubby stole money from my bank account, on the same day I discovered he'd been ordering flowers. Hubby had committed to take the dogs out 2 nights a week (when I had night class and was gone from home for 14 hour days) and forgot/didn't make alternate arrangements 4 times. I've cleaned up the messes he left in the house. Washed dishes he left dirty and taken recycling he collected to the recycle center. I almost broke my knee being pulled after a squirrel at the park. I broke out in hives (don't know why) and my eyes and throat started to swell shut.

I only have guaranteed employment for another 6 weeks and my house is not ready to put on the market. Hubby owes me more money than he makes in 3 months, and he is screwing with my credit as well- not paying car payments for his car (I cosigned) while I struggle to pay all our bills by myself. He won't even reply to my emails about the house or the dogs most of the time.

I am starting to feel a little down after rehashing this. But the point of it all is that I have made it through. I survived all of this without doing something tragic, which I definitely thought about from time to time.

I am making a wish list for myself. I have a dream condo village I want to live in. I would have a one car garage and a fenced area for my dogs. I would have more than one toilet (seems good after the days without one), and a full sized closet (my house is over 100 years old. 2 half closets do not make a whole). It has tennis courts, a walking path, and swimming pools. It's much closer to my dream job than I live now. It would be mine. Entirely mine. As would my paycheck. No longer will I have to live in fear of discovering new secret credit cards, thousands more dollars of electronics purchased for hubby's personal pleasure, and know that I am working all weekend long to pay for his leisure.

I was cleaning and packing up more stuff this week, and found more fast food credit card receipts than before. It's nice to know that when I was stretching the budget eating 80 cents worth of sandwiches and carrots daily he could charge 13 dollars to the sub shop or to Burger King.

But that is a tangent, and this is not what I meant to say. I meant to say that I am trying, but the healing comes slowly.

Long Absence

I haven't written in a while. At first student teaching got pretty busy, then I got out of the habit of writing. I'm not sure what to write any more.
I'm big into the job hunt right now. I'm hoping to work at a local community college teaching, but I'm also looking at a few private high schools as well. There's a condo I have my eye on. I want it badly, but I need a regular income first.
I want male attention badly. I don't want a relationship, but it would be very nice to be appreciated. I might go dancing next weekend.
So here I am. Not very far from where I was before. Still poor and jobless and a little sad. Trying to deal with the ending of my marriage, which I'm still not happy about.
Life goes on.