Round One...and so it begins...

We had our first meeting with our lawyer today…I’m pretty sure that in the history of the world, no good has ever come from a sentence that starts with that statement. The lawyer seems like a nice enough guy, in his my-job-is-to-help-you-two-identify-what-you-want-this-to-look-like-in-the-end kind of way, but at the end of the day, we aren’t in this together. We’re on opposite sides of the table negotiating how we’re going to divide up the life we’ve shared for the last 16 years. We might smile at points, and I think I may have even laughed once, but at the end of the day, we’re on opposite sides of the table. I moved out on December 26, 2009 and it took everything I had that first month to not call him and beg to come home because I was afraid I’d made a horrible mistake. I’ve come to realize that just because I was in pain so profound that sometimes it felt like I couldn’t breathe, that didn’t mean I had made the wrong decision. I’m still very much in love with my husband and I’m not sure I’ll ever get to the point where I don’t love him anymore. We just don’t work as a couple. I thought I had made strides in the last few months. I thought I was through the worst of the pain. I was wrong. The pain is still here, in fact, I’m pretty sure as it was waiting for me, it was doing push-ups. What I came to realize tonight as I was curled up in the fetal position listening to Pink’s “Who Knew” was that I’m hurting because my best friend in the world, the man who knows me better than I know myself, the one man that I can’t fool, doesn’t have any faith in me. My character is a question mark in his mind. That stings. How did I get here? When I was a little girl, my dad would tell me I could do anything I set my mind to, and I believed him. How did I become this morally suspect woman? I’ve been known to say that my gregarious exterior is simply smoke and mirrors because I’m actually a very shy person, but is my character all smoke and mirrors too? If he knows me better than I know myself and he has no faith in me, what does that say about me?