blogging, divorce and the videotape

Ok, so I did something I shouldn’t have done. It was stupid, it was neurotic, it was unhealthy and yet I did it. I did it knowing it would make me feel bad, knowing it would make me feel inadequate and I did it anyway. I read my husband’s ex-wife’s blog. I don’t know if any other “second wives” share this compulsion or not, maybe it’s just me. On a more lucid moment I might think, “get over it.” After all he was married to her for what a half a minute, compared to the five plus years of marriage we’ve shared it should mean nothing. And yet it means something because I go and read, and fume.

I read about how she and her new husband adopted a dog and how much this dog loves her. This makes me fume as I scrubbing the cat vomit off my carpet left from one of the two cats she’d adopted and left behind when she left my husband. I then reflect on comments to her blog saying she is so good hearted and all that is good in the world. Reflecting on this while I spend my time cleaning the litter box of her past benevolence does little to provide peace and serenity for me.

I read about her exploits with her single child and all her outings with friends while I live like a virtual shut in with four children under the age of four. I read about her running in races, while I, a past marathon runner have become the runner that makes everyone else feel great about their ability as they pass me by. I read a blog where she jokingly refers to “divorcing” her husband and I think has this woman learned nothing? She left a wake of emotional destruction and she has the nerve to joke about doing it again!!!!

Like I said I find these reading to be less than bastions of tranquility for me. But really this obsession of mine has less to do with this woman and what she’s doing than it does with me and with my history with my husband.

I don’t know exactly when this compulsion began. I know it has its roots at the very beginnings of my relationship with my now husband. There was a line in a movie, I think it was Sweet November, about how a woman leaves her mark on a man. This woman had certainly left her mark on this man. I had started dating him a few months after the divorce had become final and about a year and a half after she had left him. Perhaps I shouldn’t have dated him, perhaps in retrospect I should have moved on and found someone who had already worked through his past relationship. But I didn’t move on. At the time I had little inkling that this relationship would lead to a tomorrow much less a marriage and a forever.

Later in our relationship, after we had become engaged and began planning our wedding, he made the mistake of providing me with the video of his first wedding (what was he thinking?). I watched him (on video) promise this woman that he would “love, and cherish her until death did they part” and hear the minister proclaim that what God has joined together let no man put asunder. And inside I scream those were my promises; those where the words that should have been mine alone and yet I had to watch him make them to someone else. This is a wound I’m not sure will ever completely heal. But, it is not this wound that causes me to read this woman’s blog. I think that reading her blog, and the indignation that it causes me provides me with my internal justification for my own selfishness. I think that internally I look at her life and I can say look, despite the hardship, I kept and cared for the cats, and I take care of four children not just one, and because I’ve done that I can’t do all these things that she can so thus I deserve ____ (fill in blank). It’s my way to justify to myself why I should have what ever it is I have decided I want.

In the end, the world is an imperfect place and in life we all have to work with the less than ideal reality we’d like. For now I’ll just be glad she did leave this man and that he and I have built a beautiful family and life together. In the end, with all of it’s imperfections it is enough, and maybe someday I will be able to accept my wants for what they are and not feel the need to justify them.