We gotta get out of this place, 'cause girl, there's a better life for me and you

About a month ago, I was at my camp, telling my SILs things I'd never told them about my marriage, when my phone buzzed with a text from a friend at home.

"Are you moving? Your house is for sale."

There was only one possible response: "Whaaaaaaaaa‽"

I was sure there was a mistake. The house I live in looks like a lot of other houses on the street. It was possible my friend was confused. Still, I thought I should check the local realty sites...no, it wasn't there...not there, either...OH MY GOD I WENT ON VACATION AND MY ROOMMATE LISTED THE HOUSE FOR SALE.

I looked up in shock. "This is the craziest thing I've said all night, right?"

My SILs said it wasn't.

I suppose I can't be too surprised; I've been over the story of my doomed marriage in my head so many times it's now just part of the background, but I sometimes forget that it is a bit much all at once. 

Anyway. The house.

The roomie has been increasingly erratic, making what I'd call burn-your-bridges decisions. The sort of decisions that can't easily be undone and that don't appear to have many benefits. She'd been talking about selling the house for months -- it had been something we'd discussed when Son and I moved in -- but as winter turned to spring and spring turned to summer, house-selling season passed and I'd figured it was yet another idea she liked to muse about without bothering to take action. 

The constant talk of selling the house had bothered me. I do not like feeling unsettled. But it seemed like it was just talk. Son and I discussed our plans for the coming year and decided to stay at least until the end of the next school year: the house is just steps from his new school and there were no better options. At the conclusion of the next "if I sell I'll need to paint THIS wall and THAT wall and restain the deck and finish the landscaping..." discussion, I told the roomie that she should let me know when she decided to sell, so that Son and I could find another place and be out no less than a month before she listed it. I'd just been through the hassle of trying to sell the home Ex and I owned together, and I did not want to live in another house that was for sale. But that's not what I told the roomie. I told her it would be better for her to sell if we weren't underfoot. She did not like this idea -- "But then you'll take your furniture!" -- but I hadn't thought much of it, since it all seemed pretty hypothetical anyway. This was't the first conversation I'd had about the multitude of tasks she'd need to complete if she decided to sell. 

And that was about a week before I clicked a link and saw my furniture online. I was pretty creeped out to see that my bedroom was all changed around. WHERE WAS MY UNDERWEAR? 

I wasn't sure what to do. I wondered if this might be her low-profile way of seeing if she could get any interest in the house without losing the person who pays half of the bills; she might think she could pull it off the market before I came back and I'd be none the wiser. I texted to ask how she was. 

It took her a while to respond: she figured she should tell me she had decided to list the house for sale. 

Uh huh. 

I said yes, I'd noticed that, and when should I be out?

The question seemed to catch her off guard; she sputtered a bit about no particular time, no rush, there hadn't been any showings...

I found a house around the corner and made tentative arrangements with the landlord, who is a friend, to move in October 1. A second friend said she was looking for a roommate. Things were pretty well settled by the time I got back to town two weeks ago. 

I have not been at my house much; I usually stay with the Long-Haired Musician when Son isn't with me, and Son is spending a month with his dad. 

I am still a bit startled by this turn of events, but so is the roomie. She did not seem to expect me to immediately decide to move out. The roomie does not have kids and seems not to realise that people who do can't have unstable housing. Even if she does not sell this summer (and I doubt she will), I can't stay; what if she does this when we leave for Christmas break? 

She also seems not to realise that it is not cool to go through someone else's things while they're away. She prattled on nervously as I looked for my personal items (where the heck are my bank statements?): she hoped I didn't mind that she moved things around, and she'd asked people if they thought I would mind (Long-Haired Musician: "Huh. She didn't ask me..."), and she thought that there are people who PAY for others to redecorate their places, and, and, and.

The roomie is unwell. It is best for us to leave anyway. 

So, yeah, I had a bit of a kick in the pants to find a new place. I haven't signed the lease or done a walk-through on the new place, but it's around the corner from Son's BFF and is about the same monthly cost as this house. And -- bonus! -- I'll be able to put this weirdness behind me. 

When does my life get to be NORMAL? 

Silent all these years

The surgeon told me not to talk. 

This, as you might imagine, does not come easily to me. I am an extrovert. 

Doctor, to My Loving Partner: You're being quiet.

MLP: I'm quiet.

Doc: I see. Is she quiet?

All: HAHAHAHAHAHA...

I've been reasonably successful, though. The doctor told me to carry a sign telling people I can't talk. I resisted at first -- it seemed far too LOOK AT ME for my liking -- but without the sign every interaction turned into an elaborate game of charades that drew far more attention than simply holding it up and going about my business. 

It's not clear how long I'm supposed to avoid talking. A few days, at least. One of the patient-information sites I was reading today suggested that avoiding speech for a few weeks was the best plan. (10% of normal speaking for the first week, 25% for the second week, 50% for the third week.) I may not make it that long. 

A-a-a-hem

About six months ago, I noticed my voice was getting hoarse. No big deal: it was probably a cold. 

I wouldn't say I ignored it; more like I didn't put much thought into what seemed like a normal wintertime annoyance.

The hoarseness didn't go away. It started getting worse. I felt like I needed to clear my throat every few minutes. Part of my job at the time was to produce a podcast, which is how I noticed it: I'd have to stop and cough, or retake a question because my voice had dropped a few seconds in. It was starting to cause problems, in other words.

I felt a bit silly. I was healthy. I do not think healthy people should waste precious health-care resources seeking treatment for imagined ailments or minor issues that will heal on their own. But I started to worry that perhaps I had a problem with my vocal cords. Maybe even -- YIKES -- cancer or something else that was equally horrible. I swallowed my principles -- carefully, as by then it almost felt like I had a lump in my throat -- and booked an appointment with the local nurse practitioner.

The NP thought I might have a thyroid problem, based largely on a mass she could feel in my throat and the fact that I'd lost about ten pounds without warning about a year earlier. (I did not tell her that the weight loss had coincided with some emotional trauma; there are some things I just don't want to get into with people.) She ordered thyroid tests, which were inconclusive.

One piece of advice I will offer for people with an Internet connection is that googling "thyroiditis" is a bad idea. People who have, or believe they have, thyroid problems are an unhappy lot. Those who cannot seem to convince their doctors they have thyroid problems are especially miserable. I wanted to put the computer down and back away slowly. 

And so I was relieved when an ultrasound showed the size of my thyroid was within normal parameters. But I still had a lump in my throat and was having trouble talking. (Yes, go ahead; HA HA.)

The ear, nose, and throat specialist had other ideas. His scope (through the nostril and down down down COUGH COUGH COUGH) showed a polyp beneath my vocal cords, pressing against them and inflamed from causes unknown but likely caused by...uhhhhhh...talking too much. (I heard you the first time: HA HA.)

He prescribed meds for acid reflux, which I still doubt I actually have, but I suppose that is a minor thing. And today I went to the hospital for surgery to poke at this damned polyp. It was a bit of a procession of "you're too small for this medical device" and I hope there is now a note on my chart: USE PEDIATRIC EQUIPMENT. It took three tries to get the IV line in and two tries to intubate me, and they needed to find a smaller blood-pressure cuff. And after all of that, they found they would need different equipment to remove the polyp, so they simply biopsied it. I was displeased when they woke me up and told me this, as I'd been hoping this would be the end of the line and I understood the options to be "remove it" and "biopsy it and then travel to another city for a second surgery to remove it". It sounds like vocal therapy may be a third option, though; I'm hoping this is the case because I have zero desire to have surgery alone in a far-away city. I'll know more in a week or so.

Finally home. And finally awake.

I got off the plane after a day and a half in cars, planes, and airports, and went almost directly to bed, where I stayed for 15 hours. You could say I was worn out.

I woke up in the middle of a dream. 

There was a raffle, the small-town sort where they call numbers and people "win" prizes of dubious quality. They called my number last, and my unironically raffish prize was pressed into my hands over my objections: a wedding dress, a size-eighteen mass of white satin and gathered seams. 

I protested. No! No! I didn't want to get married! I wanted to get divorced! 

This seemed like a good time to wake up, heavens to mercies.

I don't know why the dress size mattered. Perhaps if I hadn't ripped myself from somnolence, I would have started shouting in my dream that it wouldn't fit.

It will be nice to be able to say that this process is over. It has seemed very long. I have a lot of lawyer friends, and they tend to agree: you spend so much time thinking about leaving and putting it off, by the time you finally make the decision to go, the year-long wait to file the paperwork seems far too long. That said, it has taken a year to get everything in place to deal with custody and assets, so perhaps a year-long wait isn't such a bad thing. 

You don't really need a divorce unless you want to get married again, but I want some finality to this. I want a piece of paper that says it is over. I want a judge to stamp my file and put it in storage. It is further and further in the past every day; I am settling into a contented life with a smart and nice guy who loves me, and "normal" is within striking distance. 

I will eventually lock a few of the older posts and attempt to turn this into a regular blog instead of a blog about some of the more  sucky things that have happened over the past ten years. Finality, you know. 

All is well.

Camp is great. It has been a good summer. The family is doing well.

I've decided to move out of the house Son and I have been living in. We will get our own place around the corner. We'd been talking about moving for a while and I'd started quietly looking at apartments, but a house became available as of October 1 and I finally had the kick in the pants I needed to take initiative and move. 

More later. I'm enjoying my time at the lake. 

Steeling myself

A friend pointed out a rather nice story in the paper the other day. Her aunt and uncle designed and built a unique duplex after their divorce, one that allows the kids to keep their bedrooms while the dimensions of the house shift around them.

Pretty cool. The sort of thing I liked to think, long ago, was possible. The sort of thing I still like to think would be possible one day.

But that's not the point of this post.

The point of this post is in the seventh graf: "Why the marriage failed is really none of our business. But Monica explains..."

Ugh.

Yeah, definitely not a stranger's business. (If you know about this blog, you're not a stranger.) But I thought it was funny that the reporter first noted that it wasn't our business, and then went on to give a reason.

It's been about a year since my traumatic summer "vacation". I know I'm doing better, because part of me longs to see my family again. But part of me is in knots over what is to come. I don't want to answer questions about why. Not because the lie I will tell is particularly awful, but because I don't think it's strangers' business. It's not even family's business.

At some point, people decide that you have to explain why you're not with someone. I don't know if the magic time period is in years or months or, God help us, in days. I only really know that after twenty years, people think I owe them an explanation.

I feel like this is pretty intrusive; not only because I'll have to lie again and then maintain the new lie, but because it doesn't seem like it should matter enough to even ask. We're not together. If you're a stranger, you don't need to know any more. Even if you're not a stranger, you probably don't need to know any more.

Okay, not YOU. But I'm definitely planning to lie to everyone else.

I need to find a way to answer the question. I gather that "I dunno; how come YOU aren't married to him?" isn't acceptable.

So, yes.

This story has a happy ending.

Or a happy middle, anyway. The last time I tried to force a particular ending on a relationship, it didn't work out so well. Unless you count the way I forced it to be over.

This is not going to be my divorce blog. This is just going to be my blog. I hope that one day I will have a million and one things to write about again. Maybe one day I'll even tell people I have a website.

I am looking forward to summer at camp. I didn't have much of a holiday last year; this year can only be better. My family doesn't know the whole story and may never, but at least they seem to be past the "you are the bad one" bullshit of last year.

The bad one, you may recall, is the one who leaves. The one who is unwilling to work on the marriage. That's me. 

I won't pretend to be perfect, and I am willing to accept whatever blame is due to a person who falls in love with someone else.

We are going away next weekend; my favourite band is touring and I was able to match the tour schedule with my custody schedule. I've never been to Winnipeg before and am looking forward to visiting museums and exploring riverside trails.