love

the process from separation to divorce was nearly two years.

the healing process of leaving someone who you trusted the most in the whole world, who you loved and thought loved you, yet who terrorized you and your children, is different for everyone.  therapy helps immensely.  

to be truthful, i'm still triggered around certain things, and I'm in therapy and i know i'm healing still.  i have, carefully, miraculously, lovingly, found love again, but not after some serious therapy.  not after some serious consideration of what i do and how i make my choices when it comes to choosing someone to be with.

for instance, somehow, along the ride, the seeds of love and pain were sewn side by side within me.  So i only understood that love comes at the price of pain.  i still, weirdly, deep down, feel that is the emotional truth, it was laid down somewhere so long ago that i can't consciously remember it.  but i know that's how it was for me.  because my exhusband was not the first to abuse me, to terrorize me.  my former partner did the same.  i look back at my life with vision that is clearly 20/20, that sees the pattern of how i ran from 'safe' partners and embraced the ones who hurt me.  because, somehow, i learned and decided that the painful ones, they dispensed love in a language i recognized.  a love that comes with fear and pain.   (WTF??!!)

so i'm learning now--for the sake of my children--that love does NOT come at a price of pain.  I am doing my best to heal now--for the sake of my children--so I can show them, so i can teach them that love is love.  that one day, they will meet someone and they will recognize love as something that is beautiful and as something that does not come with a price.