Moving Forward With Absolutely No Grace

First and foremost, I want to thank you all for the support and kindness you showed after my last post. In a lot of ways, outing myself as a divorced woman makes me feel like I’m walking around with the word FAILURE stamped on my forehead. We were together eighteen years, married for fifteen, but we failed. While that isn’t exactly what transpired, it’s certainly how it feels some days.

I am here to promise this blog won’t be all doom and gloom. Sure, getting divorced is an absolute carnival ride, but my longtime readers know that I try to poke fun at everything, no matter how tragic. I will try to be honest (for myself) but respectful (for others touched by our splintered relationship), while keeping in mind my children who don’t know I have a blog at all. This is a safe space for me to share what’s going on and bring some levity to a dumpster fire of a situation.

For example, I have recently entered the very shallow dating pool of single people in their late 30s and 40s. It has been…eye-opening. The last time I was single my cell phone didn’t have a camera. Names will be changed to protect the innocent, but full addresses and background checks will be shared to shame the villains. It’s the wild west out here, man.

I’ve written often about the full time “work” of being a patient with an incurable disease, and I’d like to add divorcee setting up child support to the list of unexpected full-time jobs I am taking on. You would not believe the amount of time sensitive paperwork that is being fumbled through snail mail instead of email these days. We submitted our divorce agreement to the court in early December, but couldn’t get officially divorced for 60 days, even though the document was essentially effective immediately. So child support started in December, but you can’t access child support until you are officially divorced, and then an account has to be set up by about 7 people acting independently. You need a case number from one place, an ID number from another, and there will be a letter coming in the mail with your PIN, but when you fill out the online form the website will crash, so you need to call in order to find out through an automated message they are “closed” during regular business hours and someone forgot to switch off the robot who tells people to call back during the day which is when you called in the first place.

All this nonsense from an uncontested divorce with two cooperating parents. Godspeed to those who are wrestling child support from an unwilling person.

As we move forward, there will be stumbles. Probably some faceplants. As I get some emotional distance from the crash, it’ll be easier to find the humor in everything. Thank you for coming along for the ride.