The past has a funny way of sneaking up on you…

Less than a week before my 10 year anniversary with Steve, I received a really odd email from a friend from long ago. She was asking me if it would be okay for my ex husband to contact me. This really threw me for a loop. I hadn’t really thought about that part of my life in a long long time. I told her that I was okay with the contact and heard from him shortly there after. It was a surreal series of emails that followed. He was contacting me to see if I would be agreeable to getting an annulment from our marriage which had ended over 10 years ago. He is not Catholic, but his wife of 4 years is. He loves her so much that he wanted to do this for her. Takes a amazing amount of love to open up old wounds in order to get something that really means a lot. At the time of the initial contact, she didn’t even know he was doing this. Wow… just wow.

Have you ever lived through something and then walked away and just shut the door behind you? That is what I did with that relationship. I left a pretty bad situation where we were both incredibly unhappy with our lives and basically jumped into another relationship. I didn’t ask for the divorce because of Steve or anyone else for that matter. I had come to the conclusion that there should be MUCH more to life than the misery we both were living at the time. I decided in a singular moment to release my need for control over my life and told the powers to be to lead me to where I needed to be in order to be happy. I can remember that moment as if it were yesterday. My life took some major twists and turns after that point but it *is* good and has lead me in the direction of incredible happiness. I am truly blessed with my family and my life.

Joel’s contacting me was like opening a pandora’s box of feelings I had long buried and left for dead. Unfortunately, they rose up, like zombies, and chased me around for a bit before I came to terms with it all. Who am I kidding, I am still coming to terms with it all. In my attempt to move on with my life, I totally disregarded his. I was in a place emotionally where I was incredibly ready for making ME happy and didn’t even consider him. I didn’t hate him. I did care about him but I couldn’t continue living the life we were. He was very much a “life sucks and it’s my lot in life to just accept that” person at the time. I KNEW there was so much more to life than that. I couldn’t make a difference in his life, but I could in mine… just not together.

Steve kept all the emails we sent back and forth while he was in England and I was still in the States before I moved to England to be with him. After Joel’s contact, I NEEDED to go back and re read the emails to make sure that how I was remembering things was how they were. I know that what I did was right. The way I did things at the time just isn’t settling well with me. I hurt him a lot… A LOT. Reading though the emails made me see that I made Joel invisible after I finally moved out. Today I came across an email where I was talking about the final court date for the divorce to be finalized. I didn’t go and I didn’t even call Joel to make sure everything worked out okay from the looks of it. I cringe to think about how that made him feel. I am such a different person now than I was then. I just have a very difficult time coming to terms that I would treat another person the way I did him. I wouldn’t change my life at all. I am happy, just as I believed I could be, actually much more than I ever imagined. Sigh… time will deal with the feelings that have come up. Hopefully I will be able to put them to bed nicely this time instead of burying them like I did the last time.