Tag Archives: moving forward in divorce

The Power of Words

Photo by picjumbo.com from Pexels

I have loved books and reading since that first Janet and John book in Primary 1.  When I was a child, my mum joked I had square eyes because my nose was always buried in a story. (Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five was my favourite!)   Until a few years ago, I always had several books on the go; one by my bed, one in the bathroom, one in the kitchen and one in my bag.

And then my husband left me and I could no longer concentrate on the printed page.  I tried to, but would find myself reading the same paragraph over and over again, the words refusing to connect with my brain, so I walked away from one of the passions of my life.

Until the last couple of years. Continue reading

How’s it going?

This Saturday, April 25th, 2020, it will be exactly 5 years since that horrendous Saturday morning, April 25th 2015, when my husband came downstairs as I was making his breakfast and announced our marriage was over.

Five years.

Five years.

I thought I was over it.

And then, this weekend something happened which brought me (temporarily) back to my knees.

I had hoped a good night’s sleep would help me put things in perspective, but it didn’t.  So when I got up this morning, I wrote about it in my Morning Pages, hoping that would exorcise it…  but all I did was stain the pages with tears. Continue reading

Choose your words carefully.

I’ve been thinking a lot about subtext recently –  when someone says something that doesn’t match up to what they actually think or mean – and it got me thinking about some of the things people said to me in the days, weeks, months, even years, after my husband left me.

“You’re better off without him.”

“Think of it as being released.”

“He was a weight around your neck.”

“I never trusted him.”

“The first time my husband cheated on me would be his last time.”

“You should have walked out years ago.”

I know what my friends and family were trying to do.  They were trying to comfort me.  Support me.  Help me.  Love me.  I know they were, but sometimes those words of ‘support’ cut me to the core.

Because if you really look at those phrases, and how they can be interpreted by someone who is in emotional pain, it’s not hard to read the subtext behind them.  Continue reading