Happy Birthday, America!!
While I will celebrate our great country today, Independence Day has a new meaning for me this year.
As I sit here with my fur babies, watching the Austrian Grand Prix, I can't get that Martina McBride song out of my head. While my situation isn't the same as the story in the song, it is a song that sings true for me today.
"Let the weak be strong, let the right be wrong Roll the stone away, let the guilty pay It's Independence Day." - Martina McBride, Independence Day
Then there's Miss Independent by Kelly Clarkson (can we get some cheers for strong female voices!)...
"Miss guarded heart Miss play it smart..." - Kelly Clarkson, Miss Independent
Songs aside, this weekend has been an unplanned milestone, of sorts, one where I have definitely exercised my independence.
It was July 4th weekend, 2016 when I first realized there was a problem with our marriage. We had plans to visit my brother at his new home and at his new job as fire chief. The fire department was having an open house celebration and I wanted to be there to support my brother. There was a parade planned that weekend in which my brother would be driving the chief's official SUV, and fireworks over Lake Winnipesauke. It was supposed to be a fabulous weekend, but it ended up being tense.
The first issue was that our oldest son had to work until 3pm. If we waited, we'd miss the open house. But we didn't want our son to miss out on the whole weekend. Our options were to just let him stay home, to wait and miss the open house, to take separate cars and have my husband come later with our son, or to drive down as a family, and then my husband would drive back later to pick up our son.
As always, the decision was left to me and I struggled with it for quite some time until I finally bit the bullet and decided we would drive down, and then my husband would drive back to get Jared. It's a 2-hour drive each way, so that was a lot of driving for him, but he agreed and so that was the plan.
That decision ended up setting the tone for the weekend, and not in a good way.
First, he didn't believe that the route I told him to take was the quickest route. I've been making this trip to Wolfeboro since I was a kid because we had a family cabin down there and spent countless weekends there my entire childhood. It was also where we honeymooned after our wedding.
He took the route, but when he was getting ready to leave to pick up our son, he asked my brother about other routes. Thank goodness my brother validated me by telling him that the route we'd taken was the quickest.
The ride down was terrible. He was grumpy, driving like a maniac, which was pretty typical for him anyway. To make it exceptionally tense, he was grumpy, all weekend, and at some point complained about all the driving and the decision I had made.
Well, a-hole, I gave you the opportunity to make the decision and you opted not to.
The reason this all came to light is because I went to my brother's this weekend. It was a quick trip, just down one night to see the fireworks and back the next day. (Fireworks were canceled because of rain and I ended up going to Connecticut to rescue my sister in law, so the weekend didn't go as planned, but it still triggered the memories.)
When my mom first invited me to go, I didn't think much of it. I was excited to get away for a night and see my brother and his wife.
Then I read my journal from five years ago, the one I started after I discovered him texting with a woman (turns out it was women - plural - but I didn't know that at the time), and I realized this was going to be one of those unplanned milestones that could pummel me emotionally.
In my journal, I wrote that even though the evidence showed his indiscretions (what a politically correct way of putting it) started July 16, I suspected things had started before July 4th. That's why he was so grumpy about everything...it interfered with his texting and porn trolling time, as well as his drinking time.
Looking back, his attitude had taken a dive around February. He was unhappy with his job, and he didn't find a healthy way to deal with that, so turned to drinking, video games, and porn, his typical go-to vices. And somehow, that all led to texting with women, and eventually having an affair.
Anyway, I had to mentally prepare myself for this trip to Wolfeboro. Things had changed since 2016...my brother lives in a different house, he has a different job, I was going with my mom and her friend, and it was just one night. By the time we hit the road, I was excited about the trip. None of the memories of our previous trips to Wolfeboro pummeled me.
This mental preparation has become a new tool in my arsenal and it is one that I will continue to use because it works.
If you're struggling with an emotional trauma that has triggers, I'll be sharing more details about how I use mental preparation to get me past the milestones and trigger in my book Thriving in the Aftermath (coming out in 2022 - I know, such a tease!!).
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