An hour or two at the SSA

It was a good time to people watch ... nothing else really to do ... it's interesting because people go there for beginning of life, end of life, marriage, divorce and to get their benefits whether it's disability, death or retirement.

However, it was interesting to be sitting there ... divorce decree in hand ... ready to change my name in all legal capacities back to my maiden name ... to watch all these young, terribly in love couples come in ... some of them with obviously sun-kissed skin that I can only imagine came from a honeymoon in some amazingly romantic and tropical place ... I thought back to the last time I sat in an SSA office ... I was one of them ... although he didn't come with me, I was there alone, but I was terribly in love, fresh from my honeymoon, anxious to take on his name and start our new life together ...

Ironic ...


Now I'm sitting there anxious to get my old name back, to take back that piece of me ... and don't get me wrong, my ex is not an asshole, we have an amicable relationship, I've met his girlfriend ... we talk in a friendly manner about the kids ... we filed as co-petitioners for our divorce and didn't fight over anything ... but still .. I was anxious to get this piece of myself back ... to leave that piece of him behind ... and as I'm looking at all these couples .. I'm wondering how many of them in several years will be sitting back in that office ... divorce decree in hand ... feeling the way I do now ...


I've said it before in blogs, I'll say it again ... nobody gets married expecting to get divorced ... nobody wants that .. in fact my ex and I swore we wouldn't do that to ourselves or our children ... but the bad things, in both of us, got the best of us. We got married young, and had you told me back then we were too young to know, that we weren't through figuring out who we were as individuals, I would have told you that you didn't know what you were talking about .. that we were at an advantage because we would learn who we were together .. that we would change and grown together that being young would make us stronger ... although I don't think that argument is completely without merit ... it was not the reality we faced in the end ...


I don't have a horror story to tell you .. there were fights that definitely went to far, but even though things were thrown and walls were punched nobody was ever hurt .. he didn't go off and have elicit affairs .. he didn't have unhealthy addictions .. sometimes he spent way too much time away from home .. I guess for me looking back there was something manic in the way I felt; I either felt neglected or smothered ... but after the first couple years I never felt like we just existed together ... he was either completely gone and unavailable or he was completely there and all over me (in both the emotional and physical meaning) ... I never felt unloved or unwanted ... even when I felt neglected ... he always told me that he thought I was pretty/beautiful/gorgeous/sexy/hot .. whatever word he felt like using at the time .. and he always kissed me goodnight and good morning ... I always knew that he loved me ... but he was possessive, not in a psycho movie kind of way, but my mom would call and I would talk to her, he'd get mad, my best friend called to tell me she was pregnant and he was pissed off because it was during the Broncos game and I was supposed to be giving my undivided attention to him and the game, even though his attention was clearly just on the game; I even left the room to have the conversation. The possessiveness was bad, but not what went wrong in the end ... in the end ... we could not stop fighting ... we fought over everything ... weeds in the lawn, dirty dishes, dirty clothes, his hobbies, my friend, his friends, my family, his family, how we would handle our children, what to have for dinner, money, jobs ... we fought over everything .. he would walk in the door from work and immediately have a complaint ... I would walk in the door from working myself ... he would immediately have a complaint ... I started dreading going home ... I started dreading him coming home ... because I knew the second we were in the same room together the fighting would start. I would drive around for hours sometimes after work listening to music, talking to my friends on my cell phone .. not wanting to go home. I tried to walk away from the fights, when I did that he would get downright mean ... but I admit that if I wasn't done making my point and he tried to walk away I would do the same ... the day I knew it was probably over was the day my 2 year-old son came and covered both our mouths and told us to stop. My daughters had come upstairs from their downstairs bedroom on occasion in the middle of the night to tell us that we had woken them up, but for some reason those little tiny hands covering our mouths was one of the biggest eye-openers in my life. He went to counseling for anger management ... he used what he learned there to turn around and attack me ... to tell me how I was the reason he was angry ... then we went to counseling together .. he would take over the sessions, rarely even letting the counselor talk, nonetheless me ...

So, a few months after my son so brilliantly opened my eyes ... and after talking and trying ... and going to friends for their counsel ... we went to my middle child's pre-school graduation ... we came home .. we laid in bed next to each other and decided we were done ... that we couldn't do this anymore that regardless of how stupid it sounded to us years ago, and how we knew people would perceive us .. that we had to get divorced, for the sake of our children ...trying to force something that wasn't going to work, that was clearly something we couldn't do in a mature and civil manner, in order to keep a family together ...was in the end going to do more damage than cutting our losses, doing it as amicably and civilly as possible and just moving on ...

Some drama ensued for a few months after ... he called many of my family and friends and told them that it wasn't a mutual decision and told them everything from I was going to try to get full custody of the kids and take them away from him to I cheated on him to I was an alcoholic and neglected my children ... he in all honesty, kind of went crazy for a few months ... in his defense; I was really his first girlfriend ... he had never really even dealt with a breakup before, nonetheless a divorce ... after spending 10+ years with someone and 8+ years of marriage ... when things calmed down is when a new woman entered his life ... he became civil again, we were able to discuss, negotiate ... etc., ....

So, again, here I sat in the SSA office ... "decree of dissolution of marriage" in hand ... ready to take back my maiden name ... and I wonder how many of those happy young girls sitting there anxious to take on their new husband's names ... will have a similar story to tell ... sometime down the road ...