Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. We are coming to the end of the year. It’s the end of a decade. If you are as old as me, you might remember twenty years ago when many thought that the world would end at the turn of the millennium. We partied like it was 1999, and then we had to get up the next morning and carry on. Actually, I was sitting home alone watching the ball drop on TV. About 30 seconds later, my future 2nd ex husband came running in asking if he made it. Nope. Thus my millennium started with a “men will disappoint you theme.” But the world didn’t end. The computers didn’t even crash.
Ten years later, at the end of 2009, I was doing great. I had lost 135 lbs, I was running 3 or 4 times a week. I had a great job, great kids, great friends. I had been a single mother for a long time, and I had lots of great support from my family, but I was starting to think about dating again. I was going back to school, so I was juggling a lot, and I was rocking it. I had my own home, multiple cars, and my kids were happy and healthy. I had a good therapist helping me with the not-so-good stuff. I had come a long way in those ten years.
Then I met someone and did something I never thought I would do again. I got remarried. I thought we were good for each other, and in some ways, at some times, we were. One downside was that I gained back 90 lbs of the weight I had lost. Then I lost 100 lbs again. I learned a lot about myself through that process. Another downside was that some people are determined to be miserable. I won’t speculate about what causes someone to behave that way. I won’t give advice about how to avoid this situation or chastise myself for not getting out sooner. I believe everything, good and bad, happens for a reason and eventually leads me to higher good. Will I understand what this is leading me to by the end of the next decade? I have to be okay with the chance that I might never understand.
Each of my first two marriages gave me a beautiful baby. I have always seen how even the most terrible things that happened with X1 were required to put me in the right place to encounter X2 and that all of these things had to happen for me to have the two squids that I have. Therefore, I couldn’t change anything in my past without risking changing everything, and I would never risk that. Now I’m at the end of a 3rd marriage, and I did not have a kid with X3. Why shouldn’t I regret this one?
I don’t know what the next branch of my journey looks like, but I know it starts here, and I know this is exactly where I am supposed to be. I can already identify some valuable lessons I have learned in the past decade.
- Having a support system is critical
- I deserve happiness and good things and to be surrounded by good people
- I have to practice self love and self care first
- My primary Love Language is Acts of Service, I can practice this on myself
- No man will ever spoil me like dad did, but I can spoil myself
- Happiness and Love are choices that we make every single day
- When people show you who they really are – believe them
- The world is always ending, and it is also always beginning
- Nothing gold can stay, but we can stay gold
So here we are, at the end of another year, another decade, another relationship, another spin of the wheel. Is this the end of the world? Or is it once upon a time? The short answer is: YES.
If you are asking yourself how the world will finally and truly end, let me suggest that someone might just throw a black hole at our planet. I just read the third book in The Children of the Dead Earth series. Scifi book club liked this series so much that we read one book each year for three years. I really enjoy these books. I enjoy that they don’t take themselves too seriously and that they reference pop culture stuff that no one this far in the future is going to remember. I like the police procedural style that I would probably not read if it wasn’t hidden in science fiction. This is yet another of those trilogies that ends by trying to turn into something more, but I read it with the mindset that it would be the end, so I felt a sense of closure, even if the author has other intentions. Someone at book club said, “but it didn’t end!” and I found myself saying, “Oh, but didn’t it?” For me it did, and it didn’t. And I have peace with that.
