All in all, my life is good.  I have beautiful children, a stable job, interests and hobbies galore, enough money to provide for my family … there is no objective reason why I should sit in the bottom of the shower and cry, but I do.

Change sucks and despite months and months of trying to process the suckage, I’m just starting to get some insight into why I hurt.  Yes, after the separation I am redefining everything about myself, who I am if I’m not a wife, what my family looks like now with these changes .. but the one that REALLY hurts is my future.

I’ve started to notice how very often I picture my future.  High School and College graduations, grand babies, inevitable illnesses of old age, Christmases and Thanksgivings, rainy Sunday mornings with coffee … you name it, these pictures flit through my mind off and on virtually every day, sometimes many times in a day.

Now, every single one of them hurts, because he’s there in them.  In every picture he’s at my side, truly as foundational to the picture of my future as I was.  Since he left, every picture of my future is shit, so there are little stabs of pain all the time, death by 1000 cuts.  My mind wants to correct the picture, to remove him from them … but I also hope that he will still be there, maybe not at my side, but at the side of one of our children, peeping from the back as he laughs with a wedding guest, or proudly holding flowers out to a happy graduate.

It’s this process of reworking that hurts so much, and I also think where bitterness and anger and hatred can fester.  I could go at these pictures with my mental lighter and melt his face from each, leaving a charred wreck – or I could absorb the sad and let my future rework itself organically as time goes on.

I hope I am a person who can embrace his having a new place in those pictures or accept his absence from them with grace and respect … so it goes.