In two days I have to take a court ordered parenting class that will be the final step in my divorce.  All the papers are filed, and signed.  My understanding is that once the Judge sees that the class is complete she waves her magic wand, and *poof* my 17.75 year marriage to the man who I thought was my everything is dissolved.  

So.  Yeah.  

I’m in a pretty good place with this actually.  As good a place as anyone could be I think.  I’m downright happy with my life.  There’s a lot of beauty here, and in many ways I can tell that I am happier than I have been for a long time.  It’s really strange how those little realizations sneak up on you when you never thought of your marriage as an unhappy one.  Maybe I wasn’t unhappy, but I can see now against this new backdrop of happiness many times when I was lonely, or resentful, or just trying to hold things together when in hindsight they were very gradually falling apart.  

I can see that now.  It still takes my breath away though.  The way when it finally unravelled just how quickly my life as I knew it came apart.  I don’t want my ex-husband back.  I really don’t.  As painful as that admission sometimes is.  I don’t love him anymore.  

I don’t love him anymore. Wow. Don’t I? No, I don’t. I will always love who he was.  What we were.  Everything that we could have been.  But no, there is nothing like love between us anymore.  I’m working daily on showing mercy and kindness toward him, but even though we have been so intentional about remaining amicable for our kids, we’ve thrown too much salt on the ground for love to grow.  

Wow.  That’s sad.  I’m wrecking my makeup right now, and I know for certain that it’s not about him.  It’s that pesky mourning of the life we had planned.  The life I thought I was so carefully building for us and my children.  The part of this that I will never understand is how we walked away from that before we really even tried to salvage it.  It’s easy to say that maybe it was more important to me than it was to him, but I’m not sure that was true.  I just don’t get it, and I probably never will.  I guess part of my journey is to come to peace with that.  

Anyway...kind of melancholy.  But I suppose it would be strange if I wasn’t feeling that way.  

I'm overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude for having a life that once included a marriage so beautiful that it’s really hard to say goodbye to.   

Staying strong.

~Clover

I did this really crazy thing.  I put a hole in my face.  On purpose.  I think that this is my midlife crisis.  Maybe stranger, but definitely cheaper than a convertible,

I have wanted to pierce my nose since I was about 14 years old, but someone or some situation was always telling me no, it's not a good idea.

Nobody tells me that anymore.

It makes me feel kind of edgy and sexy.  And holyshit, if there is ANYTHING in this whole wide world that a newly divorced 42 year old woman needs to feel, it's edgy and sexy.

Flying my flag...
~Clover

Doing laundry sucks.  Not like root canal suckage, but the kind of never-ending, weekend-killing monotonous suckage that drains the soul right out of you.  So if you are a human who is old enough to cook up a box of mac and cheese or have your very own Instagram account, and you do NOT have to wash your own clothes, then you need to adopt an attitude of gratitude real quick.

Along with that, I need us to agree to the basic terms and conditions for “someone does my laundry for me” privileges, with the full understanding that non compliance will result in your personal launderer/laundress going on strike and giving zero you-know-what’s when you run out of clean underpants.  ZERO.

RULES TO LIVE BY IF YOU WANT ME TO WASH YOUR DIRTY, STINKY, SWEATY CLOTHES

1. I wash the things that are in the laundry basket.  Not in the laundry basket?  Not in the wash.
2. Check your pockets.  We all know I’m going to check your pockets too, that’s like OCD 101.  But if I find something I will know that you did not check your pockets, and you will be subject to the rant about how “one pen/lipstick/hershey’s bar/piece of gum can ruin an entire load of clothes, and you don’t have enough money to replace all this stuff.”
3. I do not stick my hand inside other people’s dirty socks in order to turn them right side out.  Inside-out socks can go into the wash, however, inside-out socks - especially the ones that are rolled into little sock doughnuts - don’t get clean.  Your input, your output.
4. When you get out of the shower, you are clean.  So there is no need for you to use a clean towel every day.  Also, I am not fooled by your complicated “body towel/hair towel” rotation system.  2 towels per week is plenty.  If you insist on using 14 towels a week, you will be washing loads of towels.  
5. LIkewise, you do not need to change your clothes 6 times per day.  But I’m willing to overlook that, if we can all agree that a shirt you wore for 5 minutes goes back into your closet, not into the laundry basket.
6. I wash the clothes, I dry the clothes, I fold and hang the clothes.  All I ask is that occasionally you help a little bit by putting the clothes away by the end of the day.  Failure to put your clean clothes away will result the rant about how “I wash the clothes, I dry the clothes, I fold and hang the clothes.  All I ask is that occasionally you help a little bit by putting the clothes away by the end of the day.”
7. DO NOT EVEN be so lazy as to take your clean clothes that have been neatly folded and placed on your bed, and put them back into the dirty clothes basket rather than put them away. Not only will laundry privileges be revoked, but this week’s dirty laundry will be piled on your bed in protest.  
8. This.  This is grounds for immediate revocation of laundry privileges.
   

   
9. If you are asked to help out by moving a load from the washer to the dryer, please do not act as though you have been asked to harvest your organs.  
10. A little “Thanks Mom” goes a long way.  

I just got back from a conference in Boston.  What an amazing city!  Boston you stole my heart.

This week was the first time in a really long time that I was relatively anonymous.  Other than my two coworkers who traveled with me, no one knew my story.  No one felt sorry for me.  It was pretty freeing.

I met this really cute guy there who flirted shamelessly with me.  I flirted back a little, because why not?  It was weird.  Really, REALLY weird.  But it was also good.  I think more than anything it was a reminder men are going to be interested in me, and one of these days I'm going to be interested right back. I really think I had convinced myself that I would never feel attractive or attracted again.  I was ready to order the Crazy Cat Lady starter pack.

(And now, because I'm still a good little Catholic School girl at heart I feel the need to make it very clear that nothing happened beyond flirting.  I'm not ready for more than that just yet.  But you know what, if I had wanted to make out under a full moon in Boston I totally could have.  So there.)

Anyway.  Thank you Boston.  I think you helped me find my mojo.

I’ve been blogging for a long time.  I started Clover ten years ago actually.  That was before blogs were cool, and also after they weren’t that cool anymore.  (I blame Facebook/Twitter and our inability to generate new ideas or read more than 140 characters without getting totally bored and overwhelmed.)

I haven’t been very prolific over the last few years - mommy blogging is definitely something that was easier to do before I went back to work full time.  I still love my little corner of the internet though. There has been a lot of life recorded at Clover, and that’s a good thing.  But my world has changed pretty dramatically over the last few months, and I needed a new space.  I’m not the same girl.  This isn’t the same life.  

I’m not going to write about what caused my separation and imminent divorce.  This project isn’t going to be about the past.  I realize that I can’t go back, so I really have no choice but to make this the best damn thing that ever happened to me.  The only way to do that is to live this dark chapter of my life with authenticity.  Easier said than done.

There’s no getting around it, my heart is broken.  Most of the time I feel like I am walking around with a hole right through me.  It is so broken that sometimes, if I am not careful, I start to believe some pretty ugly things.  I start to believe that I am not enough.  That I can never be enough.  And that I will be broken forever.  That’s the kind of crap that makes you want to start drinking vodka from a big gulp cup at 8AM, or tricks you into thinking that it’s no big deal to sit in the middle of your kitchen floor scarfing down an entire gallon of salted caramel ice cream.  

If you’ve done those kinds of things in an attempt to heal that hole right through your heart, I get it.  I really do.  I hope that if you find yourself doing those kinds of things regularly, that you will consider finding a therapist you love and trust.  (I LOVE my therapist.  LOVE HER.)  As tempting as vodka breakfast shakes sound on occasion, I am choosing to handle this heartbreak differently.  I hope, in a healthy way.  There are a ton of reasons for why I’m trying to walk through this with some grace.  The two most important are sleeping down the hall.  

So I’m going to be writing about grief, and how I’m dealing with mine.  I hope that writing about it helps me, and I think maybe it will help others too.  I know that there have been many times over the last year and a half when reading about other people’s journeys with grief have helped me get through some dark days.

That’s not all I’m going to write about.  Pretty much I’m going to write about whatever the hell I want.  But this is your heads up that it’s not always going to be funny stories about my kids, pictures of art we make, or Pinterest nails and fails.  Sometimes it’s going to be vulnerable, and sad.  I’m sure it will even be a little angry at times.  That’s life.  Real life.  And my real life is really messy right now.  

This is my comeback story.   I hope it's a good one.