Divorce and Adoption

Death Of My Marriage

/ Gardy Loo Pismire / 11 Comments

images-4

Yesterday was the day that we decided to meet for lunch to exchange lists regarding how we would like to divide our property, arrange child custody issues, and the like. We have decided to try to forego lawyers and see if we can work this out between the two of us.

We slept the night before holding hands and when we woke up B tells me, “Maybe we should go back to the belief that divorce is not an option,” so when we went to the restaurant for lunch I half expected that he might give me a piece of paper that said I DO NOT WANT A DIVORCE but he came fully prepared. I guess there is a little part of me that is still floating down DE-NILE. A part that does not want to enter the raging, swirling currents of divorce that could at any time capsize my raft and suck me under the torrents of tears that seem originate at the mouth of this river.

images-6

These days I find tears are always threatening to leak out of my eyes at the most inopportune times. Paul came downstairs and found streaks from tears that I quickly wiped off my face but he saw them and asked what was wrong. Thank goodness I am still wearing this arm sling because it hides a multitude of emotional sins that are bubbling at my surface surprising me as the burst forth when least expected.

“I’m okay, sweetie. My shoulder is I just hurting me right now,” has become a great response when my sad and raw sentiments threaten to take me down to places in which I do not want my children to see or dwell.

After Christmas we will detonate their world by blowing up all they believed to be right and true to smithereens. They will never be the same and I am afraid that my two sons with autism will regress/rage as a way to handle the major changes that their lives will undergo. Change is something that is very hard for people with autism to endure.

I also feel terribly guilty. As adoptees my children have already lost the first parents, their first country, their culture and their language. We were suppose to be their Forever Family and we have let them down. Paul’s therapist tells us his biggest fear is ending up alone with no family and I am sure it will set off feelings of abandonment for him. This is one of the things I am finding it difficult to find peace about and find the compassion to offer forgivness towards my husband destroying our lives together.

Last night B and I got into bed. We held hands all night and we both cried on and off. It was a night in which sleep eluded us but sorrow did not as it swept us up in its tight grip and kept any sweet dreams at bay.

Today is a new day…I think I will go back to sleep.

images-7

Thoughts on “Maybe” Divorce

/ Gardy Loo Pismire / Leave a comment

images-6

“As you become more attached to yourself you will become less attached to the outcome,” my therapist says with a smile.

Sometimes I wonder about this statement. Although it seems true enough as I continue this journey of the “maybe divorce” sometimes I wonder if this attaching to yourself, this honoring your self and your desires, really means at some point that you just dial back the caring…maybe you just begin to not care anymore because the fight for keeping your marriage has cost you too much personally. Your anxiety has increased to the point that everyday you wake up wondering “if this is the day.” And while once I believed that this thought might kill me, now, sometimes, I just wonder if it would be a relief for it is difficult to live with a man who no longer loves you the way he wants to and the sadness plays out like recessed shadows etched deep into his face.

I know when this began two years ago I felt like the world was coming to an end. It seemed as though my heart was being ripped out of my chest and I couldn’t sleep at night. After all this time my anxiety about divorce and what it would do to my children has decreased but is it because I am working really hard on integrating all aspects of myself and discovering more about who I am or is it because I am shutting down? Perhaps I see the train wreck in the distance, so I move away, because I don’t want to witness the carnage firsthand. I also don’t want to deal with the repercussions that it might have on two boys with autism and one with mental health issues much less the fact that four of my children are adopted and have already suffered so much loss in their young lives.

And so I continue to work on myself. To find corners of sunlight and to open the shutters wide to let the sunshine flood into my life. I work to make myself more aware of what I am doing and why I am reacting in the ways that I do. I am practicing ways of building up my resilience and incorporating peaceful ways of thinking as a habit that I can rely on to keep me centered. And I am trying to learn not to allow negative self-talk rule my head and my heart even though it still wants to.

images

So if this work, if all this trying to find better ways of attaching to myself, is going to make me wiser, happier and more peaceful; I am all for it. For I am becoming a better me and I am finally doing all of this psychological work for greater self understanding of what makes me tick.  And if the “maybe” divorce comes to pass I think I will be in a much better position to retain my own dignity and grace during the process. And for me, that is what is important.

So be it.

images-13

Past The Depths Of Hell

/ Gardy Loo Pismire / 3 Comments

images-1

I’ve been past the depths of hell

These last 18 months

Changing myself

And trying to make you happy

You have happily filleted my heart

Scraping out my innards

As you lifted my soul out of my middle-aged body

And held it up for the world to see

I’ve been past the depths of hell

Down further than one

Ought to go without proper diving gear

I’ve been awash on a sea of tears

That could have floated an ocean liner

Tears of sorrow, frustration, and anger

A body dragged across the sandy floor

Leaving raw, mangled meat

Hanging on the bone

The shark circling in for the kill

images-3

I’ve been past the depths of hell

Losing myself while trying to please you

Carrying your burdens first

While dragging mine behind

Sleepless nights

Etching my face with fine lines

I look like I’ve aged 18 years

Instead of 18 months

I’ve been past the depths of hell

I mourn what was

I mourn what is to come

I mourn for our innocent children

I mourn for our marriage

Which was only an illusion

Like you-illusionist

Like me-the mind reader

You settling for something

You knew you didn’t want

Along time ago

But didn’t have the guts to say what

You needed or wanted

Until the resentments rose up

And rolled the ship under

images-2

I’ve been past the depths of hell

And I’ve going down for another dive

But this time when I surface

I will be all alone

And divorce will bear my name

Holding onto my tattered mind

And a body that spent

Thirty years

Loving you

images-4

Think Of Them

/ Gardy Loo Pismire / Leave a comment

 

Sometimes I am just so disappointed in both B and myself on behalf of our children. Ideally, no child should be a child of divorce but our kids have even more compelling reasons than most not to have to their parents split up.

Our youngest three children are all adopted. Obviously adoption involves loss and children who have been adopted have already lost their first family. They already have certain holes in the hearts and as adoptive parents we do everything we can to try to patch them. But as hard as we try, for most adoptees, something is still missing. Some don’t examine these feelings or loss or abandonment until they are 20 30 or even 40 years old. Some, like my son Paul, live with this wound their entire lives. Always wondering who they are and who they come from. Always believing there was something “wrong” with them rather than something wrong with the situation they were born into. None of these kids deserve to have their family severed again. My heart aches for them should we divorce and the guilt is tremendous. I mean, we willingly and lovingly brought them into our “forever” family, as the adoption community refers to it. But we may not be forever to children who desperately need the stability of forever.

Both Andre and Paul have autism while Paul also has some mental health issues. In talking to their psychologist she says that divorce would devastate Paul and could take him to a place from which he cannot return. Who does that to a child? Who knowingly divorces knowing that this is a possibility? I don’t even know how to wrap my head around this and I don’t understand how B could either.

And Gracie is at the age where losing her family could impact her ability to sustain her own relationships. According to studies older children remain profoundly effected by vivid memories of suffering due to their parents divorce. They are concerned about the unreliability of relationships and fear of betrayal when they are older and divorce happens.

I know that there are good reasons for divorce and I know that not all kids suffer because of them. But I also know in a family like mine that divorce will be most likely be catastrophic because of the special issues that are involved. It seems so ridiculous and selfish to be talking divorce just because a marriage isn’t “perfect.” Nothing is perfect in this world and I hope our children don’t internalize it as this divorce is occurring because they are not perfect either. Although we would sit down with them and try to convey that it has nothing to do with them, I suspect that they will not buy into any easy platitudes.

So I sit here and hope with a heavy heart that things improve for us and for the sake of our children. For if we divorce they have the most to lose. They are the innocents.