Day: September 28, 2015

Posted in Blogging, daughters, divorce, forgiveness, mistakes, sons, values, Writing

You can’t hide

Posted on by Dede

Alternative-mask

     You can’t hide. I thought you could. I spent 30 years thinking I was doing a good job of hiding my unhappiness. Tonight at dinner I found out no one was fooled. My daughter told me she knew that I had been unhappy for years. She shared memories of finding me crying and lying on the floor. She has memories of me telling her it was selfish to want breakfast in bed on her birthday. She says she knew I was hurting. She just didn’t know why and as a kid, you aren’t there to save your mom. I know we all remember different things and I know she has some good memories. But I also don’t doubt her unhappy memories because she was right, I was extremely unhappy.

     It made me really sad. I had to fight to hold the tears back. Crying in the middle of the cafe would not be a good idea. She grew frustrated with me because I had asked her to be honest and when she was, I got upset. I wasn’t upset with her honesty. I was upset with myself. I had spent all of those years working and putting so much energy into hiding my unhappiness when I should have spent all of that energy on getting out of my marriage and making a life for my girls and me separate from my their dad.

    She pointed out, rightfully so, that many, many times I was superficial. I valued all the wrong things. I had let my husband’s values supersede my own values. How had that happened? In my effort to keep him happy, I abandoned what I knew to be true. And in doing so, I hurt my daughters. I only hope they can forgive me.

   We all know that you do the best you can as a parent and some of us are lucky enough to make smaller mistakes than others. My daughters are wonderful people and I am so proud of them. They have their values in the right place. They remind me to love myself and that they love me. Learning tonight I wasted all those years trying to hide behind a mask has taught me just to be myself. Happy or sad, don’t hide it. Just be happy with who you are.

Posted in choices, Dreaming, Experience, Faith, friends, God, help, Moving, New life, questions

How do you know?

Posted on by Dede

fork-in-the-road

   For all of you bloggers and readers out there, how did you know you were living where you belonged? If your place of residence was not your choice but the choice of your partner or company, how did you go about making it feel like home? If made the choice to move, how did you decide where to go? I moved quite a few times between the ages of 9 and 14 every time my father received a business promotion. As a child, of course you don’t have a choice, you go where ever your parents take you. Then I married and moved again to my ex-husband’s home state followed by a move to Texas when he was hired at AA. I lived in the Dallas area for 30 years and recently relocated to Austin.

   I feel unsettled. I never chose Texas as a home but as long as I was married, it’s where I belonged. Now that I am divorced, I have a choice where to live. I moved to Austin to be closer to a daughter, but she and her husband have their own lives. And I don’t anticipate that they will permanently reside in Temple, TX which means in less than four years, there is a good chance they will be relocating. So where do I go? How do I decide? My finances are limited so an apartment on 5th Avenue in NYC is not an option nor is an oceanfront property in Seattle.

  So I am asking you to send me either places to consider or questions I should ask myself before I move. In my life I have lived where it get extremely hot and extremely cold, so any type of weather is fine. I just can’t go somewhere that has mostly cloudy as the general forecast. I have some time to decide and plan, so let me hear from you.