When my first wife decided to return to England with our children many things in my life changed. Looking back I'd have to say that it wasn't all bad news, if you've ever lived with somebody who's having a hard time and totally miserable then you'll also know that it's not fun for any of the people in that relationship.
For some reason I'd been "gifted" with the ability to make things worse no matter what I did to try and do to get our 28 year relationship back to the good times. Unknown to me my instincts in the area of female physiology didn't even trouble the score keeper and I probably scored about the same as my final French exam of 0.5 out of 100, I was a complete beginner and my first mistake was probably trying to help my dear sweet wife.
Looking back I remember the exact moment I began to understand that the problem with my marriage couldn't be solved by my limited abilities, the family was on a vacation in Aruba. This was well before the tragedy of Natalee Ann Holloway meeting the currently incarcerated monster called Joran van der Sloot but it was another typical windy day.
I was in the pool with our two girls while my wife was drinking a beautiful blue $1,292,000.99 cocktail from the Hyatt hotel swim up bar. Suddenly my eldest daughter asked me why her mom was crying, at first I thought it was because she'd seen the updated status of our hotel account but when I asked the mother of my exceptional children what was wrong she replied that she was in paradise and was totally miserable.
In my wife's defense, back then we had absolutely no idea that Aruba was perhaps the worst Caribbean island we could visit and she had no idea that there's many other places in the world that would rank higher than the perpetually windy island of Aruba!
When my wife eventually deduced that I was the cause of her misery and that she wanted a divorce I was almost relieved. I'm not saying that I popped corks of champagne magnums from the basement but eventually I began to understand that I'd been given a gift and that was a chance to restart most of my life.
One of my first decisions was that I wasn't going to clean or press shirts in my lifetime. Looking back now that decision seems so ridiculous and yet I continue to strive to maintain this goal. Since the first day I was alone I retained a cleaner that would take care of the house once every 14 days, while this is quite expensive and extravagant I've never had one moment of regret about paying for help with this task.
In reality I was only using the kitchen, the family room, the bedroom and master bath but even then by the end of the 13th day the house needed attention. It was a revaluation to me that if I left a room neat and tidy it would be perfectly tidy when I returned, years of following my children s tornado like effect on a room had led me to believe that every room had to be reset on the hour, every hour.
I'm a natural slob and in my youth would let things pile up until it became a major chore to get thing back in order, in my new persona I became a dedicated follower of tidying any mess I made immediately principle and this discipline made my life so much easier and even more importantly guilt free.
Fortunately my wife did leave behind an ironing board and an electric steam iron but I started taking my shirts to the local dry cleaners and this worked out very well. If I was going on a trip I'd tick the folded box and then I'd be able to pack the shirts in my case with ease. Any Nazi SS interrogation specialist could also get me to confess that I sometimes left home with dirty shirts and had them cleaned at great expense by the hotel laundry service on the company dime.
My parents flew over to help me "adjust" to my new single lifestyle and thanks to my mother I learned the skills of using my washing machine and the dryer for laundry other than shirts. I was shocked to discover that dryer had a lint filter that needed attention before every use. When I managed to extract the filter for the first time it was like someone had stuffed a duvet in the slot but the good news was that a drying cycle went from 3 hours to 30 minutes!
About 3 months into my new single life I realized that my remaining years on earth were not necessarily going to be better or worse, just different. I'd been enjoying a long circular discussion with my wife, I'd just banned my eldest daughter from driving due to her bad behavior and my youngest daughter wanted to go to the mall even though we'd just been there in the morning. Then I woke up, it was a dream, some might say that it was a nightmare but after I was fully conscious I understood that I'd been given a gift, for the first time in my adult life I had my own money and could follow my own dreams.
Of course I missed my two girls but not the feeling of responsibility for my soon to be ex-wife's misery. It was like a huge weight had been removed from my shoulders.
That's my reality,
Jobsonian
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