notes on recovering yourself after a bad relationship
If you’re a single mother because you were in a bad relationship, there’s a good chance your baggage has a tendency not to just open up at inopportune times, but to actually explode all over the place in an extravagant display of dirty laundry. I don’t know that I’ve ever written about this, but towards the end of my marriage, I was prescribed no fewer than four different anti-depressants to manage what the doc diagnosed provisionally as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
You know. What our soldiers over there are coming down with in droves.
The doc was amazed at my ability to withstand all I had gone through, the conditions under which I was living, emotionally, and had every confidence that I would recover… it was a wake-up call to reevaluate what I was enduring, and why, and at what cost. Enduring a marriage with a man whose values and priorities were so fundamentally different from my own was killing me and destroying our son.
So, if you are trying to recover from a bad relationship, take heart. It’s possible. I know several women whose stories are worse than mine, who deal daily with the phantoms of their past while forging a bright, new path to their future. The one issue that seems to trigger us all is, of course, anger. When someone I know, trust, and love expresses a normal level of anger about an event over which they have no control–traffic, delays, letdowns–it triggers in me an instant need to panic, cry, scream, run, escape, hide, vomit. I don’t know that I’ll ever be entirely free of that gut reaction, but the great news is this: I know why it happens, and I no longer let it rule me. I can stay calm in the face of anything, because I have learned it the hard way. I still fall apart inside, but I know it’s simply a gut reaction to past trauma.
It’s harder to deal with anger from people I know and love when it’s directed at me, for some stupid thing I did or did not do, something I said or did not say, but I’m dealing with that, too, and folks are patient with me once I explain what I’m going through. They usually give me that extra time I need to get myself together and shake off the ghosts. Let me tell you a secret, single mothers… it’s easier to survive the occasional slip up/failure than it is to walk on eggshells all the time, striving for a level of utterly pristine perfection that no man can humanly maintain.
Be human, single mothers. Be safe and sane. Be loved and love. Mess up, make up, and breathe.
Tags: abuse, antidepressants, divorce, single-mother, solomother
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