the dates of your life...

I'll confess, sometimes I use my phone calculator for basic math tables. My father would be terribly ashamed, considering the hours he invested with me as a youth to get me to learn said tables...

...some of them just never really stuck...sorry dad...

on the flip side, if a date somehow becomes engrained in my memory, it's there...locked in and stuck...for there rest of my life. 

Today is one of those dates that sticks...for about a decade now. 

10 years ago today, right around this time of day, I came home from work, the door was slightly ajar and upon walking in my husband commanded me to sit down. 

Today, 10 years ago, I was surprised with divorce papers. 

Why won't my mind let me forget this day? Why does my memory store every moment of that night, from what I was wearing, to how the street felt on my hands as I crumbled in the middle?

If it can let go of the memory of the answer to 9x6, why on earth does my mind insist on retaining the memory of such moments?

I tore up the papers, convinced that if I tore them up, they wouldn't exist. "We're Catholic and have been married for 8 months and 5 days...we aren't getting divorced"...I remember thinking, I remember pleading. 

The next few hours I can remember almost every detail of. My parents cars pulling up on the street in front of the house, the discovery of my ex-husband's (a "was-band" in terminology I recently learned) cousin with his head pushed in the back window; a "witness" I'd later learn. (But still to this day don't completely understand of what.) My mother's attempts to hold me at the front door of the house, while I was wildly flailing my arms and begging him not leave. Eric stating that he was going to call the cops and claim I was "holding him hostage" if I didn't let him leave. (In some ways, I would have liked to see him call the cops and wonder exactly what he would have said and what would have been the response from Indianapolis's finest) 

Once he passed by me, my mother let me go. I ran out to the street, begging him not to leave.
Pleading with him right upto the point where he drove away, leaving me a crumpled soul in the middle of a damp street, for my mother to pull back to the sidewalk.

I fought her embrace and grabbed my keys. The exact thought in my head was "I need to be anywhere but here." I pushed by my mother, ignoring her pleading requests that I not drive off in the state I was in...and made it to the car...throwing it in gear and tearing off, crushing through the gears of the standard transmission... The radio played, I turned it off. 

I had no idea where to go and no idea who to talk too. 

I had the foresight to call my boss and let him know I would not be at work the next day and I drove through the treelined streets making turns with for no reason.

Who should I reach out too? Who would be nonjudgmental and calm me down, to the extent that could happen. Who could I call that could place some sanity into an otherwise insane evening?

ASC was on her honeymoon, an injustice I'll never quite forgive Eric for.

My sister was in training for her first job, to bother her would compromise that...

I called SJ...who picked up in two rings. I blurted out that Eric had just served me with divorce papers and that I didn't know what to do. The poor girl was in the midst of a shift in her second job, as a server...but took time to tell me she loved me and we'd figure this out. 

When I realized where I was driving, it was to my Parish, where I had been married a mere 8 months earlier. I wound my car around back and found myself in the grotto.

Rocking back and forth...declining calls from my mother. I couldn't bare to answer them.

I stared at the statue. I asked it accusatory questions...shouted really...at the concrete and, on some level, expected answers.

I rubbed my face against the cold, wet grass, letting the rain shower over me, one million tiny pin pricks covering me...the smell of wet grass and rain in my nose. 

I cried with a primal urge I had never felt before. A sadness that was so profound, my mind had yet to define it, let alone process it. 

It was SJ who finally told my mother where I was. For some reason, it felt humiliating to tell her myself. I have no idea why.

As mothers are prone to do, mine showed up and showed out. Sitting with me in the cold wet grotto. Rocking me in her arms. It must have felt terrible. Knowing how much pain I was in and knowing there was nothing in the world she could do for me...Nothing but sit in the rain, on the wet rocks, listening to her oldest daughter alternate between wails and shrieks. My mother, who can find light in the darkest of nights, could not find light in this. My father's pain was so intense and his heart problems still in such transition, he was forced to go back to their house, to get medication. While I have never and will never forgive Eric for his lack of empathy regarding my father's heart problems (While requiring that we pay utmost attention to his own father's illness, which we did.) in certain small ways, I'm glad that there was only one parent in the grotto with me that night. There were plenty of other situations to come and I'm not certain that the sight of my crumpled body in the middle of the street or the sounds of my wails in the grotto would have ever left my father. 

I can remember the feel of the rocks and the softness of my head on my mom's shoulder while I heaved sobs that came from the pit of my soul. I remember my mother finally convincing me to come home, which was based around my initial desire for a shower. I can remember pulling back up in the driveway of what had, until a few hours earlier, been my marital home...I remember seeing the ripped shreds of paper my mother had pulled from the trashcan, the paperwork I had torn up. 

It's been a decade and I survived that night. Along with countless other nights that followed. But I remember that one in vivid technicolor detail, with each of my senses. 

And I think of that night, every year, on this day. I try as much as possible not to relive it. However, often that's not possible. Without trying, I relive that night, the sights, the sounds, the scents.

It lives within me, I've lived with it so long, it's part of the makeup of who I am.

And I won't give it back, even for instant recall of math facts. That night profoundly changed the course of my life, sending me off course from the safe harbor I was expecting to the rocky seas of uncertainty. The journey from that night to this one has not been an easy one. 

In the decade that has transpired since that night, I've had other nights that have rocked me to the core of my being. That have assaulted me with change. I've stumbled as much as I've flown, cried as much as I've laughed. I've learned that life is a collection of game changing nights.

I've evolved enough to realize that change is the process, not the product. 

I've also learned that ships were meant to sail in the ocean, no matter how many icebergs float alongside them. You'll hit any number of them, but there are always lifeboats on their way, no matter how high up you have to send the flairs. 

Life does only one thing: It goes on.