As most of you know, our family has had quite a bit of drama through the years, most of it health-related. Now we are going through something else, and it's time for me to share it here.
After 16 years of marriage, Matt and I have decided to separate. Next week, I will be moving into a rental house exactly two blocks south from where we live, and the kids will go back and forth between the houses week by week.
This news will come as quite a shock to many of you, I know, but rest assured it was not made lightly. It was also, ultimately, made mutually. Both Matt and I agree that this is the best way forward for our family.
The reasons are, of course, intensely personal and complicated, and even I (with my normal lack of boundaries) don't feel the need to go into them here. I will, however, repeat here a version of what we said to the kids:
"I know you probably think that when you grow up and become an adult, you're done growing up, but that's not true. Most people keep on 'growing up' their whole lives, and that means you keep changing. Sometimes people who choose to be married at one point in their lives change so much, and in different ways, that after a lot of years they realize that they don't really 'match' as married people any more. I know it probably seemed like your dad and I were very 'together,' but we had stopped feeling like we were 'together' in the way married people should be. We care for each other very much and want each other to be happy, and we've decided that it will be the best thing for everybody in our family, ultimately, if we were friends instead of married people."
I want to assure everybody that while this separation is sad and difficult and painful for all of us, we are all handling it as well as anyone can expect to. Matt and I are actually very 'together' in this: we talk all the time, have had hours and hours of conversations about how we got to this place and where we go from here. We are getting along very well, for the most part: Matt is actually helping me get my new house ready; he bought me dining chairs at a garage sale. For those who are wondering, we are basically thinking only one year ahead (the terms of my lease), but we are assuming that this year of separation will be transitional to divorce rather than to reconcilation.
Matt came up with an analogy for our situation...a neurosurgical analogy, surprise, surprise. Dr. Curry always called surgery a "controlled injury." Performing neurosurgery requires doing great harm; it requires deliberately causing damage and pain to the patient, but it is done under controlled circumstances and with as much as care as possible, in the hopes that the patient will be healthier (and happier) than without surgery. Because it does involve danger and the outcome can never be predicted with certainty, however, it should only be done when the outcome of NOT doing surgery is almost certainly worse than the pain and damage done by the surgery. Separating now, in this way, is our surgery.
So that's it. We would like to say that we are doing OK with this, and that we hope that our friends and family will be OK with it as well. While it is a difficult and painful and sad thing, it is not the worst thing that can happen. It is far from the worst.
P.S. Ian wants everyone to know that he got a phone for his birthday. And that he is doing OK.
P.P.S. Paul seems OK, too. He has been mainly concerned about where the furniture (read: TV, and the couch on which to sit while watching TV) will go in the other house.
