2019 A Review

I was expecting something different from today.
The cottage is now mine. The solicitors have sent my soon to be ex husband his requested monies and so there was just the simple job of sorting a few minor joint bills out and that, more or less, would be that!!!!
All neatly in time for New Years !!!
Yeah right
Things never quite go as planned..do they?
It's like being on an unknown rollercoaster
That's a theme from 2019
Rollercoasters and serendipity.
More about serendipity later.

I started 2019 at my very lowest ebb
I've never been so unhappy and out of control in my life
I had just returned to work in a miserable nursing home ( such a comedown for my self image) I had to borrow Jason's car to get by and I lost William, my old dog with the very gentlest of souls.
My life was uncertain with the cottage eventually having being put up for sale

Single in my late fifties.
And Jointly responsible, I guess,  for a failed marriage which had come out of the blue.
I was in a sorry state to be sure

Then serendipity started to place her fickle hand on things
Over weeks and months and purely by chance I started to sing in a choir that fed my soul with light,  I bought my own car with the help of a gay friendly bank clerk divorcee and I grew restless with the mundane work of a badly run nursing home and found a job advert for a nursing position at the hospice unexpectedly one night.

I got that job in the most fiercely fought and needed job interview of my career.
And by getting that job, I was steered onto a course of obtaining my own mortgage. A course which has never run smoothly or easily, but one which finally ended just a few days ago when £300 took my husband's name from off of the land registry records.

I lost my dear old George in the summer and made new friends here and abroad and felt supported by old ones as my family watched quietly in the sidelines as they have always done ...And eventually I lived more interesting days that were not always filled with tearful self reflection and overwhelming grief .

I made mistakes ( oh why did I put myself through going to my father in law's funeral?) but I also
learned from a friend's experience of divorce that you just need to accept when someone has fallen
out of love with you.
It just happens...
And I get that fact..I really do
But I also get that the most important thing about divorce is not that you want one
It's about how you go around getting one.
It's all in the doing.
No lies, no half truths no unkindnesses I've seen a quite a few
and Hopefully no in laws that drop you like a cheap whore once sides have been taken
I will never forgive those callous moments of pain.

And I should know what was done and when for in the words of Jim Steinman at the beginning of his Classic Love and Death and the American Guitar was belted out...
" I remember Everything, I remember Everything it only happened yesterday" 
Divorce and a good memory
Are very bad bedfellows.
Believe me, indeed they are....I know

And so on this New Years Eve the whole sorry mess of my divorce is almost over.
Not quite, but almost over and
I've finally realised that I have survived it.
I have my family, my new friends and my old ones
I have my blog readers and my new wonderful colleagues
I have my dogs and a golden eyed cat called Albert
And I have my cottage
In that tiny corner of a village I call home.

And, like a feather in a cap, I can honestly now say that  I have my sense of humour which has slowly returned to me , like lazy swallows do in early summer long after you think that you will never see them again

Onwards......onwards............onwards