Suddenly Single

The birds are singing. The azaleas are blooming. The sun is shining and your skin tingles when you step outside. You dust your flip-flops off and head for the beach. It's time to spring clean your mind, stop harping on the past, wasting your time and feeling sorry for yourself.

Stop "what if-ing" and "if only-ing". Let it go. Forget talking about "when I was married we." This is the new theme for our little Wednesday "therapy" club. Cee, Emm and I have decided to spring clean our minds, and we are helping each other stay in check. Sometimes it is not easy. We get ourselves in a rut and go round and round re-hashing the not so pretty past.

I have been there! I have googled my ex-hubby, if only to see what I am NOT missing. I have classmate.com-ed old boyfriends. And obviously, I am not alone given the popularity of the sites that re-unite people.
This is how our Spring Cleaning started. One afternoon during our regular "therapy" session I made a rule. It stemmed out of exhaustion with myself. I had nothing left in my brain, talking non-stop, bending every ear I could about how my life had changed with the arrival of Nana living with me. If some one would ask me how I was, I would tell them the whole unabridged edition of what was going on in my life, not getting the hint that when the poor good Samaritan started heading for the door it was a signal for me to shut-up. So the rule was there were certain things/people we would not mention. It had been a tough few months for our little Salon group. Life altering situations happened to each of us - two divorces, a relocation, and well, me feeling old, tired, sad, sorry for myself, selfish, and can't forget guilty. The three of us were in different places than we were nine months ago.

Now if you drove down the divorce highway the sign probably read, "When I was married we really didn't get along." Sure that is a simplified way to put it, but most situations come down to that. Again, you have to get honest and spring clean your mind. Get over the " I just can't believe he left." He did. "We never really fought, I thought everything was fine." Well, it wasn't. Get honest with yourself, men too; spring-cleaning is not just reserved for the Pink set.

I am a believer that if a marriage or relationship breaks up and you take a look back, you can see the writing on the wall. I don't think relationships just break up; they break down. And the sooner you are honest with yourself about what happened, the quicker you will get that spring back in your step. I am simply speaking from my experience. I am guilty of being a huge dweller in the past for far too long. Sometimes waking in the middle of the night in bed thinking about "if only, what if." I have done it so much that I bored myself just droning on in my head and to others. I just didn't realize how much I did it until I saw others around me in the same sad spot I had once been. I had not realized how much my life was engulfed with me feeling sorry for myself, rather than accepting the situation and doing everything I could to make it better for all involved and move on. I needed to spring clean my attitude and brain. They were covered in pining pollen just like everything else around here this time of year.
So Wednesday rolls around, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the Sonoma is suitably chilled, spring-cleaning is under way and for the first ten minutes we just sat there and stared at each other. We were afraid to open our mouths for fear of a tiresome complaint tumbling out and onto the already crowded table. I started getting nervous. Had our lives come to the sad fact that unless we were complaining we had nothing to say to each other?

Then we just looked at each other and started laughing. How pathetic were we? So what if we had a few hiccups, that's life. So what if the worlds we knew were turned upside down, now it is a new world and if we harp on the past, wish and long for things that are no longer there, well THAT would be the pathetic thing. We are all damn lucky to be here and to have each other. The past few months, we have helped each other get through difficult times. We have grown closer and wiser and braver.

When I told Mr. Crown and Ginger I was writing about - and doing - some spring cleaning this month; he winced a bit and gingerly asked, "Should I be worried?"

"As long as you are not covered in pine pollen, you should be fine."
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