Happy Antiversary

On this day, seventeen years ago, I married the wrong man.

It was a beautiful wedding, a dream come true.
My mother made my dress and my bridesmaids' dresses.
My best friend and my sister were gorgeous bridesmaids.
I felt beautiful.
It was all I'd ever wanted.
I was that little girl who had always dreamed of her wedding day.
I'd been planning it since I was about 10.
I was in such a hurry for it to happen, that at 24 my dream came true.
But I was impatient, I forgot to wait for Mr Right.

My first husband was good man, mostly.
He was good looking and popular.
He was athletic, a cyclist and loved to surf.
His mother was a Torres Strait Islander and his dad was English, so his family was a very interesting mix of cultures.
We travelled to Europe and met some of his relatives in England.
We laughed a lot.
He was fun and funny.
But I always felt he was waiting for me to turn into what he wanted.
He was constantly pushing me to lose weight, even though I was only 57kgs at my heaviest with him.
He tried to be my personal trainer, and didn't take no as no.  Which is OK if you're paying a personal trainer, but I didn't appreciate my husband pushing me to run up hills when I did not want to.

I always felt that one day he would probably leave me.

I never, ever expected that I would leave him.
Even though I would often read the accommodation section of the newspaper and dream of moving out into a place by myself and maybe even having a life with someone else.

But of course it was one of those things I was never going to do.
I was never going to be divorced.
Marriage was for life, I always believed that.
No one goes into a marriage thinking it will end one day.

It took meeting my real husband to give me the courage to do it. And when I met him, I walked out on my first marriage within two weeks.
I was that sure.

It was the best and worst time of my life.

I'd met my soulmate.
I finally felt true love.
The feeling that we were born for each other.
It all felt so right, like God and the angels had planned the whole thing and that we actually had no choice.   We were like magnets.
When we were together it felt like we were in a bubble.
In the same space and protected from everything.

A week after we met I remember my real husband saying we were both the type who don't leave, we would only ever leave someone for each other.  (He was engaged to someone else at the time.)

But the cold hard truth of it was, we were the home wreckers.  We left two people and two families with broken hearts.  We hurt a lot of people, lost friends and my mother was distraught over the whole situation for a very long time.

I did waver at one point.
I felt so much guilt and shame.
I would constantly cry and begged God to tell me what to do.
Stay with my husband or start a whole new life with my soulmate?
A few weeks after I moved out and after the pleading from my husband to come back wore me down, I did go back for a couple of days to try and see if my marriage could work.
But the whole time I felt I was cheating on my new love.

My first husband called me all kinds of awful names when I left for good, but that was something he often did anyway.

In the very long run, after countless dark days of tears and wishing I could press a 'fast foward' button, we made the right decision.

I believe my ex-husband is now with someone who is much better suited to him.
My real husband and I are coming up to our 8th wedding anniversary and have two absolutely, perfectly beautiful children.
And while the gloss has worn off, it still feels like we were born to be together, that we will always love each other and that we would never leave.

It took years to get over the pain and loss of divorce.
Some of the most difficult things to deal with apart from the obvious were getting used to saying 'me' instead of 'we'.
And having a new 'we'.
And replacing the old significant other's name with the new one.
Thought patterns are like habits.
After almost 10 years of using one name in all of your thoughts, replacing it with another took a long time for my brain to adjust to.
It's mortifying using the wrong name, but it happened.  And very occasionally still does.
And losing a whole life, his family, his parents, his brothers and sister, his niece and nephew, his friends, were all a huge part of my life.  Then suddenly, they weren't there any more.

Then, of course, there are the children.
I didn't have any with my first husband which I am constantly grateful for.
At least I could walk away with no strings. I don't see or hear anything about him anymore.
But explaining to my children that I was once married to someone who wasn't their dad is not something I ever wanted to do.
I have already told my son.
I dropped it lightly into a conversation when it was appropriate.
He just accepted it and didn't ask too many questions.
I suspect there will be more questions when he's old enough to understand what it really means, though.
I want them both to grow up knowing, so it's not a dirty secret that pops out at a time when they least expect it.

Would I change things if I could go back?

No.

I learnt a lot from my first marriage.

I experienced racism first hand.  It's amazing the things people say when they have no idea you are married to a black man.  I learnt how ridiculous it is to judge people by their colour and felt how awkward it is to be in the minority, having people stare at you for being one of the few white people in a room.

I learnt love is not a fairytale.
I think I would expect a lot more from my real husband if I hadn't already been married before.
I know that ups and downs come with every marriage.
If I met my real husband 10 years earlier and we had the usual rough patches, maybe I would be thinking I'd made a mistake, that the grass might be greener somewhere else.
But after you've lived with dead grass, it's sweet to realize that all you have to do is water your brown grass and it will be green again within no time.

Do I regret the pain I caused?

Of course.

Sometimes life leads you in a direction that you didn't expect, but is right for you.

Everyone says it but I couldn't agree more...

Everything that happened in my past has got me to the point where I am today.
And I do not want to be anywhere else.

But anniversaries, or antiversaries even, will always bring back memories.