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What About the Kids?
Raising Your Children Before, During and After Divorce
By Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee
l moment when you become this new person.
How can you tell? You'll know that you've begun to acquire this important new identity when you finally excise your partner's voice somewhere inside your head. You are a new person when you finally stop feeling like a failure, when you feel hopeful and can make decisions without trembling inside. In taking these new steps toward a new identity, reward yourself with something real that makes you feel good. Try a massage, a night out, a new hairdo, or go for broke and get a whole new outfit or set of golf clubs.
To begin the healing process, you might try this simple exercise. In your mind, go back over the years and try to recapture who you were before you got married. Are there earlier self-images that you can substitute for the sad ones linked to your failed marriage? Were you hopeful as a young woman? What happened to that hope? Did you have other choices when you chose your husband?
Try to find your earlier self-images and use them to rekindle the hopes and strengths that you need to move ahead with your life.
At some point every woman, whether left or leaving, has to face up to the hurt and disappointment that go with a failed marriage and the continuing tensions of the divorce. Resolving grief means letting go. In divorce, it's letting go of the memories collected over many years of being together. It means letting go of the hopes and dreams that led you to marry this person in the first place. You need to pull up the memories of your courtship and all the good times you had together to mourn each recollection individually and put them to rest.