Revisiting the past

I'm always amazed at how much growing I'm still doing since my divorce. I'm just now reaching a point where that life seems too far away to hurt me much anymore, and it's slipping further all the time. And I've only just realized I've reached a place where I'm no longer defined by him or my relationship to him. I no longer feel he is a reflection on me. This is huge. It leave just...me. Which is still (and always will be) a work in progress.

What brought that up, you ask? I had an interview in Aiken earlier this week. Near downtown. I don't know why, but whenever I'm up that way I always want to drive by the old house. It's a good 20 minutes, the opposite way from the direction I needed to be going, but I went anyway. (After the interview, of course)

This house I was driving to is not even the house we lived in when I left him four and a half years ago. That house is sitting on a seven-acre parcel of land behind a five-acre parcel in Beech Island. There's no "just" driving past it. I'm not even sure GPS could help you find it if you don't know where it is. I have no desire to revisit that house.

The house in Aiken, though, might actually be considered the last decent house we lived in together, and I liked it.  (That's saying a lot, by the way. We lived in a lot of houses, and less than a handful can be considered decent. Some were barely even habitable.) It was very rural, but we weren't isolated. It was quiet, and had a deck all the way across the back that overlooked the woods.

I can't really say we were happy there. We (or I) hadn't been happy for most of the marriage. But life was peaceful. Or maybe I was just too busy to notice anything different. For the three years we lived there, I went to school, worked part time at the paper at night and worked for the school newspaper. I drove the 45 minutes to Augusta twice a day on the days I had class.

I have no sentimental attachment to the house. The current tenants have run it down a bit. There's junk everywhere, worse than when we had it. I felt nothing when I saw it. But driving through the neighborhood, taking the same route to and from the house, passing the same homes and familiar landmarks, it felt...nice. And distant. I remembered the promise and the hope for the future I felt back then.

See, all that work, the drive, the late nights and early mornings...was to build us a better life. It was to give us the kind of security that the kids and I have now. It was evident to me that he would never do it. I didn't go to college and try to get a better job so I could leave him...it was for all of us. But I did feel I needed to be able to take care of myself and the kids should the marriage fall apart. I had no idea when we closed that door for the last time, that less than a year later I would be on my own, and six months after that he would be gone.

I do wonder what it is I feel the need to visit when I drive that way. I truly have no idea. It's not that I miss him. I don't. It will take me many blog posts, the memoir I keep threatening to write, and probably then some to for me to feel like I can adequately convey to you how much better off the kids and I are now. It's not that I miss our life together. I don't. There is not one thing about it that I want back. And it's not that I miss who I was. I hated who I was married to him. I don't hate myself anymore. But I still find myself making that drive, all the way out of my way, to visit a relic of a past I would rather forget.

When I say life was peaceful there, I don't mean "peaceful" in the sense that it was a period of time when we weren't fighting. We didn't fight a lot. I'd given it up years ago when I figured it was just easier not to. So I think I just mean that we weren't struggling quite like we were before I started college. We had car insurance, a bank account, regular phone service, satellite TV...all the trappings of a "normal" life. Maybe that's it. This was the place we were finally "normal," because when we left it, nothing about our lives was even close to normal anymore. Until now.

That doesn't really make any sense, either, though, does it? Because that "normal" still involved late payments, little white lies, and other things that are blissfully absent from our current lives. I guess, no matter how many rabbit trails I chase, it makes no sense to want to revisit any relics of my past.

How about, it's a really pretty ride?