Hindsight

Hindsight is 20/20 “they” always say… and I suppose that’s true. We often look back on life, look back on choices and moments and actions and wonder if what we did was right… wonder if perhaps we should have charted a different course, or wandered down that less trodden path sooner rather than later. I think about that sometimes. Not as often as I used to but still… it creeps into my thoughts every now and then.

This morning I remembered a moment some ten, eleven years ago when my ex husband came home and said he just wasn’t happy anymore. I think it was August, and the kids played outside while he and I sat under the huge oak tree in the yard behind the house. He said he wasn’t happy and he wanted to be happy and he just didn’t think he loved me anymore. It rocked me to my core… shook my foundation… and I had to get away so I took a drive. In truth he didn’t know what he wanted to do so we started marriage counseling. That was the beginning of the decade long descent into hell. The therapist suggested he was depressed. There were doctors and therapist and medications and hospitals and suicide letters and a whole host of waters to navigate. I watched this man I loved and trusted, this man I knew to be a good man, become someone I didn’t know. I watched him make choices that ultimately tore apart a family – choices that still reverberate and affect what happens to all of us to this day.

I didn’t callously and quickly just give up. I fought the depression, I waged the war, seemingly alone much of the time. But of course he was waging his own war, locked deep inside himself… fighting to stay afloat. But I think at some point he gave up… and like a doctor who works for much longer than he should to perform CPR on a dead patient I was finally forced to let it go too. I was beating that proverbial dead horse. I tried so hard to get people to listen, tried so hard to get people to help… but doctors only saw it as a cookie cutter diagnosis, it was all too much for the therapist because he wouldn’t work with her, wouldn’t open up, and his parents didn’t want to talk about it or acknowledge it. I was alone.

I was alone for a long time. It did its damage… fighting the depression and the loneliness and the blame… fighting him. Oh not fighting in the sense that we argued, or exchanged heated words… but fighting his reality, fighting his perceptions. What I finally learned was that it didn’t matter; I was indeed fighting a losing battle. I wasn’t ever going to win – at least not fighting that war – so I laid down the sword and I took off the armor and I walked off the battle field. Done.

I’m not sure what about today made me think of that moment under the tree… for some reason it made me wonder what it would have been like if I had just let it all go then, if I had, at that moment, just packed it all in and said ok... over, done. I'd have survived then like I have now... I would have picked up the pieces and moved forward, but it would have been different - in good ways and in bad. Maybe I would have missed some lessons, missed some people, missed some experiences. I think though, it all happens in its own time, at its own pace... this life. I coulda, I shoulda, but I didn't. Hindsight.