taking a step back

Hello again! If you're new here, my name is Tomasi, I'm 22, in the process of divorce, newly single mother, and a psychology student . my life used to be full of domesticity. Cooking, cleaning, and running a home were my full time job requirements. I was fully immersed and lost myself in what I had thought to be everything I had wanted in life.

I was nineteen and my husband freshly twenty when we got married, and I was roughly 4-5 months pregnant. Truthfully I am far too busy to regret my life decisions. There is nothing I would really wish to change in my past as it led me to this exact moment and time, and this new person I am today. I have always believed that whatever happens in life is a part of a much bigger plot. The biggest thing I think people forget about life is that we are meant to evolve, we are supposed to change. We age both physically or mentally for a reason, and when we don't progress, obviously it can cause blockages in all kinds of aspects of life. Today I'm 22, when I started this blog over a year ago my main demographic were married women. Because I was one, I wanted to be the blog-diy-pinterest mom. I had wanted to be a soccer mom since middle school. I was full of desire both for scholarly goals and ambitions, but I wanted family life, delving into who I was as a mother, a wife, and a member of a community. I clung to the perfect family image I desperately spent trying to create, despite a clusterfuck of trauma, and disagreements that my marriage was actually full of. As much as I loved my status as a mom and wife, the pressure combined with a lack of help and that resulting in mental illness severely deteriorating, I had to choose to end my marriage so the both of us could get better for ourselves, and mainly our child.

It has been over seven months since i told my husband i wanted a divorce, and since then we have gone our separate ways, trying our best to make things work for our co parenting relationship, and while it is not easy all of the time, every time, i'm determined to try my best for my son to have a better relationship with his father. A big part of pushing off a divorce that was destined to happen was because we both remembered what it was like to have parents go through custody battles and cps calls, that we had no desire at all of recreating for our child. It's a relationship that requires just as much work as our previous marriage, and it's still just as difficult.

In these seven months I took pretty much every waking moment trying to work through trauma. When I was married, I rarely ever left the house, aside from running errands to maintain the house. I didn't have friends, and my main source of company was a one year old set of child and dog. Moving back to my hometown was a big adjustment, not only was it physically bigger, but the amount of people in my circle also grew. While I still spent most of my time home, I now had friends, and i didn't have to feel guilty about having friends anymore. When summer ended and my friends had jobs and school to get back to, I immersed myself in writing and reading, hobbies that helped me work on healing my inner child, and things I had used to do before I got too caught up in devoting all my time to my family and house. And I know it sounds like I'm really drilling in the loss of myself into the whole perfect family image, and devoting wife and mother, but it truly was like that. I had no sense of individuality and I had fully become a wife and mother 24/7 with no breaks ever in between. My child free time never felt like a break because that was time to fully devote myself to being a wife. I rarely committed time for myself, which in hindsight was one of the many things I had contributed that helped dissolve my marriage. I loved my family so much, my husband loved our family so much, that instead of focusing on what was truly damaging our marriage, we were both too caught up in arguments that didn't really matter. In the end we had become so blind to where we went wrong that there didn't seem to be any other answer, the two paths available were constantly arguing and ruining each other or ending it all so we couldn't hurt each other, and seeing as i had spent the last four years making every single decision for our family, it only made sense that i made the final decision to end our family.

I loved my little family beyond belief but losing myself was something I promised myself as a child to never do, and I wouldn't let anyone stand in the way of me. Maybe things could have been fixed, maybe it was always destined to fail, who knows. I could try to pin all of the blame on everyone else, and while many people contributed to where I am today, whether negatively or positively, it was only me who led myself here, I was the only person to walk the road to wherever this path will lead me. I could try to explain my journey, the pain behind it, how every step of it was meant to happen, but it seems futile. I realized a lot of the time i just talk way too fucking much, and it exhausts people. And while I love to annoy people, blabbing about my personal experiences and paths just seems draining and there would be too much to write and discuss about anyway.

I could have sensed that 2021 would have been the year to completely blow my life to pieces, there were warning signs I chose to ignore, there were signs from the universe that I just ever noticed, but the last seven months forced me to recognize, you can't do shit but live. These past seven months have been full of healing, heartbreak, longing and just generally stress fueled and managed as well as possible. Separating from my marriage forced me to take a break, look back at my life and what i wanted my future to be and i tried to plan my way out of the hole i had dug myself into. While rebuilding myself and putting shattered pieces of myself back together was something i had grown accustomed to doing alone, the loneliness of it all still kills you. obviously i wouldn't change it though, i've gotten too far and have learned far too much about myself to be able to wish to go back and change things, even if i physically could, any scenario i imagine is just that, imagination. and changing things or wanting to change past events, looking back at scenarios and longing to change details, eventually, and if you do it long enough, breaks you. humans were never meant to live in the past, never meant to stay idle and stagnant. the best part of being human is learning. By the time an event begins there's nothing possible to do to change the outcome, the only thing we as humans control is our responses and reactions to the events in our lives. We don't write our stories, we only edit them.