I don’t know if I really believe in manifestation, but I do think words possess power, and that sometimes you can bring those words to life. During the last years of my marriage I was a shell of myself. Looking back now, I see it as my gray period. I lacked color, I existed but didn’t really live. Every day was just the motions of living but not the real actions.

I think the pandemic was the long drawn out ending of the event. During that time things started to really come in to focus. J was suddenly home all the time, retreated to his upstairs office to work. Leaving me downstairs to teach our son second grade virtually while also trying to hold down a full time job. All the responsibilities that I’d been carrying suddenly doubled. My career suffered, my mental health suffered, and every single day was a blur of Zoom classes, school work, keeping a small child occupied and entertained in a world that had totally changed for him. And then you added in all the “normal” things, housework, meals to prepare, keeping us stocked in groceries and the every day essentials.

I was tired. All the time. J would call down from upstairs if we were too loud, or if one of his calls was interrupted by the life we were living downstairs. If I asked him to please take over for important meetings I had come up I was met with his suddenly busy calendar. His actions through the entirety of those events drove home to me that my work was less important even though we brought home the same amount of money, even though I’d worked myself to the bone in my 20’s to get where I was.

It became so bad, I took a leave of absence from work, I had no other choice, and it had been made clear to me that it was probably better if I took the offered pandemic leave than to continue trying to juggle it all because my work had begun to suffer. I wasn’t “delivering” at my normal rate. So I took 3 months, longer than I’d been out of the workforce since maternity leave, and focused on our son, on trying to make his life as normal as possible while everything burned around us.

I lost myself, I lost my identity. I was a wife and a mother and caretaker and everything except myself. And in those moments resentment started. My pleas for help were met with indifference. Sure, if I gave him a specific list of the things I wanted him to do he’d gladly help he said. It wasn’t enough to say “just look around with your adult eyes and find the things that need to be done”. So I’d give him tasks, little ones here or there, like please could you do the dishes or please could you take out the trash. Then hours would pass and I’d get fed up and do it myself. Later I heard the term weaponized incompetence and my god did it ring true.

Towards the end of our marriage he’d gaslight me with claims that he never did anything because if he did I’d say it wasn’t right, or that he never felt like I appreciated it “enough” when he did magically decide to do one tiny thing. I was drowning every day and he just watched and then wondered and lamented about why our sex life became non-existent. I had two children to take care of, one just happened to be 8 and the other was 42.

The last year of our marriage I’d take walks at night after putting our son to bed. Long, long walks through the neighborhood, earbuds in and I’d repeat over and over to myself that I wanted a divorce. I don’t know if I was trying to build up the courage to ask for one, or demand one, or if I was trying to just make it so. Manifesting as it were. Either way, I suppose it worked because one August night shortly after our son went back to in person school he asked for one. And away we went on the most painful 9 month journey of my life, full of anger and hurt and more losing of myself until finally , I started to remember who I was and rebuild myself, and find my joy again.