240 : Feel Peace

Merry Christmas!  It was officially a white Christmas where I was.  And I had spent several days with my family feeling the happiness and spirit of Christmas (see post #239).  It was amazing to me how this holiday was so very different than the one just one year ago.  Last year, my Ex had just told me a couple weeks before Christmas that he was unhappy in our marriage.  We went to his parent's house for the holidays as planned, but something was incredibly off.  I'm not sure if I was denial as to what was really happening, but I have never felt so alone in my life as I did that Christmas.  I wanted so desperately for my Ex to snap out of whatever was troubling him and to acknowledge we were in this together.  He had told me just a few days before we left that he didn't know if he was in love with me anymore.  Gulp.  Okay.  I asked him if he even knew what it was about me that he fell in love with to begin with?  He said he didn't know.  Yes, that was the very dark world I was living in just one year ago.  I thought there was something I could do to fix the situation.  And so I tried to pull off what I felt was a very romantic gesture.  I had some letters we had written to each other prior to getting married.  Since he could no longer recall why he fell in love with me, I thought I would let him read his own words and then read my words to him.  I put the letters in a card for him as my Christmas gift.  I was naive.  I thought this act would open something in his heart that had somehow been blocked, but I could not have been more wrong.  Not only did it not change anything, my Ex didn't even read them.  I had spent time tracking down the letters and the perfect card for them to go in.  And he couldn't even be bothered to read them.  Last Christmas was pretty much one of the darkest days of my life.  And now a year later.  I was home with my parents and my boys.  I had just enjoyed the days leading up to Christmas surrounded by family.  I felt loved.  Unconditional, endless, heart bursting love.  My parents stayed up with me on Christmas Eve until nearly 1am assembling a very complex kitchen set that Santa had delivered.  There were far too many pieces for one to begin assembling at 10pm, but we did it.  There was no fighting.  No swearing.  Not even tension.  We put it together and then snapped some pics of our job well done.  Oh the clarity in just knowing how that would've gone down had a certain someone still been in my life.  I'm not going to say that 1 year was all it took to heal my heart from a divorce.  I knew that wasn't necessarily true.  I knew I was healing though.  I knew I had gotten better over the past year and I would only continue to do so.  And I knew that today of all days- a day that would always have a little bit of a negative association for me somewhere in the back of my mind- that today I felt peace.  I didn't know how I would feel tomorrow.  But today... I felt peace.  And that was by far the greatest gift I could ever receive for Christmas.