Kerplunk - It's Over!!, A.W., H.R. and Our Girlfriends [best biographies to read txt] 📗

CHAPTER 1

Introduction – OMG! Is this our life? How did we get here?

We’re just two hard working, middle-class American women. Our lives were going along pretty much according to our design for quite a long time. Blissful, not as often as we wanted, but we never in a zillion years did we ever, ever, EVER think we’d end up here.

First, we fell in love. It started off as fun, romantic, and exciting. It was perfect in fact! We said “till death do we part” and we meant it. What happened during our many years of dating and marriage?

Why did it end with the darkest, most painful, gut wrenching time of our lives? We could have never imagined this happening to us. We were going through the Big D and we don't mean Dallas! Divorce. Oh no! Not Divorce!
From the outside, we led dream lives. We planned for happily ever after; but sometimes things don’t work out as we plan. So we chose to leave the dream house, and our secretly miserable marriages, and found ourselves wading through a nightmare of hideous criminal trials, custody battles and costly divorces.
How did we get here? What is wrong with our society today where over 44% of married women have considered leaving their husbands and the current divorce rate in the US for first marriages is over 40%? Some say the high divorce rate is due to stress from our collapsing economy. Some say it is our cultural "Me first!" mentality and our fixation on personal entitlement. Some say it's our disposable attitude – "My flat screen TV won’t turn on so I'll just buy a new one. This dog is not cooperating so I’ll drop him at the pound and get a cat instead. My spouse doesn't live up to my every expectation. Cut him out. Just gimme a divorce and I'll move on to the next one." Maybe we're all coming down from the "Donna Reed" generation when our mothers and grandmothers waited for their dear husbands to come home and greeted them with a hot meal, a peck on the cheek and sat patiently by their feet while they watched the evening news. Is that how good wives are supposed to act? Wow! As “modern” empowered women our jaws drop when we watch "Mad Men" on AMC and realize just how different our roles of man and wife have changed in just 50 years. Our mothers told us to put up and shut up. "You're lucky you have a man. It was harder in my day,” but our intuition tells us to stand up for ourselves and not accept (and reward) our husbands' bad behavior.
It's a difficult age – we are receiving so much information. Our culture is definitely shifting and we, both women and men, are all a bit confused as to where we go from here. Turn on any television talk show and the topic, 3 out of 5 days a week, is about relationships – how to build great ones, how to repair the broken ones, and how to forget and recover from the destructive ones. Look at the magazine covers in the checkout line. Watch the news. The media is full of celebrity marriages that are unraveling. Scandalous marriages are not just in Hollywood anymore. We are all the same. We are just trying to figure out how to make our marriages work – day to day, year to year. We were good daughters, straight-A students, good mothers, good friends, good wives...but our "good life" wasn't playing out with the storybook ending anymore so we had to make a change. But, here we are now. We’re alive –for a while that was iffy! We’re healthy. We survived and learned a lot!
While we were deciding whether to go forward with a separation or divorce, we were searching for other women who shared our fear of loss, our anger about being abused or in a broken marriage and uncertainty about how it would play out. We felt so alone, embarrassed and ashamed. We felt positively miserable. We felt as if everything we held true was going to rust. We felt like an oddity – maybe something was wrong with us – no one else had it this bad, did they? We wanted someone to talk to. We needed to find someone who could commiserate and tell us what was working for them and what was not. We felt like we had to re-invent the wheel every day. We had to educate ourselves, talk to the police, talk to lawyers, stay on top of everything, and keep it all organized. We just wanted to have some friends who could say, “Oh girlfriend, we know your heart is breaking, we know your love and life just went POOF in a cloud of bitterness, but we are here for you and we came out alive and so will you."
That didn't happen for us. We spent our days alone, nights alone – sure maybe we spent time with friends and family but no one understood. And frankly, they were sick about hearing the drama and if we kept drawing them in for help, they would suddenly be busy, couldn’t get together and then they were out of our life, too.
That is why we had to write this book. Not want to, but had to. This book took on a life of its own. We could not stop until our words were down on paper. We had quite a few excuses – especially when we had to write about things that made us uncomfortable, things that gave us a stomachache or a headache when we churned up our memories. So this book is for you. For our girlfriends who are reading this book while they are sitting in their minivan at the grocery store parking lot dreading to go home. For girlfriends waiting to pick up kids from school or from a sports practice and pondering, "How do I get out of this train wreck of a marriage?" For you, the girlfriends who are awake at 3 a.m. reading this book wondering what dramas this new day will surely bring. We wrote this to save you a little heartache; to make you laugh when you are in the midst of sobbing, to save you time and money as you navigate the system and to let you know you are not alone!
We needed, no craved, to hear other women’s stories to prove we were not alone, not crazy, not imagining things and that there will, at some point, be a time of peace and calm and that this will be behind us. We could not imagine any of that – our heads were so crammed full of “what do we do”, “how do we do it”, “where do we start”, “whom do we tell”…woulda, coulda, shoulda type stuff! And the “maybe he will change this time” thought was always the soundtrack playing in the background of our minds. Incidentally, nope, he did not change and the police told us that they usually don’t…ever!
Our book sprang to life in May 2009 when we realized that we had five to eight close friends EACH who were unhappy in their marriages and struggling to figure out a way to make it work or end it. Five to eight close girlfriends EACH who were considering divorce! Those numbers shocked us! What is wrong with our society when that many close friends are second-guessing their marriages? In researching the content for Kerplunk – It’s Over, we interviewed and surveyed hundreds of women, age 24-76. The criterion for our control group was simple: 1) the woman must have been the partner to initiate the divorce. We wanted factual accounts from women who realized their lives were miserable and sought to rectify the situation. 2) We did not want to glean information from anonymous sources. All survey/research participants must be our direct contacts, either women we know personally or those directly referred to us by friends, family, co-workers. For example, Heather has a friend Betsy (happily married) who has a friend Molly (who initiated her divorce). Molly was asked to take our survey and asked if she could also refer similar friends or family members to us.
We have collected countless stories from our girlfriends and girlfriends of girlfriends to share with you so that you know that you are not alone. Someone once wrote, if you can find one other person who shares your most odd idea or view, you will know you aren’t crazy! We are not doctors, not therapists, not social workers, but we’ve been in your shoes standing exactly where you are right now. This isn’t just happening to you. Many other women have experienced the same thoughts, heard the same threats and have dealt with all the emotions you are feeling right now.
You are not alone.
There is nothing wrong with you.
You are not crazy.
You are not imagining things.
You are not being too sensitive.
You do not need to hide.
You will, however, need to stand up, speak up and be proud that you can! (Gulp!) We had to stand up for ourselves, speak up for ourselves and sometimes yell! We became Personally Empowered Barbies with fun accessories like attitude and self-respect! That was something we had never done before because we were those good daughters, good wives, good mothers who did as we were expected. We are grateful that we finally learned how to get past the false expectations we were imposing on ourselves and take charge of our destinies.
We would have given anything to have been gifted the powerful information in this book during our struggles with divorce. It is our hope that we are able to provide you with a feeling of friendship, provide you with some tangible guidance and help you find a starting point to make a plan. We hope that by sharing the information in this book, you might be able to salvage your marriage and find that happily ever after you are searching for right now. We want and need you to trust your gut and intuition – it is mandatory for you to do that. Listen to yourself and then start moving one step at a time. Sometimes you will find that you may need to take very big steps and sometimes you may need to take really tiny steps – just keep moving forward. Don’t give up!


Chapter 1 Checklist

We are both list making kind of women! We take great pleasure in crossing accomplishments off our daily lists. Chances are you are in need of some goals and a sense of accomplishment too, so at the end of each chapter you’ll find a tidy little checklist to keep you on track. We are sure you will learn some new things in each chapter or at least reinforcement on ideas you already had. Research has proven that our brains like repetition – it helps us to remember and internalize new ideas! So let’s get on it! Help yourself to imbed these new ideas by checking off each item!

___ Realize that you are not alone!
___ Acknowledge that there is nothing wrong with you!
___ Accept that something is wrong or askew in your life and you suspect the root