Angela Kelsey

Divorce Day, a guest post by Luca

Dates are very important. They give us a sense in time, excuses to look for in advance and moments to remember. I celebrate almost everything:

December the 24^th –and not the 25^th– Christmas with family, gifts and friends;

December 31^st, New Years Eve, with champagne and hopes for the best to come;

the Fourth Thursday in November, Turkey Day, filled with a thousand reasons to be thankful;

June something, my birthday, between tears for the new wrinkles that appear followed by a rewarding trip to the mall and a massive celebration with joy and acceptance, and finally,

October 31^st, where Miami turns into a parade of slutty costumes.

One that I never celebrate is the very lame February 14^th, Valentine’s Day. YUCK.

If there is a National Pancake Day, are we allowed to have our very own Divorce Day?

A family attorney in Chicago states that National Divorce Day is April 16 because more people file for dissolution of marriage after the deadline for federal tax returns. In the UK, D Day is the first working day in January, after the Christmas and New Year celebrations disappear. Carlos Vives, a Colombian vallenato singer, has a song called November 19^th and some people say it is named for the day he got divorced. The lyrics are self explanatory: “November 19, after all the suffering I bring your picture to the heavens and I declare myself free as the wind… each November 19 (it is) a cry for independence”.

Well, D Day for me is November the 2^nd.

Before you think I’m the Grinch of love, I want to state for the record that I am a true fan, believer and admirer of marriage and all the Cinderella stories. So, if I do and I did, what went wrong? I could start telling that I was young, that I blindly jumped into the wagon of commitment, that I had absolutely no idea what marriage was, that we were living like rommates and that we had all the required ingredients for a stinky divorce soup: lack of communication, money issues, different religious beliefs, border-line personalities, control issues, etc. Hey, I could even blame it on Miami; the divorce rate in Florida is pretty high! So, let’s just say that it happened, and for a long, very long time it felt like the biggest failure of my life.

Have you ever felt so oppressed that you can’t even breathe? Have your defenses gone so low that acne popped up, cold sores invaded your mouth and flu showed up uninvited? Have you ever cried so much that you run out of tears? Did the embarrassment, shame and sadness prevent you from going outside? Well, that’s how I felt once I moved out, when I was trying to decide whether to continue or not in the marriage. I was confused thinking about giving it another chance or running away. When the decision was taken and we were going through the filing process on our own –no lawyers required- we had to wait one more month. Eternal month. Finally, the judge declared the dissolution of marriage and I felt like the weight of a piano was taken from my shoulders.

Celebrating D Day helps me look back to the good and bad. I learned innumerable lessons and I’m trying hard every day not to make the same mistakes. I can look forward to having another chance. Let’s celebrate D Day not as a failure but as a tough and wonderful period of our lives.

Luca

http://girl-in-miami.blogspot.com/