I'm not really sure where this post fits, or if it even fits. I'm not sure if it means something, or if this kind of thing happens to everyone. But I do know I am not the only 40-something single white mom out there. So maybe this happens to everyone. Or at least someone. Besides me.
Because so far 2017 has me feeling like I need a book (I do) or a tv show (probably not) about my life. Or maybe even a reality series. It's just been a train wreck.
And while I've already commented on how the new year in Africa is often filled with apologies and calls for forgiveness, this year it seems filled with something else as well. Messages from my exes.
It's not easy to be my age and realize that most of the plans and hopes and dreams are not working out as anticipated. It requires a deep reaching search for resilience and perseverance. It requires flexibility to re-imagine the coming years and reshape expectations (or ditch them altogether. It's what all the yogis suggest these days.) Being over 40 and still single includes a bit of soul searching as well. (I searched a bit to put a link here, but, really, it's all just depressing. I'm going back into denial for a bit. Who's over 40?) How did I become that lady? That older, single lady that just hasn't been able to make a match, meet a partner, create something solid that lasts with another human?
While I am struggling to reinterpret myself and keep my inner thoughts positive, my exes start calling and texting and sending messages that leave me checking the calendar. What year is it again? How long since we last talked?
Nearly every message contains an "I love you." A few contain a "you're beautiful.' And several suggest regret. There is no blame, no cruelty and no name calling (actually, there never was. These guys each went their own way for unexplained reasons, professing love as they backed out the door.)
All of these random messages have arrived in strange synchronicity. I don't have many exes. Since my divorce, I could count 4 significant relationships. The fact that my ex-husband and 3 of those significant relationships have all resumed contact with me at about the same time, with a similar cheery message, is surely meant to impress upon me something that I can't discern. It leaves me with a sense that if I could just unravel the mystery, decode the meaning, then I would know exactly how to move forward.
In the meantime, I have no idea what it means when everyone you've dated in the last 10 years says, yeah it was great, and you are great...sorry we didn't last, we should have lasted, can I call you? And then they do. All around the same time. My phone is ringing and beeping and sounding off like an alien spaceship landing.
Yet here I remain, single as ever. But apparently still a great and beautiful person. Or something like that.
