One Year Later...

Thursday would have been a good day to ride; Emilie was in New York on a class field trip and Allie was spending the night at her mom’s. The Poto chapter of the MMBA just started their Thursday night rides but I was tired and didn't feel like socializing. A friend from work and I talked about riding at Island Lake but he dropped me so bad at Pontiac on Tuesday that I was still embarrassed. I drove to Maybury to quietly ride by myself. I fought falling asleep on the drive there then sat in my truck near the trail head wanting to curl up and sleep more than I wanted to ride. I decided to go home.

Sleep deprivation is one of the unexpected side effects of my divorce. It was final a year ago. I realized it was inevitable long before then but my brilliant plan was to stay together until the girls where done with high school; that would have been the classy, standup thing to do but apparently I didn’t do as good of a job isolating them from reality as I intended.

Filing was the right decision for me but I feel horrible about it. Allie who, like me, doesn’t talk much is finally starting to ask questions but there is nothing satisfying in my answers. I’m glad I didn’t fully comprehend all the ramifications of my divorce because if I had, I may have procrastinated longer. I may have continued trying to fix a problem that was unfixable. Unfixable problems is a concept Engineers have difficulty grasping. We aren’t allowed to respond to a Technical Incident Report by saying: “Well, shit happens” but the reality is sometime shit does just happen. Hardly a mantra to live one’s life by but it’s true nonetheless. Sometimes shit happens for the best.