This morning I woke up in the middle of a dream where I had just realized my cats were standing next to each other and they were not hissing in offense or defense. I was all like “hey, look at that! Do you see that?” And the cats in my dream did not look like my cats. They weren’t my cats but in my dream they were. What’s even stranger than that is that I was with my ex-mother-in-law who was showing me some cool new feature on the iPhone that makes it super easy to share pictures and videos.

She had some thing she wanted to share with me that had to do with the kids and I just didn’t know how I was going to access it. She was showing me the settings to change to turn on this super cool new sharing feature and then I got distracted by the cats, amazed that they were both just sitting there like normal cats. When I said “do you see that?” I’m confident I was saying it to Jim, so he must have been with us but I never saw him in the dream. Then I woke up.

Now I haven’t seen or talked to my exMIL in years. I was always her favorite DIL (she had 3), right up to the day we told her we were ending our marriage and I ruined her sons life and her picture perfect family. Well, yeah, on the surface things always look perfect because that’s what we’re programmed to do. Beneith that thin veneer, though, were secrets, lies, grief, alchoholism, and infidelity.

The day we broke the news she said to me “you are a strong woman and you can get through this, I survived and so can you”. WTF was that supposed to mean? It took me a bit of time to put the pieces together enough to recognize that she had gone through much of the same things I was experiencing. They stuck it out and managed to maintain that picture we are all taught to believe is the ideal life. Perhaps by then things were back to good for them, that there was an end to the very dark tunnel I was in. But I was not going to try any longer or waste any more time on what felt like a lost cause. A marriage isn’t supposed to be a “cause” anyway, it’s supposed to be a partnership.

No, I said “F that noise”. She was right about one thing.. I’m a strong woman. I was strong enough to leave her son and take my life back. It was a hard road, but I did it. Sometimes one day and one step at a time, and of course I’m still alive and tied to that part of my life and my ex through our beautiful children so the struggle is still challenging at times.

Like I said, I haven’t seen my ex-husband’s mom in years. I’m not sure why she showed up in my dream now and why she would be the one showing me a cool new iPhone feature when she was always technologically challenged (and I’m the engineer). Does that mean I have unresolved issues with that family? Does it mean I should hold on to hope for my cats actually getting along? Does it mean I should look into getting a new phone? Dreams are so strange. 😜

It’s Friday again.. and I’m so ready for the weekend. I’ve worked a full week already and am ready to forget all that and enjoy doing a whole lot of nothing important with my sweetie for a couple of days. We’re prolly gonna be doing a careful balancing act between binge watching shows, vacation planning, and getting stuff done around the house. It may not be the most exciting thing in the world but it’s far superior to the alternatives my stupid dream-brain has forced me to think about.

Time to Jam,

~Miss SugarCookie