Surprise, surprise surprise

I am a very vivid dreamer.  Sometimes my dreams can feel so real that they actually influence how I feel during the day.  This has been true my whole life.  In fact, it is almost as if I have two lives. The one at night and this one.

Lately my dreams have been dwelling on the negative aspects of my marriage and I wake up feeling as bad now as I did then.

There are things that follow people throughout their lives and one of those things for me was divorce.  When I was three one of my parent's friends got a divorce.  The idea terrified me. I worried about what would happen if my parents did that. Who would I live with?  Where would we go?

My parent's marriage was extraordinarily strong, they never considered a divorce, but my grandparents did, after thirty years of marriage.  In my family there was no distinction between people who married into the family and those who were born into it, so their divorce brought out a lot of fears for everyone I think.  My mother, especially, was very angry about the whole thing and for the first time we had someone in the family who could never be family -- my grandfather's new wife.

She was very kind to all of us, and in no way linked to the divorce, but to like her would have been betraying my mother (and my grandmother, who my mother never liked by the way!) It was confusing and terrifying.

Eventually, after nearly thirty years, my marriage ended in a surprise divorce.  One moment I was married, the next he was moving into an apartment where he'd already moved many of his things.

My dream last night dealt with these things in a way I think I finally understand.  For me it is the surprise, the intentional hiding of the truth until the final blow that is so disturbing. It means anyone could be lying to me, abandonment always looms, ready to rise out of the depths from nowhere.