Where do I go from here? in My heart is on my sleeve

How do I start? How do I start to deal with the hurt and the pain his leaving has caused? I’m so torn between holding on and letting go. My heart wants more than anything for him to see that she’s not what he wants and to come home to the boys and I. I had to answer our youngest this morning about why Daddy can’t come home and all I could say is that Daddy is happier living on his own and that of course we want Daddy to be happy. I’ll always put his happiness ahead of my own but the pain is so real. I just want to crumble. I love him so very much. How is it possible that he could fall for someone else instead of working on us? 14 years out the door and my heart walked out behind him when he left. He’s a good person making a bad choice and I want to hate him for hurting me but my heart won’t find hate, only more love and more wishes that he’d come back home and let me show him the love and attention he felt he was missing. I feel somewhere in my heart that I have to let him go because he would only be forced to stay out of guilt or responsibility and I would be sacrificing his happiness and mine.
Oh the pain is so real and I don’t know how to deal with it. I want to be happy for our boys, I want to try and create a new normal for them but my selfish heart is broken in shreds and I don’t know how to pull myself together. I want to walk, I want to eat better, I want to get into shape for the first time in a long time and I want him to miss home. I want his new girlfriend to be insecure of him spending so much time with the boys and I. I want to hang onto him as long as I can so she goes running and he sees that I’m still home waiting. Yet while I wait, my heart shatters a little more each time he drives off to go see her. I know I need to start healing. I need to truly let go and show him and myself that I can move on and be alright but I don’t know how. I don’t want to function. I hate small chat. I know people are trying to help but I’m numb to it all and I just want to scream at them. Don’t they know that my world just shattered into a million pieces? No, I don’t care that it’s going to get colder later this week or that the price of gas is going up or even that the Liberals might win the election. My heart is in pieces, my husband doesn’t feel the same love for me anymore, and I don’t know how to breathe without him in my life as my husband.
I need to start to detach. I can’t depend on him to come home and trap the squirrels in the wall of our…my bedroom. I can’t hope I run into him and that he’ll keep giving me his comforting hugs. I have to stop that attachment on my own and let him go free. I told him I hope she takes care of him. I hope he is cared for but why can’t that be me? I spent so much time working and trying to make ends meet that until it was too late I didn’t realize that life isn’t all about the money. My family has been destroyed and I wasn’t home long enough to realize it was happening under my nose. Why? Why did it have to happen this way?
They say grief is harder to deal with when it’s a loss of someone who is still with us because they are still here to see and touch but you can’t have them. I believe this. I have been doing some brief research and see that anger is a stage of grief. I don’t feel it now even though I know I probably should after the way he left but I only feel love and sadness and devastation, even desperation at times. If only I had been home more, if only I had taken better care of myself, been less self conscious of myself and my appearance so I would’ve been more open with him, if only I wasn’t such an introvert and kept him from going out with his work and personal friends in crowds that scared me and made me anxious. I would go back and change it all if only I saw then what I saw now. Please give me a rewind button.
I know I need to be confident. I need to get back on track and do it for me, not for the hopes that it will draw him back home, but to start the healing process, to make me a better person that I love fully, and to be the best mom my kids could ask for. I need to break free from the hope that he will change his mind and come back, and I need to start building myself up so that if that time comes I will be able to think with my head and feel with my heart and be strong enough to say NO if things won’t be different. I deserve to be as happy as I want him to be but when will I put me first and stop sitting back and helping everyone else become happy while I’m suffering inside?
I am a good mother
I am kind
I have a welcoming, trusting heart
I have determination to succeed at my goals
I am creative
I am loved.