More drama, but this time it's not mine... yay?

Once again, I've let my blog go for far too long. Bad blogger! Bad!!

My work gets a little nutty from time to time. I was handling a labor arbitration which just went crazy for nearly a month. I wound up negotiating a settlement, not just for this arbitration but for three more that were still in the pipeline involving the same grievant. Good stuff - makes me feel all lawyerly an' shit. But now that it's over, my phone's stopped ringing and I've got nothing on my calendar til the end of the month. Seriously, it's either feast or famine in this place.

Fortunately, everything on the homestead has been blissfully peaceful and calm. Esther's vocabulary grows daily. She is full of energy and joy. She keeps getting longer, if not necessarily thicker, so her pants fall down while she's reaching onto tabletops and into drawers that she couldn't reach just a month ago. She eats like a champ - not necessarily huge quantities, but she'll take a few bites of just about anything. That's my adventurous little eater! Hubby, too, has been very kind to me. No sex issues, no pressure on me to do things I don't want to do. I'm trying to be mindful of his needs, but I have allowed myself to fall asleep on the couch rather than initiate things far too often lately. I owe him some serious lovin' at this point, and tonight I intend to deliver. He's getting on the treadmill and exercising every day and I recognize that if I supply positive reinforcement, he's more likely to continue. I do love to love my man when he trims down, as he does from time to time!

And now - the drama. My best friend, my oldest friend, the one who I've known since we were little kids, the one who people ask if she's my sister when we go out together, is getting divorced. She was the very first of my friends to get married, just a little over nine years ago, which surprised me at the time because she was also the most politically active and outwardly feminist of my friends. But I thought her hubby was a perfect match for her. They both had masters' degrees in anthropology and wanted to live the majority of their lives living in the middle of exotic foreign cultures. For reasons too long to get into here, that never really happened. Only after the wake of the Indonesian tsunami did her hubby manage to get himself overseas - in a variety of short- to mid-term positions providing disaster assistance and recovery in Indonesia and later also in Pakistan. The thing about all of these positions was that they were just for him, no room for my friend to come along. So he went, each time, without her. She was left behind to hold down the fort, work a steady job that provided health insurance for both of them but utterly failed to meet her emotional and professional needs.

Her hubby went on, I think, four of these solo jaunts. He just came back from the last of these about 2 weeks ago. He had a job offer in hand from the Red Cross for a long-term, maybe permanent placement in Aceh, the epicenter of the tsunami in Indonesia. The catch? ONLY he could come. They didn't say "oh, we don't have a job for your wife but she can come along and try to find something for herself." No, the deal was that ONLY he could come, and they wouldn't give him the job if my friend coming along was part of the deal. Long story made short - he wants the job more than he wants the marriage.

My friend has always been rock-steady in her commitment to her marriage. She told me for years that she didn't believe in divorce and would do whatever it took to make it happen. But now that her hubby has initiated things, she is off like a shot and never looking back. The day after the decision was made, she had taken off her wedding ring and all the jewelry he had given her, changed her email addresses to drop his name/initial, changed the household utility bills into her name alone, packed up all his belongings in boxes, removed all obvious evidence of the marriage from her life. She seriously considered hooking up a date for the following Saturday. All she can think about is how quickly the divorce can get pushed through so that she can get started on "slutting around" (her words) and moving out of town to someplace more exciting like D.C. or San Francisco.

Honestly, it's wigging me out. No period of mourning, no sadness, no gradual transition. Don't get me wrong - I don't think she should be trying to make it work even now, given that he's utterly unwilling to do the same. But what she's doing is showing me how easy it can be to just give up, to just let it go, to just throw a nearly decade-long partnership to the wind and embrace divorce with open arms and a joyful heart. Yes, I know it would not be so easy for my hubby and I given that we have a child together, but my friend is showing me that it would be do-able, that I would survive, that I would probably even be happy - maybe even right away. That's a scary thought for me.

I'm not there yet. I'm not even close. My hubby and I don't have anywhere near the problems that it turned out my friend and her hubby have. And I am still willing to do whatever it takes to make our marriage work - including laying some lovin' on my sweet hubby (who, by the way, cleaned the house top-to-bottom while I was at work yesterday). But I don't think I really needed to see first-hand how very easy it would be to walk away if eventually things get broken beyond repair.

Oh yeah - and the kicker is that my friend's hubby, having been the one to propose divorce - apparently repeatedly, after each one of his overseas stints, I only just now am finding out - is now a total wreck. He's begged my friend to slow things down, tell her divorce lawyer to back down, because he needs some more time to think about things. He seems utterly incapable of running his own life now that she's not doing it for him - she keeps getting calls from people like his dentist, saying that he's late for or has missed an appointment. I think it's pretty funny that he had the nerve to propose divorce for years, and once my friend finally took him up on his offer, he just completely fell apart. Oh well. In two more weeks, he'll be back in Banda Aceh, doing what he does so well - taking care of other people while his own life goes to shit.

I liked him, but only for so long as he made my friend happy. As far as I'm concerned, he made this bed and now he can lie in it. No sympathy here! Anyway, that's the drama of the day. I'm glad it's not my drama, but boy is it still close enough to home to make me squirm...