No such thing as "new normal" for me

[Guest mawidow]

It's been over two years and still no signs of this "new normal" thing I've heard so much about. Every single day feels weird and I am dog tired at the end.

 

This is not a complaint. Life just feels constantly new and in flux. No cruise control, no autopilot. There is no such thing as getting it all together - as a widow, I know in my heart not to wait for life to feel steady state, because nothing lasts.

 

I just moved in with a guy I dated for only 5 months before cohabitation. He is lovely. It is so incredibly weird, though!

1) I was a practical-minded wife for 20 years and never the kind of girl who would take the leap to live with someone after 5 months. But now I am a grown-ass widow and am allowed to live by my own "what the hell?" rules.

2) Being in a new relationship is a disorienting mix of feeling like a girlfriend and feeling like a wife. We are still learning so much about each other's preferences and quirks after only 5 months. Yet, there is quiet and easy puttering and making sandwiches and lack of pretense that arises with two people who have been married before.

3) I feel like DH is the person who would understand best what an incredibly big deal it is that I took this leap in my relationship.

4) I want to share some of these impressions with new guy but I don't even quite know how to articulate them to myself yet. Thanks for letting me get it down on the page. I guess what I'm saying is, I just don't have a handle on who I am and I might never know.

 

Sending support all around.

 

[Guest IronBear]

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[lcoxwell]

Having spent 13 years of my life as an extreme caregiver, in which nothing in my life was "normal", I don't think I shall ever quite figure out what normalcy truly is. What I can say, is that I can relate to what you are saying about your relationship now, because I have thought many of these same things about my relationship with New Guy.

[Trying]

I would imagine it feels a little like playing house or living someone else's life.  Buckle up for the ride and have fun discovering who you are.

[Guest mawidow]

Thanks, everybody. I also want to echo what's been said in other posts: no matter how wonderful the relationship, it does not fill the hole or quench the ache left by death. People are irreplaceable. Thank goodness.

[Missmybecky]

I always hated the term "New Normal" it was created by "Grief Experts" and has no real meaning. In many ways I am feeling better than I ever have but, I still don't feel as if my situation feels normal in any way new or otherwise.

[maddalena]

after 35 years of living with one person, living with another seems like  a shoe that fits better sometimes and fits much worse in others. And yes, the doubts fighting with the certainty.. and yes, new quirks in new guy, heck, living with DH was NORMAL... i don't think anything else ever will be.

 

hang in there, tell us ALL about him!

[anniegirl]

New normal is a terrible term because it implies that life is set in stone rather than being divided up into stages that are defined by experiences, age, milestones.

 

Barney is right that two years is not a long time. At two years I'd been married again for seven months and with my new husband for over a year.

 

Did it feel more weird than being married the first time? Not really. LH and I moved in together after just a month of dating. We're engaged a few months later and married before we'd been together a year. So, same sort of "wow, this is my life now!" as opposed to what my life had been.

 

It's not odd to continue to miss what you had even when your life now is pretty good or even great.

[Pammy]

I guess I am the odd one out as seems to be one of the few constants in my life.

 

I have established what I firmly consider my "new normal." But I have managed to reinvent myself several time before in my life, so this is a familiar feeling for me. I don't really consider this new normal (or any normal for that matter) as something that is set in stone, Annie, but I do get where you are coming from. My "normal" is ever changing, and what I feel is normal for me now, is way WAY different than even 5 years ago. Life tends to do that to me.

 

Now I do sometimes look back and think about what was sometimes missing what could have been, what might have been even what was, but it is rarely with longing that I do this re-visitation of my past. I certainly have no regrets. I have adopted the theme of "it is what it is" and it helps me. It also helps me to know that the path I travel is of my own choosing and the mistakes I have made have been learning times rather then regretting doing what I did that led to the mistake. Most of my mistakes have revolved around men - beginning long ago with my father, but I learned something from every mistake I made and applied it to my next normal, so how can I take that as a bad thing?

 

For a while I even berated myself for choosing a man who just up and died on me with not even a F*ck you from him - my widowhood began with a sudden death, but it led me in a direction I never even considered, with a man I might never have considered, living in a city I definitely never would have considered in any of my other "normals".

 

There is no right, there is no wrong (well, aside from the obvious rights and wrongs in the world), there just "is" and in the end I know that its not what I choose, or what was thrust on me, but it was what I did with it and what lessons I took away from it.

 

MA, never knowing who you really are is not that bad. Like you said, life is every changing and every evolving so we need to evolve accordingly..... but I have a hunch you know more about who you are than you give yourself credit for 

[anniegirl]

Pammy, exactly! It's evolution.

 

I always hesitate before I jump into discussions like these because I really don't miss my life with LH. I don't look back very often. I am happy where I am. Like you, I believe life is what it is and that when you have an opportunity to move it somewhere better via a job or person or whatever, you should jump on that.

[Mizpah]

I consider a "new normal" just having a routine, being able to say that life is generally like this or like that.  So, for me, I have a one-year-old daughter and I commute far to be a litigation attorney for the government, and I live with my boyfriend, who's the father of my daughter.  Seems so normal, right?  But my new normal, beneath that surface, is nothing like normal.  The man who believed he'd grow old with me died when he was 28.  My boyfriend lost his pregnant fiancee when she was 26.  Our very story - the story we'll tell our daughter about how we met and fell in love - has origins in death.  Highly premature deaths.  Bizarre accidental deaths.  We're the opposite of normal - even just statistically speaking.  My life may be very structured, but my feelings and our relationship, and the realities of who we are and where we've come from - how will we ever be normal?  We already are, and we never will be. 

[Mizpah]

I just moved in with a guy I dated for only 5 months before cohabitation.

 

And, mawidow, I can relate!  Within a year, I met him, got pregnant, and moved hundreds of miles away to join him in his house.  Cohabitation is such an adjustment and learning process when it's so early in a relationship.  Feel free to PM me anytime - I likely get it in many ways.

[Guest mawidow]

You guys are the best - so much care and insight in your posts. Thanks for sharing.

 

As I and others have said, this is not a complaint. I don't mind not having a fixed sense of self (although the paradox is that I know and am loyal to myself in such a deeper way now than ever before). And thanks for the reminder two widowyears is not a long time. I still wake up in the morning and think, "what is it I need right now? what is the most important thing just in this moment?" The present is the only place I have any agency, any choices. I couldn't prevent my husband's crazy one-in-a-million accidental death. Facing that utter lack of control over the Big Things put me in this state where I live much more moment to moment instead of in the illusion of future and past - and I guess I thought maybe that would fade out over two years and I'd get back into more autopilot mode, but it just hasn't happened.

 

So most of the adjustment to living with a new guy is not that he is new but that I am constantly new! I get to be whoever I want to be, moment to moment, in this new chapter. I notice that the loving things that DH did with me, the things that nurtured me (his encouragement and generosity and availability) are the things that come flowing out of me toward the current guy. So current guy is getting a little taste of my last marriage. That makes sense and yet is weird in its own right.

 

Sending support to everyone.