When you get divorced, you lose a part of your identity that you've carried for however long you were together. Sometimes you lose the friends you had together and you have to work to rebuild your identity and your self esteem.  I'm somewhere in there, still lost.  I have spent much of my adult life as a wife and a mother. What I am trying to figure out now is....Just who the hell am I?! I started using the term 'Muse' after someone told me that that is what I am. And quite frankly it seems to be true.

This is what I see a 'muse' as. Someone who brings either success or happiness or both to a person who is lost in what to do. Sometimes it takes a while, but eventually, after being with me they all eventually get what it is that makes them happy. But here's the other part. While helping them discover who they are or what it is that makes them happy...the more I lose a part of myself in them. I have come to terms with being a muse and have learned to embrace it. I have been called a 'life coach', a leprachaun and an angel. I have also been called other things as well but that I will leave for the time being.

Now that I have lost the identity of 'wife' I am left to figure out, for really the first time in years, who I am. What makes me tick, so to speak? What is it that makes me who I am? Do I complain too much? Am I being too bitchy? What do I have to do for myself to try to make me happy?

I have been thinking more and more lately of home. They say 'home is where your heart is' and my heart just isn't here anymore. I enjoy being with them man I am with. It is nice to finally be with someone who wants to do more than just sit around drinking and complaining about everything. But there is also a downside. I put everything I make into the house that more and more is not mine. Money into children who are not mine. It was not originally a relationship, it was just a roomate situation and I enjoyed helping him out. I had such hope at that time that I would be able to work and get going on my own after the divorce.  It's been six months now and nothing wonderful  has happened yet. The job situation absolutely sucks!  I run into people at these temporary jobs who tell me "oh, I didn't work for a year", "oh, it took me a year and a half to find a job".  WHAT?! I have never gone that long without a job and to be working these temporary assignments for this long is really starting to wear me down. How much longer is this going to last?  I'm now seriously considering going back to waitressing just to bring in money on a daily basis just to put money away. 

My feelings about being here are very mixed. On one hand we have talked about things in the long term. But the confusing thing is that we don't say I love you to one another. I wait for him to say it but it never comes and I've always been told to let the man say it first. If they don't feel it they won't say it. So if you don't say you love someone and can't say it, then why talk about things in the long term as though we will continue to be together? Why talk about moving to my home state with me if you can't say it? Many times I would like to say it to him, but other times I am glad that I haven't.

I'm not sure that after only a year (well, not quite a year) since the end of my last marriage, am I ready to say those words to someone else. Those words have brought alot of pain in the past and I don't want to go through that again.  Why would anyone?  I felt as though my ex was the love of my life, that I would never have to be with anyone else and yet at the same time I disliked him. I hated the way that he was.

So the journey of figuring things out for myself continues.