We're Still Talking About What I Think We're Talking About -- Right?

Listening to stories about my ex and his girlfriend is similar to throwing away your 12th grade World Cultures notes on the last day of school.  There's a certain YEA!-I'm-done-with-this feeling that strikes me all over again, as it did during our separation and ensuing divorce.  I listen to my daughter recount my ex's liberal drinking and sleeping habits, his religious, exhaustive and expensive diner/ convenience store patronage, ridiculously time-consuming ? projects and complete retreat from responsibility, and I want to jump up and down screaming, "Tell me what I'm missing!  Tell me what I will never, ever, ever have to stress over again.  Tell me what will never ever consume my thoughts again, make my stomach churn, or reduce me to feeling totally worthless and cause me to eat an entire pint of Ben and Jerry's Coffee Heath Bar Crunch!"  I do my happy dance and sing like I would if I won the lottery (if I played).  It reminds me that I am free -- free from worry, free from carrying my burden all alone, free from deception, duplicity and harm.

I'll be honest, I don't always feel that way.  Not because I shouldn't, but because over my years of wallowing I developed a vile habit of living like I am still in the pen.  I don't always walk as though I have been redeemed.  I don't always think as if I have begun a new life.  I sometimes am drawn to feeling burdened or sick with worry, strictly because it is what I knew for so long.  There are times when I damage my new life by patching it with logic(?) and mistrust -- remnants from the old existence.  But Scott has been there before; he understands. 

If he and I had never taken that first walk along Penn's Landing, if we had never fallen so deeply, crazily in love, if we never had the slightest inkling that we were sharing the same dreams with the one we were destined to spend the rest of our life with, I would be happy, for I had been released from my torment.  The fact that I was not only pulled from it but restored, given a new life, inspires and encourages me to walk and work and live and rejoice accordingly.