Home Reno at its worst

Yesterday was officially day of exhaustion.
I feel emotionally, physically, mentally worn out.
It was raining outside. Esme and I spent a lot of the day cuddling on the couch watching movies.
I figure the healthy cuddling negates the unhealthy tv watching (you have to do what it takes to get through these things).

Anyway I'm officially tired of feeling ill and unsettled. I'm really ready to move on, I just have no idea how one even begins to do that. There are a few things lately I've been thinking about in hopes that they'll help me move forward.

One of the things is that I've been reading Elizabeth Gilbert's book Committed. I know it may seem like a strange choice but I'm enjoying her research and thoughts on how marriage has evolved. Early on in this blog I talked about how all I really wanted was a partnership. That's something she talks about in this book quite a bit. If you talk with people from other cultures you can see how they don't expect their partners to fulfill or complete them. Marriage always used to be, and in many cultures still is a partnership necessary for survival. There was one section where she talked about the women working together all day and families sleeping entirely in one house (like 11 members of a family in a 2 room house). I kind of like this thought that just like raising a child, having a successful marriage also takes a village.
When a number of people in your "village" stop supporting your marriage it will have negative consequences.
In my life it only took two people wavering in their support and the sad thing is that the downfall of my marriage has also had negative consequences on my village. That is the part that I am really sad about. (as if losing my husband wasn't enough).

Lately a number of my friends have also been expressing to me their thoughts on whether or not men and women can actually be friends. There was another great section in Committed where she talks about a well known researchers approach to knowing if your relationships are healthy.
She described a marriage as a home with walls and windows. The walls are the supports you and your spouse have built for your marriage and the windows are the places where others are allowed to enter your relationship. If you start sharing things with a friend of the opposite sex that you should be sharing with your spouse you essentially replace one of those walls with a window. Sensing that the integrity of your home's structure is becoming comprimised you build a wall between you and your spouse to try to salvage it.
In the end, with all the movement of walls and windows you've rebuilt your whole house and you, and your spouse find yourselves in a completely foreign environment.
And from my experience you're a bit confused about how you even got there.

I have to say that has been a huge analogy for me. As I read it I could see where the extra windows started breaking through and I could identify the times when my husband built up extra walls to try to keep things "normal". What a painful realization this was. At the time I told myself we were still living in the same house so things must still be okay, ah if only I had known.