Transcription
[Music] Let's go to Chelsea in Kansas City, Missouri. What's up, Kansas City? Chelsea, how are we doing? Great, John. How are you? Cool. Go Chiefs, right? Yeah, go Chiefs. They killed it this weekend. Yeah, they did. Pima Homes, he's a Red Raider. Awesome. All right, so what's up? So last year, I divorced my best friend.
Um, why'd you do that? Well, we got married twice. This was a second round. We're just much better friends than we are married people. Okay, and that happens sometimes. And so I came to terms with that. But I filed for divorce in January of 2020. After a very hard, we were in marriage counseling all of 2019. And it got to the point where every counselor was like, "Well, you just need to change who you are to me." And I'm like, "Okay." So I try and I try and I try, but nothing I did, even to the point of allowing him to quit his job in February of '19 to stay home with the kids, it still wasn't enough. So we filed in January of 2020. COVID hit in March. So he's home and the kids are home, and I'm still working full-time at home. And you're divorced? Two months. I'm divorced now. Yeah. Our divorce was finalized in May. Um, we'd also put our house on the market in January of 2020. And I couldn't live in that chaos anymore, so I moved out in May. The house closed and sold in July, and the kids and I moved to an apartment. And then he had moved in with my parents at the time because he didn't have a job. Now he lives on his own. Everything's great. But every year around this time, my kids bring up our old house and how much they miss it. And I can't help but feel like I've failed them and just constantly feel like a failure because I did work so hard to keep her house when he quit his job. But COVID really made me realize how much I missed my kids and being home with them. And I wasn't willing to be the only one working in the home anymore. But now I find myself struggling this year, feeling so badly that what if we could have worked it out? Even though we had tried it twice, we're still like, I mean, last Christmas we went down to Branson together as a group, and we get along really well. But we're just so on different spectrums as far as hard work goes, that if we set goals, we have to stick to them. And he just was never willing to do that.
So, so a home is a metaphor. Home's not a place. Home is a fantasy for y'all. And when your kids say they miss the house, they miss the home, they miss that picture they have. And it doesn't sound like anybody's grieved the loss of your marriage, of your friendship. It sounds like y'all are still playing friend, you're still playing married-ish, sort of kind of. And nobody has said, "This happened. This was devastating. This was heartbroken. I missed the house too. I miss being married to my best friend too." And yet, here we are. I started doing that a lot the last couple months. And I'm in a new relationship now where we were having some fights a few months ago. And I'm like, "I really think this is on me because I haven't grieved the loss." And so I kind of feel like I'm in limbo, but it's affecting every part of my life. And I've gone to counseling, and everybody's like, "Well, this is all on him. Like, you just need to get over it and think better of yourself." It, it, he could have been the most evil, abusive, angry, awful person, and you still grieve that loss. You grieve the loss of trust in yourself. You grieve the loss of trust in your marriage. You grieve the fact that your kids don't have a dad present anymore. You grieve all those things. And so the fact that he is a good human being, you just couldn't, you just decided, "I can't live with him anymore." You gotta, you gotta grieve that. Grieving isn't about whose fault it was. Grieving is simply acknowledging the gap between what I hoped for and what actually happened. And you married this guy twice thinking he was it, and you chose for him not to be. And so you're going to grieve that gap. It's not about finding fault and blame and getting over stuff. Now, man, but you're right, it will affect every relationship forward because you don't trust yourself anymore. You don't trust yourself to stick it out when you stick it out when it gets hard. You don't trust yourself to pick right. You don't trust yourself. You just don't trust yourself. That's what grief's for. It's making peace with reality.
So I guess my big question is, how do I show my kids in future relationships that a marriage can work? Especially when the question comes up with, "Well, you and Daddy get along, but why, why couldn't you stay married?" And how am I supposed to stay married? Like, how do I show them what a good relationship and that when you get married, it is for good, better or worse? But it was, I don't want to raise that. I know. And I don't want to raise them to think that you can just quit if it gets hard. You just quit. And that's what I feel like I did. Well, then the only thing you can do if you want to teach them that lesson is to teach them out of your, out of the things that you did wrong, that you feel like you did wrong. See what I'm saying? You want, you want your kids to have a great marriage. Show them what a great marriage looks like. And you're, there's not a lot you can tell them right now because they've experienced it, they felt it, they've seen it. And so if you get remarried to somebody, they will see what a good marriage looks like 5, 10, 15, 20 years later from now. Oh, this is it. But there's not like gonna be some magic conversation you have like, "By the way, I did this and this and this, and I feel like I did it like this." That's not how it really works. It really works like that. The kids can't process that. How old are your kids? My daughter is seven and my son is three. Yeah, I mean, that's when your kids say, "I really miss the house." And you hold them tight and you cry and you say, "I miss it too. I really miss it too. And we miss Daddy." And you say, "I miss him too." And then they say, "Well, then why don't we just go? Why does Daddy just come back here?" You say, "Because, you know..." It's funny, they never. I was really afraid last year when we all went on vacation and we had to go to two separate homes that they would be like, "Well, why can't we all stay together?" Not even. They didn't even question it. They will sometimes just like, "This is the way." But maybe this is the way life is. Yeah. And you got to remember that they don't have that back. They're just trying to deal with whatever reality's put in front of them. That's what kids do. That's the beauty of being a kid. And that is the, that's why being a kid is so brutal because they just deal with the reality and put in front of them. Huge chances. You, you haven't made peace with this. You are still, you haven't owned this. I feel like I've cried about the loss recently, and I'm just like, "When is it enough?" And I'm in a relationship now where now I'm like, "We're living as if we are married. We should get married." But then I don't want to rush into a marriage again just because life looks like we should be married. Jesse, you're Chelsea, you're still married. You're still married to that dude. You still love that guy. You still call him your best friend. You don't live in the same house with him. You have a separate life than him. But y'all are still teaching marriage would be great right now. Exactly. You're playing married. You want both sides of this. You want to be divorced and have the freedom to be with other people, and you want to not have to live with the reality that I am divorced. I left him because we could, he couldn't keep goals up or he would, whatever the thing, the reasons you left him. That's a whole other call. But you have not separated yourself from that relationship. Have a legal separation, but you're still, you haven't let that go. And you've got no business dragging some other poor soul into this until you've let that go. It's like a weird inverted affair, kind of. Am I right? I feel like I have, I have let it go. But I never did the grieving process. You are right about that. I know for a fact I never want to marry him again. But we're still really good friends. And you can be really good friends, but you need to be best friends with your new spouse. And when something funny happens, or something sad happens, or something great happens, your first call needs to be to your new husband, not to your ex. And I don't think you're there yet. It's like somebody died, and you still pick up the phone to call them when something happens. You haven't fully, your body hasn't accepted this is over. That's what I'm saying. I think it's hard with. Oh, it's real hard. It is. But what I'm telling you is even harder is dealing with kids who are living in that limbo. And they are, this has been a weird summer campy, awful, weird vacationy thing. I don't know if you've ever been swimming in the ocean in the middle of the night. It's both exhilarating and terrifying because it's just ink black for as far as you can see, and you're bobbing with the waves, and you can see your friends around you, but it's also, you don't know what's underneath you. You know what's above you. You don't know what's really happening. And that's where your kids are. They deserve the closure. You deserve the closure. Your ex-husband deserves the closure. You gotta grieve it. You gotta spend a season where you don't talk to him except to drop the kids off. You gotta spend a season where you don't call each other or text each other. You have to spend a season forgiving yourself or making peace with yourself. You've got to spend a season saying, "This part of my life is over." Then we will rebuild a new friendship because we have to co-parent these kids. And we're going to love our kids. Whatever he does, can't live at your parents' house anymore. He needs to go have his own life, create his own world. And if he chooses to be homeless, that's his choice. And if he chooses to not want to work, those are all his choices. Now, he's an adult male. He gets to do that. But you've got to spend some, a season breaking that relationship off. And you haven't done that yet because you still want to hang on to it, the good parts of it. You gotta let it go. You can rebuild it later, but right now, you gotta let it go. Thanks for that call, Chelsea.