The old-maid great aunts in my family were a feisty bunch, or so I've heard. They all three passed away before I was born in a horrible fire during the ice storm of 1973. Regardless, the stories surrounding them are legendary and surprisingly keep popping up at family gatherings. Last Christmas my dad's cousin told me that the great aunts never used the word "divorce." Living in the south, that word wasn't uttered by refined women such as themselves. Instead, women without husbands were put into two categories: sod widows or grass widows. A sod widow was a woman whose husband had died and was buried in a cemetery - hence she walked on sod to visit him. A grass widow, however, meant that a woman's husband was still walking on regular grass; she was divorced. How fitting they called them both "widows" because in each scenario a death of some sort had occurred, be it a person or a marriage. Either way, those were the terms they used when talking to let one another know the status of a woman. If a woman was of a certain age and had children, she clearly fell into those two categories and they needed a way to define her without speaking the unspeakable.
And so it is, I have found myself in the worst category they could ever imagine - a grass widow. Married for 13 years, one amazingly beautiful 10 year old daughter, a ridiculously neurotic mini schnauzer and I'm starting over. Trying to find my sea legs in all of this has been a challenge and I've decided to start a blog to journal the next year. This journey is going to be crazy, messy and emotional, but I hope it will encourage me through the tough times and maybe encourage others. Feel free to leave positive comments, but I'm done with negative, so leave those type of comments on a more open minded blogger's page.
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