That feeling, when you’ve been holding your breath so long it feels like your lungs are going to burst. In a microsecond you’re contemplating just letting go…you’re going to drown if you have to hold any longer but something greater is waiting for you outside the impact zone.
You pull some strength out of thin air, long enough to make it up for air. The air is just enough to keep you from drowning but you’re stuck in the impact zone and another wave buries you, so at the same time you take that breath you steady your mind, along with your body struggling to tread water and propel out of the impact zone.
Your mind, you steady it, preparing for the worst possible outcome but fighting like hell to make it out to safe waters. This is the impact zone. The impact zone is a risk of surfing but surfers don’t go out to surf thinking that they’re going to get caught there. They just paddle out, paddle like hell to catch one, take the drop, set the rail and fly. It’s not a certainty but it is always there as a risk.
I’ve been caught in the impact zone once while surfing. It’s a scary place to be. You can’t make sense of up, down, left or right. The wave has you tumbling about like you’re on a spin cycle from hell. Pair that with not only the inability to breath but the fear that you may never catch a break to breathe and the potential inevitability that you may never come up for a breath again.
The last nine months have felt like I have been steadily caught in the impact zone. It has gradually waned with time and perspective but it’s tiresome and beyond my capacity of patience.
One day last July, it was a day like any other post divorce filing. Awkward but manageable. My rail was set for that day, I would pick up my car from having the brakes changed at Mercedes and head out to a Realtech and Tech Industry event in the city.
“Um…Mrs. Caballero there’s a problem with your card, it was declined.” My poor service advisor is looking at me hesitantly as his statement shakes me out of business email.
“That can’t be right,” I say as I pull up my banking app. As the screen produces zero balances across all my accounts. As I look into the account activity I see all balances were transferred to an unknown account. EVERYTHING WAS GONE. Everything but a small account I had the tax payments for my business in. I transferred the money to pay for the nearly $2,000.00 brake job as I saw red.
He had been threatening that if I didn’t drop the divorce proceedings he would make me pay, one way or another. Here was the first wave that would knock me off my board and draw me into the impact zone. I had no way to know how treacherous and long standing this impact zone would be.
The things I have experienced in the last nine months I would never inflict on my worst enemy and what’s worse, I wasn’t alone. What was inflicted on me wasn’t just inflicted on me. It was inflicted on my daughter as well. That didn’t matter. She didn’t matter.
The third biggest blow to my heart in my lifetime, came from the fact that the person I had invested nearly two decades in and hundreds of thousands of dollars on, who swore to me despite me leaving the abusive situation my daughter and I were in, he would never hurt the two of us. He did, bad, and he appeared to get joy out of it.
He hit me when I was rebuilding, after taking some time off to raise or daughter, homeschool, take care of our family and mostly his baby ass. What he failed to realize, in his egotistically driven power trip was who his opponent was. I built him. Plain and simple. Up until a few short years before I still had to show him how to use the balls he was ill-quipped with being raised by mentally ill, abusive, fraudulent drug addicts.
I bought my time. Put my head down. Hustled my ass off. I still am. He left me with all the debt, completely stopped paying for anything, including his child. He’s wracked up ten’s of thousand’s of dollars of attorney’s fees by not honoring court orders. Every time I felt like I could come up for a breath, crash…another wave blindsided me.
All good motherfucker…I was born with fins. I’m built for this shit. Hit me with another one. The good hearted always win in the end. You’re living on borrowed time. The chickens will come home to roost and it’ll sooner or later be time to pay the piper…and any other colloquialisms I can think of. Even flaunting $600 dinners yet buying your child a sweatshirt and a bag of skittles for Christmas, purchased only an hour or so before you were supposed to get her. Which she saw through and decided to not spend the holiday with him.
How does one make ridiculous money and still live paycheck to paycheck? Spend, spend, spend…My daughter and I save, save, save. We find joy in the little things in life, in each other, in our family members and new connections. New traditions fill our time and our hearts. We do dancing in the kitchen, we do silly, we do fun.
He spends to fill his empty ass home and heart. Every pick up yields a new ridiculous looking outfit. He doesn’t know who he is and it’s sad. To the effect that in one enraged message to him after he did yet something else heinous, I asked him if he knew who he was because I was starting to play a guessing game of what village person would be picking our daughter up that week.
The turbulence of the impact zone lessens as perspective rises. He’s lost. He’s alone. He has no one of value in his life anymore, just losers who have the same values and morals as what he was raised by. What you have makes people like you or think you’re something special. Pitiful, but what I’ve found is that the only people who care what someone has, verses what they have in their heart and soul, are broken and insecure individuals.
My daughter and I are moving on, out of the impact zone, only to come out stronger, more resilient and with iron lungs from holding our breaths collectively. Our strength only matched by the intense love we have for each other. The impact zone didn’t drown us, it made us stronger and bonded us for life.
Today- would have been the day that this divorce was final. I was pissed last night and most of today that something like COVID-19 could keep me legally bound to this individual for an indefinite amount of time. I was supposed to go into my 37th year of life without being bound to this person individual but it took writing this piece to finally smack me upside the head and beat me out of my self imposed pity party.
Whenever this ends, finally, it will be the absolute last time I will ever get caught in an impact zone because of this individual. Upon further reflection, while there were high times and good times, a good portion of my life since I was 17 years old was spent in a self imposed impact zone because I had vexed myself to raise this boy into something he is incapable of being..a real man.
In the impact zone I have found so much. I have found a strength I knew I had but was afraid I had lost. I found an even more unbreakable bond and love with my daughter so profound it defies anything constructed to break us. I’ve found standards for which I will never lower for anyone. Guidelines for what I will never settle for in life again. I’ve found grace for others knowing that while I have boundaries, their behavior is a reflection of the evil that they have inside them and the demons they fight with daily and will spend the rest of their lives combatting out of sheer indifference.
A couple weeks ago, when the realities of COVID set in for them and they realized that they had nothing, not even their money to keep them warm, and they tried to come crawling back, begging for another chance I found solace in my response.
Which was simply…I’m fire, you’re gasoline. I don’t like who I am with you. Even if I could get past all the aspects of life I hated while I was with you, the fact of the matter is that, no one is perfect. No couple is perfect. We are all broken and we all have demons that we wrestle with daily. The objective in love and life, if you will, is to find someone who’s demons play well with yours.
As the impact zone fades into the horizon for my daughter and I, it is just beginning for the other party. The old me would have jumped in and saved him from it. But I can’t and I won’t. By me always saving him I never enabled him to actually cope with life on his own and hence the premise of my own issues in the last 9 months. Everything in life is cyclical if you don’t learn to break it. So this is me breaking it. For all of our sakes.
Staying the course. Loving what life has brought to our lives and holds in store for my daughter and I. Letting Karma cash in on its debt. I freed myself when I started putting me first so I could be better for my daughter. Just like our marriage…it’s just a piece of paper decreeing my freedom. I was free the moment I chose me and her.
Gypsy Mogul Mama 