To my dearest Love,

The morning sun hasn’t even peaked out yet as I woke up like always, before dawn, before the kids, and before you. Sitting here at the kitchen table, stirring a pack of Stevia into my morning addiction, I have to admit that I am completely overwhelmed by the silence in our home. My mind is cheering so loudly that for the first time I am actually tasting the coffee in my cup and not just chugging it as if it were the prerequisite to the next hour. I honestly don’t remember the last time I have tasted coffee. When did I even start to like this stuff? Or did I?

So many habits and patterns that I don’t even recognize as me anymore. A part of me knows that they were all reasons why you did what you did. Why you made the decision that shattered my mind earlier this year and left me spiraling in disbelief and anger. When you stood up and declared your position so firmly, “You’re Fired and this is why….”.  Just so you know, I stopped listening after the first two words as nothing else mattered in that moment.

For the 10+ years I have known you, I have not only loved you to my core, but also had the utmost respect for your wisdom, experience and insight. I mean, you do have six more years and way more grey hair than me. But to be told, to be redirected by the person you expect to protect your heart, that you have no choice but to stop; it left me angry that I had allowed this opportunity to even occur.

To be fair, we do hold equal legal responsibility for the companies we have created together. However, to be selfish, there were a few days after those words were stated where I wished I had never agreed to that business partnership in the first place, and almost thought you were joking when you made your announcement.

You weren’t joking though.  And I don’t regret our past decisions.  

In fact, I have a couple of apologies to make. First, I need to apologize to myself. I don’t even know how I got here. To this place of completely drowning in one never-ending panic attack. Literally, I can feel my heartbeat pounding in my ears 24 hours a day. So loud that it started sending me into the craziest doom and gloom scenarios that have landed me in urgent care for fear of dying of a heart attack too many times to count. I probably owe the urgent care doctors an apology too as they now have me on some official nutbag list.

As I sit here writing this letter, my feet won’t stop bouncing up and down as if my body needs to get up and run a marathon. As if I am boiling over with extra energy, all while I’m completely exhausted and can’t even think straight. Let’s be real, I have zero extra energy, but my body is restless beyond explanation. When I made my cup of coffee this morning, I pressed the brew button and moved about the kitchen doing multiple things to get as much done as I possibly could in just a few minutes, and didn’t realize I forgot to put a cup under the machine. This isn’t the first time I’ve done that.

Secondly, I need to apologize to you. You have stood beside me for the past four years while I built my portion of the business from nothing to financial success. Which means you were there when nothing was working, when I got scammed and taken advantage of, when I had to fire people and face public social ridicule for standing up for myself. 

You held me up when the world couldn’t push me down fast enough.

And throughout it all, I allowed my drive to succeed to overshadow your support and take over my every waking (and sleeping) moment. So when those two words cut through the air, directed straight at me, “You’re Fired”, all I could feel in that moment was everything I had worked so hard for crumbling to the ground. As if it weren’t enough. As if I had not done a good job. When what I should have felt is relief that the commander-in-chief of our partnership was sending the wounded infantry (…Me) to the hospital for much needed rest and healing.

“You are enough. You are more than good enough. And you’ve done more than your fair share.  It’s my turn,” you said.

Thank you for being the type of partner who refused to stand in my way as I plowed through every roadblock possible to achieve what I deemed as success. And for saving my life as I unwaveringly stood on that front line of our businesses every single day, before dawn, weary and exhausted, overwhelmed, out of control and lost so far away from my own self, that I couldn’t find my way home.

The delicate balance of supporting your partner between their success and their demise is a decision that I never understood that you had to wrestle with daily.  I do now.

Thank you for handing me a pink slip and allowing me the space to find my way back home, to myself.

With love,

Your Wife