Well, Cry, Honey, Then Fly!

By Miosotis Jones

In Well, Cry, Honey, Then Fly, Miosotis Jones tells her unforgettable, floundering story of emotional alchemy, often for her children's sake, and her newfound desire to help others overcome the pain and suffering after a breakup that will resonate with anyone who's still suffering from heartbreak. This two-part memoir also offers result

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Native Publishers
• Release date: Dec 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798869052605

Book preview

Well, Cry, Honey, Then Fly!

Discover the Alchemy of Divorce, embracing a new beginning.

First English Edition 2023

2023 © Miosotis Jones / Bigger Purpose, Inc.

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without the publisher's and author's written permission.

Editor: Maria Lewytzkyj-Milligan

Disclaimer

This book is a memoir. Throughout this narrative, I've made every effort to faithfully reconstruct the timeline of events, the various places I`ve ventured, and the profound conversations I've had in person or through email exchanges with the individuals mentioned in this book. In addition, I've drawn upon the journals I maintained during that period. To safeguard their privacy, I've opted to alter their names. As for myself, I've chosen to retain my own name, a testament to embracing both my vulnerabilities and achievements during the most pivotal moments of my life.

This includes daring to pursue my dreams, even when the person I initially shared those aspirations with was no longer by my side.

To

My children for being my best teachers in patience and unconditional love.

& The three bravest women who have inspired my inner strength:

My mother, Andrea Jones, for her integrity, tenacity, and generosity.

The trilogy of my life, Angela Ortega, for being a sister, mother, and best friend. My dear Josephine Al Hadad, for being an example of dedication and devotion to the family.

Table Of Contents

Introduction

PART ONE

Chapter 1 Emotionally Naked.

Chapter 2 Travel to Philadelphia

Chapter 3  Back home

Chapter 4 Breaking the News to His Parents

Chapter 5 Innocence Torn

Chapter 6:  How? When? Why?

Chapter 7:  The Confrontation

Chapter 8 The Accident

Chapter 9 Sleeping Pills

Chapter 10 You Don’t Need Him

Chapter 11 At the Right Time: Axel

Chapter 12 A Matter of Time

Chapter 13 Jordi, at the Speed of Light

Chapter 14 My Life is a Mess

Chapter 15 One More Child

Chapter 16 The Coliseum Theater

Chapter 17 Yassira

Chapter 18 Mother-in-Law

Chapter 19 From Mistress to Stepmother

PART TWO

Introduction

Chapter 20 You Are Not Alone

Chapter 21 Grieving Love

Chapter 22 Empowerment

Chapter 23 Reinvent Yourself

Chapter 24 Planning your Goals

Chapter 25 The Power of Intention

Chapter 26 Emotional Distance

Chapter 27 Love With Detachment

Chapter 28 Relationship with Partner & Relationship with Parents

Chapter 29 Suicide and Depression

Chapter 30 Learning to Forgive

Chapter 31 Build a Toolbox Especially for You

My Reflection to Wisdom

Book and Audiobook Recommendations

Acknowledgments and Special Thanks

About the Author

PostScript

Introduction

I had an uncomplicated plan for when I grew up by the time I was twelve. When I grow up, I will have a family of my own. I’ll be a wife and a mother, and I will grow old with my husband. On a warm summer day, I waved goodbye to my mother, after hugging her dearly, and stood at the passenger door to my father’s car, reminding myself of my plan. Looking around that warm day, I renewed my commitment. I pictured my future, a beautiful house in a gated neighborhood, a big kitchen, a pool for my kids, and a beautiful garden. On holidays, I would make a big meal for my kids and their families while my husband would play with our grandchildren, making them laugh.

Our immediate plans made my heart flutter as I anticipated my weekend with my father since we always had a wonderful time on our trips. And somehow, I would slip in that I made a commitment to myself that when I grow up, I will have a family of my own.

And this time, I was going to ask my uncomplicated question. Part of me wondered if he’d answer it, considering me too young, but I’d decided to ask the night before, and usually, he didn’t shy away from difficult questions too badly.

My father was the one who would make sense of what married life meant until it didn’t. I still had no idea that it wasn’t that easy. The word until might suggest a brief time—it’s a short word—but here it represents forty years. Plans crash, even though life involves so much planning. We plan meals, birthdays, careers, weddings, vacations, owning a home, making a home, becoming parents, funerals, doctor visits, saving money, how we dress and act, gatherings, and family discussions. And these plans are built on so much we absorb in our lives. Isn’t it what we do for all the details to fit our dreams?

I’ve always filled my life with my big dreams … I believe in love, family, and marriage. I intended to combine my visit with my father with an unmistakable opportunity to answer my questions about marriage and fill my deepest desire with the potential of something better than my mother and father had. Maybe I could learn from their mistakes someday. However, for now, I have an uncomplicated question to ask. Although it may seem like a lot to hope for, in my mind, this was simplified to having my children within the bonds of wedlock and a faithful husband to grow old with by my side. Achieving this would be a rarity in my family, but it was a dream I held dear. I was determined to make it happen. To me, marriage represented the happily ever after my mother couldn’t have.

I was just understanding romantic love. My own observations about my parents’ marriage and divorce reside in my mind like a frame that I slowly painted layer after layer hoping to fulfill an image I was imagining.

I sat down in the car, hugged my dad, said hello, and off we drove on our way to his girlfriend Milagros’ house. A few miles down the road, I decided to ask.

By that time, he had already divorced his second wife, Emy. His beautiful, charismatic girlfriend, Milagros, lived with her daughter in the city of Cotuí, about twenty-five minutes by car from Pimentel, the town where we lived. She had a very nice house. I remember how immaculate, clean, and spacious it felt. Everything is arranged in the right place. I loved it when my father took us there on the weekend because she always treated us very well and showed her affection toward us, unlike Emy, who rarely shared with us.

I leaned over to the radio dial and turned down the volume. As always, my father had the music on full blast.

Daddy, are you going to marry Milagros?

Milagros is not a woman for me to marry, he answered me emphatically.

But why not? She is nice and pretty.

Yes, she’s a good person, and she’s a good-looking woman. And I feel good with her, but it won’t go any further from there.

Why? I asked, confused.

My father cleared his throat. Look, Miosotis, let me tell you something. In life, there are only two kinds of women: one to marry and one to have fun with.

But, Daddy, how do you know? I didn’t understand why she wasn’t a woman to marry since she seemed perfect for a wife and stepmother to me.

Well! Because I am a man of the world, he said.

But how do you decide who is a woman to marry and who is for the other?

That’s not for me to decide. That’s for the woman to decide, he replied with a hand gesture as if clearing himself of guilt before returning his hand to the gearshift.

I still didn’t understand, but I was embarrassed to ask him any more questions. I didn’t want my daddy to think I was still a silly, little girl who didn’t understand anything. But finally, driven by my great curiosity about the subject, I asked him another question.

How does the woman decide?

I told you. There are only two categories of women, one for marriage and one for fun, and each woman chooses which of the two categories she belongs to. He set his sights on the long road ahead.

That’s all? I thought.

Until, raising the index finger of his hand in warning, he said, Get that straight in your head.

That seemed to fit my need for an explanation sufficiently. I understood the importance of my father’s warning. From that day on, I vowed to belong to the category of those who would get married since it was part of my plan, my dream. That belief in what kind of woman I’d become stuck with me to this day, but I had no idea yet about how people sometimes blur these categories, making things unclear about marriage and women’s choices and how the laws of the universe happen to sometimes mix up the two, no matter how I imagined my future marriage.

My father told me that the following weekend if my mother gave us permission, my brother, Rodrigo, and I could spend it with him at Milagros’ house. My mother agreed.

I kept thinking about my father’s words for the rest of the week. The category thing is serious.

As we prepared to go visit with him again—my brother and I—my mother sent me to change my clothes. She didn’t find my outfit suitable for the occasion because it was too short. I put on another dress with a skirt below the knees. And Mom told me to pass on the other dress to my younger sister Camile.

I thought if Milagros dressed in a more appropriate way for the occasion, she could change to the other category so my father would marry her. I never doubted that my father was absolutely right about the importance of categories. However, I still believed that Milagros would be perfect as a wife and stepmother.

Their relationship ended soon after Christmas. My father told me that she had gone to live out of the country. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone and went to bed early. I thought that maybe if I had told her about moving to the other category, my father would have married her.

I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t live happily ever after … forever. I didn’t know that marriage was not a fairy tale until I got married. Not until near the end of those forty years, when I was facing a divorce, fear of losing my children and starting all over again from a place that roughly resembled a cave in the middle of an arid desert with no access to running water, a spiritual vacuum, and me I no longer recognized. Not until I realized that finding your prince and living happily ever after was a lie. It took a great amount of effort and self-study, as you will see in Part 1 before I could begin to stop making sense of others’ emotions among the laws of the universe and recognize that some people marry forever and others marry several times, while others remarry after time in between.

I was divorcing when my younger self had promised throughout life not to let that happen to me. I did the only thing I could do: I resisted.

When we got married in 1999, we made such big plans, adjusting when we needed to for the sake of our marriage. We started with a huge love bank account and a large student debt due to his medical studies. We lived at his parents’ house for a year until my mother gave me the deposit to buy our first house. Fortune smiled on us for many years, until, unfortunately in 2008, we lost all our assets. Just when I thought the worst was over, I discovered that my husband had a new mistress—his third. It shook my belief in love, family, and marriage as I thought about everything that it took to build and pursue life with the same passion I always had. But, somehow he lost his connection in our marriage, and he started to live a very different code of life. Some days I felt like he wanted to have the freedom of a single man, while the rest of the time, he seemed very happy with his married life.

This was more than I could bear, so I approached him about a divorce. Incredible as it may seem to you, a year later, I came back to forgive him and give our relationship one last chance. I had to stay committed to my family and my marriage. It was not an easy road, but we had to try, and with the same determination, we started to rebuild our marriage again.

You might ask why, or you may be struggling yourself about why you haven’t left your marriage, but if you’re not ready, you’ll know if and when you’re ready. I blamed myself, and you may too, but that feeling will be there until you let other vulnerable moments and feelings in. That’s what my story will share in Part 1 of this book. Part 2 offers the results of the transformation and emotional growth I floundered through so that it can help guide you toward infinite possibilities in overcoming the suffering that stems from a breakup and the emotional process of learning resilience. Beyond the struggle and tapping into my wounds for strength, I had to realize that my ex-husband and I were having very different awakenings about who we were. And our marriage in and of itself wasn’t the foundation we could share to awaken ourselves since we didn’t share the same code of life.

Even sharing these intimate, personal experiences in this memoir exposes those vulnerable moments more than I ever wished, but my desire to help others overcome the pain and suffering after a separation or divorce has become a personal mission. My misconceptions and perceptions about my search for love, marriage, and divorce had made me lose touch with the most important partner in my life—myself. Finding myself meant looking at these moments in my life more deeply to understand myself, to piece myself together, and to reinvent myself. How could I even acknowledge my weaknesses, my solidified comfort zone, and whether I could allow our marriage to disintegrate completely? Even at tumultuous turns in our marriage, I held in my suffering. When we went from having a million-dollar-plus house to living in a small, rented house, I never lost faith in us and our family. If we were together, I had it all. That was my comfort, and all else paled.

Until. We were together for almost twenty years until 2013 when he told me he was leaving home. I always thought of myself as a smart woman, but I didn’t see coming. An email from him was sent from our home in Canada. I read it. I thought that my marriage was stronger than ever. Sitting in front of a lawyer I was meeting with about suing a contractor for breach of contract and whose assistant I suspected had destroyed our electrical wiring at our Philadelphia property, I was struck by the full force of my husband’s vague, unclear message. I had been trying to read between the lines of his seemingly coded unclear, ambiguous message overnight, but why was it different?

He was aware of our plans to renovate the property in Philadelphia and then purchase a new house for us in Montreal. However, by the time I returned to Canada, those plans were crashing to the ground. I’d told him about the lawsuit, but all I had received was a strange email. Sitting in front of the lawyer, my heart pounding, I felt ashamed for being weak and vulnerable before a stranger. For me, it was as if my marriage had suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. Perhaps there was still hope and I had to trust—until that bad feeling wouldn’t let go.

Mrs. Jones, are you alright? said the lawyer.

I think my husband is having an affair. The tears were betraying my desire to keep it all inside like I’d done countless times. Here I was handling complications in the very project that I’d reluctantly postponed for our family vacations in the Dominican Republic and Spain earlier that year, and the words tore out of me, my self-protection betraying my conflicted desire to remain private about my life.

The lawyer cut the meeting short, with me carrying out a self-addressed stamped envelope and copy of the contract to review.

The next day, when I arrived by train at Penn Station and headed to Montreal, it hurt me that it was the first time I wasn’t happy to see my husband until nostalgia made the drive home bearable for us both. Unlike the one with my father, I couldn’t bring myself to ask any questions during this car ride. Our daughter, Lisa, and son, Richard, were safe at home or probably with his parents, but our silence said it all: we planned to talk when we got home.

I froze, thinking about the pain this would cause them, crumbling their plans and dreams—ours. Yet, begrudgingly, I couldn't ignore the growing certainty there was nothing left to discuss with him. But the cavernous emptiness inside threatened to swallow me up. I had lived by my code of life, remaining committed, showing him unwavering love and respect, and fully embracing our shared dreams and the daily work of our marriage. For the initial five years, it seemed his commitment mirrored mine. However, after that period, a troubling pattern emerged. Every couple of years, he would become entangled with someone else, and each time I uncovered his infidelity, he'd beg for forgiveness and strive to regain my trust.

I had lived under the illusion that I could preserve what mattered most to me: my belief in love, family, and marriage. Where had he gone? Worst of all, I couldn’t imagine breaking it to Lisa and Richard most of all. Maybe we wouldn’t have to, I still thought.

It’s only after all the units that the stunning replays in my mind of moments when our marriage was coming apart let me feel my alchemy begin to churn. Our expectations of each other changed over twenty years, our dynamics shifted—sure. But how was I thinking that my marriage was stronger than ever, and he was deciding to end it? We’d overcome many obstacles through the years we were together: infidelity, bankruptcy, terminal illness, and many more. So few knew anything about our marital status. Maybe by telling my story, voicing what I almost left behind to prove I could save an impossible dream, and how I blamed everyone including myself, you can see how hard it is to see beyond the pain and suffering that held me to a place that had become a hostile one. A place where love no longer lived, but terror at having my dreams unravel to nothing, faulting myself, tortured me. I was driving forward on misguided fumes that I’d ignored, drained.

When we made it to Montreal, I didn’t see a future or a dream. I was as far from making a choice about how a divorce would affect my life as I could be. There was no