Phase 1: the year of change is almost nearing an end. Hopefully the whole sorry affair will be slightly forgotten come 2012.
There's not a day goes by that I don't have a practice conversation explaining why my marriage broke down, as if talking to my son or step kids when they inevitably ask. I've come up with near thirty different reasons I would guess to validate myself and yet a sense of guilt lingers. Hopefully I will be vindicated in time and rest easy in later life. 
I do feel like I was a caterpillar who spent thirty odd years wriggling on his belly in the dirt and then went quiet for three months, only to announce that he was now to be a butterfly and that everyone who held him down could Fuck Off. Then that butterfly decided that he would rather fly solo until his dying day than even land his feet on the shit coveted floor again. 
Hallelujah. 
Praise be the winds of change.