Back again

This is a very personal post but one I need to share. I would never put it on Facebook. This is the place I share the realest parts of me and I’m very selective about who I let in. I feel safe to write these things. Writing has always been the way I cope, and the 14 year old poet in me that begged her friends to listen to her writing would get such a big kick out of this place.

I learned a long time ago that the writing is for me. I need so desperately for some of these feelings to leave my head. I need now to hold myself accountable for the decision I made for myself. Because I’ve betrayed myself for so long, time and again. Even when my best friend and sister were saying it would never end. Even now when my mom is saying in clear terms I am NOT to take him back, I don’t trust myself completely.

I’ve been in love with a narcissist for over two years. Having been totally screwed up after my second divorce made me the perfect target for abuse. How can I know love from a man when I see it when I’ve chosen so wrong for myself? Why did I never see myself clearly? Why do I pick assholes and bullshitters and raging alcoholics?

I’m 41 years old, and I know it’s time to stop blaming my father who was the first raging alcoholic bullshitting narcissist that never validated my worth...or the older boy in my life who sexualized me at 4...or my step father who got a little weird and then disappeared from my sister’s and my life...or my first husband who was mean and who abandoned our children...or my second husband who just quit one day...and now Jamie.

Just looking at his name I still have so much sweetness for him. He was just like my dad. Big promises. The coolest and sweetest guy. It started because he was left by his wife and he was a mess, and I just thought I saw in him the ability to love someone so much, it devastated him. I saw the way I love in his heartache. Someone who would never quit.  

It should have ended the first time a gun was involved, but I already loved him so much I burned up my car engine driving to Knoxville at all hours of the day and night to be with him. My feelings for I-40 are multidimensional. And I had myself a wild, romantic time.

I used to record all the days we were together. It was the thrill of my life and he taught me things about my heart and body I had never been sure of.  He leaves me with confidence to move onward and upward.  While I have been conditioned for sick men to penetrate my world, I have been conditioned too to survive them.

He gave me a black eye right before last Christmas.  I walked around with the evidence of all I had endured in that relationship to date: really strange correspondence with an old girlfriend and even more disgusting pictures and texts from the ex-wife he claimed to despise (I could have spared myself so much pain with the first lie that he had been divorced for “about a month” when we met...troublesome as that really is anyway, he had only been out of his house for about a month...but he hooked me by the time I figured this out...this broken man needed me...and I saw him through his divorce).

It could have been done when he smashed the board where I hand painted all our dates.  That was the first time he hit me.

And I’m pretty sure I did the apologizing after.

Then the truth that cheated on me with a woman described as having “uninvitedly grabbed more dicks” (This will be mentioned again later on in the story).  A bar whore at the bar I was now a regular at.  She fell in love with him and went crazy when he wouldn’t leave me to the point that she did all the things that opened my eyes.

He hated his wife for cheating and boasted of his moral compass.  He got me with the line that he was just looking for a true friend, and I believed him.  I didn’t think he could do it.  I saw how shattered he was when it was done to him.

But late one night there it was: a Facebook Messenger message from Laura.  Man, I knew it about her at least.  When she broke girl code once and sat on the other side of him instead of me...and twice when she invited me to a pool party and told me that he would be there...we had already been together for over a year and 10,000 miles...why was she telling me about my man?

He said that long distance relationships never worked out, but I knew I could do it.  What would I not do for the hope of my forever love? I thought I knew so much having been through so much and not making the same mistakes twice, I would never quit.  

When the truth was in front of me, I was the best version of myself- at least in terms of minding my mouth and emotions.  I became the best detective.  I watched her unravel through those messages when I kept staying another day.  The whole bar was talking.  For as little as it’s worth, he was embarrassed.  Everyone knew she was inheriantly gross.  I walked in that bar with my head held high, knowing what they all must think of me- so fucking sad- but I supported my man who still maintained that nothing happened.

The next time, when she was there, she left her seat at the bar and came out to the deck and sat down across from us.  I would claim that I am very smart about people, but I’ve let this man I’ve lived with now 5 months get away with so much, believing he was just messed up and time would reveal his true heart and soul...but I did know she was about to start something.  And the fact that “Your Cheating Heart” was playing on the jukebox did not escape me.

She bought me a drink.  When he left the table, she started to unload.  But I told her I already knew everything and I wouldn’t let her disrespect my man to my face when she started the sentence, “he’s being a douche.”  But then she followed me into the bathroom.  I didn’t let her talk, still, but instead told her, woman to woman, she didn’t know MY man or what she might be getting herself into.  

He texted her hateful messages because of this with my knowledge, and I was glad for her to see this part of him.  And when she texted me with clear words: he cheated on me, I just handed the phone to him.  And he told a watered down version of the truth with many omissions.

Spring Forward

Friday: Fit in a size smaller jeans after running and training for softball for 40 days.

I've been working on transforming myself into a jock because of all this unused sex energy.  It had been nine months.  

I've been doing a little naughty text business with an old friend.  Panty shots and lots of sexy words.  Working myself into a frenzy.  I've been sore since the beginning of February.

Saturday: Old friend sleeps over, actually hiding downstairs from my children.  (#2 left me the perfect house to fuck, a whole bottom of a house to myself.  It was the same day I learned that he's moved to the big city into an apartment, free of all obligations, just like he wanted.)  It was the right day to fuck someone else.

Spring forward.

I've spent all day recovering from the two bottles of wine I drank last night to be able to have sex with someone else.  For my part, I know I was good.  Nervous, possibly neurotic, but my body was made for pleasure, and I know it.  I'm really left feeling, though, disappointed by it.  He was good.  Strong at times but not nearly satisfying.  He's my old friend so it was a little right and a little wrong.  He's been there for me for so much of my life.  I hope he got what he needed from me.  I'm just not sure.  What a strange thing to be pushing 40 and still be so unsure.

I guess the experience has left me wondering if anyone will love me as good as I was once loved, the terrible truth that I do not tell myself that #2 was my soul mate and I chased him away because I am selfish and sad.  I'm left just wanting to be completely overcome by a man, and fucked and fucked and fucked until I forget.

I should have told this story:

My children's father lives in NOLA.  If I lived in Louisiana too, this dude would have a big ass picture on the most wanted child support offender douchebag list for the state.  He would be #3.  

He pretty much turned his back on them when #2 came into our lives.

In all these years since, I have been in fear of taking my kids to NOLA, a place I have a deep history with and love for; I have been afraid my kids want to find their father.  I don't know where he is.  Maybe I could get some child support if I did.

But we did go this year for the first time, and it was the right thing for us.  They didn't ask about him once.

We did, however, run into him the very first place we went to (Walmart, of course)!  We were walking in directly behind him, us from the left of the parking lot and him from the right.  My best girlfriend of over 20 years was in front with my daughter, and I was behind with my son.  

I could not believe it.  I know he saw her and I know he saw our daughter.  She is quite a bit different than the last time he saw her, but I know he put two and two together.  I saw his face.

And he got his cart and walked off.

I was stunned and processing what was happening as quickly as I could.  He walked off...definitely in character.

Luckily my girlfriend had present of mind and suggested that we go somewhere else because there was someone we didn't want to see.  And my kids didn't realize who they had seen before them.  I mean they wouldn't, I guess.

Like a Badge

The divorce was final on January 14, the same day my sweet old man cat died.  He was the cat I had insisted we adopt into our fold after we bought our house and some time had passed of him running to us after school like clockwork everyday.  I loved him so much.  It was cancer.  Cause, you know, fucking cancer...it was a heartbreaking loss for the kids and I.  

I didn't know my divorce was final until a few weeks later when the car insurance guy wanted to remove me from the policy.  So both my (ex)husband and the car insurance guy found out I was divorced before I did.  I will admit there was a tear inside (and a pissed off call to my lawyer), but I think there were only four tears.  And I haven't cried again since.

He doesn't know our cat died.  I know he's happy to be rid of me (I could absolutely see his family throwing a party, probably happened); but I think he would be quite sad to know our friend died.  I do still believe that he is mostly good.  He is too unfortunately a great big bullshitter and a coward, too, and that really gets in the way of all the other good qualities of a person.  So it seems.

He is a quitter, and a liar, and a deserter, and he hurt my kids while knowing better.  I feel these thoughts, and the love only lingers a little still.  Mostly I just feel myself growing stronger by the moment.

Surviving

3/4 of the school year, almost

With the most challenging students of my career;

A sick child and months of tests,

All the appointments;

Juggling and hoping so hard nothing falls;

Being divorced- I mean, someone else doing the divorcing, and you are the one who is left,

And especially the void of where he used to be in this house;

So many sad dreams, almost nearly gone now;

Celibacy;

Then Christmas;

The first snow storm, and the second, too;

Single parenthood,

Now Death.

Everyday I learn 

Since you left,

I tried to nurse our sick cat back to health and failed.  I had to teach my son about hurting so that a soul you love can be free.

I have bucked against heartbreak in these months since you left, 

in my damaged child

in the emptiness of our home 

in the broken pieces of a future

You promised.

I have dug my nails in and I am climbing to a place you will never see.  We weren't meant to have forever, and I can see that now.  You can't go where I am going.

One day soon, all that will remain is pity for you, if there is anything at all.

I wear each day like a badge now.  

The One Thing I Had

I signed the marriage dissolution agreement today.

Like the first time I signed divorce paperwork, I felt nothing.  

I've come a long way since dreaming of him every night and waking up in disbelief and heartache.  I've come nearly all the way in my mind, believing again that I am so much better off and most certainly better than him.  

I saw him on the 4th of this month.  I had made it 6 months without him, and I grow stronger by the day.  I always told him that I could not make it without him, in an effort to reassure him; but it was never true.  He knew it, too.  I was always too strong for him.  And the one before him.  I am unrelenting when it comes to my children.

Yes, it is the hardest time of my whole life just like he said It would be, and I am utterly abandoned but not alone.  I grow strong from the incredible women around me, my mother and my sister.  It was always us.  It will always be us.  And now my children, too.  When I think of that brief time in my life when I felt, completely, in love, I remember that the cost was at my children's expense.  I could never do it.  I never did.  I never will.

He asked it always; he threatened it, really.  What would I do without him?

I still play those conversations in my head: what awful things his family must say, the way he's spun his side of it.  Oh to be a fly on the wall after our mediation when I stormed in with my dark hair and my demands.  And I got everything I asked for, immediately.  My mother said it best, "who exactly does he think he is fucking with?"

Today is our anniversary.  We were married by a Justice of the Peace in our Chuck Taylors on the day the world was supposed to end (again).  It just worked out that I signed the marriage dissolution today.  And still, all these painful things before me, I just kind of felt nothing.

There was a printed email waiting for me after I signed the MDA with all the account information he had that I needed.  I walked to my car and looked it over...he refers to me in it as his soon to be ex-wife.  Yeah, I bet he can't wait.

The one thing I had was that I felt nothing.  But he feels glad. 

Some Day This Pain Will Be Useful to You

The mediation is tomorrow.

As the Days Turn Into the Nights

I've now moved into the part where there's no fear that the phone will ring, no hope that the phone will ring.

I'm trying desperately to make peace with the idea that there's no love- in that way- for me.  I am loved completely in my life, and I tell myself everyday.  That this way is even better...I do what I want the second I want to do it, there's no hassling with others' old boring stories that drag on and on, no mind fucks, no more "there's nothing wrong (I just need space)!"

I loved him to my soul and getting over those way down deep whimpers is the hardest part...I loved him all the way down to the place where I would have jumped in front of a moving train, would have committed any crime to save him.  He was my family.  I was certain we would have each others' backs into forever.  He betrayed me in every way; I remained loyal all the way down.

Knowing everything now that came to pass, knowing now how the end was written, I believe less in my delusions of what it was and more in the facts.  My son is seeing a psychologist again, and that has everything to do with being abandoned by the second father figure who said he would never leave.  I'll never understand it as long as I live so fuck the memories of him tucking me into bed and telling me I'm his princess.  Fuck the feeling of being safe in someone's arms.  Fuck being loved during the holidays.

Our mediation is in one week.  It's been six months since he left.  I'm terrified to see him.  I dyed my hair dark.  I think I'm going to be a huge bitch, and then the kids are going to have a great Christmas.