Playground

August 10th is a hard day for me.  I wrote a very long very rambling blog about this anniversary last year. It was the day my ex-husband and I got married, and the day my father died (different years).  My father died on my 10 year wedding anniversary.  And a year later my ex-husband and I opened our marriage a couple of days after our anniversary.  And a year after that we were separated.  And a year after that we were divorced.  And this year, well.. it’s been a while.

It took a long long long time, but I finally accepted I’ll never really understand what happened with my ex-husband and me.  And it’s been a couple of years longer than that with the loss of my father and I accepted I’ll never fully understand that either.  Thinking about both of them isn’t the white hot poker of pain it once was.  I suppose my active mourning is over and I’ve moved on.  But some associations are so huge they’ll never be erased, and so.. August 10th.

For some reason this week I was thinking of the little things I miss about my ex-husband.  I’ll just say that I’ve been nostalgic and not bore you with a list.  I had this vivid memory though, a time I’d nearly forgotten.

He and I took a walk in our neighborhood.  We were just wandering around at night like I like to do.  I still do this sometimes, get driven out of my house in the dark to wander.  I’ve done it my whole life.  We were walking in salt lake Hawaii, a million years ago, some time in 2000.  We walked into a park and played on the swings and the slide and the jungle gym.  We crawled up into this kid’s play thing with the bridge and the rope net and laid on our backs looking at the sky and talking.  It was late and we were just talking and talking and talking.  We knew it was something like 2am, and we were both in the military and knew we had to get to work at 530am or so, but we just weren’t ready to stop talking or to head home.  I had this moment where I knew laying there with him that I’d love him forever.  He was talking about something with his job and telling me his reaction to things and it was about how he wanted to do good and how someone kept getting in the way of this task, and how small it made him feel, to struggle like that at work with someone.  He wasn’t thinking about what he was saying to me. He was just so unguarded.  He talked about his fear in the situation and I remember seeing him then as he must have been as a boy.  I saw right down into his marrow.  I loved every drop of goodness in him and I teared up with love for him, thanking the stars it was dark so I wouldn’t break the spell.

We ended up kissing and talking and petting each other until just before dawn.  And we made love on that jungle gym with wild abandon.  We forgot where we were and paid no attention to anything but each other, fucking long and hard and fast and slow, completely naked on a playground in a big empty park.  We kissed and kissed, sharing breath with each other, looked into each other, got lost in each other.  I could not breathe but I could not stop kissing him and I could not stop moving with him.  When we both came he was still hard for a long time, and I rode him again, slowly, with our eyes locked together.  He couldn’t come again that fast and I didn’t care about an orgasm for myself either.  We just wanted to keep the spell.  We stopped after a bit because it was getting light.  We dressed in the chill damp morning light, giggling at ourselves staying up all night talking and fucking in a park.  I didn’t shower for work that day.  I wanted to smell like him.  God that was a long time ago.  It was a whole other universe ago.  After the divorce I dug up the letter he wrote me that morning.  I had forgotten all about it.

In the letter he’d talked about the night we’d just had, and told me that he knew on the jungle gym, when we were talking and before the sexy stuff, that he would love me forever.  It was about the time I’d known that about him too.

And it’s true.  I think I’ll love him until the day I die, and not being with him and not having contact with him and being divorced from him doesn’t change that a whit.  I think we were right.  I know I’ll love him forever.  And I hope his new life makes him happy, and I hope he is surrounded by love and life and happiness.  I hope he lives a long long time and is always well loved.

There is a selfish part of me that hopes that someday he will remember me with fondness too.

But even if he doesn’t, I have to thank him from afar for all that we were.  I’ve said this a lot.  All relationships were meant to be.  They just weren’t all meant to be forever.  Maybe things ended because they needed to.  Maybe it was just our time.  As much as it hurt and as hard as it was, I think we are both okay.  I think maybe we are even both happy.  I probably would have stayed with him forever if I could have and I don’t honestly know that that would have been the right thing for us.  Maybe it doesn’t really matter.

I’ll just love him.

Seasons

So I haven’t written much because I was processing stuff internally and because I don’t like to communicate via blog.  Cleveland doesn’t read this a lot, but still.

I think we are breaking up.  I said I’d sleep on it, and I will.

It’s hard and shitty and sad. And I’m not sure.  But it’s been a long time coming.  We started to get frustrated talking and decided to sleep on it.  It’s murky.  I know I love him.  I know that I love spending time with him and talking to him and doing things with him and fucking him.  I know I love his sweetness and his intelligence and his lovely dirty mind.  I love podcasting and talking about bloggy things.  I love how good he is at so many things.  And I love his interests.  I’d like to have him in my life.

But I can’t keep doing this.  And I feel TERRIBLE for it.  But it is simply the truth.  This hurts too much.  We don’t really have the room to have a relationship and it just doesn’t work.  I want it to, but it doesn’t.  We’ve had this talk before and I asked for things, the bare minimums for what I thought I needed.

It's Just a Thing

Isn’t it funny the things you get attached to?  I teared up a bit bringing my car home from my friend’s house tonight.  It was just for a second, but still.

I have to sell the car because the repair bills when something breaks are difficult for me to pay, and I have to sell it now because it’s a stick shift and I broke my foot and can’t drive it.  I’m moving on and just bought a different automatic car that is really awesome and I love.. but still.

It’s the end of an era!  I bought my beautiful mini-cooper S in 2006.  If I could I’d keep it another 10 years.  I have considered learning how to work on it myself so it’d make more sense.  It’s the funnest car I’ve ever driven.  There are faster cars and bigger cars and cars with more utility or whatever.. but my sporty little gem is the funnest car ever.  It has toggle switches!  It has a super charger!  It has sport seats that hug your body while you drive it and it is so responsive it feels like you are WILLING it to go places.  Burning through the gears getting on the freeway feels like you have rockets.  You THINK about turning and it responds.  You feel the road and the panoramic glass and being low like that feels like you are with the road, part of the road.  That alone would make me miss my lovely Clara Bow.  (I named her after the sexy red-headed spit-fire actress from silent film).

But it’s also what she represents.

Tis the Season to Break Up

In the last few days I’ve kinda broken things off with Boss, talked to a dear friend going through a divorce and another with a long anticipated relationship that didn’t grow legs, and another who is parting from his very long-term wife.  It’s going around.  Talking to my first friend going through a divorce, and there in the thick of the most painful bits, I wished I could show her my memories and my mind like something from Harry Potter.  I so feel for where she is at.  I’m just getting out of it myself.  It still looms large in my rear view.  And it sucks, but it does get better.  I have been mourning but also mostly happy this past year.  I realized, I’m doing quite well.

In a bunch of these break up talks, the idea of all the relationships you mourn in a single break-up came up.  There’s the relationship you actually had, the one you dreamed of, the one that now will never be, and the one that really was and could have been.  There is reality, and making the best of it, and hope and dreams and history.  I agreed that it had made me crazy too.  I thought about all those years of sacrifice and sea duty and deployments and long work hours and missed birthdays and holidays and Christmases and whatever that I’d done that for “someday”, a someday that would now never be.  There wasn’t going to be a time when we’d live how we’d dreamed.  We weren’t going to build that big garage and workshop and we weren’t going to build custom motorcycles together or see the Willoughby parades from the end of our street where we lived in our cute little bungalow.  Silver haired “us” is gone.  Poof.

So much loss in a break-up.  Even a pretty small one like Boss and me.  I spent most of yesterday missing him and wanting to talk to him.  I left that up to him, as to how and when and if we’d talk.  I miss chatting here and there all day with him.  It leaves a hole.  But it seems relationship change, like so many things, is inevitable.

I wonder about this desire to have more permanent bonds and how rare they are and how unhappy it makes us to want them so much.  I think about unlikeliness that most of us will get these forever bonds.  Most of us, if we are lucky, have at least a few romantic lives.  I’m certainly not alone out here making my life anew.  LOTS of us break-up and start over and build our new lives.  It is weird that we don’t talk about this as being the way it generally IS.  We talk about trying for forever and that some of us will face loss, but the truth is that MOST of us face loss.  People grow and change and form connections and shit happens.  In fact, shit usually happens.  And then there we are feeling like we’re the only ones, like we failed.  The majority of marriages end in divorce and most relationships don’t last till death.  A lot has been said about this maybe not being the best standard to judge a relationship too.  If both people are alive at the end of a relationship, and they separate to find better ways that work for them, if they shared a time and were happy and grew, is that relationship really a failure?

I'm Divorced

I’ve written maybe 7 rambling posts I’ll never post about this.  Today was my divorce.  It’s official.

I’m kinda more of a wreck than I thought I would be.  I knew I was going to be a wreck, but I’m just raw.  I’ve cried maybe 20 times today.  I balled in my car, open mouthed wracking sobs after it was final.  I cried in the shower and in my bed, and driving to and from the trial.  I cried laying on the floor and in my chair.  I just keep breaking down last night and today.  I guess it’s my final pound of flesh.

Quinky Girl came with me to the courthouse and was there.  Hubby didn’t show.  He said he was too upset and couldn’t make it.  Quinky Girl said that I just shouldn’t have to be in divorce court alone.  Thank God for that.  I broke down crying twice but it would have been way worse without her.  Chicago and Chicago Boy met us at West 5 and we had cocktails and lunch and I had a sundae.  It was nice to be loved.

Maybe It Needed to Hurt

I lost a patient today.  A 32 year old man who came back fucked up from Afganistan, with a wife and three children, and schizophrenia that set in while he was in country, died today.  We don’t know if he messed up taking his meds or if he did it on purpose.  All I could think was about his baby.  She is just over 6 months old and he’s brought her to group a number of times.  She’s a tiny olive-complected child, with soulful brown eyes and a tiny little mouth.  She’s the kind of baby that makes no noise.  She just stares in wonder at everything.  Her name is Sophia.

He’s a funny guy and a good dad.  He always came to group and he knew he has schizophrenia and wanted to do right by his kids.  He worked hard at his recovery, putting together a nice life for his family.  He had a big truck he washed every weekend and a really pretty wife.  He did homework with his kids.  He ushered at his church.

Traveler and Quinky Girl got back into town on Sunday night and I gave them back their keys and got kisses.  I’ve been achingly missing them while they were gone and it was so fucking nice to see them.  I sent Traveler a message yesterday morning telling him that I was looking forward to our date Friday or Saturday but that I really missed him and asking if we could have a dinner or a coffee or something before then.  He said he’d like to see me too and we scheduled Tuesday night, tonight.  We didn’t really have a specific plan.. just something with a snuggle, whatever.  This morning Quinky Girl popped up and asked if I’d like to have a little dinner with her and Traveler during the time I’d planned to have Traveler.  I missed her like crazy too, and I didn’t to miss out on seeing her too, so I said yes, but admitted I also really needed a few Traveler snuggles.  She’s totally cool like that and we set up our dinner.  Later in the afternoon she texted that Peaches was coming too.  I love Peaches and was excited about that, but I was bummed I wouldn’t get my snuggles.  Then my patient died.

Ambivilent

This one has really descriptive sex.. skip it if you’d rather not read that.  🙂  Thanks!

I filed my divorce papers yesterday.  After I filed I went to the nearest coffee shop, feeling like lead.  Ironically it’s the coffee shop where I met Traveler.  I sat where he stood way back then, just for a bit.  Traveler’s Wife, Quinky Girl, and I texted a bit and she said she’d meet me for a drink.  Cleveland and I had a date that night, but I took her up on it and met her at a local place.  By the time I got there I felt a lot better.  I keep vacillating.  It’s been months and months, so part of me is glad to have it wrapping up.  I’m relieved it’s finally resolving.  I’m excited about my new place and I feel like I’m finally really starting over, not just camping and sitting in shock. 

But I also feel phenomenally stupid.  I feel like a failure.  Useless.  Thrown away.  I don’t understand and I can’t understand.  I want there to be a neat reason for it and there just isn’t.  The entire time he has been lying and changing his story.

I don’t know what happened and the more I think about that the more I feel something tear.  Why was he so cruel?  How could he be with me all those years and think the things he thought and said about me?  Did he even believe them?  Was it just an excuse?  He said them to RollerGirl too later, when she became the bad Madonna and another girl the Whore.  He lied to her as much as he lied to me.  He’s lying to the dog walker too.  Lies lies lies.

Quinky Girl’s very presence was a balm.  I keep having to remember it doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t make sense.  And life is like that.  We talked about honesty and relationships before Traveler and Cleveland arrived.  When Traveler came she asked him to sit with me and give me snuggles because it’d been an eventful day.  I kissed her face for her generosity.  We had a good dinner and some laughs.  Cleveland arrived in time for happy hour tacos too.

What was that all about?

I went out with a friend Friday and in the middle of a really good conversation I started to cry.  I was embarrassed.  I didn’t know why I was crying at first and afterwards I kept revisiting it.  What was that all about?

She was talking about her life and I was listening intently, deep in what she was saying, and then suddenly I was crying.  It was a simple acknowledgement, one I’ve personally made long long ago, but it just felt so fresh.  It pained me deeply that this beautiful thing she has might one day fall apart too.

I want so badly to believe that sometimes it stays.  I know a relationship’s length isn’t a measure of its success and often the end is the healthiest thing.  Staying forever just to rack up anniversaries or limp along unhappily is a fucking shame.  It’s a waste of life.  We have one precious existence here.  One.  And to stay unhappy is a much much sadder and bigger travesty than the simple fact that most relationships end.  Most of them end.  I know this and I’ve known it forever.  It’s why I avoided relationships for so long.  It’s why I had casual sex and casual things for so long before I committed.  If I never really got vulnerable then I could never really be hurt.

The fear of being hurt kept me from pursuing connection, love, and happiness.  I wasn’t hurt, but I also didn’t live.  I wanted to have the beauty of the thing.  I wanted it.  So I loved.  I risked it knowing full well what I was risking.  I didn’t have the fairytale beliefs of most girls.  I got married.  Twice.  I was young and stupid the first time and chose better the second and it still ended.  There were years and years of happiness and then there wasn’t.  Then there was unbelievable and senseless betrayal and cruelty and meanness.  Then there was everything I ever feared.  I remembered being in my happy marriage, having survived so much together and come out the other side, thriving.  I thought we’d never be where we were.  I actually stopped fearing it.  My entire life I’ve been processing abandonment and I finally and fully trusted and I was wrong.

I’m creating a better bedrock for myself.  I’m relying on myself and I’m good at being alone.  I’ve been a Navy wife for years and one thing it taught me was how to be utterly independent and self-reliant.  I’m relying on friends and on my loves too and I am honestly so blessed to have such loving people in my life.  I’m building a better thing and I have to admit that most of the time I’m pretty happy.  I’m healing.  But every now and then I hit a little landmine.

And here’s one.

I’m afraid.  It’s all fine and good to say that I’m good at being alone and it’s utterly true.  But I don’t want to be alone forever.  I don’t want to.  I know most relationships end but I really really really want to think that sometimes they don’t.  I’m not talking just about romantic relationships either.  If I could even have faith that this friend and I were going to do this.  There’s a part of me that misses the lie of monogamy so badly it stings.  I miss that false security, feeling like “we” will tackle the world.  Feeling like the thing we made was this really solid thing instead of a series of promises we could break.  We had a ceremony and a paper.  We had financial things and a common last name.  We were a family.  We raised a foster daughter and had years of shared experience.  We had pets and furniture and things we’d collected together.  We had routines and history and a deep understanding of one another.  We’d been through the worst things together and survived and grew.  We had so many beautiful experiences and so many dreams.  Somehow I was able to finally buy the lie and I miss it.

And the truth of all of it is that all of it is temporary and all of it ends.  I have ALWAYS known this.  I grew up never doubting this.  My mom left, three times.  My father sent me away once.  My mother married five times and my father married four.  I saw people make absolutely sincere promises many many many times and none of that lasted.  It just didn’t.  Most of my friend’s parents were divorced too.  People remarried and divorced again.  I don’t know anyone who still lives next to the elementary school best friend they promised they would one day live next door to.  We grow and change and change some more.  Things are ever shifting.  It is simply a truth of the universe.  We get the time we get with people and with places and all of that changes again.  People don’t work one job or live in one house or stay married to one person forever anymore.  And things changed even when they did.

I don’t mean to sound like everything is dark, because I don’t feel that.  Things being temporary doesn’t make them less precious.  It makes them more-so.  A rainy evening learning to weld with Cleveland is a beautiful thing, maybe even more beautiful that it’s rare, the first time you welded, this thing you always wanted to do and you did it together.  A tiny moment on a Sunday, fishing in World of Warcraft and watching football with Traveler, him leaning over and into you, curling up for a brief snuggle, his warmth and the smile you can’t help, these things are wonderful and I don’t regret them or diminish them by saying that they may end.  Hell.. if I KNEW with utter certainty my heart would be broken by my loves I would still sign up for this to not miss the experience.  Falling in love with Traveler and putting that out there and being vulnerable enough to let him in, even while I’m mourning, has been one of the most beautiful experiences of my life and it just gets better.  Learning all about Cleveland’s weird little world.. it’s magic falling in love.  It’s worth all of the pain and fear.   It’s beyond worth it.

So why the crying?  Well.. knowing and accepting something doesn’t mean that I don’t feel the pain and sadness of it.  I’m afraid.  It doesn’t make me not love and I don’t want to shut off to avoid feeling pain or loss, but I do have to acknowledge that I am afraid.  And maybe it’s okay to be afraid.  I’m allowed to miss my old certainty.  I’m allowed to miss feeling so sure.  It was wonderful.  I’m lucky I ever felt that at all.  And for that matter, things being over does not erase what was.  It doesn’t make the love we felt less real or the things we made less true.  I’m not wallowing in this fear or allowing it to rule my life or keep me from building trust or love or from being vulnerable or real.  I’m happy most of the time and I feel like I am living well.  I had a moment with my friend that I got a little too close to that landmine of fear and I cried.

Good.

I’m glad I’m not still so afraid I can’t feel or admit that I feel.  I need to remember how long and how hard I worked to be here, making a fool of myself with a woman I trusted enough to be real with.  I’m doing what you always have to do with fear.  I’m asking myself why I have this fear and what I need.  I’m addressing it the best that I can and moving on.  I’m trying to live with courage, and courage isn’t acting in the absence of fear, it’s acting in spite of it.

Old Comfortable Love

This beautiful post was shared by a Ginger at “Poly Nirvana”, and I have to share it too.  It’s achingly true.

Old Love is Not Like Comfortable Slippers by Poly Oliver, at “An Open Book”.

THAT is what I had.  THAT is what I lost.  THAT is why I took so very very long to walk away and why me, a girl who would never tolerate such things, sucked up abuse for almost a year.  I kept thinking any day that he would turn back into himself.  And he didn’t. 

Love Abounds

My dog died today.  She became sick a few days ago and I found out because the Vet accidentally called me.  I still don’t know exactly what was wrong with her or what the vet said or what the treatment options were because my husband won’t share info with me or answer questions.  He did let me see her though.

I came to the house today and spend a few hours with her.  You could see her come and go in her eyes.  A few times her one eye rolled back in her head and had spasms.  She stood most of the time, looking confused.  She nearly fell a few times, she was so weak.  She had a huge accident right before I got there and threw up while I was there.  She was too weak to lower herself down to lay down, so I helped her.  I laid with her and petted her belly a while.  Her breathing was rapid for a bit, but she calmed when I lay with her and she drifted off to sleep when I sat up and she was mostly in my lap.  She was peaceful for a good long time in her sleep.

I told her everything I felt about her and thanked her again and again.  I told her she was a good dog and that I loved her and how grateful I was for her love all these years.  She helped me raise my stepdaughters and supported me through two of my husband’s deployments, the loss of my father, and so many times when I needed affection or love.

Every dog walker or dog sitter we’ve ever had has offered to watch her for free just to be with her because she was just such a loving and gentle soul.  Three friends visited her for the therapeutic value of her love and acceptance.  She just radiated good.  I’ve never met a human or animal that radiated that kind of utter goodness and love.  Many people over the years commented on it.  I consider myself blessed to have shared my life with such an amazing being.

When my husband threw me away for Rollergirl, leaving Leeloo (my dog) was actually harder than leaving him.  I don’t make a lot of money and couldn’t afford a place with a dog or the care and feeding of a dog.