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“I never asked you for
A sailboat in the yard
That fancy dress to wear
A ceiling made of stars…”
-Rosie Thomas
Please know this choice of a song means nothing – nothing except this song and it’s melody has been stuck in my head over the past few days. There’s not a farewell right now – I am working quite hard to do what I’m supposed to do even though it feels rigid and unnatural to me.
The thing is, my husband and I are great friends. Sometimes I think we miss the mark with each other romantically – and it didn’t always seem that way. I wonder why people don’t tell young people that more often. How freakin’ hard marriage is – but then I see my sister preparing for her upcoming wedding and I bite my tongue and say nothing because who wants to be the cynic who says, “Be prepared, keep your eyes open, because life happens, and sometimes you can’t always keep up and it’s hard to nurture your relationship with curveballs coming at you from every direction.”
She’s smarter than I am, though.
Her fiance has no kids. He’s never been married.
Sometimes I think that that ultimately the nucleus of what is wrong with us. Drama from my stepson, drama from the exwife, related money issues, even deeper drama with his son beyond the normal teenage boy stuff. And one too many times, my opinion and feelings were not taken into account and then we end up at this place where I feel like I really don’t matter much.
And I just want to matter.
I’m not good at therapy – it’s only been one session and I guess part of me wants to dig in my heels. Fortunately, I have friends who are snapping me into shape with virtual face slaps – because it IS hard. I dread going back and I dread dealing with issues and I dread sitting there crying while he’s stoic – because I’m an emotional mess and he’s… who he is. He’s emotional in his way, and I am in mine. He talks about the things going on as if he’s reciting a grocery list. Me? I’m honking into a kleenex.
I fight the part of me that says it’s because his feelings are any “less” than mine. They’re just different and he shows ‘em different and I have to accept that. I just wish it wasn’t so freakin’ complicated.
“I’m sick of myself when I look at you
Something is beautiful and true
In a world that’s ugly and a lie
Hard to even want to try
I’m beginning to think…
Baby you don’t know…”
-Matthew Sweet
Our first counseling appointment was Monday. I am not sure how I feel about it, except that I went in feeling an extreme sense of dread and left feeling like I had been run over by a Mack truck and really my first instinct is to RUN LIKE HELL in the other direction because I don’t know if I want to work this hard. I don’t have a lot of faith right now that he’s going to be able to make changes, and I don’t really know how long I have to feel like this – because right now? I’m so so so so sick of being sad.
A friend asked me the other day, “What do you want out of this?” I said that I didn’t want to be sad anymore. He said to me, “But that’s your mistake, you are focusing on what you don’t want instead of what you DO want.” But really? That’s because I have no idea what I want. What I am finding is that the core of who my husband is was definitely rooted long before I met him and even longer before that. The roots of how he is the way he is are pretty deep. I have a hard time feeling confident that someone can essentially change WHO he or she is.
Granted, I have some work to do as well. As the counselor said, it’s certainly on BOTH of us how it got to this point, but he wouldn’t go so far as to call it 50/50. He said that we had a lot of baggage in the room with us (no shit, sherlock… and for this we’re paying you how much an hour?).
I don’t know.
Maybe I’m not the type to be married. Maybe I belong by myself ruling the roost with my kids. Maybe I am the type to be married and we’ll fix it. Please don’t think I’m going into this completely tuning things out and not willing to do the work – because that’s not it. But right now, I am so fucking hurt. I have BEEN so fucking hurt. And I just want someone to unhurt me. Of course, you know, that’s not possible. Can’t undo what’s been done, can’t go back in time. Can’t erase. Can’t change stuff.
And so that’s the thing… I mean – how does it move forward from here? Is he going to be able to overcome his baggage (of which there is far more than I ever knew about and part of me is mad as fuck that he always used to say, “I have no secrets from you – why can’t I read your journal?” which led me to shredding my journals, when in fact he definitely had a secret and that’s not fair. Are there more?).
So – we’ve set our next appointment. We’ll go again on Monday and do some more talking. I don’t know. I spent so much time crying and he’s so clinical – he can be saying the most gruesome thing with this straight faced mask on – “do you feel anything?” But I know he does because while I was out of town last week, he called me. I was at a cocktail party with friends and he called because he couldn’t sleep. He said he was worried about us and needed to talk to someone. So, I left the party for awhile, sat in the lobby of the hotel and talked to him for awhile, telling him we had our appointment coming up and we’d learn what steps we needed to take next. We hung up – and from what he tells me, he was then able to go to sleep.
Me? I had sucked in all of his hurt and the guilt that I had caused that hurt. I proceeded to drink some wine, then some liquor and then more wine. Fantastic game plan, right? Yeah.
Therapist says I overfunction. I worry too much about how other people are going to react to the things I say that instead of saying things, I suck it all in. But he says it’s up to the others to own their own feelings and their own reactions. And that possibly, by my tailoring things to my husband’s mood, he’s become codependent on me – hence him not being able to sleep til I soothed his stress.
Yet… who’s soothing mine?
“Before you met me i was a fairy princess
I caught frogs and called them prince
And made myself a queen
Before you knew me i traveled ’round the world
I slept in castles and fell in love
Because i was taught to dream…”
-Faith Hill
I am only finding covers… which is okay. I like this one. It’s very different than Faith’s version.
“And I don’t know who I am, who I am without you
All i Know is that I should…”
-Missy Higgins
Today doesn’t feel any easier. I feel so insanely claustrophobic right now, I am afraid I will scream if he puts his face near mine one more time to ask if I’m okay, is this okay, do you want me to not go to poker night, do you need me to stay home, if you change your mind you’ll just call me, right?
And part of me holds my tongue because he’s uncertain, and he’s trying, and he’s reaching out and he’s scared. And part of me wants to scream, “BACK OFF! Please, just let me breathe.”
And it makes me realize why I stayed quiet for so long because watching him hurt? It sucks. Being responsible for making someone feel that way? It’s rotten. And I don’t have the words, and I can’t make any guarantees, and the cynic in me fully anticipates that eventually this will blow over and he’ll be back to normal, no longer being cautious and putting the dishes in the dishwasher, and not being patient, and instead drift back to habits.
Last night was a poker night planned long ago, and he asked me, “Do you want me to stay home? I don’t have to go.” I just wanted to breathe, to have a few moments to myself. “Just go,” I told him. “You’ve had this on the calendar for three weeks, it’s fine.”
“Call me ANY TIME if you change your mind,” he said.
He came home at 3.
And that’s fine. I was sleeping – I wasn’t up waiting. I had wrapped myself in blankets and quiet and was sleeping. And this morning, it’s been constant – and I am relieved to have plans with my friend to get out for lunch and maybe a trip to a bookstore and to be away from the pressure of his uncertain eye watching me and analyzing my words and tone of voice. And I feel like an asshole because it is making me crazy – but it is making me crazy. Years of not paying close attention to me replaced by a microscopic gaze all of the sudden. It’s tough to adjust to.
So, tomorrow will be another new day. And I’ll keep having new days. And we’ll get to our first appointment, and figure some shit out. I hope.
“I will let you down
I will make you hurt…”
-Nine Inch Nails
How could my heart break so badly before eight o’clock on a Saturday morning? How can I feel so devastated? Not sure how many tears one cries on average, but I have to figure I’m covered for the next few months.
My husband and I had a come-to-Jesus talk this morning. It has been a long time coming. It was ugly. It was hard. It hurt. The past several weeks have been difficult. We have had a lot of talks about something that has been ongoing – something that was leaving me with the feeling that rather than a wife and partner, I was a housekeeper, a cook, and a whore. And These feelings have been seeping into everything – I was feeling so horrible and so awful that yes, I pulled away and distanced myself from him, and to compound that, he seemed not to notice, not to do anything to reel me back in and basically showed time and time again how little he knew me.
He went away this week. Was gone four nights, and I was absolutely fine. That scared me, actually – that I was so fine. You’d think I would be struggling under the weight of extra duties with the kids – but… I wasn’t. He’s gone so much that it wasn’t more work – if anything, it was less. One less person to clean up after, one less mood to dance around, one less person not flushing after peeing (seriously, I SO wish I were kidding here).
Sure, I slept horribly while he was gone – I sleep so hard when I sleep. I was afraid of a house fire or something requiring me to be awake and alert in the middle of the night. So. I didn’t sleep.
But when he came home yesterday? It was just a huge smothering weight, and I felt lonelier with him home than I did the entire week he was gone. I had been hoping he’d swoop in and take over with our children – hoping he’d say, “Don’t worry about dinner, let me do that.” Instead, I returned from a short walk to find that he’d crashed on the living room floor in a nap, the kids were running amok in the kitchen – trying to get snacks and juice and he slept on oblivious. He even moved upstairs to the bedroom to continue his nap while I took over the parentals.
I was SO FUCKING PISSED.
Then his exwife called wanting to switch weekends last minute for something she damn well knew about and SHOULD have called about WEEKS ago, and I just broke down. He tried to talk to me and I said I just wanted to go upstairs, I just wanted to be alone. I locked myself in the bathroom and sat under a blistering spray of hot water in the shower sobbing for about twenty minutes.
This morning he tried to get close to me as he was leaving for a volunteer project for work, and I just couldn’t even muster any fake happiness. I’ve worn a fake smile so long and I just haven’t been able to put it on – and so we talked. And talked. And I cried. And we talked.
He had no idea it’s been so bad. And when he asked me point blank if I’d considered leaving him and I said yes, I know he was stunned. We’ve both been feeling things and neither one of us talking – him, because he’s not very observant and admittedly not a good reader of emotions and me because I wanted to spare him hurt and discomfort so I held it all in. I’d rather hurt myself (emotionally) than fling my feelings out there and hurt someone else.
Today, they were flung. I’ve asked for counseling to get us through it – said I don’t know if iwe could do it on our own. I think that was the hardest part for him – seeing that part of me didn’t even know if our marriage was salvageable. He said he’d call the counselor on Monday to make an appointment.
Where do we go from here? I don’t know. The hope is that we can only go upwards.
In the meantime, today has been pretty fucking sucktastic already – and it’s not even 9:30. The crying has made me look like I’ve been hit in the face with a 2×4, and frankly… I’m emotionally wrung out.
“Do you get, do you get a little kick out of being small-minded?”
-Lily Allen
Someone posted this song the other day and I love it. It has nothing to do with anything really – it’s Saturday song on Monday because HEY, I can do that if I want to.
Also, there are grammatical errors on this video and when I was watching it, I tried so hard to not comment on the improper use of “you’re”. GAH.
Also, excessive use of the “fuck” word, so if you don’t like it (why are you reading me anyway?) or you have kids near by, you may want to skip watching the video.
I love how she makes a kiss off song so perky.
“If she remembers, she hides it whenever we meet….”
-Counting Crows
For Contessa… Oh, baby doll. If you were listening to this song on repeat… I’m sorry. If you’re ever in a Sullivan Street Repeat mood, drop me an email.
It’s a beautiful song, though. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen them perform this one live. The last time I saw them, they performed “A Murder of One”, and since it’s the song I’ve been listening to a lot lately, kind of felt like maybe it was a sign. But, I don’t know if I believe in signs. If I did, though… that definitely was one.
“People staring, Mary Jane humming softly to herself,
Nobody really knows her.
Any day now it’s all right,
She tells herself that this will be the last time.
Mary Jane pulls her hair back and wonders what she’ll do with all her free time…”
-Counting Crows
And here I come drifting in, waving hello like I haven’t disappeared for days, weeks, nearly months with barely so much as a glance over my shoulder to tell you all where I’m going, who I’m going with, when I’ll be home mom, but I assure you… I’m here.
In general, I’ve had a very difficult time writing lately. Particularly when it comes to being real – when it comes to talking about my feelings – about who I am. I have been working on a set of lyrics for over a week, and I can’t get myself to finish it because I don’t really know where I want to take it, where I want to go with it, or even where the story really ends. And I guess that’s part of it – is that right now I don’t know where the story is going.
I’ve made no secret that things aren’t always rosey and sunshine for me and my life… And sometimes that gets frustrating and sometimes I find that I’d rather just shut up and not blog it because the fact is, even I get tired of listening to myself – and it’s my problems, and my life and my hooey. I can’t even imagine strangers really giving a shit. (Not that you’re all strangers – you, over there? You’re no stranger. How you doing?).
So, let me think of some less dismal stuff…
I am working on my first song written on the guitar – it’s kicking my ass, quite honestly, because I’ve always written lyrics - sometimes with a melody in my head, usually not. I’m not so good at translating that to my limited guitar skills yet.
I am counting down until school begins again – and that makes me feel like a monster mom, but you know I was in this same boat last year at this time (before this time), so you’re not shocked.
Maybe it’s about time to start a round of 20 questions to dig me out of my slump and give me something to write about… anyone have anything for me?
