Failures Make The Best Stories Later

Posted on by Standard 10

good friendsI was talking to my friend Scott the other day, and I mentioned how I had read every single advice column known to mankind about infidelity, divorce, separation, etc., and pretty much broke every cardinal rule there was in my quest to recover from the damage my ex did to me. I can laugh about it now, but I can see where most of this sage counseling would have made things a little easier on me. Problem is, I’m rarely in control of any of my emotions when I’m hurt. I figured I’d share my mishaps with my friends here so all the women out there who know what they should do, but still do the very worst things anyways will have some company.

There’s tons of sites, but I’m not going to quote from just one. Instead, I’ll pick out the ones that really, really were glaringly  correct, and I equally glaringly blew them off anyways. :-)

INFIDELITY ADVICE FROM THE EXPERTS

1. Practice indifference. Cheaters are usually flaming narcissists. The cruelest thing you can do to a cheater is pay no attention to them.psycho

And this is what Bird did: I completely agree that this would have been my best course of action. Instead, I wrote him emails, letters, blog posts, text messages, and slapped him with a PO order. I waited by the phone for him to call. I dropped everything and came running any time he crooked his finger. All said, the guy has a library of correspondence from me that he admits he never read.

2. Let them live with the natural consequences of their crappiness. Cheaters are really good at not taking responsibility. They pin the blame on you.

And this is what Bird did: Because I felt fate and consequence would take entirely too long, I moved the timelines I could control up a notch. I tanked a million dollar lawsuit we’d been a hair’s breath away from winning, because of one snide comment from Chef about pretending he loved me to get the money. One comment. One. :-) I turned off every utility that was in my name, and scheduled them to be off on the same day. I sent texts messages to his new girlfriend about embarrassing secrets he had. I called them both every mean name in the book. There’s more, but I think you get the jist. I was pissed.

3.  Succeed. Go be awesome. You’ll enjoy that in its own right, but I promise you, it will get back to the cheater.

And this is what Bird did: I didn’t totally fail on this one, but it’s all relative if you think about it. Chef lost pretty much everything because of an addiction, so he didn’t set the bar to succeed all that high. Yes, my rent is paid, but I also live in the ghetto. He is unemployed, and I have a job, but it’s the same job I had before. I think where I really succeeded is that I learned to laugh again quicker, and he is still struggling to just get up each day.

4. Expand your world, make new friends and try new things.

And this is what Bird did: Especially at the beginning of the separation, I withdrew from anyone and anything. I hated that I seemed to not be able to think about infidelty fail 911anything or anyone but myself and how much this all had hurt me. I drank like a fish, mixing ambien with it at times, wrote mean posts, sobered up, pulled them down again, and cried, cried, cried. I could hear my anger in every word I said, and it made me feel even worse. Finally, after Bekkie put her foot down about booze, I began to address the emotions, live through them, and as they were tackled, I got the sense that things just might calm down. Still, it took a really long time for me bother with new friends or new hobbies. My world was really, really lonely.

5. Keep being the individual you were before you got in the relationship. When you give up aspects of yourself, you stop being the person your partner fell in love with.

And this is what Bird did: When you get married in your early twenties, and stay that way until your mid-forties, my guess is this advice isn’t all that good. In true form, I reverted back to a dork teen-ager that had been dumped by her first boyfriend. :-) Shall we call that a point for me? I’m still learning who I am, and that has been one of the few things about this whole crappy chapter of my life that I’m really enjoying. I’m a work in progress, but at least I’m progressing.

6. Don’t talk about relationship problems with other potential love interests. Common sense, right?

And this is what Bird did: And still does — talks to The Guy about Chef a lot. But I’m actively trying not to bring things up all the time. Or at least wait for him to ask before bringing it up. What can I say? I’m traumatized.

7. Don’t use contact with other people to make your partner jealous. This is a form of manipulation. Even if gets your partner’s attention, he or she will resent you for it and think less of you.house for sale

And this is what Bird did: Rubbed his nose in all of them. Maybe he thinks less of me for it, but I don’t really care. 

8. Don’t cast insults at your ex or his affair partner. You are the victim, and as such, you maintain more dignity than either of them will ever have if you remain composed.

And this is what Bird did: I did not remain composed in any shape, form, or fashion; nor can I say I was in the least bit dignified. Once, I physically hit both of them in their/my living-room. I perceived smugness from them both, and reacted accordingly… I muddied the waters with my reactions, and when it was all said and done, I regretted almost everything I said and did all along the way.

These are just a tiny scattering of the many, many wisdoms I couldn’t seem to follow. So, to my fellow sisters on their own journeys through hell, my only advice would be

Me & T - Ninja Warriors battling for the love of a man who cheated on us both. We're both winnners..even if you can't really tell. :-)

Me & T – Ninja Warriors battling for the love of a man who cheated on us both. We’re both winners..even if you can’t really tell. :-)

to not be all that hard on yourself even if you fail. If all of this didn’t hurt so badly, we could have all followed these truths with no problem. But when something strikes us to the very core of everything we’d built our worlds around, a bit of psychotic, extreme behavior is to be expected….and later, those are the episodes that make the best stories. :-)

– Bird

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Goodbye, My Favorite Human.

Posted on by Standard 12

According to my journals, Chef’s official Midlife Crisis started on 10/16/2011. Well, actually, that is just when I became aware of it. From one minute to the next, I never images (1)knew what to expect from this person that I’d practically shared my entire adult life with. He’d be normal, and then quickly cold, withdrawn, reserved. I’d try to talk to him, and would be quickly silenced. I’d do things for him, and yet he’d hardly seem to notice, much less care. Where once we were inseparable, I’d find myself alone a lot, always sad or disappointed, or scared. When I found out why the personality had changed so quickly, I was foolishly not as concerned as I probably should have been. My entire family has grappled with addictions, me included, and while Chef & I had seemed to escape this lifestyle for decades, the naive part of me thought this would be temporary, and quickly addressed and fixed. Hmm. Seems I was wrong.

It’s been a whole year and a half since this ugly period of my life first raised its ugly head, and I’m sitting here in the tiny apartment that I love, marveling at how slowly time seemed to crawl by back then, and how quickly it had sped up to get me here.

As I mentioned before, T left Chef. Chef had been basically playing both ends towards the middle. He was constantly calling me/coming over, always full of promises of fixing things with me. He would go on long rants about how I was the mother of his children, his soul-mate, his best friend, and most importantly, his wife. On the other side, he was telling T that he’d been looking for love in all the wrong places, that he’d stayed with me for the children, that she was his best friend, his soul mate, and someday, would be his wife. I’m a girl. I can see how T would fall into this. Chef is convincing, especially if you don’t know him very well. But, as his problem with drugs increased, and his behavior became more and more erratic, she finally had to concede that I was indeed right — Chef wasn’t being truthful. Unlike me, T would dig for the truth quietly, unobtrusively, and frankly, she showed an amount of self-discipline that is kind of impressive to me. The first time I found a Love-Text from her on Chef’s phone at 5:30am one morning, a few months before I left, I woke Chef up by beating him in the head with his phone. :-) See? I didn’t decide to keep it to myself for awhile, to gather more evidence, and to confront him when there were no ways to wiggle out of it. I went for the jugular immediately.

imagesI dealt with a ton of emotions all along the way, and I’m still a bit unsteady some times. For the most part, I’m kind of over all of this. After T left him, and we confronted him together with our Notes of Comparison, I was able to accept that it was over. I watched this exhausted, stressed, frantic man try to baffle us both with b***s***, and a part of me felt relieved. Even completely healthy, this guy has been no picnic. I always felt, and still do, that back then, he was worth it. But, as I wrote about in Old Roy Dog Food, this disease had taken so much away from him, there just wasn’t enough bang for my buck, if you know what I mean. As each promise was broken, and each lie surfaced, a little bit of what I had always really loved about this human being would wither and die. And one day, the bad outweighed the good, and I was less likely to be broadsided with sadness at how all this had turned out. Instead, I had times I actually felt a little guilty. Because of his lack of addressing some health problems, he is sicker than he should be at this stage of the game. He already is needing some help physically, and I’m pretty sure, it is going to go downhill from here. I hope for the best, but I can’t say that I’m all that optimistic. What a stubborn man!! I can see God‘s hand in all of this, trying to get this man to look up, and even when he’s been told this by so many people in his life, he stubbornly refuses. And that is his right as a human being.

I wrote that we were supposed to start marriage counseling next week. Let me clarify, as I got some panicked comments. I have probably no faith whatsoever that our marriage has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being resurrected from the dead. I am not simple or stupid. Nor am I a glutton for punishment, and I truly get nauseated at the thought of having to make myself somehow trust someone who pretty much callously tossed the trust it took me years to develop for him, aside like so much trash. I wanted to believe that our relationship had been real all these 20+ years, and in a way, I have that. Sober, he was a decent husband. Flawed, but then who isn’t? I can be a nightmare myself with my trust issues, hyper-vigilance, insomnia, and bouts of depression. He didn’t marry Mary Tyler Moore. But we worked hard, made a good life for ourselves and our children, and we all laughed a lot. The drug changed everything, as it will do, but it didn’t render my life before worthless. If anything, it put the past on a pedestal, and that is what almost crushed me. Remembering and longing for, and weeping over, the beautiful, beautiful past. Only the past had it’s own issues, and in the light of day, it didn’t have that angelic gleam. Our marriage had survived for so long because we were both willing to work really hard to keep it going. But when Chef bowed out, and I had finally quit trying to carry  it along on my own back, it died. And just because I wouldn’t let go, or he wouldn’t go away, it wasn’t any less dead. I think God knew that, and He was very patient with me as I came to understand that if He, Almighty Author of the Universe, Creator of Mankind,  won’t fiddle with man’s free will, I’m certainly not going to be able to either. It blows. But God isn’t a liar, and these are the rules. Love isn’t love if you don’t have a choice to not love. I didn’t want Chef to come back to me out of necessity. I wanted him to miss me, and to come back because he realized he loved me. That just never did happen.

Everything this last year and a half spun in the gravity of Chef’s choices, and while we are each dealing with our wounds — Chef, T, me, the kids, friends, etc. …. There really is no way to un-ring the bell. I won’t venture to say what Chef has learned about me through all of this. I’ve been one pissed off, angry, somewhat vengeful, hurt wife. But I know something about him now. I know what he is capable of saying about me, behind my back to people I consider my friends. I know what he is capable of doing to me when he is crossed. I know how cold those eyes can be when they watch me cry. I know how easily lies form in his heart, and how quickly they become truth to his mind.

 I know.

I just know too much, and while I sometimes like to see him when he’s sobered up, and he’s singing as he’s working on his wood projects, or see the occasional remembermischievousness that lights up his pretty brown eyes as he tells me a story he remembers from years ago, and hear him laugh at something I’ve said, there is a wall around my heart that doesn’t let him too near me. He had the keys to that heart, and he threw them away. They aren’t so easily given again, especially to the person who didn’t treasure them in the first place. He was my very favorite human on the earth. Now, he is too dangerous to my own self-image, my self-worth, and my self-esteem to be trusted. He’s been ousted, and no matter how much counseling I have with him, I don’t see myself trusting him again, ever. He hurt me. I don’t want to be hurt by him again.

I see Chef as very, very sick right now. On a spiritual level, he wouldn’t fall on the Rock and break, and so the Rock is crushing him. It’s horrible to watch, and painful to feel that bond between us severed. But the kind of person I’ve always been is not going to let this person die unloved, unwanted, and completely utterly alone. I can’t imagine how horrible and hopeless that must feel, nor do I ever want to. Until Chef’s dying breath, he’ll at least know he has one person who gives a rat’s butt whether he is alive or dead, and that person will be me. I most likely will not be his wife…but I will be his friend, even if he hasn’t been a very good friend back. And that’s okay.

The counseling sessions may or may not happen. Chef begged for an opportunity to have a mediator referee an honest, open dialogue between us. We don’t get very deep into anything constructive before one or both of us draws blood on the other. I’m hurt by him “falling in love” with someone else. He’s ….who knows? Angry. Pissed. Humiliated. Selfish. I’m really only guessing. My instincts believe that he takes out how he feels about himself on me, but I have no real proof of this. Either way, I have enough to address that I’m responsible for. I can’t shoulder his, too.  But I desire with all of my heart to communicate to him just how much this has cost me, how much I really loved our lives together before the drugs, and how thankful I am that I had so long with him before this all came crashing down. And I want to hear what was going through his mind that made me suddenly undesirable as his partner. I’m afraid to hear it, but I just need to know. And I think counseling would help us there. It would be some kind of closure for me.

So, that all being said, no, I’m not high on pot! I’m not flip-flopping around. I’m content that things are the way they are for a reason, and I hope God kicks satan right in the teeth with Chef, with me, and with T. In the meantime, I’ll just keep taking each day as it comes. Thank you for your concern, though. I really do appreciate it!

– Bird

Quick Word from Bird

Posted on by Standard 14

I don’t have time today to write one of my epic, wordy posts. I’ve been working on one, but alas! It isn’t ready, and I don’t want to post anything from the hip. I tend to think I jinx things when I write about them, and things seem to be going really well. I’m making no sudden movements. I don’t want Fate noticing me right now!!

I plan to finish up the other post this evening, but I thought I’d answer a few of the emails/comments/texts I received this last week. sadness

Yes. I’m still alive and kicking.

Yes. Chef’s girlfriend dumped him.

Chef blames her.

She blames Chef.

She doesn’t blame me, but knows I was the problem.

Chef blames me, but is glad I was the problem.

I remain unconvinced anyone knows anything anymore.

Chef & I are going to go to marriage counseling, starting next week.

It was Chef’s idea, but I figure what can it hurt?

I have a sneaking suspicion it might just be too late for me to ever go back to this marriage.

Ok. I think that’s about it for now. I don’t want to tip my hand just yet! Talk to you guys tonight!!

– Bird

 

As With Everything in Life, Things Begin to Wind Down

Posted on by Standard 22

The last few weeks have been confusing for me. Even though I really wanted to, I chose not to write about the events until I was sure I understood what it all meant to me. imagesToday, though some things are  still up in the air, I seem to have a firm grasp on what I think about this last dramatic year.

Chef’s girlfriend, T, left him a week ago. They had been in a relationship with each other not quite a year. The overlap with my marriage was about four months.

As women tend to do, the girlfriend and I did compare notes, and T was able to answer a lot of the questions that had burned themselves into my soul, and while they still caused some pain, the truth has laid them to rest for me. No more fevered-brain stories I’d spin for myself deep in sleepless nights, all because I just didn’t know for sure. Did he ever love me? Does he despise me? Did he cheat with her for years and I was too stupid to notice? I’m sure every person who’s ever experienced this has pondered sadly and fearfully some of the same ones.

But when I was able to ask T, and she was able to ask me about my perspective, a lot of those questions just evaporated. I knew I was hearing the truth, and that truth had set me free.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t secretly (and sometimes, not so secretly)  hope they weren’t very happy from the minute they moved in together. I was so freaked out in the beginning of this mess, I’d have thrown a party to celebrate every single tear they shed. I felt so miserable, and it seemed from my vantage point, that they were peacefully playing house and flippantly unconcerned about how me or the kids, or our friends, and even our pets felt about any of it.

Betrayed, I tortured myself with hope, despaired over every good and bad memory, and let my imagination envision them happily building their new life together, unencumbered by their pasts and confident in their future together. Dreams of them having babies, dancing slowly to music I loved, or just snuggling on the couch watching a movie would dance mercilessly through my mind, and a lot of my tears were shed over those vain imaginations as well. I won’t even go there about thoughts of them in the bedroom! The whole situation was just horrible… I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, even Chef.

My imagination can be my very worst enemy in situations like these, and I tended to work diligently to find out the truth about this affair, just to dispel the myths I knew I would come up with if I was left to my own conclusions. The problem was, I changed their dynamic with each other whenever I was around, so I knew that my presence was “tainting” the evidence. I’d try to feel out Chef whenever I could, but as usual, Chef pretty much only told me what he thought I would want him to say, and not the actual truth.

If he was mad at me, he’d sing T’s praises, and rub his happiness in my face, dropping out key words to barb me with like love, companionship, and comparing her to me.

If he was feeling sentimental about me, the opposite was true. He’d find ways to paint a picture of himself stuck, martyr-like and full of regret, in a hopeless situation he’d accidentally launched us all into. Here he was, longing for the beautiful wife of his youth, who had been torn away from him by the demon drug and a midlife crisis.

Yet, in an act of penance,  he’d live the rest of his life with this new girl, knowing he was caged in by his mistakes, but ultimately not able to extricate himself from the situation because T would be unable to care for herself. He’d be responsible for ruining her life as well, he’d lament, and after ruining mine, he couldn’t do that again to another human being.

Basically, I heard: “I want my cake, and I want to eat it too.”

Also, “Womp, womp womp. Poor me. Womp, womp, womp. Not my fault. Womp, womp.”

You can trust me when I say this: whatever, dude. I was born at night, but it wasn’t yesterday night!

I wasn’t fooled by these kinds of statements, though I have to admit that in his condition these days, Chef might have actually convinced himself this was indeed the case. His timeline is completely ludicrous, his memory very faulty, and his lies too many. Even he has admitted now that he just can’t remember how all of this came to happen. His lies had been told enough times, however, that they were beginning to become the truth as he knew it. And maybe if I hadn’t been writing about all of this both on-line, and in my journals, he might have lapsed happily in those revisions. I wouldn’t let him, though, dragging out journals, and pulling up posts feverishly at every turn, because his revisions always make me or to a limited degree, T the ones that caused this mess, and allow him to hide from his own conscience. I don’t want to be his fall guy..not for something this crappy. Everyone sucked all the way through this experience…Chef, T, and me. I’ve got my own sack of garbage to carry around. Don’t pile yours on me, as well.

Though it was easy to get lost in the fear and humiliation, I was smart enough, even from the beginning,  to know that every thing that goes around, comes around again. Still,  I worried they’d be the exception.

I’d always heard “men don’t leave their wives for their mistresses”. Mmmm, mine did.

I’d heard that the other woman is the rock that men throw away the wives that are diamonds for. Mmmm, T was pretty much a diamond herself. Yes, she cheated with a married man, and she took the occasional pot shot at me. But, I have to admit, she really hasn’t been all that easy to really, truly despise. I’ll go more into T in another post. I don’t want this one to be as long as Gone With The Wind.

From the very day I moved out of the house up until a week ago, Chef was reluctant to let me go. The main reason I struggled so hard letting him go was because he would say or do something that would melt my anger away, and when I’m not really pissed at him, all my defenses droop like dead flowers. Decades of living with each other had taught both of us how to effectively get what we wanted out of each other. Well, let’s say it did for awhile, that is. Even though we saw each other rather disconcertingly regularly for separated people with no minor kids, we were both changing subtly, and somewhere along the way, words or actions that were guaranteed to work in reaching the heart of the other person, just didn’t work at all anymore. Reactions, especially from me, could be different from minute to minute, and I can say on my part, even I had no clue what something said might trigger in me. For a guy who’d become a professional at NOT looking deeply inside of himself, that made this whole thing unstable and explosive, and probably easy to pin on the psycho wife.

I’ve pondered a lot of stuff, and there’s just too much to write about in one post.

 

Loving With A Limp

Posted on by Standard 44

I wanted to write when I was in a better mood. However, since the funk isn’t clearing much these days, I’ve decided to go ahead and write about where my mind keeps PIXECT-20130315055221returning to time and time again. I know I’ve written in length about these fears from my childhood in my journals, but I can’t remember if I’ve written here about them or not, and I’m not in the right frame of mind to sift through the 300+ posts I’ve authored to see. If I already have, please indulge me this time.

For me, one of the worst things about this whole separation and divorce from Chef is the amount of garbage that keeps washing ashore on the beaches of my mind from my childhood. I’ve written about my mother, my father, my stepfather, and my brothers and sisters somewhat, but, while this may be hard for some of you to believe, I’ve actually held back some, too. I’m notorious for being an open book about stuff, probably more so than most people, but there’s more to some of my stories than I let on sometimes. Trust me. If I really spilled every thought, every story, and every perception about my life, you’d freak. Or you’d tell me yours, and then I would freak. :-) Who really knows?

In a nutshell, my childhood sucked. I don’t say that for any sympathy or pity. In fact, please don’t pity me at all. That childhood shaped who I am now, and I’m okay with me for the most part. But I don’t like to reminisce about some of the crap that went on, and these days, I’m somewhat dismayed at my inability to push these hard memories back into the dark closets of my mind. The fear of human beings, mainly men, is back with a vengeance, and I have had a few dreams of what all had happened to me that made me wary of  people in the first place. I’m mentally and physically tired from this new battlefront.

broken heart birdsMy mother and father weren’t happy people. I don’t want to get into what they did to make themselves unhappy, or write any judgments about them. All that is important is that I watched the two most important people to me as a child very carefully, and what I learned from both of them I actually used to change my own life so it wouldn’t resemble theirs. (Or, at least, that is what I tried to do). My fear is that I was destined to walk down the road my parents did, whether because of my genetics or the harsh childhood I endured, and now that I seem to be plodding along in their footsteps, I’m slightly depressed. I feel like all that hard work was for nothing. I could have gotten here without all the twists and turns in my life.

Each of my parents lost their one great love in life, though ironically, it wasn’t each other. Well, not for Mom, anyways. My father will tell you to this day that the only woman he ever loved in his whole life was my mother. They met during the Vietnam war, both of them in the United States Marine Corp. Dad was getting ready to be shipped off to do his part in this great police action, and Mom was pregnant. They married because I was on the way, but for Dad, it was real. For Mom, not so much. 5 or so years later, and with another child recently born, my Mom left my Dad and married her great love, my step-father R.

Just with that one sentence, I have an infinity of roads I could travel down. I loved my father with every fiber of my being. He was cheerful, happy, and he made me feel like I was a real princess. We were inseparable. And when Mom left, I didn’t know what we were doing, or why, and suddenly Dad was out of my life. What was once a cheerful disposition slowly over time became bitter, resentful, angry, and so very hurt. My Dad married briefly right after Mom did, but the marriage quickly fell apart, and for the rest of the 35 years since then, he never married again. He once told me he already had had a family, and lost it. He wasn’t doing that again.

Mom’s story is better and yet worse. She had a very long marriage to her great love. But, her great love molested me. I have nothing much to say about him other than I learned a great many skills about hiding, confrontation, shame, guilt, sex, love, and plain selfishness from that man. And because I was angry about my father being yanked from me, I refused to be close to her much. I wasn’t mean to my mother, and I really did love her. But I resented her decisions, and I learned early on that she made decisions on the fly without considering her children at all. I want to reiterate that these are my perceptions, which are always colored by my life experiences. My mother had her own brokenness that shaded her, and I don’t want anyone to think I’m automatically correct and she’s wrong. Life isn’t like that, and I’m not trying to throw my mom, who can’t defend herself anymore, under any buses. I write this only to show why I’ve always felt so very alone on this planet. Dad was gone, and Mom’s decisions seemed to always end up with something bad happening to me. I didn’t trust her.

My mother’s marriage fell apart at the 30 year mark when R decided that caring for a wife who had just recently had a liver transplant wasn’t what he wanted to do with the brokenremainder of his life, and he drove her up to my house in Oklahoma and dropped her off with me. He gave her an old Jeep Cherokee, $100, and some of her writing stuff, returned home, divorced her, and married a much younger woman. Feel free to throw rocks. I state the facts, but I’m sure you can read the disgust in my typing. I had a front row seat to watching this very ill, very crushed woman cry day and night for months. It was horrible. Nothing I could do or say could comfort her, and I was lost for words. In a probably misguided effort to make her feel like he wasn’t all that big a loss, I told her about what he had done to me for years and years. It only made things worse, because she then she had to admit that she was still in love with a child molester. I did not think that one out well enough, and I launched her into another ring of hell. We were able to mend the bridges a little, though, and while she didn’t really want to admit it, she did acknowledge that she’d known something was wrong between R and me, but she had felt that she was ill-equipped to support 5 children on her own, and it was just easier to look the other way. She was very apologetic, and I can honestly say I’ve forgiven her completely. She was right, in a way. She hadn’t worked all those years. She was a stay-at-home mother which is the hardest job on the planet but the least paid.

A few months after being dumped, she had several strokes, and now she is an invalid in a nursing home. Her children are scattered in different states, and we all feel disconnected from her and from each other. Her life just makes me weep, and I just never wanted mine to resemble hers.

The question to me lately is, what if I end up bitter, angry, and am never able to love or trust anyone again, like Dad? Or even worse, I stroke out from the stress and get put in a nursing home and promptly forgotten? Oh.my.G__!

The last couple of days have been really hard. Let’s say Chef really, really showed his a$$ this weekend. I won’t go into specifics. I want to be careful about holding him up forimages judgments to be made. I’ll just say that I wouldn’t treat a person I disliked with my whole being the way he used me this week, and that is no exaggeration. The fact that T (his creepy girlfriend) basically helped him hurt me made it even more low-budget. I’m the queen of this whole farce, though, because I fell for his crap again after learning for the last year and a half that he can NOT be taken at his word! So, as usual, I’m the one who came out of the fiasco with hurt feelings, tears, and a little poorer for the experience. I wear my crown of shame with pride. I earned what happened this week. Hopefully, next time I won’t be such a moron.

Today, while I was at work, I had vicious thoughts about both Chef and his girlfriend. Each time a thought would enter my head, I’d reject it. I’d pray. I’d imagine what kind of person would even think about such things. It was this whole wearing process, and I ended up leaving early and coming home. I don’t want to be that kind of person!! My dad isn’t a Christian, and he’s old school about father’s shooting their sons-in-law if they make their little girls cry. While I like that someone feels that way about my tears, I also get hit with all the sadness and pain his own wrecked marriage had caused him all his life, and the bitterness, anger, and hate seep into those conversations. I don’t want be  35 years out from this and still feeling what he is feeling. I just don’t. Mom ended up leading a relatively happy existence in comparison to Dad for most of those years before it all fell apart, so all those harsh emotions didn’t achieve anything for him. Bitterness is an emotional cancer that eats the life right out of a person, and I’m terrified that I might be my father’s daughter in this respect too. Everything about me has mimicked him all my life, and now I’m scared a little bit.

hurt motherMom’s reaction was to turn over and die, and there was a time that I did want to just give up on the remainder of my life, but that is gone now. I say that, though, when I’ve been losing weight at a shocking rate. I call it the Divorce Diet. Unlike some people, I’m not a comfort eater. I’m a stress starver. The more upset I get, the less I eat. But even though I’ve been eating more than usual lately, I’m still losing weight, and I’m at about 110 lbs now. That is way too skinny for even my liking, and I can tell from my family and friends that they are concerned. Am I subconsciously trying to die? I can’t honestly say.

I have a friend who I’m seeing at the moment. We’ll call him The Guy. I don’t call him my boyfriend…we aren’t any where near that yet. I have literally tried to “break-up” with The Guy several times. If you think I’m honest with my crap on here, you ought to see what this poor man has to endure, being my first real step back into the land of the living again. I knew I was going to probably be a big pain in the ass when I got back in the saddle again, and I was right, but he just keeps on hanging on.

He knows I think I will always be in love with Chef. He not only understands that I feel like this, but he is somewhat glad to know that I’m capable of loving someone that deeply. What?? He complimented me instead of getting hurt and jealous. I find myself always in un-chartered territory with The Guy. Chef’s head would have split open and laser beams from his eyes would have melted my face. The Guy has listened patiently as I cried about the latest wound Chef has inflicted, or the shame and disappointment I was experiencing for whatever reaction I’d launched in return. He’s watched me rage around the room about the things Chef’s little t**t says to me when she feels like getting in a shot for herself now and then. He’s patient when I cancel plans at the last minute because I just want to be left alone. He’s everything Chef never was. Where Chef is charismatic, The Guy is quiet. Chef is kind of a bully; The Guy respects my freewill. Chef is somewhat selfish in all aspects of a relationship; The Guy puts my wants before his own. He isn’t intrusive. He is a reader; Chef says print is dead. The Guy has a massive education, and I find we have whole new unexplored areas of life that we can talk about to each other, and I find myself learning stuff from him; Chef likes to talk about himself. I know enough about that subject.

But in the back of my mind, I have an uneasiness about The Guy. I think he’s wonderful; I don’t think I can make him happy in the long run. I am really afraid that with all theimages (1) baggage I keep hauling around from my life, I will only end up giving a tiny part of my heart to anyone again, and that has made me sad. No one deserves to be loved fractionally. We all crave to be loved whole-heartedly. But you have to be willing to be vulnerable and I’m not there. Hopefully, Chef won’t be the first and last person I’ll ever trust, but after examining my parent’s reactions to their own losses, I’m truly worried he might be. I hope that in this one respect, I’m not so much my father’s daughter.

I’m loving with a limp these days, and I am convinced The Guy deserves better than that.

I have no answers to my questions. I wrote down my fears in hopes that someone will deliver magical words to me that will make this latest train of thought dissipate  and I continue to pray that God be merciful with this broken kid of His. I don’t want to be anyone’s partner in this life if I can’t bring them happiness in return.

 

– Bird

My Heart’s A Traitor Bastard

Posted on by Standard 32

I cried today. A lot.

Now, if you’ve been following this blog for the last year and some months, you’re probably saying to yourself, so what? This girl has

You moved a girl-chipmunk into our hole, gave her my nuts (and yours), and everyone saw. But these flowers make it all better, baby. Give me a smooch.

You moved a girl-chipmunk into our hole, gave her my nuts (and yours…tsk, tsk), and all our chipmunk friends saw. Now I live in a rundown hole in the ghetto. But these flowers make it all better, baby. Give me a smooch.

been crying for over a year now. But the truth is, I’ve been relatively content the last few months, and tears haven’t been all that common. But in the last few weeks, a lot of stuff has been happening around me, and today, I finally broke down and had a nice, long cry-fest. Sometimes, tears are the only way to cleanse a wounded soul. And mine is sparkling clean right now.

I’m only guessing, but I think every jilted wife in the world has this secret fantasy that their wandering husband will wake up one day, kick the other woman to the curb, and come crawling back, professing their undying love between the heart-felt regrets for what they’d done to us.  It’s a stupid daydream in all it’s simple-ness; by the time the wanderer has wandered, there is a mountain of crap to be shoveled through before reconciliation can even be considered, and mere words don’t even begin to cut it. If , that is, reconciliation is even something these broken wives hope for. I’m betting there is more interest in seeing their husbands having a high-heeled shoe surgically removed from their a$$es than any kind of sorrowful regret / let’s-live-happily-ever-after moments. But I’m actually not one of these normal, broken women. As pathetic as it may sound, deep down in the hidden recesses of my heart, I wanted my husband to come back some day. And for some added humiliation, I’ll go ahead and admit it. I still love Chef. So much for being a secret bad-a$$ ninja woman. I’m a sap.

I’m a person that holds logic in high regard, and it is with no small amount of embarrassment that I admit this to you all. Despite all the betrayal, humiliation, and dashed hopes, I still wanted my husband to come and sweep me off my feet again. And that deep desire has been the bane of my existence for months now. While it’s true that I haven’t felt that excruciating pain like I did in the beginning, and I’ve been able to happily believe at some points that I was over him, I’ve noticed this disturbing trend in myself. The less angry I feel, the more I can still feel that love for him.

Will someone please shoot me?

The Chef and T Love Fest has been going downhill over at the old Homestead for a while now, and even my poor dogs look traumatized by the rather quick run this relationship seemed to have taken, almost from the minute they moved in together. It is a sterling example of the very truth that the old cliché preaches — the grass is never greener on the other side. I won’t pour out the intimate circumstances of the up-and-coming demise of their relationship…It is their story, and I’m only a third-party spectator with limited rights to it, but I will say this. I can’t say with any real honesty that I wasn’t a little happy to see it all fall to crap, and so quickly at that. So much for the next Romeo & Juliet romance.  :-)

I know.

It is a very ungodly attitude, but as I told you all before..I don’t have this Christian thing down yet when it comes to my separation and impending divorce. I still suffer from being a fallen human with a fallen nature. And as T has had to experience, in lesser degrees, some of the emotions I had experienced when she and my husband decided they were in love, I’ve found a lot of that crazy anger melting away. Turns out, revenge loses some of its charm without that anger to fuel it.

I actually dreamed of the time when T and Chef would get a taste of their own medicine, and yet, when it really actually happened, I found myself less gleeful than I had expected, and rather a little more sad for them. None of the major players in this creepy triangle are happy for the most part. Actually, I’m the one who seems to be enjoying my life more consistently. How weird is that?? Satan must be having a blast at the amount of misery he’s been able to spread around in my little circle. What a douche.

Which has led me back to my original thoughts. Would I take him back? I think the answer is maybe. On the one hand, forgiveness isn’t a problem for me. I can forgive him. But trust, on the opposite hand, is a huge problem in my life. And the trust is gone, gone, gone. But, what if he and I were to get counseling? Oh, please. I’ve tried how many counselors for lesser things in my life? And I’ve stuck with none of them. And he’s worse than I am about that kind of stuff. Then, I’ve asked myself if he really loved me, how could he have done all the stuff he did? And here’s where I get stuck. He couldn’t have, could he? His words these days are perfect, as usual, but I’m not a fool enough to believe this man I’ve lived with my entire adult life doesn’t know just what to say to manipulate me. But, where are the actions to back up the words? Until recently, there were none, but he’s starting to do little things that make me wonder.

And I just hate that!

This cartoon sums my life right now perfectly. Chef is chasing Bird...but what will happen if he catches her? Fried chicken?

This cartoon sums my life right now perfectly. Chef is chasing Bird…but what will happen if he catches her? Fried chicken?

Let’s face it. As long as Chef and Bird live in the same city, we’re always going to be connected. We both find it easy at times to slip back into the comfortably worn routines we’d had with one another all these years, and while I can’t say what it does for him, I can say it makes me long for those simpler, happier times I was secure in his love. And anymore, he voices more and more of his regret over all that has happened to our marriage and family, and more importantly (to me), his dissatisfaction with his new relationship. And now that she is setting up her own escape route, I’m faced with the decision…move on without him, or explore the possibility that this marriage might have a tiny chance if we were to work on it.

Today, all the stuff going on in my life, added to Chef’s very early morning visit to my apartment this morning, where he cried for hours over all that has happened, including hurting me, his children, and T, and his one, true humble apology added to his pleading for another chance, all culminated into a good cry this afternoon.

To my chagrin, not once did I even think about kicking him in the butt with my own high-heeled shoe. Instead, I just wanted God to take that lingering love for him out of my heart, or to just make this last year and a half disappear completely. I want a Do-Over.

And incidentally, God is completely blowing off my requests. I guess I’m always going to love Chef. I might never be his wife again, but the love is still there. And whether I like it or not, all of this really did happen. It isn’t just going to go away. Oh, my treacherous heart!!

Anyways, this is more of a mental health post than anything. I’d love to know if there are any other wives that wish they didn’t feel this vulnerable to their exes, like me.

– Bird