Tag Archives: Love

Are You Prepared For Being A Friend of Mine?

Posted on by Standard 4

Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know about me.

I’m extremely fearful, to the point it is an actual phobia, when it comes to going to the hospital. It has something to do with the way they smell and sound. One whiff of fear of spidersdisinfectant and the sweat of fear, coupled with some feminine, bored, muffled intercom voice communicating life and death in rainbow-colored codes, and I have been known to incapacitate myself with a full-blown panic attack.

A rumor that someone I know might be going in to the hospital for something is enough to make me hyperventilate and avoid Facebook, pigeons and voice mail for a week.

Because of this crippling effect on me, there is a kind of process I go through mentally before I’m going to step one foot into these sinister, stinky hubs of health. I’ve established an Is-It-Worth-It Checklist that I complete in my mind before I commit to visiting someone at the hospital.

Well, there are actually 2 lists – one for whether I should go for my own health, and the other for being a supportive, good friend.

The one for me is really just the one line of questioning – how bad does it hurt and will they give me excellent drugs to make it stop hurting?

The other, though, is kind of more complex, and until they start giving out the excellent drugs to the visitors, I’m probably always going to use it. It goes something like this:

Bird’s Is-It-Worth-It Checklist

1. How serious is the condition my friend is in the hospital for?

a.Could they possibly die? (Here I calculate the odds of survival, and adjust accordingly.)

Floating Petri Dish of Disease

Floating Petri Dish of Disease

b. Not life-threatening? Like plastic surgery or a mild heart-attack? (See you when you get out, dude!)

c. Odds are, this could be the end of the line for them. (What are the chances I’ll be seeing them in heaven? Just kidding! This one is unflinchingly rigid.)

2. Just how angry or hurt will they be if I just call them on the phone instead of physically going to the hospital?

a. Really, really angry? (Are they prone to kicking butt when displeased, and if so, can I take them down? Also, how bad will it hurt?)

b.Indifferent – (They’re super popular; they actually begin their recovery after they return home. The hospital visitors actually sign a guestbook walking into the patient’s room. $5 and a broke friend, my name can be there, too.)

c. Hard to tell – (They might act like they don’t care, but last time you did find a stuffed animal of yours boiling in the kitchen…It seemed like it was some kind of warning.)

d. They get the really cool drugs and won’t be lucid for weeks after they get out. (I’ll photoshop a picture of myself in front of the hospital, and presto! I’m a good friend!)

e.They hate visitors – I’d being doing them a favor! (I’ve never met someone I could use this one on.)

3. If I buy them a really cool get-well gift, can I get off the hook?awesome me

a. No. They’re flush with stuff, and a gift isn’t going to go very far with them unless I had to take out a loan to buy it. (Not likely these days.)

b. They practically live in a cardboard box. A gift certificate to Taco Bell will buy me a pass for the next three hospitalizations. (God bless Taco Bell’s Dollar Menu!)

c. Depends on the kind of gift. Am I willing to go to the mall (another phobia of mine, though to a much lesser degree) and spend the ridiculous amount of money they charge for something from Hot Topic or Victoria’s Secret? (I’ve never answered yes to this one. It’s included because eventually one of my friends will get a boob job, and this one will finally come into play.)

d. No. This friend isn’t superficial or materialistic. Next time, be pickier about the kinds of friends you want. :-)

4. Is it in any way possible to pretend I didn’t know they were in the hospital until they get out?

a. Yes, if I pretend I’ve just been super busy. Once upon a time, I could actually get away with this one. I’m notorious for being hard to get ahold of most of the time. These days, though, my friends all know me pretty well, (or I’ve already done this the first couple of times they were hospitalized), and this doesn’t fly anymore.

b. No. They ran ads on every television and radio station in Tulsa, left text messages and voice messages on every telephone I have, sent a telegram, two pigeon carriers,hilarious a note on my windshield, sent a note from my mother to my boss, and paid to have their name and room number written in the sky over my apartment. My presence is requested, and my absence will be noted and unhappily addressed when they are released.

5. How important is this friendship to me in the long run?

a. I can make new friends; giving me one of your kidneys doesn’t make us sisters under the skin, right? Actually, I find it pretty nerve-wracking to try to even talk to someone I don’t know, so this is a stupid thing to even be on my checklist. Still, it does cross my mind…

b. Will they quietly be hurt, or will I find a dead fish wrapped in newspaper on my doorstep? Quietly hurt, in my opinion, can actually be worse than a threat from the mafia that I’ll be sleeping with the fishes, especially since I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

c. Friendships are pretty important, and I really love this person a lot. Oh, fine!! I’ll go to the stupid hospital, but I’m not promising I won’t pee myself on your floor when I smell alcohol swabs, spray you with snot when I can’t breathe because I can mentally see the needle in your IV stabbing through the walls of your vein,  or puke in your trash can when that horrible intercom voice blares through my head. Hey! It’s what you wanted!! Still want me to be your friend??

I wanted to take a minute to thank the fellow bloggers that nominated me for some awards. I promise, I’ll try to get to those some time this weekend. Thank you so much!!fear of trust

– Bird

 

Goodbye, My Favorite Human.

Posted on by Standard 13

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

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 34

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