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On to the next challenge…..
Get a Life
I never thought I’d be using that phrase on myself but, at the point in time, it applies to me. It’s been an on-going struggle for me since my separation in ‘07.
WHO AM I?
My friend, The Squire, told me at the beginning of the summer that I had an opportunity. Since he’s known me, he believed that I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t sure of what he meant and that bothered me. I could identify myself as a son, a father, a brother, an ex-husband and ex-boyfriend. I am a December baby, Baby Boomer, potentially somebody’s baby and a child of the Seventies. I am am identified as a lover of music, golf, good barbeque, good sex, long road trips, long beach walks, country fairs and oxen pulls. I am other things, but does that mean I know WHO I am.
When I was married, I found my identity as part of a marriage and the head of a family. When I was seeing My Love, I was her partner. Currently, I am a employee of the Big City Hospital, member of my church and Red Sox Nation.
But is all of that WHO I AM?
Here lies the challenge: find out who I am. It’s a good subject to bring into therapy. I believe it’s the missing piece of the puzzle. By discovering who I am, I can move forward and live my life. I know it’s not an instant fix, that it will take hard work and reflection. It means asking myself alot of questions. Some of them will be difficult and challenging.
All I want is to be happy. Doesn’t everyone want to be happy?
I have been a bad boy.
After posting yesterday, I checked my email and discovered a response from My Love. I got the full lowdown on her reasons behind the breakup. We are both at fault, but she is blaming herself.
Yes, one of the issues was money and we both took ownership of that. But she was frustrated about where I was in my life. She has been concerned that I am wasting my natural talents. She was hoping that I could move myself along and go forward in my life. She was hoping that I could get myself out of the rut I was in, but that wasn’t possible. She decided that we break off our relationship rather than become a nag.
Since my divorce, I have been subconsciously ignoring my adult responsiblities and move forward. I have been afraid to do that because I am afraid of success. I use all sorts of excuses: I don’t know what I want, this doesn’t intrest me, I don’t have the money to go back to school. I can easily retort with reasons why I should make life changes. I never have enough money to do what I want, or to cover emergencies. I constantly worry about if there’s enough or if I have to rob Peter to pay Paul. I just need to take a leap of faith and start exploring possiblities.
But it bothers me that I was so cold towards My Love. I have just as much to do with all this as she does. I need to take responsiblity for my stuff.
We exchanged emails last night and have it sorted out. But it makes me wonder where we would be if it weren’t for money issues or career goals. We agreed that we wanted to exchange emails now and again. She still is an important part of my life.
Let’s see where the future will take us.
I realize that I mentioned in the previous post I wouldn’t write about My Love. But I have to share this.
The reason she broke off our relationship was money.
Apparently, I wasn’t the knight in shining armor she hoped I would be. Since my divorce, money has always been an issue for me. Mostly the lack of it. My Love was always wanting to go to concerts, out to dinner because she didn’t want to cook, or go places to do things. She told me that she was easy to please and happy to stay home, snuggle on the couch with a good movie, or play games. She would tell me it was about sharing resources, each of us contributing to the relationship in our own way.
The reality was she wanted a man to take care of her. SHe wanted that fairy tale where her true love would sweep her away and he would provide for her. She wanted to be able to pick up and take off for the weekend. She wanted spontaneity.
I feel foolish. I feel humiliated. I feel like I was deceived. It seems that after those feelings of infatuation wore off, reality set in. It makes me bitter to think about it.
I will take responsiblity for my part. It takes a bit of cash to maintain a relationship and it was rare to have extra cash. But I held a steady job and was reliable, unlike one of her ex-husbands. My battle was against all the men in her life who screwed her over. If we had a conflict, we’d address it but there was always that spectre hovering overhead. I will give her this much: she never nagged me about making more money.
At the moment I feel empty. There’s a part of me that wants to explode in rage, but knows that wouldn’t accomplish anything. The other part of me wants to run away from the pain. It doesn’t matter where, anywhere to get away from it. I feel three inches tall.
That’s it. It’s possible that My Love will read this again to see how I am doing. Go ahead and read, sweetie. She won’t give a rats ass about me anyway.
MEMO TO MY LOVE: When you said you wanted to protect me, I didn’t think you had emasculation in mind. With what you did, you make what my ex- did look like childs play. Any shred of self-confidence has been torn away. I hope you are satisfied. I won’t be bothering you from here on.
I pity the man that follows me. He doesn’t have a chance.
I’m back. This time, I am walking a bit humbler, but a little bit jaded and stunned. I made a promise to My Love that I would not write about her, and I will keep it.
But I return with a boatload of questions about myself. Some are ones that I cannot answer. That’s why I am going into therapy. The appointment has been made – November 30. As much as this forum has allowed me to do similar work as therapy, I need the feedback and support that you cannot give me.
I will continue to write, but nothing similar to my posts on My Love. At the moment, I wonder how my life will play out over the next year. People keep telling me that it will get better. I heard the same things after my divorce, but I had My Love as a sounding board. That’s why I need therapy; I need the feedback.
SO……..
I’ll be back from time to time. Nothing of the regularity for the last four months, but you never know. I might get on a streak and then you’ll get sick of me.
If you are new to this blog, I invite you to view the archive for past posts. It’s been a wild summer and fall, a regular rollercoaster ride.
It has been brought to my attention that I am making slow and steady progress.
Really?
This is a “can’t see the forest for the trees” moment. As much as others believe I’m making progress, I am having a difficult time seeing it. I recognize I am slowly emerging from my “shell”, enjoying lost pleasures now that My Love and I are no longer together. I am enjoying afternoons at the movies, playing rock n roll on the stereo while cleaning my apartment (it’s the music I enjoy, not the cleaning), and other stuff I can’t think of at the moment. But is that progress? Should it take so long to heal? How long will it be before the pain goes away? I am getting to the point where I feel like I’m stuck in a rut, that I’m trying too hard to break free and do something different, but all I do is slip backward.
I am attempting to manage my emotions when I think of My Love. Sometimes successfully, other times not. But she is tough. She has hung on longer than any former girlfriend in my life, in that I cannot shake the thought of her. I don’t want to let go. As much as I want to move forward, I recognize that she has helped me reinvent myself, so to speak. There are unanswered questions. Such as…
WHY? Why couldn’t she talk about her issues with me? We have there for each other all along, why stop there?
WHY? Why could she just walk away? Did she fall out of love with me? Did she not want me in your life?
WHY? Why does it seem so easy for her to walk away?
These questions may never be answered. They may be answered only when the time is right . Here’s another that I need to consider:
WHY? Why have I hung on so long? Why can’t I forget her? Why won’t I let it go and get on with my life?
It’s not because I enjoy feeling this way. It’s not that I am trying to be a martyr, suffering in my self pity. I am not taking pity upon myself, allowing my emotions to get in the way of living my life. At least not outwardly and not as intensely as three months ago. I recognize that the end of my relationship with My Love didn’t end in a conventional manner. The only issue that was familiar was that she broke it off. I have ended up on the short end of all relationships with women.
I guess I’m just lucky, he says with tongue planted firmly in cheek. This time, it was old boyfriends and ex-husbands that did me in.
This one’s been rolling around in my brain for most of the weekend. It’s one of those philosophical questions that reach out and slap you in the face from time to time. This one comes from a John Grisham novel called “Playing For Pizza”. More on the plot, but here’s the question:
What am I doing here?
The story concerns a washed-up third-string NFL quarterback, who’s only option is to play in the professional league in Italy. His world has been completely turned upside-down. In the process, he begins to learn what life is all about through Italian eyes. He learns how to live well.
I finished the book in a few hours on Monday and walked away finding something I didn’t expect to find. I found myself mirroring the main character, and asking myself the same question:
What am I doing here?
My love had sent me a response to some of the posts I had written in these pages. One of the discoveries she made that we were “very good together but frighteningly stuck”. What does that mean? Did it mean our relationship wasn’t progressing the way she hoped? Did it mean I wasn’t progressing the way she hoped, or was she more concerned about her role? If we were that good together, it would be a step forward to bring this issue to the table and discuss it as a couple.
My guess is that she was waiting for the shoe to drop. She had been married twice. They were short courtships and quick weddings. Without going into details, both of her ex-’s betrayed her trust and hurt her deeply. We had two blips on the radar within the context of our relationship. While most relationships would take the experiences and learn from them, we separated for brief periods. It’s my guess she did that as a way to reassess the relationship. They were tow painful periods in our relationship.
Frighteningly stuck? Can a relationship have those times when it’s necessary to just “be” – taking time and recharging your emotional batteries? Were we “stuck” in the sense that we weren’t progressing and a couple or as individuals? Those are valid questions and could very well be applied to My Love and I.
Can you get unstuck? Is it possible to step back, see the realtiohnshiip for what it is, and make the necessary changes to make the relationshiip vital and interesting?
All questions to be answered at a later time.
November 4. Four days after Halloween.
I am assuming that most of you have come out of your sugar coma by now. SInce I never bought Halloween candy in the first place, I’m happy to report that my eyes are clear and bright and I have energy to burn. I was not found sitting on my couch and covered with wrappers.
I have a love/hate relationship with chocolate. My Love turned me on to dark chocolate. Her claim that it was an aphrodisiac was spot on. Well before that, there was Nutella. For the uninitiated, Nutella is a milk chocolate/hazelnut spread with the consistancy of peanut butter. It is smooth, thick, and sinfully good. I discovered Nutella when I was on a high school exchange trip to Germany. My first breakfast with my host family included Nutella. What a great way to start the day! Sometimes I’ll heat it up and pour it over vanilla ice cream, or I’ll make peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches. My mother will buy Nutella in HUGE jars. My Daughter is a Nutella junkie. She’ll hoard a jar in her room so her brother won’t swipe it.
But despite loving the taste of good chocolate, I have a tendancy to overindulge if there is chocolate in the house, and the result is not a pretty sight. I have a history of abusing food. Whenever I’m having a tough time emotionally, I binge eat when I’m alone. I haven’t weighed myself lately but I can tell I’ve packed on a few pounds. That ship has been righted and we’ll be working to slim down. The fact that I recognize this is helpful. I recognize that I should be taking better care of myself. But my emotions are taking over when I should be in control. Lately, I have lost the desire to cook and have turned back to Mickey D’s and take-out Chinese. I need to remind myself that I need to think about what I eat. My weight goes up when I eat like this, and I recognize why I eat that way.
I have discoverd this fact: there is no timetable for mending a broken heart. I know that the majority of the time I do alright. I am in the moment and enjoying life. But there are times, such as when I discovered that My Love was reading my blog for real, when my heart goes into a tailspin, causing it to try to figure out which end is up. I catch myself daydreaming and figuring out what she’s doing, what her impressions of my writing are, and just getting lost in thought. That is the tendency that needs to be changed. It’s as if my heart has left a light on for My Love, waiting for her to come back.
SHE”S NOT COMING BACK, FOOL! GET IT THROUGH YOUR THICK SKULL!! SHE”S GONE AND YOU’RE HISTORY!! GET OVER IT AND GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE!! SHE DOESN”T WANT YOU ANYMORE!
Sounds harsh, doesn’t it. It needed to be said.
I am now waiting for the translation for my heart. I suspect my heart speaks another language.
It’s Election Day. If I were in Chicago I’d say, “vote early and vote often”.
It’s a gorgeous sunny day which made walking to the polls a wonderful experience. After a short line and an even shorter ballot, I made my way back. I decided to talk the long way, so to speak. Deering Oaks Park is a wonderful space, designed by Frederick Olmstead, the same man who designed Central Park in New York City. There are wading pools and a playground for kids, basketball and tennis courts, horseshoe pits, a very quirky baseball field (very short down the line and a “deep” center field of 350 feet), and wonderful walking paths under a variety of trees. As I walked through the park, I found some chestnuts on the ground. I hadn’t seen chestnuts since I was a kid in Bangor.
But the crown jewel of the park is the duck pond. The perimeter of the pond is surrounded by a 3-foot stone wall with flat cap stones. People like to sit at the edge and feed the ducks, along with the seagulls who come inland to “slum” in the park and steal the bread from the ducks. Today the pond was full of ducks, splashing and quacking.
In the center of the pond is a simple fountain. There are colored lights that come on after dusk, making the fountain look like a beacon coming up from the water. About fifteen years ago, there was a week-long festival in the park, put on by the Chamber of Commerce. One of the highlights of the week were the Chinese fireworks that were set off over the pond. It would stop traffic, turning State Street, Park Avenue and Deering Avenue into parking lots. I was living four street up from the park at the time. My Ex- and I would walk down and spend the evening.
Today, it was kicking fallen leaves, breathing deeply, and “looking up”. I remember a story I’d read when I was a boy. It’s was called “Frederick”, and it’s about a mouse who lives in a stone wall with other mice. Rather than help gather food for the approaching winter, Frederick is content to sit on the wall, basking in the warm sunshine. The other mice aren’t too keen on him not offering to help. But later, when the winter winds are howling and their food supply is dwindling, the other mice come to Frederick and ask him about what he stored for the winter. What the mouse stored were memories of the warm autumn days, the feeling of the stones on the wall, and the colors of the world surrounding him.
I was always touched by that story. For me, it’s about taking stock in the world around you, and keeping those cherish memories tucked away until the right moment. Someday you’ll pull them out when you need a laugh, when you want to remember a loved one, or to remember a time from childhood, when the only care you had was having a friend to play with or a bike to ride.
On a day like this, I’ll pull out memories of jumping in huge piles of maple and oak leaves. I’ll remember walking to school and listening to the crunch of the leaves under my Stride-Rite sneakers. I’ll remember hikes with church youth groups, stuffing scarecrows with my children and propping them up in lawn chairs in front of the house, and a first kiss. That happened on a football fan bus, heading south to Portland for the State Championship game. She was a year ahead of me. She also was the one who pulled me into a supply closet after school, teaching me to French kiss. We kissed on the way down and coming home, scrunched down in the seat so that no one would notice. She went out of my life as quickly as she came in, and I didn’t stand a chance.
I also remember the first time My Love and I first made love. It was around this time. We began our afternoon walking in her neighborhood, kicking leaves and holding hands. All the time in the world was ahead of us, and all the time was what we needed. I won’t get into details, but it was the perfect day.
And it was the perfect night.
Create your memories today. Let them bring you warmth when your life gets cold.
I want to take care of some housekeeping today. There’s stuff I want to write about but really don’t want to go into great detail.
Except one.
My Love has been reading my blog.
No, really. This time she has been reading it.
When I opened my mailbox this morning, there was an email from her. That surprise packed a wallop. I sat there and stared at the screen for a while. I wasn’t sure if I should open the email. When you don’t expect it, the emotional impact seems to be much greater.
What I discovered was a gentle note. She has been having difficulty sleeping lately. Last night, it was another tough night for her, so she decided to take the plunge and read my blog. What kept her from reading it before now was fear. My Love was afraid that I would rip her to shreds, that the pain and anguish she caused would be spilled all over the page and she would be to blame.
What she found was reflections tinged with sorrow and sadness. It was a surprise for her, though, to find me treating her with tenderness and respect in these pages. It’s the only way I know. I hope it sent her a clear message that I still love and respect her, no matter what happens between us. She changed my life for the better, and I could never repay that kindness. My Love still wants to communicate, but I believe my heart needs more time to heal. I want her to return and read more of what I’ve written. I want her to understand that I am doing the best I can with what I have. We were given a wonderful gift: a love that most people dream of but never find.
Moving forward……
I have a date tonight.
I am taking My Daughter to a hockey game tonight. Before that, we will carve jack o’ lanterns and make homemade chicken fingers for dinner. My Son has plans with friends, otherwise he’d be joining us. We all love hockey. The kids, their mother and I would go watch our AHL franchise several times a year. One year for Christmas, we gave ourselves a half season ticket package. That season we logged in 25 games. It was great. Tonight, however, it will be a Daddy-Daughter Night.
I started my seasonal job this week. For the past five years, I have worked the phones for L.L. Bean during the Christmas season. I use the money for Christmas presents. I also get DEEP DISCOUNTS at the employee store. It’s a lot of fun. I get to step outside my box a little and talk to people from all over. The folks from the South are very friendly and love to chat. I also get to (internally) chuckle at some of the folks who drop a thousand dollars in an order. They have a certain air about them. It’s part confidence, part insolence, part entitlement. I have no problem with people who’ve been able to make their money work for them. There are some folks who seems to think that their crap doesn’t stink, and those are the folks that need to be taken down a peg. But, as a customer service rep for a company that prides itself on world-class customer service, I have to bite my tongue and smile.
I should be quite busy for the next 8 weeks. They usually dismiss their seasonal employees before Christmas. I’ve wanted to stay as long as possible to make some extra to stash away. This year, however, I think I’ll request to be let go just before Christmas. I’ll have to work my regular job on both Christmas and New Years Day, so I’d like some time to make merry.
Everyone enjoy your weekend. Enjoy the ghosts and goblins on Saturday. Find a costume and let yourself go. Don’t just hide behind a mask. Get out of your skin and try on another.
