I’ve spent most of the last week recovering from a surgical repair to my left Achilles tendon. It had been bothering me all year, but I’d put off seeing ortho about it, thinking it would get better eventually. I was already battling cervical and lumbar spine pain. I was back and forth to Alabama to see and care for Bumblebee while he was undergoing chemo and then surgery and then radiation. I was starting grad school. I was still raising two teenage sons and working a full-time job.
But after a ten-day study abroad in Berlin, I came home limping. The sixty miles I walked during that trip were invigorating in so many ways. They also gave a nasty bone spur in my heel the opportunity to lacerate the tendon. There was no option but to remove it, which happened this past week.
I’ll spend two weeks in a splint, then several weeks in a boot. I have at least four weeks on crutches or a knee scooter. Physical therapy won’t begin for at least four weeks, and I’m told to expect a year for full recovery.
I can’t do most of what I normally do around the house, like laundry or cleaning. I can’t reach some of the cabinets to put away the dishes. Cooking is awkward. Showering is a convoluted chore. The boys have been somewhat helpful. Friends have brought food. Pandy and Cookie came to help get some things situated for us this weekend. Max is old enough to make a run to the grocery store for me. (Delivery isn’t terribly helpful, as I can’t really put a lot of the groceries away.)
Elevating my foot is key to healing during the first few weeks. I have spent days in bed or on the couch, binge watching television. My eyes have been too blurry from the pain meds to try to read.
In the midst of it all, I am still dealing with the emotional aftermath of this fucking breakup.
I am forced to be still in ways I hate. For years, I have walked to clear my head, and the exercise is incredibly helpful at dealing with my anxiety and depression. But physical limitations this year have made me far less active. I’ve lost muscle tone and gained some weight back, and that is going to worsen over the next few months before it gets better.
All of this makes for a perfect storm of self-recrimination and frustration and anger.
I find myself journaling the same things over and over—hurt and anger and confusion at how the hell I ended up in this place again, how anyone could be so consciously and callously hurtful of someone they professed to love. Then I think about the times I have hurt others, and I question at what point I stop paying some karmic price for damage I’ve inflicted.
When will I have worked hard enough and atoned enough that other people stop fucking hurting me as some kind of cosmic penance? Why am I the one left holding the hurt and carrying the blame for anyone else? Why does there seem to be no consequence for their actions, except what I am left to deal with?
I don’t know how to get past what I don’t understand.
Moonshine admonished me not to lie in bed crying over this and not to let it define who I am, to look at the good in my life and not get mired in the bad. “I really believe that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes we can’t/don’t or won’t see the reason. I think the reason for this is that you needed to see how string you can be.”
I don’t want to have to be stronger right now. I don’t want another Nietzschean lesson in my own resiliency. I am fully aware of my tenacity and my capacity. The one thing I wanted was a partner to carry some of that for me, sometimes when I needed it most, so I didn’t have to keep breaking my back to do every fucking thing by myself.
He told me he would do that. I trusted him and believed him and gave him the opportunity to be taken at his word, and he shrugged and dropped it all back at my feet when I was least prepared to pick it back up.
And he told me it was for my own good.
I am viscerally offended by the cowardice. I am hurt in ways I have rarely been—after having been as open and honest and brave as I could be to even engage in that relationship with him. I am now literally trapped inside my own head with no physical outlet for it, and I want to crawl out of my own fucking skin.
But I refuse to compartmentalize it away. I refuse to pretend it didn’t happen or that it doesn’t matter, because to do so it to traumatize myself in the exact ways others have hurt me. It won’t define me, but it will be another marker on my journey, another cautionary tale of another person who made me carry their shame and who dismissed me with little thought in order to justify their cowardice.
Another on top of another on top of another on top of another….
Except this one promised me he wouldn’t do exactly this, just so I would never have to feel this again.
I’m not grieving him. I am mourning the loss of trust and love and faith—and at a time when I need it most. Hope feels dangerous and is not allowed right now. I am lamenting the death of my own passion, again, at the hands of a man who will never face me to apologize for the catastrophe he created.
And I’m doing it all from forced confinement.
The timing is ironic. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of forcing me to slow down and deal with it now. Maybe there’s something coming that will need my attention and focus, so that I need to be free of this bullshit to deal with that.
This breakup with Bumblebee has been foundationally shattering. Over the course of a few days, my plans and my beliefs about my life just shifted. Grad school and work and boys are still ongoing. I’m still getting ready for an upcoming surgery to repair a blasted Achilles’ tendon that has bothered me all year.
But I’ve also mourned. A lot. I haven’t slept consistently, and most days the thought of food makes me nauseated. I’ve seen 4:30 a.m. most mornings this week, eyeing the tear-blurred clock blearily.
I’d forgotten how hard this part is.
In reality, I begged him not to make me remember. From the very beginning, I laid out what I was afraid of and why. More from self-awareness than from self-fulfilling prophecy, I knew the depths of despair I was likely to fathom if another man let me down in those ways.
Alas, here I am.
My therapist praised me for having been truthful and honest and open from the beginning, for giving him the literal playbook to prevent my being hurt. Don’t do this to me. For giving him the opportunity to take the responsibility for his actions within my boundaries.
“But maybe most people can’t handle that,” she said. “Maybe most people not only can’t be themselves, but they also can’t handle you being yourself.”
Fuck. This is hardly the first time I’ve been faced with such musing, from someone else or from myself. I have a tendency to see straight into other people, especially emotionally avoidant men, call them out on their shit, and tap my foot impatiently while hoping they will step up and make the changes they need to make. I know how hard that can be. I’ve done it. I’m still doing it.
It took me a damn long time to realize I wasn’t going to be redeemed by anyone else. No other person can ever make up for the shit that has been done to me—or for the shit I have done to myself. That responsibility lies squarely with me.
But the redemption comes not from meeting someone who can not do the stupid shit that undermines my tenuously-reintegrating psyche. It comes from my not making the same choices, not having the same limited emotional responses to similar stimuli.
And this time, I did do it differently. It still wasn’t enough. But it wasn’t that I wasn’t enough.
But I am a girl who believes in Love. Deeply. Completely. Yes, in its redemptive power.
It took me decades to realize that my paternal grandparents had set the example for what love was supposed to be. More than fifty years of commitment and love and songs trilled across the house to one another. No fights, just “discussions” and intense care and open affection, no matter what. (At least as was shown to me.)
The daughter of an abusive alcoholic who fell in love with a magician and lived happily ever after.
I have spent my life looking for literal magic.
To love someone is an act of grace. It is to be willing to accept their flaws, to offer forgiveness before slights are committed, to promise to be there and to accept them, no matter what. Love is a mercy, both to them and to yourself, and that spark is as close to the divine as we may ever experience on this Earth.
“I think you need to rethink what it is you want from love,” Queen Frostine said to me. “I know you want that redemption, but maybe it comes in a different form than you want.”
I get her point. I do have people in my life who love me, whom I also believe will be there for me, no matter what. She is one of the few, and she knows it.
But Queen Frostine or Pandy or any of my Psyrens can’t be there in the middle of the night. They can’t be there to hold me or to share in deep ecstasy. They aren’t the ones with whom I want to craft that magical life.
I am afraid that the likelihood of my ever getting the empirical proof of the mystical, of what I know exists because I am borne of it, grows smaller and smaller with each passing year and broken relationship. The reality is that I am unlikely to end this life with that resolution, both because of other people and because of myself.
It seems as if my Holy Grail will be forever ensconced in gauzy veil.
And it is frightening to me, to think of becoming the thing I hate the most, of turning into the monster that hides under my own bed.
This is what I begged him not to do.
I understand that I still have the power to make me and to make my life what I most want it to be.
Except what I want isn’t happening. Still. Again. And it’s deflating. The only way I know to make the cycle stop is to get off the damn carousel, but I keep reaching for the brass ring one more time. Just one more time!
I’m dizzy from the trying.
Maybe it’s the last bastion of adulthood. It begins with realizing your parents are simply human. Maybe it ends with accepting your own mortality, closing the binding-worn Fairytales and shelving it forever.
What if that’s not what I want?
Maybe what I want is delusional. Maybe my love of myth and tortured epic is the fairytale I get. Maybe I am fated to live out my life as a Grimm protagonist.
Except I know it exists. I know couples who commit to respectful, equitable, mutual reciprocity, who gift one another with care and affection, whose passion ebbs but also flows for decades.
I don’t know how my story will end. I almost gave up on Bumblebee in October, and I made the decision to try again. It still went unexpectedly south, but I tried. I will try to keep trying, though I’m unsure I will ever be successful in that endeavor.
Yes, my girls will still be there, no matter what. There are a few others. More importantly, I will still be there, no matter what. And I will continue to be exactly who I am—open and honest and clever and smart and loving—because I don’t want to be my own monster.
When Bumblebee and I started 14 months ago, I was coming off a long series of bad relationships and encounters that had left me unsure I would ever be willing to date again. The logistics of a long-distance relationship might be insurmountable, but we both found something so special in the other that we were willing to try.
I was still going to therapy every week, grappling with how my past continued to influence my present, determining what was useful from more then 40 years of good and bad and what could be put away. But one of the things I was adamant about, from the very beginning, was that I could not be a secret. For me, secrecy is indicative of shame, of being told by a child molester that he loved me and that what we did was okay—but that everyone would blame me and be mad at me if they knew.
That dynamic played out time and again, specifically with men and sexual and emotional relationships. Sometimes it was their secret shame that hurt me, but usually it was my own. I learned to equate secrecy and dismissive hurt with love. It wasn’t until I ended my relationship with Rango in 2017 that I really decided to work to rewire that thinking.
And I was exceedingly clear with Bumblebee that I was not willing to take carry that weight in our relationship. Although he’d been separated from his wife for more than a year, he wanted to finalize his divorce before introducing me fully into his world. Fair enough. Like most people he knows, including our mutual friends, I knew nothing of his separation. He told me he was trying to finish it all before it became public. But the divorce was imminent. And he was adamant that he did not want anyone to cast me into some shadow of mistress.
So he said.
Look, my own divorce took far longer than I expected to finalize. Sometimes it be that way. But things with his kids and logistics got in our way. I pulled back but decided to give it another go. Then he was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer, just before Christmas. All of our attention turned to his survival.
I was battling my own health issues, but I was back and forth from Atlanta to Birmingham to see him. We spent an inordinate number of nights holed up in a hotel, away from his supposed-to-be-temporary roommate and most other people. Occasionally we would spend a little time with my friends, as his energy allowed. Chemo gave way to surgery gave way to radiation. And when I was having regular dreams of being denied access to him after cancer surgery, he introduced me to his brother and then, albeit unexpectedly, to his parents, at the time of his surgery. I stayed at the hospital and at his parents’ home to help with his post-surgical recovery.
“I’m looking for the right time to tell the kids,” he said.
Two months later, he finally moved into is own space. He’d been delaying, he said, because he wanted to buy rather than to rent. Okay. But he suddenly relented and secured an apartment, telling me the divorce really was finally almost done. We talked of plans for my visiting him, working on grad school homework from his couch while helping him after more upcoming chemo.
And through it all, we had begun to navigate the idea that, when all four of our children were out of high school, we would have the option to move to the same location. He would talk of what we would do when we retired, how we would grow old together.
Except he still hadn’t told his teenage kids that I even existed. He still wasn’t comfortable with my telling my mom that we were dating, his having known her professionally before he ever knew me. And I was continually agitated by his social media, which was still filled with pictures of family nights and date nights with his long-estranged wife and maybe even a wedding picture (including more mutual friends).
All of these things screamed to me that he was still projecting an image of in-tact nuclear family that had been irretrievably broken for years. And I was still not allowed to share pictures of the two of us together, for fear that it would hurt someone unnecessarily or give someone the impression that there was something untoward about our relationship.
Except, there was nothing untoward about our relationship. His marriage had been over for years before we even began. They hadn’t shared more than co-parenting, as far as had been relayed to me. He was insistent that he loved me, that I understood and loved him more than anyone ever had, and that he was working for long-term future for us. For We.Oui.
“Keeping me in the shadows is hurting me,” I told him.
For the first time in almost two years with her, my own therapist expressed concern at his motivations for not moving forward at a more reasonable pace. Yes, so very much was happening at any given time, and his energy reserves cold be easily depleted. But, from my perspective, being faced with significant adversity tends to make people gravitate toward what they love the most.
I fully admit that I had moments of unparalleled utter fucking freak-out about the whole thing. I would be left waiting or rescheduled, because he couldn’t tell the kids or his brother that he already had plans with me. Illness could sideswipe a romantic rendezvous in a matter of moments. And when I asked when it would change, he would tell me he was thinking about how and when to do it.
“I’m looking for the right time.”
It played against all of my insecurities and my greatest fears: making me an object of shame, emotional abandonment, and dismissive ignorance of me. I had been fighting for years to deal with these issues. He knew about all of it—both from me and from my having openly written about the entire process—from the very beginning.
Through it all, I clearly defined my boundaries and defended them. I used my words and said when things were hurting me. I asked directly for change. I tried to avoid ultimatums. For more than a year.
But two months after introducing me to his parents, his children still had no idea that I even existed. He still wasn’t comfortable with telling my mom. I was still prohibited from posting a selfie of us together in case all the people who didn’t know realized we were a couple. I was given the responsibility of the emotional well-being of people I didn’t know and who didn’t even know I existed.
“I need a plan for how and when this changes, or I need the honesty that it isn’t changing,” I insisted. “To keep me living in this limbo is unkind and unloving, and it’s eating me alive.”
I did not demand to meet his kids immediately. I did not demand that he change his Facebook relationship status to include me. I asked that he offer us a path toward starting to blend our worlds—a necessary part of any future we would have together.
And so Bumblebee decided that losing me and losing We was less painful than acknowledging my existence. He chose to continue to hide and to refuse to do the hard work of change that would improve his own life. As I have seen partners do before, he threw up his hands and shrugged and said, “It’s too hard.”
“What the fuck?!?” my therapist said.
I’m not sure I have ever been so shell-shocked by a relationship in my life. It is all counter to everything I believed about him. The confusion from having been held and told days before that he wants every morning with me and then summarily dismissed and ignored is overwhelming. It feels distinctly as if I missed something somewhere. I have replayed every conversation and reread every message a dozen times or more, to the point of making myself sick from the dizzy.
I just don’t get it.
I can psychologize him—I have and likely will do so again. I understand what I believe to be his motivations. I understand his eccentricities and his weaknesses and clearly as I understand his strengths. I have loved him in spite of and because of them. But it is not the path I, or my girlfriends who came to know him quite well, believed he would choose. At all.
Knowing how previous relationships have played out, knowing my reticence and my fear and my strong desire to work through those issues, I was clear at every turn about what I needed and expected and why. He clearly responded that he understood and worked to meet those needs and expectations. Love and respect and care were mutual and reciprocal.
But now I find myself grieving. Breakup grief is different than the grief of death. You’re grieving the loss of the person, but you’re also grieving for yourself—as both the one who has lost and the one who is lost. Your identity with that person, the intertwined being the two of you created, is inextricably just gone.
And it undermines everything I came to trust and believe about myself. What did I miss? What did I do wrong? Was I really so arrogant to believe that I, myself, was making progress in dealing with my bullshit? Am I really just more broken that I realized? Is it impossible for me not to be better, if never fully repaired? Was I simply an object to him, a supplier of the comfort and affection he’d been missing for more than a decade? Was I just a great, gullible fuck? Was he really a coldhearted, calculating liar, capable of fooling me and all of my girlfriends?
Those are some of the questions I grapple with in the dark, in the middle of the night when I am awakened from some fitful dream. Those are the questions I churn throughout the day, as I’m driving or as I’m trying to work. Those are the questions I repeat in my head every time my heart feels like it’s clawing its way out of my chest.
Those are the questions I raged to Queen Frostine when, the day after he made this decision, the gift he’d sent for my birthday arrived in the mail. Because all of this happened two days before my birthday—just like it had two years before when Rango and I broke up.
(And let me tell you, there is no kick to the teeth quite like an unexpected birthday gift in the mail from your unexpectedly-recent ex.)
I don’t know how long this will go on. I can’t even begin to speculate about when I will start to feel human again. I’m currently waiting on a couple of my girls to get into town so that I can feel some love and support while I cry and wallow for a couple of days. I am plodding through work and home responsibilities and schoolwork, feeling like I’m watching everything happen slowly to me, as I move through some thick underwater. I feel dehumanized by his refusal to acknowledge my existence.
I am careful to comfort my internal parts. I am soothed the tiniest bit by knowing that I did everything I could to care for and defend myself. When I made mistakes and missteps, I apologized and did my very best to change. I was as patient with him and his situation as anyone could every be expected to be.
The fact is, I just have to get through it. Logically, the hurt will abate someday. For now, it’s the shadow I still can’t escape.
