Muchness and Light

A million lights are dancing, and you are a shooting star.

As I wrote about a few weeks, I have been seeing someone new. I won’t wax poetic here; it’s simply too early to exalt him to the status of Blog Fodder, in and of himself. I hadn’t necessarily intended to get into a relationship—though maybe it’s still too early to even call it that—while also trying to work on my own stuff, much of which was highlighted and exacerbated by the ending of my relationship with Rango. But the fact is he presented as an opportunity worth exploring while I was beginning the process of self-reintegration.

Whether coincidental or due to some meaning I have assigned (or even thanks to that fickle bitch Fate), there are things about him that remind me strongly of Bounder. He is not another alcoholic, though he may well be overcoming a history as a dismissive-avoidant. He is not Bounder, however, and it is unfair of me to make direct comparisons. They are two different men, with different histories and stories, but there are moments that are striking, to say the least.

Because of this thing with Finn (so named because he is my huckleberry) and because of the end with Rango and because I sometimes pass him driving on the road between our houses, Bounder has been on my mind a lot. A lot a lot. It makes sense that he would be, but it set me off on a path of re-analysis and overthinking (again). I think I’ve dissected that relationship for the millionth time over the last few weeks, still looking for where exactly I went wrong. Because his shit is his shit—I can’t control how he acts or reacts or fails to act—all I can do is try to figure out what I screwed up. He told me numerous times that it wasn’t me, and I generally believe that, but I always dissect to the point of vivisection, flaying myself to a bloody, psychoanalyzed mess.

I do remember getting a text from him, a couple of days after we’d met. He said he was glad we could take things nice and slow. Except we didn’t. We started intensely, quickly, and that’s exactly how it continued. Within two hours of that text, I was making out with him in the parking lot of his office, a quick drive-by on my way home.

And that is where I failed him. Hurricane Sassafras was coming, no matter what he did. I didn’t really hear him and slow down. It wasn’t terribly caring on my part, no matter how unintentional the push was.

Finn also said he wanted to go slowly, I have tried to honor that. I have tried to dial back my impulses to forge full-steam into his world. There is something there worth exploring, and I don’t want to do it all in hindsight.

Which brings me back to Bounder.

Working within the IFS model, I have become very mindful of my feelings. I don’t just mean my emotions. When I feel something—anger, grief, sadness, longing, affection, attraction, love—I take note of where in my body I am processing the emotion. There is usually a physical locus of that energy. Because my strongest emotions are often tied up with what a subpersonality is processing in a given moment, I feel them in different places, which is effectively where each of those subparts resides. Harley and Quinn and Stephie and each of the others sits in a specific spot and pulls on my center from her point of reference. When I feel a subpart whose name I don’t know (who maybe I didn’t even realize existed) pull at my center, the emotional and physical feelings are often coupled with anxiety.

Because there has been so much thought of Bounder over the last few days and weeks, my anxiety has been really high at times. It has often felt like a pull from the right of my stomach. Sometimes it has been so bad that I would get nauseated and irritable, desperate to make the pain stop.

“What is that she’s feeling?” my therapist asked. “She may just want you to acknowledge her feelings. Can you tell what she wants?”

“She wants relief,” I replied. “She is hurt and angry and confused. She doesn’t understand how anyone could have something so precious as that kind of love in their damn hand and just walk away. It makes no sense, and it’s infuriating.”

This, of course, is wholly indicative of my fear of emotional abandonment. While that’s rooted deeply in my childhood, the feelings of hurt and betrayal and confusion are never more profound than when I think of Bounder. While I’m still angry at Rango for how he handled the boys during our break-up, I have dealt with my feelings toward him, kept what I needed to keep and shed the rest. Same for DH and Rex and others whose names and memories don’t really matter or impact me all that much anymore.

I explained to my therapist that the feelings are seated in this very specific location, that they can be overwhelming at times. And when I am most overwhelmed by something, I tend to dive into it head first, hoping to reach the bottom quickly and resurface cleansed.

But that never seems to happen with him, and I am forever in a loop of self-flagellation.

“Well,” she said, “first of all, she needs to know that you are simply witnessing the trauma again, a memory of it; it’s not actually happening again. You’re not being traumatized again.”

Okay. Just a ghost. Not real. Not happening now.

“And,” she continued, “she doesn’t have to feel that anymore. You don’t have to feel that anymore. That’s a lot of burden to have been carrying around for so long. She can let it go. You can let it go. Let the elements have it—they can take it—they can take a lot more than that. But she doesn’t have to feel that anymore.”

Wait—WHAT?!?

Even I could tell that my facial expression shifted in that moment. I was stunned, utterly baffled by the idea that it was okay not to keep feeling those emotions over and over, effectively retraumatizing myself every time. I have dealt with it repeatedly, and there is no healthy in dragging the futility of it all around, night after night.

And it makes sense. I had stopped feeling similar things for others long ago, in a healthy timeframe and in healthy ways. Why is he so special that I should continue to carry that burden?

In part, I think, it’s because he wouldn’t. Part of what happens during the emotional abandonment is that I’m left to feel whatever with no support, and I’m the only one feeling it. Maybe the other person is feeling something, but it never seems to be anywhere close to what I’m feeling, especially when the other person is a dismissive-avoidant who is so well-versed in compartmentalizing emotions away to protect themselves.

I have often railed against feeling like I was carrying it for both of us, because that was sometimes the only way to prove that the thing had ever happened, with no acknowledgement of grief coming from the other person. I am sure Bounder felt it in the darkest of times, but I know that he never faced me to tell me he was sorry for hurting me. His not acknowledging me and the hurt he created, his ignoring of me when he damn well knew it was the worst possible way to hurt me, made me feel worthless, especially to him. But that flew in the face of his telling me he loved me, of his moments of showing me deep, incredible love, and I could never reconcile the conflict of extremes no matter how much I psychologized him and myself.

But to think, to realize, that I don’t have to do that was foundationally shifting. I could feel the anxiety and the tension to the right of my stomach abate immediately. There was a deep sense of relief. She’s there, and she’s a little antsy about what she’s supposed to do now. If her job was to hold all that baggage, what is she going to do now that still allows her to be of use to the Self?

I had a dream once while Bounder and I were dating, one of those lucid nap dreams. I was standing outside a tall, wide, stone tower, trying to figure out how to get inside. I could hear a knocking from the inside, and I needed to let whomever was in there out. As I looked more, I realized the tower was his face, the details of his mouth and eyes and brows built from each brick. I climbed some scaffolding and began to chip away at this one high, white stone. It was the speck of light in his left eye.

Months later, he told me that I’d been like this force knocking on his walls, over and over and over, until he eventually poked his head out enough to see what was in the light.

I let light back into his darkness, and somehow that wasn’t worth staying for. And it’s not that I wasn’t worth it; it’s that he didn’t see himself as worth me. So convinced that he would hurt me in the end, he made it happen, pushing me unaware into the dark pool so that I felt like I would drown before I could resurface.

But in the same way I did it for him, I must do it for myself. I get to be the disco ball for myself, to reflect light and shine it brilliantly into my own dark corners. Disorienting and distracting at first, yes, but eventually it becomes a beautiful swirl worthy of dancing.

It is odd, a little unsettling, to think of life without the possibility of him. I gave up the possibility of him as a romantic partner long ago. Our life goals are different, and he would never be able to consistently meet my needs. But he was always this driving force of emotion and thought, even when we weren’t together, sometimes in contact and sometimes not. Music, in particular, became a daunting prospect for me, because everything could remind me of him.

And that’s her job now, that’s what she is supposed to do, to dance. She is lightened of her load. And she gets to pick the music she wants to dance to. She’s not trapped by the years-long playlists of Bounder songs. She doesn’t have to be afraid of hearing one of them in the grocery store and bursting into tears. She doesn’t have to listen for him in every new song. She can move freely again, not weighed down by his burden or mine. She can find the path that she lost, can move toward light and laughter and love, because she deserves that.

This wasn’t her fault.

And if we pass him on the road again? I don’t know. I could feel something; I could not. I may well never see him again. I’m not going to dwell on what might happen. Now I have different roads to explore and a different Stephanie to discover.

And there is dancing to be done.

 

 

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You can be the outcast, or you can be the backlash of somebody's lack of love... or you can start speaking up.

NOTE: This post includes discussion of some pretty difficult subject matter, presented in an emotionally honest way. It may not be appropriate for all reading audiences.

At the heart of my myriad insecurities is a deep-seated fear of emotional abandonment. I am afraid that the people who profess to love me will stop caring, will decide that I am not worth their love and affection, and will dismiss me and my own emotions outright.

Physical abandonment is daunting enough, but it always seems to be symptomatic of a deeper emotional distance. DH left after our 19-year marriage crumbled, but that came only after he’d emotionally checked out of our relationship for years. I’d struggled to get Rango to engage in any emotionally significant way for more than a year before he told me he just wasn’t showing up for Max’s football game or my birthday. And when Bounder was most overwhelmed by the intensity of our relationship, he stood me up and distanced himself—at least until he decided he missed me too much to stay away—only to do it again and again.  

But the fear comes, plainly, from my childhood and adolescence.

I’ve written extensively about the sexual abuse I suffered as a child. There are at least six years during which I can remember being told, “Don’t tell anyone. You’ll be the one to get in trouble.” Years later, when I did finally tell—in the aftermath of a date rape at 16—I was left to deal with the physical and emotional impact on my own. Both the molestation and the rape were acknowledged very calmly for a few days, but there was no significant follow-up. I wasn’t sent to a counselor or therapist. I was sent, by myself, for my first pelvic exam to make sure I didn’t contract an STD.

My fear and my shame were dismissed, were boxed away so that someone else could handle what happened to me. My emotions were treated as if they were secondary and unimportant—or at least it seemed that way to me. With the exception of one close friend who literally held my hand through the process of telling, I never once felt that I was supported or cared for in those days and weeks.

I was scared and sick and confused and alone. When I most needed to be loved, the person who should have loved me most left me alone in my horror, pretending then and for most of the years since that none of it happened.

So what I learned from an early age, and relearned over and over and over, was that when someone loves you, then they leave you when your emotions are too much for them.

They leave you when you are too much for them.

Because they can’t handle what they’re feeling in response to what you’re feeling, it’s easier to pretend the feelings don’t matter or that there are no feelings at all. So while love is supposed to be this caring, beautiful, wonderful thing, for me it’s also tainted by hurt, twisted up with rejection and carelessness and neglect.

None of this is new. None of this is revelation.

What is new for me is the realization that the subpersonalities are afraid that I will emotionally abandon them. They are terrified that I will decide that they aren’t worth the trouble, that the help they try to provide is too much of a hassle for me to bother to listen to them. They are afraid of being ignored and dismissed. They are afraid that I will shut them all down, in turn becoming exactly what I fear most.

And my choices, my culpability, in all of my relationship failures make my trustworthiness questionable. My complicity in DH’s ignorance of me, which I would go on to rebel against in the most damaging of ways possible. My constantly shifting boundaries, allowing Rango to pull further and further away while I accepted the blame for his distance. And my tortured love for Bounder, whose kiss could make time stand still and the seas turn to sand—who I will still seek out when I feel utterly lost and alone, even though I know he will almost certainly let me down. The multitude of others, who said I mattered but then walked away with barely a glance over their shoulders.

Besides, I was the one who was making out with that guy the night of the rape. I was the one whose tiny body reacted with sexual arousal when touched inappropriately. While that is a totally normal physiological response, the behavior that wasn’t normal became utterly normalized. I knew things at an age when I should’ve been happily playing with my baby dolls and getting hugs goodnight instead of confusion and lies to deflect someone else’s blame.

They won’t love me anymore if I don’t do this thing that feels weird and wrong, being done to me by someone who says they love me.

Hurt was normalized. Secrets and shame were normalized. Pretending like nothing happened, like it didn’t matter, was normalized.

So if I have culpability or complicity in those hurts, who the hell am I to be trusted? How can my internal family trust me to make healthy loving decisions for them when I can’t even seem to make them for myself? How can I be trusted to do the right thing for any of us?

The difference in me and those who’ve hurt me is that I don’t want to be distanced from my emotions or anyone else’s. I don’t want to be ignored or dismissed, and so I try like hell not to do the same to anyone else. To disregard those parts of myself, to act as if my own emotions just don’t exist or matter, inflicts unbearable hurt. Shutting down, being numb again, silencing those inner voices entirely is the last thing I ever want to do.

I have to show myself the love and care that I expect from anyone else.

Integration can only come about if I trust the parts not to hurt me and vice versa. I have to honor what each feels, acknowledge each emotion I am ultimately feeling, and accept that the emotion itself is not the trauma. The traumatic events are over and done; the feelings are ghosts whose chains rattle me in a million directions at once sometimes, making me shaky on my feet. Making me insecure.

I may be moving forward, but I’m not leaving them behind. These parts of me, trapped at different ages and stages of development—disintegrated—deserve the chance to mature. They deserve the opportunity to grown into the woman they would’ve become had shit not gone horribly wrong.

I deserve the same.

Part of that maturation is coming to terms with the fact that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t allow those other people to hurt me. I didn’t encourage them to devalue me and to dehumanize me. I didn’t ask to be sexually assaulted. I didn’t ask for them not to love and care for me.

It wasn’t my fault.

IT WASN’T MY FAULT.

I am worth love, and I am worth care and concern. There is nothing about me that is so inherently ugly or unlovable to have warranted horrid, difficult abuse. I was a sweet, smart, precocious little girl with Moonpie eyes and one dimple. I should never have been a sexualized object. I didn’t deserve to be molested. I didn’t deserve to be raped. I didn’t deserve to be smacked around and degraded by an angry boyfriend. I didn't deserve to be used and abused and discarded.

I never deserved being the target of someone else’s self-loathing and guilt.

I was worth more than dismissal and ignorance because I didn’t meet someone else’s expectations or conform to their fucked-up, dysfunctional norms. I am worth more than an eyeroll-and-sigh in toleration.

All of those bits inside me have fought to protect me from hurt, from allowing anything in that might cause more damage, But the fracturing of my personality into smaller parts left vulnerable cracks. Rather than fill the spaces with gold, like Japanese kintsugi, I often used whatever I could find: leftover packing tape ripped from an old dusty box… someone else’s half-chewed gum… desperate hope coated in blood and sticky mess.

But I was never going to be able to close my own rifts with someone else’s effluvia.

It’s up to me to find the healing from deep inside me, to let those internal persona who so badly want and need to help do just that. If the end goal is a whole Stephanie, the parts that make her up have to have a role in filling those gaps.

So I’m letting them talk, and I’m listening. I’m hearing what each of them says they need, and I’m doing my best to honor those wishes. I’m giving each an opportunity to share their respective visions of wholeness and then choosing what works best for all of us. For me.

It is a process to pick up the broken pieces and put them back together. It took years for the breaks to happen, for the dust to settle enough for clean-up to begin. But it has.

And it’s up to me to do that work.

It’s up to me to show myself the love and care that I need, and that starts with sweeping away everyone else’s pain and destruction and refusing to force my bits to fit with theirs.

It’s up to me to trust that I can do this.  

 

 

Though you drown in good intentions, you will never quench the fire. You'll give in to your desire, when the stranger comes along.

Break-ups can be foundationally shattering. The end of a long-term relationship can be shocking to the core. There is the grief that comes from severing a deep, meaningful connection, of lamenting what has been lost, but there is also a sudden shift in daily routines that now feel hollow and future plans that will never come to fruition.

The day after Rango came to get his stuff from the house, I struggled just to maintain. I woke early, fed the cats, and cried for a while before falling back asleep. At noon, I realized I needed to get up and do my normal Sunday chores. The boys would be home from their dad’s that evening, and they would be expecting clean laundry and food for the week.

Walking through the grocery store, I felt raw. I felt like everyone who passed me in the aisles could see the sadness dripping from my every pore. I was certain that my hard-fought composure would come undone if anyone spoke kindly or smiled at me.

It’s not just that the sadness is a part of the grieving process. The sadness fulfills a purpose.

When I realized the futility of the relationship, I started looking for a new therapist. Therapy had been incredibly helpful through the demise of my marriage to DH. I was fortunate to have found an incredible therapeutic partner to help guide me through a couple of years of divorce and dating and loss. But my insecurities undoubtedly played a role in the tensions and break-up with Rango, and I knew I never want to feel those things again. I never again want to feel so easily broken by another person, especially when my head knows it shouldn’t be possible.

As I did some research online, I came across the Internal Family Systems therapeutic model developed by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s. It seemed to be especially effective in treating anxious attachers and rejection sensitivity. The idea is that we are each a Self, which is the true, whole, spiritual center of us. But we also have these discrete subpersonalities with their own intentions and needs and quirks and purpose. Each part has a specific viewpoint, developed from its interpretations of life experiences. Each has its own memories and interprets them according to its unique perspective:

• Managers handle the way we interact with the external world. They try to protect us from hurt, whether from others or from our own memories.
• Exiles are the parts that feel the worst emotions—pain, hurt, shame, fear—usually resulting from childhood trauma. Managers and Firefighters try to exile these parts to prevent their emotions from coming to the surface.
• Firefighters show up when Exiles break free and demand attention. They try to distract us from the pain, often encouraging unhealthy behaviors as coping mechanisms.

The goal of IFS is to allow the Self to access and connect to each subpart, healing them one by one. Thus, the Self leads the other parts in harmony and health. We become a whole, heathy person, rather than an amalgam of these smaller bits that exhaust themselves fighting to maintain a losing battle.

I have long believed that we each are made up of various persona, and we take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone….

In an online interview reposted through the band’s Facebook page, Alex Wheeler said the title, Persona Non Grata, referred to all of the unacceptable and unwelcomed parts of everyone—the lurid, the shadowy, the hidden, the broken.

“Each of us has a persona, all the time,” he said. “I’m one persona with the band, someone a little different with my fans, someone else entirely with my wife and daughter. Sometimes that persona is ‘good’ and sometimes it’s ‘bad’. I spent a lot of time exploring the bad sides of normal, everyday people, you know? Not serial killers or rapists or anything. I wanted to look at the things regular people like to hide from the people they know and, most especially, from themselves.”

                                                                                                                                Persona Non Grata (2012)

I have, at times, named some of my subpersonalities, though I wasn’t thinking of them within the context of IFS.

• Cissie is the sweet, blond girl who never seemed to be pleasing to her parents, no matter how hard she tried. She never felt like she was enough. She was also molested for years, and she spent a lot of her time agitated and afraid. She is an Exile.
• Quinn is the rebellious teen who learned to trade sex and secrets for affection, often in an attempt to protect Cissie. She has her own anger and hurt, but she will bear it all to protect that little girl. She is a Firefighter.
• Stephie is a loud ball of angry. She will erupt and tantrum and demand her way when she feels she is being ignored. She is potentially a special subpersonality called a Tormentor. (She secretly wears that like a badge of honor.)
• Sassafras Bombalurina O’Malley is the one who reminds me to be shiny and sparkly and to tell the world to go fuck itself if it doesn’t like it. She is an eccentric, outrageous Manager who knows how to call on the Firefighters to back her up.
• Wonder Woman is the Amazonian princess who does it all, because she has to. She handles the day-to-day business of life, and she is remarkable. She is strong and capable, smart and intuitive, and she can predict everyone else’s needs and desires before they can. She is a Manager.
• Stephanie Quinn Jackson is the writer who sees it all, who arranges it and espouses the shared perspective of the others, who bears witness to it all and gives them a voice when it seems that no one else will listen. She is a Manager.

There are others, nameless but all with some variation of my face. Each has its own role and purpose in getting Stephanie through her life. Not to be confused with Dissociative Identity Disorder, I am not claiming to have multiple, distinct personalities. These are simply facets of my personality, and each strives in its own way to help me be secure and healthy and safe—even when its influence result in dysfunction.

The sadness is tied up with the hurt, and it’s not just from this break-up. This is hurt that hasn’t healed in 40 years. This is sadness that helps me to keep others at bay, or to curl up in bed and sleep when I should be doing productive things, so that I don’t have to feel the hurt. So I don’t have to delve back into every haunting memory and question again why I was both too little and too much. Why I wasn’t worth careful, healthy love.

None of these parts can or should ever be exorcised. Each is valuable and necessary, both as its own part and as a part of the larger whole. But the hurt can be healed enough so that it doesn’t make more hurt, create more sadness, because somewhere in there is joy and beauty. Somewhere in there is a sad and lost little girl who desperately wants to be loved.

I have to find her and help her.

We have to find her together.

 

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Muchness and Light - But if you'd known how that would sound to me, you would've taken it back and boxed it up and buried it in the ground.

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

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I don't want to be tied to anyone's strings. I'm carefully trying to steer clear of those things.

I am a passionate person. I tend to throw myself fully into whatever I do, doing it loudly and brashly and intensely—though I am perfectly capable of tempering that passion when needed.

I’m also verbose. If you’ve read Muchness and Light over the last seven years, you know I rarely spin up any idea in less than 1,000 words. Text messages and emails are almost as wordy, even if they’re just to myself.

Even while I’ve been inactive in this forum, I have tended to continue to journal, whether in a Word doc or an email that sits forever in my Draft box or in a note on my phone. Bounder commented once that he was amazed at how much I could get out through a tiny phone keypad. Although initially interested in my writing, and in being the recipient of effusive love letters, Rango eventually told me to stop sending him walls of texts that he’d lost interest in reading.

Over the last few days, I looked back at many of those messages. What I saw was almost two years of trying to convince him to love me. That’s not to say he didn’t feel the affection. I’m certain that he did. But I wanted his actions to match his words, to behave in loving ways toward me (and the boys) as often as he told me he loved me. It wasn’t just that I wanted reciprocity of affection—I needed to feel loved to feel secure in our relationship.

What I also saw in those messages was a slow spiral into severe insecurity. I didn’t regularly and consistently feel love from him, and I questioned the distance he was putting between us. Like so many others I have known and loved, he compartmentalized his feelings into these tiny boxes that he used to build a wall between us. As it got harder and harder to get reassurance from him, sometimes to get response at all, I inferred a great deal to fill in the empty space. Eventually I adopted what I interpreted as his skewed perception of me as my own, and I became unbearably self-critical, lobbing ugly accusations of flaws and unlovability at myself.

Last night, as I was journaling again, I got myself type the words, “He wouldn’t have hurt me, if I hadn’t made him so angry.”

There was no physical abuse, ever. But for me, the systematic elimination of my passion was just as devastating. I reread months and months of my begging him to engage me, of telling him that I couldn’t take much more of his ignorance. I saw him blame me for being too much and causing him to withdraw.

His withdrawing would stop, the distance would shrink, if only I’d give him space and time to allow it to happen. Every time I changed my own behaviors and approaches to match what he led me to believe he wanted, he would move the finish line and leave me just as far away from him as I had been just weeks or days or hours before. Eventually I learned to stop having expectations of him, because expectations are just regrets waiting to happen. Eventually I learned to suppress my own desires and needs—until my passionate nature would erupt in anger at having felt ignored for far too long. My anger would, of course, drive him further away.

“Baby, why you make me wanna hit you?” Queen Frostine commented dryly.

While I have been effectively starved for intimacy, I am also incredibly fearful of it now. Certainly, it hasn’t even been a month since we broke up, and I’m not ready to meet anyone new. I’m still not quite ready to entertain the thought that it might one day happen. The idea of getting over someone by getting under someone else is repulsive to me right now. As I explained to a friend today, the thought of anyone touching me make me physically ill.

But I long for affection. I long to be touched carefully, to feel my own warmth reflected back from the skin of someone who chooses to share in intimate moments with me. I miss being seen, being regarded as an interesting woman. I miss being valued as a woman in any way.

At the same time, I don’t believe I am an interesting woman. If I were, surely Rango would’ve stayed interested. He told me time and again that he wouldn’t have been here if he didn’t want to be. But wouldn’t he have chosen to engage me, if he’d really wanted to? He did other things he wanted to do. So, if he didn’t choose me, there must be something wrong with me. And if there’s one thing wrong, then everything is wrong. If I have no value to him, then I must have no value to anyone else.

I understand the logical fallacy. I get that this thinking is maladaptive and self-defeating, if not self-destructive. If I ever expressed these thoughts to him, he would tell me I was wrong, that none of it was true, but he would never offer reassurance. He might say it’s not true, but he would continue to behave in the same ways that contributed to my having arrived at the conclusion that I am fat, ugly, stupid, worthless, etc. And so my insecurities systematically buried my own passion, compartmentalizing it away so that it was less likely to hurt me.

He told me a few times that he didn’t understand why I needed him, or anyone else, to contribute to my own satisfaction. In his mind, I should be able to be fully independent, especially emotionally. In the end, I believe he saw me as weak because I needed him.

But I believe that love is shared. I believe partners in healthy relationships care for one another. They do the things logistically and emotionally that support the other. They work to create and maintain intimacy that is meaningful to each and to the whole.

I believe love should be greater than the sum of its parts.

I want to believe that there are others who believe the same, who want to live and love passionately for their whole lives, not just for the initial stages of a relationship. I want to believe there are people who care about others more than they care about themselves. And I want to believe there is someone who could both allow me to care about them in such a way and do the same for me in return.

But I don’t. Not really. I want to. I want to still be the woman who had faith in love above all else. I want to still be a believer. I’m just not. Not because I don’t think it’s possible for me to be that woman, but because I have become so accustomed to being shown those beliefs were delusional that I don’t trust them anymore. I can’t. The possibility of hurt is far too great.

Even if I never again allow anyone close enough to hurt me, there is still the damage I have done to myself. There is still my own culpability in having allowed him to hurt me, to have given him the proximity and knowledge-as-weapon to be able to do it.

Maybe in the end it’s not just that I don’t trust others. I don’t trust myself. I adopted those skewed perceptions, and I’m no good to anyone until I can unravel that mess of barbed wire. But I am truly afraid I will weave into some kind of armor to keep others at a distance—including myself.

 

 

But if you'd known how that would sound to me, you would've taken it back and boxed it up and buried it in the ground.

Talking to Queen Frostine one morning late last week (as I do almost every week day, on my way to work), I relayed a conversation I’d had with Fluffernutter the day before. I told her how I hadn’t cried about the break-up with Rango since the first days. I was feeling more centered and more at peace with everything, if sad and resigned at times.

“You’re handling this break-up so much better,” she agreed. “I’m really proud of you.”

I told Pandy that, again, I felt like I was reliving events of five years prior, ending my relationship. The similarities were eerie at times. Certainly, I am prone to attract avoidant attachers, usually dismissives, and Rango was no exception. But there hadn’t been the self-recrimination and second-guessing that I’d experienced before. I had avoided the prolonged bouts of melancholy that followed in the wake of Bounder. I chalked it up to having done much of my work in those five years, coming to terms with myself. I’d also had a year or more to live preemptively through the grief of losing Rango.

But he came on Saturday to get his belongings. I’d packed everything neatly, wrapping his glasses in paper and putting a figurine we’d gotten him for Christmas back in its Styrofoam sarcophagus. Some of the boxes were labeled, and I’d stacked them neatly in the carport, away from the edge where the rains of Hurricane Irma might blow onto them.

I heard his car drive up, and I was okay initially. But when I glanced out the kitchen window, peeking from a distance through a space in the curtains, I saw him. There was the man I loved, from whom I’d been separated physically for nearly a month.

I lost my shit.

I immediately hurried back to the bedroom, far enough away that I wouldn’t have to hear him load his boxes and talk to the friend who’d come with him to help. I messaged the Castration Committee that I was sobbing uncontrollably, that it must be Snoturday.

My girls were sweet and messaged with me constantly throughout the afternoon. They reminded me of all the ways in which they see me as wonderful, as well as all the ways in which they see him as an ass. 

But for a moment, none of that mattered. I wanted nothing more than to fling open the front door and run to him, to feel his arms around me and his breath in my hair. I had the fleeting argument with myself over whether I could do it, trying to convince my anger that its sister, aching, would be relieved if only I could hold him for a moment.

It was the bargaining stage of grief, in the Kubler Ross and Kessler model.

I’d avoided it until that moment, at least since I’d officially called it quits. In practice, I’d been bargaining with him for months, trying to abate my grief at what I saw coming. I’d vacillated between denial and anger and that negotiating, trying desperately to convince him to meet me on some middle ground, to love me and to let me love him back.

The last of a 24-hour-long fight over email ensued, plus a final phone call from him asking about where something was (packed neatly just as I’d said in email). Hearing his voice after hours of crying was a sucker punch to the gut. I shouldn’t have taken the call. Not being able to tell him that I love him made me want to vomit.

Pandy suggested this morning that I find my anger again. I don’t want to be angry. That takes too much energy to maintain. I understand her point, though. If I can feel not so sentimental about him, then it will hurt less.

But it’s going to hurt as long as it hurts. For me to feel nothing after a month, in the aftermath of a three-year relationship, would be unhealthy in its own way. I never wanted this break-up. I wanted to fulfill those promises of the rest our lives. It will take time to find peace in the acceptance of what we lost.

For years, I had a sign in my bedroom that says Forever And Always And No Matter What. I hung it on the wall across from the bed when DH and I were married. He took it down in those last months, but I put it back when he left. It was, and is, an important vow exchanged regularly between me and my sons.

We took it down again last summer to paint the bedroom. Rango never got around the hanging it again. I did it this week, while I was home with the boys during Irma. It’s the first thing I see when I wake in the morning.

But Rango had also  bought a sister sign, in the same style, that said HAPPILY EVER AFTER. He’d intended to hang it with the other one, just for us. It never made it to the wall.

I put it in the pile with his boxes. He left it to the side, and for two more days I will see it sticking out of the trash can until the garbage man comes to take it away.

I kept lots of reminders of him. I kept the blue canary nightlight and the book end he bought me for my first birthday with him. I kept the charms for my bracelet that he bought with the boys. I kept the sound machine he bought me for Mother’s Day, to soothe me with rain sounds when I can’t sleep.

But I could not keep the things that would hurt in the coming weeks and months. I couldn’t keep the metal Rango he also bought me for Mother’s Day. I couldn’t keep the house key he returned yesterday.

Those things are all packed away in a box I bought especially for him. In the back corner of my closet, where I don’t have to see it every day, my life with Rango sits in the dark. If I were to get it out and go through it, I’m sure I’d cry.

But I can do that on my own right now. I don’t need his box.

 

 

 

And as soon as I get out of here, I plan on coming back for nothing.

When DH and I split up, it was devastating for us all. He and I had been together for most of two decades, and even with all the bullshit that precipitated our end, there’s no doubt that it was hardest on our boys. Max and Tricky weathered it all beautifully, for the most part, but their world collapsed in on itself. Their dad exited it for most of four years, whether physically or emotionally. While he and I have battled off and on for much of that time, I can very cautiously state that we have achieved a détente in recent months and have been able to effectively communicate and co-parent. I know it has been good for me and for the boys, and I hope it has been good for DH, as well.

When Rango came into our life, it seemed magical. Not only did he get me, he got my kids. His personal history gave him very specific insight into what my young sons were thinking and feeling. He bonded with them almost as quickly as he bonded with me. We were all happy when we intertwined our households and created an entirely new life for ourselves.

But somewhere, it all went awry. It’s not just in hindsight that I can see the landmarks pointing us toward destruction; I could see them happening in real time and spoke out against them. My aggressively railing against impending damage gave him reason to withdraw, and eventually I found myself with yet another avoidant, who could dismiss me and compartmentalize away until he felt the need or desire to deal with me. When I became an inconvenient reminder of his own damage and shortcomings, I was ignored to the point of feeling as if I didn’t exist for him until he chose to acknowledge me.

I could spend days psychoanalyzing him, breaking down his history as I know it and applying that knowledge to his behaviors, inferring meaning into every action and word ever exchanged between us. I could obsessively reread every email and text message and chat message, listen to the couple of voicemails I still have on my phone. But really, what’s the point? It won’t change anything, and it’s unlikely to offer me an insight I don’t already have.

I have spent days packing his belongings. I cleaned out drawers and closets and cabinets, looking for any lingering reminders that might blindside me if found later. Yes, it’s logistical, but it’s also a reclamation of the space. I have moved my knick-knacks and pictures onto the shelves where his things had been. I am slowly taking over the empty dresser and closet space again. I am gleefully eating glutinous yummies and not worrying about dropping crumbs, in case I irritate his wheat allergy.

When I told my dad that I really am okay, that it has been far less upsetting than other break-ups, he replied, “Well, that probably just means it was time.”

I’m not burying the sadness. The first few days were awful, and I cried a lot. But I also cried a lot during the last year, begging and negotiating and demanding resolution that didn’t come in the way in which I’d hoped. In the way in which he’d promised me when we met or during the first year of our relationship.

What I can’t get rid of yet is the anger. I’m not angry that our romantic relationship ended. I do think it’s incredibly unfortunate, given how wonderful the man I fell in love with was. We both changed in three years, and we couldn’t change together. He has his own damage and his own need for protections, and those needs are different than my own. In the end, we couldn’t meet each other’s needs, no matter how mindfully and intentionally I tried.

But he hurt my children. The last time he saw them, we sat around the kitchen table while he told us that he loved us, that we were his family, and that he wanted to be home with his family again. He asked the boys to think about his moving back home and to share those thoughts with him. But before they could respond, he was gone.

He ghosted on them completely. He told them he loved them and chose them and then never saw them again. He effectively unchose them with no explanation or apology. While losing a beloved family member and parental figure is hard under any circumstances, especially for children, this was eerily reminiscent of what happened with their father. Rango’s behavior mirrored what was the most hurtful and damaging experience of their young lives, and he knew better. He knew the exact way in which to inflict the most damage, both on me and on the boys, and did it anyway. He abandoned two boys who adored him, who relied on him, who loved him and just wanted to be loved back. If it wasn’t calculating and malicious, it was thoughtless and careless, cruelly reckless.

When I finally made the logistical break from his avoidant bullshit, Fluffernutter asked me if I could see the possibility of reconciliation in the future, maybe after a few months of no contact and time to settle and rethink everything. At the time, I ruled out the possibility of ever ruling him out completely.

But last week, Tricky asked me, “Will we ever be able to bring Rango back?”

I realized in that moment, as he looked down at his homework, floppy hair hiding his face from scrutiny, that I am no longer open to that possibility. DH is their father, and Max and Tricky love him very much; they will always find a way to maintain that relationship. I pray regularly that DH does the same.

But Rango was an outsider, whom we chose to love. The boys chose him, every time, until he didn’t choose them back. I introduced him into our world, cautiously and with the reservation that all single parents have in such cases. For me to ever allow him access to them again would open the plausibility of additional hurt, and I am unwilling to gamble with their hearts again.

So for now, for the foreseeable future, it will just be me and my young men. I’m not remotely interested in dating again. I’ll say maybe ever, but I understand the statistical likelihood of that actually happening. But if I even contemplate trusting someone enough to let them past my own mounting defenses, my heart and mind slam up those steely walls, unwilling to consider such possibility even cursorily.

I also remind the boys that this wasn’t their fault. His choice was his choice, and nothing they could ever do would warrant the kind of hurt he has inflicted. I remind them that they did nothing wrong, that their love is worth far more than Rango admitted.

And I remind myself of the same.

 

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Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

Huffington Post Article #3

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

Bluebird of friendliness, like guardian angels, it's always near.

After I started dating post-divorce, the men who had meaning to me all became identified with birds. I tend to attach meaning to things that might seem otherwise coincidental, and the more those men meant to me, the more synchronicity and meaning seemed to develop. Vultures, especially black ones, are significant to me personally. Someone told me once that some Native Americans called them “spirit eagles,” because they took away bad thoughts and carrion of the soul as they soared majestically. They're beautiful when they circle, and they always seem to appear when I'm emotionally heightened.

Rex was named for a giant rooster, but he was always associated with eagles. Katniss was a grey parrot. (Gawd, I hate bird people.) Bounder self-identified with crows, but he is inexorably tied to red-wing blackbirds.

It took me a long time to associate a bird with Rango. But a year or so ago, when things between us were really beginning to show the signs of strain, I heard the song “Birdhouse in Your Soul” by They Might Be Giants. I'd heard it a million times, but it struck me hard that night.

Even after two years, I was still fighting him. I would sometimes resist his attempts to reach into my darkness, crawling so far up inside my own head that he couldn't have reached me if I'd wanted him to. But I did want him to.

And he was my bluebird of happiness, my happy place of peace and content when nothing else could be. I had to make space for him, intentionally and mindfully. I had to build a birdhouse for him in my soul.

I told him all of this. I still don't really know how he felt about it. But I bought a decoration for the wall in our house, a tree with paper birds. The bluebird was the first one I placed, out front of the others, ready to watch for the rest of us.

He bought a blue canary nightlight for me for Christmas, to watch over me when I get up in the night, terrified of the dark. He would wear this blue shirt I bought him for his first birthday with us, even though he hated the way the collar crumpled in the laundry. He knew I loved the shirt, because the color was the same blue of the brightest parts of his eyes.

After he moved out, we decided to continue to try to make our life work. We spent the summer working on the house, painting and cleaning out crap in anticipation of his return by fall. At the store one day, I found a solar-charged LED bluebird. I placed it by the front door, so I would always see him at night when he wasn't there, so he would have a light in the dark when he came home.

We have come to the point that we are no longer tenable. My insecurities and his insecurities--both textbook examples of avoidant and anxious attachment styles--are in dire conflict. His depression and anxiety is overwhelming to us both, and I have felt desperate in my need for comfort and reassurance. We can no longer adequately respond to the other’s needs. I am no longer a place of comfort for him.

Whether super-villain or impotent superhero, I seem to be making him worse. I tried my best to offer him a hand to hold onto, but he has turned so far away that he couldn't reach me if he even looked. I love him deeply and passionately, but sometimes that's just not enough. Sometimes, it's too much.

As I look through the house for his belongings to be boxed up, I am surrounded by those bluebirds. I don't want to shoo them away right now. Not yet. They're a reminder that we were happy and that we loved one another. That we were, at all.

So for now, the bluebirds stay. Every time I wash dishes while standing on the bluebird kitchen mat, I will remember. Every night, as the blue canary shines, I will feel a little safer in my darkness. And the bluebird by the front door will remain a beacon for us for a while longer, welcoming him home if he's ever ready.

 

 

Is that too much to ask? Well, maybe I'm an idiot.

About three months ago, Rango and I made the decision that he would move out. More than a year of tension and difficulty had spiraled us into a pretty deep pit of darkness, and neither of us could see a way out together. We decided pretty quickly that we still wanted to try to make things work. We continued dating. He still spent time at the house, still called it home, still saw the boys as regularly as their schedules would allow. For several weeks, we both thought we were on track for him to move back home.

But tensions surfaced again about a month ago. Old patterns emerged in both of us, and we find ourselves again in a depressing spiral. We love each other, but our respective needs and wants clash constantly. He feels pressured to give more than he’s able, stressing that I should just accept him the way he his—which he is not going to change for anyone. I think a caring partner makes the other a priority and tries to support their happiness, even and especially when it is inconvenient or difficult. By no means am I suggesting that one partner should kowtow to the other constantly. That’s not healthy at all. But sometimes we should do things that are best for the people we love, even when it requires uncomfortable effort on our part.

The last year has been exceedingly rife with difficulty. After my thyroid radiation, it took months before I started to feel physically and emotionally normal again, due to shifting hormone levels. By the first of the year, it became clear that my chronic neck pain had worsened, and I had a three-level discectomy and fusion in April. I was working full time and finally finishing my bachelor’s degree after twenty-seven years of on-again/off-again, half-hearted attempts. I hoped that alleviating most of those stressors would give us a fresh start toward reconciliation and growth.

I didn’t talk about it much. I tried to avoid it most of the time with the girls. The Castration Committee is amazing, and they will back me up no matter what. But bringing other people into the relationship, even tangentially, can profoundly influence perceptions—and not always for the better. Also, due to somewhat skewed perspectives, my family wasn’t always supportive and could be judgmental. Mostly I found it better to keep it to myself or between me and Rango. Mostly.

But as we’ve come again to a place of incredible conflict, I’m turning back to Muchness and Light. I haven’t written in months. I have barely written for the last two years. Much of that was due to school and work and health and child obligations. Much of it was due to my not feeling it was worth it.

DH told me years ago that I should stop writing, that blogging was nothing more than an echo-chamber. He was vitriolic in his assertion that only my friends cared about what I had to say. I know he was wrong, at least to an extent. But it also became apparent as time went on with Rango that he didn’t care to read what I had to say, although he would encourage me to write. He understood it was cathartic for me—effectively making it nothing more than a publicized diary—but that he had no interest in engaging my thoughts in this forum. This week, I’ve been told that I should just blog what’s bothering me and find a way to fix my messy head, but that he is uninterested in either climbing a wall of text intended for him or in talking about our problems.

At heart, he’s a good man. He is generally kind and generous. He loves me and loves my sons. But he often seems dramatically different than the man I met and fell in love with. Time has passed; we have changed. But where I thought we both wanted to grow and change together, he believes he hasn’t changed at all and that I shouldn’t expect him to.

When I did finally break down and really talk to Pandy, she said I deserve more. She is sweet and whole-heartedly believes I deserve to be in a healthy, committed relationship, receiving the same love I so freely give.

But she’s wrong.

I don’t deserve to be loved. No one deserves to be loved. As I said a few posts ago, the only thing anyone deserves is an eventual death. I used to believe that there was some cosmic force that somehow wanted good things for me, that maybe if I did good things then I would receive them in return. I believed in deep, abiding, passionate love that was reciprocal and maybe (just maybe!) destined. For a little while, I believed that I was worth enough to get happiness, not to be faced constantly with disappointment and hurt.

But I was wrong. There’s nothing up in the sky but air.

No matter how hard I try to be good, to be accommodating, to be considerate, I cannot make someone else do the same. I cannot make someone be or do what I think is ideal—or even what I think is a reasonable compromise. I can’t force them to hear me or try to see anything from my point of view. I can only accept them for who they are or not. I can live with their personality and eccentricities or move on.

I don’t expect perfection from anyone. I’m even learning not to expect it from myself. I have worked really hard to not overreact to emotions, to sit with them and understand their locus, to act appropriately in response to those emotions. But I can’t not respond to them.

So, there is sadness and grief, hurt and probably some anger. I’m sure more will come later. I’m sure it will abate eventually.

But I’m not berating myself that I deserve any of these feelings, either. So maybe I did change for the better, after all.

 

 

When your mama heard the way that you'd been talkin', I tried to tell you that all she'd wanna do is cry.

So it has been a rough couple of months. Honestly, I don’t even know the last time I checked in, the last time I wrote something that wasn’t schoolwork or workwork or some ranting, raving text or email that I hoped would perfectly and pointedly enunciate whatever the hell has been trying to claw its way out of me. Heart, brain, mind, soul… all a big confusing blob of Idon’tevenknowwhat right now.

Radiation was a downer, but I got through it. All of this activity with my thyroid has sent my hormones into overdrive. Concerns about my health have sent my head spinning, and three days in isolation, binge watching Game of Thrones, sure as heck didn’t help.

But I have, at times, been a raging bitch. It’s not that I am imagining things to get upset about; it has just been far too easy for me to explode about anything and then find myself curled into a sobbing ball of inconsolable self-recrimination.

In the middle of a tense discussion about it a couple of weeks ago, Rango told me that he doesn’t understand why I am so drawn to chaos.

“It’s like you need the tension.”

He doesn’t get it. He says he prefers to be in the middle, at even keel and as balanced as possible.

“I don’t trust extremes,” he continued. “I don’t like euphoria any more than I like chaos.”

But me? I thrive in chaos. Euphoria is my drug.

“I need the tension to know I’m alive,” I replied. “It’s the only way I know I’m not numb, and I don’t ever want to be numb to my life again.”

I challenged that I abhor the happy medium he espouses.  But he has a point: I am drawn to extremes.

Lately, though, there seem to have only been extremes of bad, of anger and disappointment and outrage, over the slightest things. I can blow a gasket if the towels aren’t folded right or if the boys didn’t clean the table.

Last night, I was adamant that I’ll be kicking Max out of the house when he’s 22, because he can’t hold down a job or finish school or take care of himself—all because the kitchen was a torn apart by a ravenous, irresponsible, 15-year-old boy.

For the last week, I’ve been hearing other people say things, often random things that aren’t directed at me, that seem like messages the cosmos intends for me to hear. There was a gathering of the Castration Committee at my house over the weekend, and all three of the present girls said something very specific about themselves that I also needed to take to heart.

Yesterday, I was driving to work, in a total funk, listening to my favorite podcast, Death, Sex & Money (with Anna Sale). The latest episode was an interview with author and Buzzfeed senior editor Katie Heaney. Anna had interviewed her a couple of years ago after she published Never Have I Ever, her memoir of then-lifelong singledom. Now dating and now openly gay, Heaney talked about what it was like to let go of much of her apprehension about dating when she realized she really might want to date women instead of men.

No, I didn’t need to get the message that I’m really a lesbian, no matter how often the Castration Committee and I plan to swear off men and just be together forever. There was actually a lot in her story and in her words that jumped through the car speakers toward me. (That happens a lot when I listen to Death, Sex & Money. That’s why it’s my favorite.)

Sale asked Heaney if there’s anything she feels like she needed to be taught in her new relationship, having never been in a relationship herself.

“Not really, no…. Not taught. I think that I… and I am still learning this… I have to learn how to not catastrophize every disagreement or every feeling that comes to me that isn’t a one-hundred-percent joyous one. You know, I always thought that I was above the sort of ‘white knight’ narrative and thinking that a relationship was going to improve my life. I don’t think I thought it was going to improve my life, but I thought that I had struggled so long to find it that once I did it would just be perfect or easy…. I was naïve about what it really means to spend that much time with someone and still be happy but still have days where you’re just like, ‘Ugh, I don’t feel good, I don’t feel good today, this is not my favorite thing that’s going on today,” and I think early on I would get very nervous about that, because I was putting a lot of pressure on both of us.”

Dude.

Is Katie Hearney living in my head?? (I’m sorry if you are, Katie. It’s a cacophonous place.)

Sale did the same thing I did, questioned whether or not “catastrophize” was a real word, or whether Hearney’s mom had coined it in reference to her daughter.

Turns out, it is a real word. It’s an irrational thought that something is much worse than it actually is. According to psychologist John M. Grohol, catastrophizing can take two forms. The first takes a current situation and turns it into catastrophe—a small mistake at work will result in your firing. The second form takes thoughts of future happenings and creates a reality around the anticipated catastrophe.

Guilty as charged, on both counts.

In the very beginning of my break-up with Bounder, when I saw the potential of so much going badly because of something he felt I had blown out of proportion, he called me on it.

“You’re always looking for the worst thing to happen, waiting for it to blow up, because you just know it’s going to. Things aren’t always that bad, Sass.”

Well, he was right and not, of course. So was I.

I am incredibly analytical by nature—I am a good Virgo, after all. And my job requires me to be hyper-analytical, looking not only at what is wrong, but also at what might be wrong, to anticipate a response and a rebuttal and a reply to the rebuttal, all with the end goal of being right. I am very good at my job, but the cacophony in my head is often just the buzz of this computation of possibility and plausibility in a way that is extreme, even for me.

So while I’m analyzing the minutiae of every relationship I have, often to my own detriment, I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to give this one with Rango (or any one) a fair and healthy shot. He noted that I am constantly scrutinizing everything, waiting for it to break down and fall apart.

And with another year of hormonal chaos ahead of me—so says my doctor—I don’t know if either of us has the energy to try to keep up with my thoughts.

My crazy train can be gloriously and devastatingly exhausting. I am always on the go, and the next year will be no exception. There is not time to slow down, between work and school and the kids. But somehow I have to find a way not to expect the worst, even though I have planned for it so carefully.

I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to just stop being me. And I am afraid of taking away the glorious if I abandon the devastation. I am afraid of being numb again.

I don’t have an answer. I have a recommendation for a book, The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living, and I have ordered a copy. I am not one to turn to self-help books, unless someone very special recommends the book. This time is no exception, and it feels like the cosmos wants me to read something.

So for now, I am waiting patiently for Amazon to deliver my copy. I will not expect it to get lost in the mail—I can always go to the book store for another one if that one never shows.

But I will try to take those thoughts when they come and let them be that, just thoughts. They are not action, they are not reality, unless I make them so.

 

I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.

After a couple of intense days of more “discussion,” I took the boys out for the afternoon. It was a lovely afternoon with my men and Max’s girlfriend, Kiki, followed by a delicious if tense dinner with Rango. (The man is a great cook, by the way.) Rango and I excused ourselves to the talk privately, again going in circles about the same issues from the last few weeks. We disengaged, and he went to sleep on the couch while Max and I drove Kiki home.

On the way home, Max asked if Rango and I were going to break up.

“I don’t know,” I replied carefully.

“Well, I want you to do what’s best for you, of course, but I love him to death. I don’t want him to leave.”

And then I remembered exactly how much my relationship with Rango impacts so much more than just me and him.

By the time Rango came into our life, DH had been living out of state for four months. In the two years he’s been gone, he has seen the boys for 34 days. On average, they talk to him every 3-4 weeks. Max and Tricky have very little expectation of their father, other than 1) he will eventually show back up for a brief period and 2) he will buy them something when he does.

For Max, especially, this has been incredibly difficult. He has 4 extra years of memories with Dad that Tricky just doesn’t have. He was hit hardest by DH’s withdrawal. He is also the most willing to seek out a relationship with him, but he tends to do so guardedly, with hope but no anticipation of regular engagement. Having just turned 13 when the move happened, it came at a really tough stage in his life.

Enter Rango, who understood being a child of divorce, being the child of distant and difficult parents, and being a teenage boy in a way I just never will.

And while he fell for me, he also fell for my boys. They hit it off immediately, and he established a solid, loving, imperfect relationship with them that is entirely separate from me.

He did what a good stepdad should do.

They fight sometimes. They give each other shit. But he also brought Max out of his shell, showing him that it was okay to trust someone other than Mom. He is a steady, constant, loving, engaging influence on their lives.

And he does it because he loves them, not because he loves me. (Though he does, certainly.)

So is that a valid reason to stay in a relationship?

No, of course not. But it is a reason to re-evaluate the strengths and reasons for that relationship.

When I got divorced, DH and I blew the boys’ world apart. Max has said before that we are all happier and better off after the divorce, but it has also been really hard on my children. (see above) Rango is a large part of why and how it got better. (see above) And I do not want them to have to extricate another important, loving relationship from their lives. (see above)

So Rango and I have called a détente. We realized how scary this was for the boys, and that’s just not okay. We have issues to work through, but we have agreed to stop them in their tracks and move forward, together and carefully, because there is more at stake than just us.

I’ll be honest (surprise!): it still scares me. Choosing to rely on someone else means allowing for the possibility of disappointment. I’m not one to run from adversity, so why the hell would I choose to run now? In the end, the possible pay-off is much greater than the possible loss, and returns on investment don’t come when you buy high and sell low.

So there are still things to work on, and we will. This was a warning to us both, to remember the lessons of the past. I don’t want to repeat the past, good or bad, and it is unfair to compare Rango or myself to those times.

While I was out with the boys, Max bought me a gift. He saw it and thought of me, even before Kiki pointed out to him that it was Alice:

And on the drive home, he told me, “Just because something doesn’t go the way you want it to, that doesn’t mean it’s bad, even when it feels bad. You can’t appreciate what you have now if you didn’t experience the bad you had before.”

That boy is totally my kid.