she’s skinnier

So, my daughter says, “Dad told us not to tell you that L is skinnier than you because it would make you feel bad about yourself.”

(They say you can tell a lot about someone by how they talk about their ex. But seriously. What if there is something really wrong with your ex?)

There are so many things wrong with the mere existence of that sentence I don’t even know where to start. My initial reaction was to stifle a laugh, thinking, asshole, you were the one who made me feel bad about myself. Then I thought, God. Does he ever think about what he says before he says it? Do he and his girlfriend sit around talking about how fat I am?

Knowing him… probably. He is not capable of focusing on anything but the exterior… he is blind to his own insides, much less those of others. Regardless, I still want to grab him by the ears and ram his big mouth onto my knee until he can’t talk for a good, long while.

The conversation evolved… starting off with her concerns around his girlfriend (not unwarranted), into the things Dad says about me. Let’s see. So far, that I didn’t do anything when we were married, that I didn’t sacrifice anything. That he did all the work. That I didn’t try to keep our marriage together.

My daughter’s comment: “Don’t worry, Mom, I know it’s not true.” Oh, and this gem: “Dad has a big mouth.”

But I want to know, she says, why you wanted to get divorced. Because her father has told her that it’s what I wanted.

See, the issue here is that I’m using my parental ethics – that children should not be lied to but should not know everything – with my ex’s “ethic”, if you could even call it that, which is that he just blurts out whatever comes to mind that he thinks will make him look like the better person, and to talk to my children as though they were non-family members, adults.

So I have to walk that line between what I would normally do, while knowing all the other shit that is flying around them. So I try to be the parent I am, the parent they need. The fucking grown-up.

My response was that one day, when she is 25, she and I will have a nice long, grown up talk about what happened, but she should know that I worked really hard, that I tried to keep my family together, and only when I knew it couldn’t work did I end things.

She said that her father and I had “totally different perspectives” and I told her that our perspectives don’t really matter, that as curious as she is about all of this, what matters most is her perspective, her story.

And that I was sorry she was being put in the middle of that kind of silliness. I told her what I wish for my ex, that I don’t think ill of him, that I just think we shouldn’t be married any more, and all of this is true, even with the pettiness he shoves in front of them like an unwanted three course meal when he spends time with them.

I understand that the words come from a place of pain, from feeling rejected, from not understanding why I don’t want to be with him. And he simply isn’t capable of being a grown up, yet.

Finally, I told her, that what she needs to know is that she is loved, and will be taken care of. In the end, that’s what matters most.

+ > -

In July, I wrote this about what I want from a future intimate relationship:

I struggle with defining what I want in positive terms and the fear that I will never find it in anyone because there just aren’t that many good people out there. I want someone who wants to be with me but understands my need for space, needs space of their own. Someone who respects me, and who in a loving way tries to help me become a better person (encouraging, not nagging, but able to deliver the unpleasant shit I need to hear too). Someone I can be both weak and strong with. Someone who really loves my kids, can deal with the whole ex thing, doesn’t view them as baggage. Someone I have that “thing” with, that pull.

I still don’t know the answers to some of the questions that these sentences beg.

I know that I’m in a better position to define these things in positive terms because I have let go of emotional attachment to my ex-husband.

I know that there are better men out there for me. I’ve met one of them already.

I know women who have a much more stringent set of standards.

I’m still struggling with that positive definition.

50 foot pole

I was told that my ex is still asking people we know in common, because he does not understand, why I won’t talk to him any more. Why I want nothing to do with him, why I won’t touch him with a 50-foot pole. Apparently these conversations happen with tears and incomprehension. Some of our friends ask me why; most understand exactly why.

I feel for him. I have an idea of where he is at – it is a dark place, feeling rejected by me. He still does not know, I think, why this happened between us. Why I left the marriage. And the severing of the connection is complete because I have made it so.

He still does not understand how or why I don’t love him any more. And it wouldn’t matter how many times I said what happened, he wouldn’t understand.

He keeps going back to “but you said we would be friends” – and I meant it, although there was a part of me that wondered if it would be possible when I said it at the very outset of separation almost a year ago. He clings to that as though I betrayed him. He doesn’t acknowledge that some of where we are at now was contingent in how he conducted himself throughout the divorce.

I think that with time we can be acquaintances, but it is his nature that makes me stay away, combined with his actions.

He cannot inhabit a space with me without going back to that enmeshed behavior. It’s remarkable, really, how he lights up when I allow him to cross one of my boundaries. It’s sad to see that he needs that from me. I can’t give it. So the best strategy is to simply not engage.

If I engage I will not be able to help myself. I will get angry about the things he has done recently that have had serious, direct consequences on my life. I will unleash on him. I don’t want to waste my emotions on someone who can’t comprehend anything I say.

Girlfriend: Reframe

Reframe: the kids are learning who their father is and they will learn from the experience of being his children.

I hope they will learn that a self-centered life in which reality is consistently skewed to fit one person’s needs is no way to live.

That living in fear of rejection is no way to live. That requiring all strength to come from outside oneself is no way to live.

Without me making excuses for who he is and what he does, quite simply, they will grow into knowing who he really is.

Which is not to say I am perfect.

But at least they have another frame of reference for life. Me.

Girlfriend

This morning I took a yoga class that was almost two hours. It’s a good thing I did.

I was about to drive off to my old house to pick up my wedding dress and take an old family photo out of a frame that needs to be sold, when I saw that my ex had called and sent me a text that there was something he needed to tell me “verbally.”

I thought, oh great. A continuation of the ridiculous conversation of the day before in which he wanted to hold onto child support money until he was good and ready to send it to me.

Nope.

The kids and I are going bowling at some point today, and I just wanted to give you a heads up that my girlfriend will be coming. To meet them.

“OK,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know. Good luck. And sorry I only sent J with one pair of undies for the weekend. They are all dirty.”

And that was it.

I hung up and sat there for a few minutes.

You might be wondering why I didn’t tell him what I thought, which immediately was, It’s too soon, you moron. But it is not up to me. He does not need my permission. According to the divorce agreement, he only has to tell me he is about to introduce them to a significant other before it happens.

I bet his balls crawled into his asshole when he told me. And if they didn’t, they should have. I was castrating him in my head.

The kids don’t even know the divorce is final. They know that I’ve been using my maiden name — I alerted them beforehand and they have seen me use it one time — but they don’t have any idea that there was a court date or anything of the sort – because that information doesn’t matter to them. I’ve learned that there are many types of information that don’t matter to them — and shouldn’t be made to matter. And in starting at a new school, I wanted to give them time to adapt before dropping another bomb on them. I asked for the same courtesy from him.

I bet they know, now. I’m sure he made it out that he was the truth-teller and I was keeping it from them. That would be typical.

I hurt, I ache for them. Because with every ridiculous decision he makes, they learn what took me a year (or several years, depending on how you look at it) to unlearn: that life — that all of our lives — are all about him. What he wants.

I knew it was coming. I knew he was prepping them. I’m just surprised — or maybe just dismayed — at his lack of respect for them as people.

Because when you see your parent with another person that way, that’s when the tangible destruction of the family occurs. The mine that’s been waiting for your step in the minefield.

In a totally selfish way, I’m glad he’s going first. He is the fuckup. Let him be the fuckup. What he has to lose is the relationship with his children. It’s his to lose.

Needless to say, I refuse to keep a gigantic, poster-sized family photograph and lug it from home to home for years, on the off chance one of the kids might someday want it. And I’m selling the wedding dress.

Rings

My ex presented me with a 1/3 carat diamond engagement ring within the first two weeks of my senior year of college.

He even admitted that he did it because there were two other young men who wanted to date me, and he thought it would deter them from asking — and me from saying yes.

When we went to tell my mother we were engaged, he had a panic attack on the way to the restaurant.

We stood on the corner of some street and the world shut down around me; I focused on only him. It was the first time I’d ever seen a panic attack and I didn’t know what to do. I thought, well, in the movies, when women are hysterical, they get smacked really hard. (No really, that’s what I thought.)

So that’s what I did. I smacked him as hard as I could, four times. He was crying openly, like a goddamn baby, in public. I was mortified, he was ridiculous – and how many more times I would have to endure such behavior, I had no idea. So, a threat: if this is not what you want, take the ring back. It was when he realized he was losing me in that moment that he calmed down.

Yes. Now I know the obvious thing I should have taken from that scene.

We went and told my mother that day – the whole time I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I struggled to ignore. I knew how she felt when she got the news. The other day she told me she was absolutely incredulous that I had agreed to marry him, that she never thought it would go that far. I remember my insane stepmother, at a separate meal, saying “We thought you were pregnant.”

Had anyone bothered to ask me, they might have known I didn’t want a diamond engagement ring. I wanted a garnet.

I lost the diamond out of that ring four years later. I never wore a wedding ring consistently for the next nine years.

I had replacements – cheap ones, slightly less cheap ones, that I would buy when my ex got upset that I didn’t want to look married.

I developed/was saved by a nickel allergy about 5 years ago, so I never had to wear another band again (he would not spring for platinum and I didn’t want it).

Today there are no indents, tan lines, nothing on my ring finger. The way I like it.

Death grip

Through being held tightly, I learned not to hold at all.

I learned what it was like to be held to every moment of another’s expectation. To wait for the next order, the next demand. The next thing I could do.

To not ever ask for, or expect, anything in return.

It was like being in a dark box, deprived of senses, waiting for someone to open a hatch and give me food. Never being allowed to say I was hungry. Being ignored or screamed at when I did.

You think I’m exaggerating. I’m not.

Imagine what a thirst for love inhabiting a place like that creates.