Days 0751, 0752, 0753 & 0754

i am loving the past tense today as in this sentence:

Yesterday would have been my wedding 16th anniversary.

But, thank Dog, it wasn’t.

🙂

Days 0745, 0746, 0747, 0748, 0749 & 0750

I’ve been struggling to put my thoughts together on the subject of ‘crazy making’ – that thing where someone makes you feel like you’re going mad by denying or questioning your reality.

That thing where a husband screams blue bloody murder at you one afternoon for putting a fork in the dishwasher basket so it faces the front door and will scratch the inside if it happens to dislodge and rub against the inside of that door just so. Because who wants a scratched inside door on your dishwasher. How embarrassing.

And then the very next day, you ask – despite your better self who feels humiliated and quite sure this whole thing is stupid – ‘Have I put the fork in there in an acceptable way?’ and he says:

‘What? What an odd question. There’s no right way to put it in. Just put it in the basket. Don’t be stupid.’

And in spite of yourself, you feel relief wash over you that you haven’t ‘done it wrong’ and that the 3075th silly rule to do with the dishwasher wasn’t even real.

And then he proceeds to question why you would ever think he’d said such a thing.

And then …

A week later he is yelling bloody blue murder at you for the exact same thing.

Can you imagine a life of that? A life, the days of which, are filled with a turning-upside-down of what you thought you were told was important, what caused you angst and worry and self hate and which you genuinely tried to ‘fix’, didn’t even happen?

And then, you escape, and realise even four years later, in spite of your rescued self and the support of others that proves your truth to some degree, that he still has that ability to make you question reality.

That his denial in an open forum is enough to make me wonder if perhaps I was wrong about it all and we really were ‘the best of friends’ and living a lovely life, must be the biggest indicator of how deeply Pavlov’ed I was.

No wonder my brain is fried trying to communicate that twist — that french braid — that he turned the truth into.

No wonder I fell for The Halfman who appeared too gentle and too lazy to ever intentionally hurt someone like me.

Day 0744

Last week’s scouring brush with Halfman allows me to continue my narrative of ‘Sad Sop Stuck in a Rut’ unchallenged.

It feels good to confirm my own story over and over. And while I realize it may not be true in the slightest, I think The Halfman Experience gives me permission to just make stuff the hell up if I feel like it.

So there he is. Sitting in the cafe we used to go to together throughout our relationship. In fact the last time we were both in there he was running his little finger along the curve of my shoulder.

He was there this time on his own, drinking coffee and looking over a colorful excel spreadsheet.

All of which said to me he was SWOTing for some report/meeting he hadn’t prepared for and feeling stressed as he desperately tried to pack work he should have been doing for months into an intense premeeting visit to this watering hole.

So, nothing different really.

Except the hirsuteness level. But I guess that’s nature’s payback for being a testosterone fueled bastard.

The Good Ones keep their hair.

Days 0741, 0742 & 0743

I am fairly shy. And I have no need to be in control of everything. And, to be frank, people talking about home renovations and primary school association politics bore me.

So I attend all my son’s extracurricular spike a good mum. I say hi to the other parents and chat to a handful of them. But that’s about it. I have other interests into which I pour my social energy.

It also pushes me away that Mr Ex is decidedly of the joiner variety, finds superficial social interaction with other parents to be proof of his worthiness as a dad and has a great need to takeover every single extracurricular activity.

So he’s there. At everything. Jollying about with his ‘mates’ and proving his Caring Dad credentials.

I see other parents seeing only the charm veneer – that presentation he makes of the poor guy whose fighting a horrid both who won’t let him see his kid.

He needs friends so I don’t wish to discourage them. He’ll never get to the point of revealing his True Self to them and that makes my son safer. A good outcome from my POV.

But it does cement me in The Outer and allow me to be washed with the thin paint of his preferred stereotype.

I find the best way to counteract my frustration is to imagine these fine upstanding parents realizing that he’s the sort of ‘man’ who threatens to stave in his wife’s head with a glass jug. I think them how the claps on the back and the ‘sure my kid can play at your house’ stuff would look and sound.

Would they feel tricked? Humiliated? Would they run for miles like I’ve tried to?

Day 0740

Some days aren’t challenging enough: they really need the Halfman thrown into the mix. Followed closely by a flick through the paper directly to a photo of his hard-done-by wife.

Just what I needed?

But at least I received one of these in the mail today, so that’s good.

And danke, meine Freundin. I needed that.

Days 0736, 0737, 0738 & 0739

Having one of those moments where I wonder what the point is to doing the right thing. It doesn’t seem to come with any rewards, dammit! Other than that one where, you know, you’ve done the right thing, of course.

But is it wrong that sometimes – not all the time – I want a great big flashing sign to light up above me, maybe one with a big arrow directed at my head, that says loudly and neonly: She just did The Right Thing! Woo hoo! Go her!

I don’t claim to always do the right thing but I do give it a real red hot go. And lately it’s been rewarded with being called a ‘fabricator and exaggerator’, by someone trying to paint my depression as making me hysterical (God forbid a female should show some emotion), and by being accused of being the cause of my son’s upset over listening to a mad woman scream obscenities at him about his relatives. I could have just ignored his withdrawal, anxiety attack and clear distress: would have been much simpler for me and everyone else. Except him, of course.

Please, could someone just give me a sticker to put on my shirt that says ‘Great work!’ And has a picture of a koala giving me a thumbs up. That would feel real nice and satisfying.

Days 0732, 0733, 0734 & 0735

I hate that a complicated inside attracts me to a person almost regardless of what they look like. Surely the outside of a person is not to be totally bypassed in favour of their brains and heart? Because the outside – especially at my ripening age – does tell you about that person. If they look mean, they probably have spent their life being mean, is all I’m trying to say.

It’s probably just the usual ‘listen to your gut’ message in the end. And when I let my brain talk me out of what my gut is telling me: things like ‘he’s treating you poorly’, ‘that thing he just said is both preposterous and mean’. I can turn these into ‘he’s had a hard day’ and ‘everybody says dumb things  once in a while’.

I am trying to retrain myself with online dating sites. I don’t actually feel much like going on a date. Life and past relationship errors are still sucking most of the marrow away from that.

Which is probably the safest place for me to be while I hone my ‘don’t make excuses’ selection technique.

Some Gut Clues are simple: a bride’s arm disembodied but still in the photo clearly taken at a – no HIS – wedding, those bloody wrap around sunglasses instead of eye balls, a drink in hand, a big engine/boy toy as companion, girlies surrounding his smiling face and any mention of liking things to be ‘orderly’.

Yup. So that just about eliminates them all. But the great thing about these sites is that I know nothing about these people. There is no compassion/empathy arising in my brain to make excuses for them.

I may have dismissed the most wonderful guy in the world. But surely, surely if there is a god, that One Guy is not wearing those crack dealer sunglasses anywhere on his being.

Days 0730 & 0731

Sleep has texture.

At its best, sleep is like whalebone corduroy – soft, wide ridges and valleys, velvety and rich, and leaving the wearer looking slightly dorky.

At its worst, sleep is macrame or – for those never forced to macrame a plant pot holder in 1970s primary school – a cable knit sweater. Twisted and turned in on itself, this kind of sleep is disjointed and anything but smooth. It’s the kind of sleep you have when you have to catch a flight at 5am.

And then there is the sleep of jello, or that foam that molds to your shape and surrounds you. The sleep of the sleeping pulled. I don’t like that sleep. As necessary as it can sometimes be, it’s like losing some time from your life. And you don’t wake up revitalized so much as crusty. It’s a mechanical sleep – empty and cold. A necessity rather than an experience.