Days 0812, 0813 & 0814

In the same week that I learned just how much of a demi-dick Halfman was, I also had this experience, which I have yet to fully compute.

My childhood friend came to visit. He was other things to me too but above all, he had always been a friend. I trusted him to care about me.

Turned out he expected, and was frustrated by, my desire to go slowly and be friends first.

Now I wouldn’t claim I treated him perfectly – ever. I stuff up on that front all the time.

But when someone who you trust more than any other male gets angry and frustrated because you’re not sleeping with them … well, fuck that (but not literally).

Even a Good Man appears to have a sense of something ‘promised’, something ‘exchanged’. In other words, a sense of ‘if I put myself out for her, she should put out’.

In spite of the Halfman revelation coming at exactly the same time and sending my sparkplugs into meltdown, I could at least see how ridiculous and wrong that was.

And unfortunately there’s no turning back from that kind of attitude.

So I lost a dear friend. And so did he.

And that, as they say in the classics, is that.

Days 0810 & 0811

hoe are you meant to feel while watching a perfectly nice person sticking their head into a lion’s mouth?

Especially when it’s a lion mouth you’ve only just escaped yourself?

Part of me wants to shout ‘RUN FOR YOUR SANITY!!’

While the other part of

Me knows that while the lion’s enticing and then chewing on her, he won’t have any teeth left for me and my kid.

And he will be trying to impress her with his charm and so will be kind to his child in front of her. Thoughtful even?

Where does my obligation to another human start and end?

Would my earrings even be heard? Or would they just be me being the bitch I’m made out to be.

Better just to leave it, take my place among the pariahs gathered on the school soccer field sidelines. We Are ‘The Ones Who Left’. And that’s all it takes to look like The Bad Guy.

If only life were so blessedly simple.

Day 0795

A lady made a kindhearted joke the other day about how I needed to go out and find me a BIG man who looked scary in order to keep my previous mistake away and out of my life.

I laughed politely, but you know what?

I want to be that BIG and scary person.

I’m not physically that person but I have no doubt after all of this that I can be that person  when I want to be with just a bit of practice.

Days 0789 & 0790

Not a great day. One of those ones where food tastes like unidentifiable mush, scented candles smell like poison and not wanting to soil myself is the only thing that gets me out of bed.

And yet here I am: two legs, two arms, a lovely home, blue skies, a fluffy dog at my side. A camera in my bag which is usually enough to get me moving.

But I’m at that place where tension takes me: the place where I wonder if the hardness of the past four years has been worth it. I know it has of course, but my brain likes to tell me I can’t be sure.

I managed to get dressed and tame the doc to the beach – it took four hours to get there, but I managed it. Yay, me. Woo and hoo etc.

And where I’m sitting in my car now is almost exactly where I used to sit in my car the occasions where I escaped the yelling and the threats and the doing of everything wrong. I would sit here with a beautiful beach filling my windscreen and cry and cry. And wonder where I was. Not my body, of course, but me and how I’d got into this place where I couldn’t do a single thing ‘right’ and where I would be threatened with having my head smashed in because … Well, just because he felt like it.

So clearly the past four years was worth it. Because I’m sitting here again – this time with my dog, knowing I have a resilient, loving child on my hands and knowing I can go home when I want and not be yelled at by anyone but me. 

Who knew that was the height of freedom?

Days 0758 & 0759

Do you know that moment when you’re talking to someone and they suddenly take a deeper look at you and say ‘are you all right?’? And the tears just burst out of you?

Well I had one of those today, except what the person said to me was: you know what? I reckon you’re furious.

And it was like having someone smooth the dirt away from my surface and see me for real. And I could feel fresh air hit my skin and, well, it brought tears to my eyes.

And the next thing she said was: and I’m so pleased for you. I think it means you’re recovering.

For the first time in 16 years I feel safe enough to be furious.

Where anger didn’t help with He Who Shall Not Be Named … Where my anger in fact escalated the danger level, I’ve now crossed a line or built a wall or hit some other metaphor that makes it ok.

And the anger is strong. Furious is the only word that comes close.

And where Halfman-related anger twists me up and makes me feel powerless’ this fury … Well it warms me and makes me feel stronger and safer. It makes me see that I don’t ‘have to’ anymore. That I don’t need to fix and avoid and work around to survive.

I can just be me.

And I can wear my anger with happiness – another rung climbed out of that pit I sat in for too long. 

I have never been so pleased to be angry. 

Days 0755, 0756, 0757 & 0758

One of the most devastating after effects of Halfman was how crushingly STUPID I was left feeling. To be taken in by a passive and lazy conman … Maybe that’s the only type of conman who could have got me, but still.

But the other day I met a woman whose brain is the size of … Well, God’s Underpants (which I’m sure are cotton with little earth motifs).

And she had nearly the same experience. Not with Halfman but still, it sounded like she was talking about the same guy.

So gentle you couldn’t imagine him hurting anyone, let alone you?

Considered a bit feminine by male peers because of that gentleness?

Admiring of you for your intellect and strength?

Telling tales of a ‘former’ partner who was bullying and intolerant – who had driven him away with her mean way of being? Such a ‘pain in the arse’, Halfman said.

This Big Brain was hoodwinked too. But at least had the good fortune of not actually falling into the Pit of Love.

She told me it took her almost five years to recover. That at the two-year anniversary of discovering the betrayal, she was still angry and mostly curled up in a tear soaked ball.

That made me feel better – all of it really – but mostly the confirmation that the anger I still feel, the anger that made me give him the Fuck You Finger again just now as he paddled by on his bike, is not abnormal.

His face, his presence still make me shake with anger, with hurt and with utter disbelief at what he did to me.

The difference between that feeling now and two years ago is that I forgive myself for it. And I think that is quite ok.

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?

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.