Here We Go Again

Sigh.  So, here I am, right back where I started this whole thing -- being pressured and coerced into something I don't want to do.  Y'see, there's this self-growth/discovery/psychobabble bullshit thing that a large number of my family members have been through, including my Beloved, and there's another set of sessions coming up and here they are again, calling and pushing and prodding.  I wouldn't mind a bit if they *told* me about it -- I see some good and positive things that have happened in their lives as a result of doing this thing (which I'm not going to name, for reasons of libel/slander avoidance), but it's way way way beyond that.  I tell them, "I'm not sure this is what I want to do."  I say, "I have other responsibilities right now and can't give up a weekend and 2 weeks later 5 days and a week after that another weekend."  I let them know, "I've managed for the first time in my life to set some boundaries (which is, by the way, one of the big things that at least one of the folks who's been through this has gained - the ability to set boundaries) and lay claim to ME, to figure out how to be ME, who I really am and not what some group of people think I should be, and I really don't want to give that up."

Do they listen?  No.  Do they hear what I'm saying?  Though one says repeatedly, "What I hear you saying is ...."  No.  Do they fucking RESPECT me enough to share their experiences and then BACK OFF when I ask them to?  Are you kidding me?  Of course they don't.  "Well, this could really help you."  "You have all the support you need to go through this tough process."  "It could help you understand yourself better."  "We can work things out so that PT is taken care of for you while you go."  


I've tried, really tried, to explain to them, even when it's uncomfortable to do so, that this whole thing they're doing is just rubbing my nose repeatedly in the biggest hurt in my life -- that my Beloved shares the good and wonderful and fun and joyous parts of himself with everyone else and shuts me out.  You see, he can't talk about this process thing - they're not allowed to.  I get some of that - if he told me things about the process itself, it would telegraph what's coming should I decide to go and lessen the effectiveness.  I totally get that bit -- hell, I should; I have a fucking degree in Sociology and damn near enough psych for a minor in it, plus years of training as a counselor myself.  No problem there.  What is a problem is that he won't even talk to me about what changes he feels it's made in his life.  I see some of them and at some point would like to know what it was that helped him get there, but mostly since he went through this, I just want to know what I've always wanted to know - what he thinks and how he feels.  And that's what's being denied me.  Again.  I see glimpses of the things in him that I fell in love with all those years ago, like getting to peek through a tiny slit in the blinds from the outside, shivering in the snow, seeing a party going on inside - people laughing and talking and having a good time - and knowing that if I knock on the door, everything will be instantly shoved under the couch and silence will drape like a pall over everything.  I mean, really, people.  I have damn near 40 people coming up to me and all saying, "Your husband is an amazing (that's their big buzzword, "amazing" and when they say it, you can hear the italics) man," like I might not have noticed.  Strangers.  Complete and total strangers, with whom the man I have loved for more than 40 years will share himself freely, but won't tell me even something as simple as "I feel freer."  


It's always - or nearly so - been that way.  He's been the golden boy (and to be honest about it, has usually taken my ideas and my words and mouthed them as his and so be hailed as said golden boy) and I've been the "go away, kid, you bother me" that has to be somewhat tolerated in order for everyone to bask in his presence.  It was that way when we started the spiritualist thing; that way when we were rabid church-goers; that way at work (we worked at the same company and in the same career field).  And none of these people get why it bothers me.


And so, here it is AGAIN.  Coming from people who say they only want the best for me, want me to discover how to be the best me I can be.  Yeah, well, one of them means it, I think.  Not my Beloved.  Another person, one who probably truly does want that -- but she still pushes.  Insists that I become me *their* way.  Why can they not see what they're doing?  If this process is the great and wondrous Answer To the Ultimate Questions thing they proclaim it as, gives them such "amazing" insight, why don't they have insight into the fact -- and I've actually TOLD them this, not expecting them to intuit it -- that they are doing precisely what everyone else has done to me: pushed, coerced, pressured until I just give fucking UP already and be what it is they expect me to be???


So, here it is again.  I had set boundaries.  I had begun to explore the real me, who I really am.  And all that is going to be ripped away and trampled on without even the slightest hint of caring or even acknowledging that's what they're doing, so that I put on the costume they want me to wear.  I am so goddamned TIRED of this.  Is it really so fucking much to ask of people who proclaim that they only want the best me I can be, that they just LET ME BE THAT?????


Apparently so.  I am far too tired to fight this one.  My physical energies are being used up trying to manage shifting gears and getting moved and settled.  And don't even ask about my emotional energies.  I don't even know what that is anymore. And now, I'm going to have to make several long trips back and forth to do this thing, spend a couple of thousand dollars - yup, it costs that much to go through this program - all to be made over into someone else's image of who I should be.


And people wonder why I don't think the universe is a very good place for me.

Can Tears Short Out a Laptop?

If so, mine is in deep shit.  I cannot stop weeping.  

We've finally established a pattern of talking, my Beloved and I, and when we have to go, it's like losing him all over again.  I can't hold back the tears.  It's as if for those brief moments life returns to the wrecked and ruined landscape of my being, and then is strip-mined away again, and I am in the midst of bereavement once more.  Not the first few days when merciful shock wraps you in a cocoon of "un" -- unfeeling, unthinking, insensibility -- but the days after you walk away from the graveside and the family and friends who've appeared to help you simply fade away back into their own lives and you're finally, totally ALONE, wounded, dripping your soul's-blood away, knowing that you're dying and unable to prevent it.  Unable and perhaps without the will, even if the ability could be found in that secret sacred space within.

If this were a vacuum, it would be easier.  Everything would be inhaled into some other-ness, some alternate space, and I could just cease to be.  But it's not a vacuum; it's a rent, a gash, a gaping and shredded-edged rupture in all that I am, all that I was, all that I ever could be.  I miss him.  I miss him.  My heart no longer says "lub-dub, lub-dub."  It repeats over and over, "where is he?  Where is he?  I miss him.  I miss him."

I fear I cannot survive this.

Shifting Quicksand

So, that's what it feels like anyway.  Quicksand, sucking me under, but quicksand that moves so that I don't know from one instant to the next if I'm looking at a jungle, a desert, the ocean floor, or the rings of Saturn.

My roles in life are in flux - never a comfortable state.  Here I am, not even fully moved into Son's house, surrounded by stuff of mine that I don't know what to do with and need to do something with and not feeling able to do a damned thing.  Son hasn't been here when I was actually awake, but for about 3 hours, since I moved in a couple of days ago.  I can't carry stuff upstairs to put away.  We've not had a chance to discuss expectations.  Not about the important stuff, or even the inconsequential stuff (like is it OK for me to set a full garbage bag in the garage or does he want me to drag it around to the side of the house).  I don't know if he wants me to decide where to put things on my own or if he wants input or even if he wants total control.  I don't know what he expects me to do or not to do.  I don't even know for sure yet what each power switch controls.  I have shit still - a lot of it, since he told me that he'd pack the stuff up because he could do it much faster (indisputably the truth) - at the apartment, and only a 9 year old to help with it.  There's a limit to how much I can carry.  A pretty big limit to how much I can carry.

All of that is just junk, just external stuff.  What's troubling the most is the feeling of uncertainty, of being adrift and not even being sure that anyone knows I'm at sea much less with a disintegrating boat.  If I had a grip on what the patterns of life are to be here, I could handle whatever comes up.  I could figure out a way to take care of what I need to take care of, even if that way is setting alight furniture I can't move on my own.  But not knowing ... that's a lot tougher.

I know we're not going back to mother/son -- neither of us really want that.  I don't know if I'm more roommate or more guest, and the roles and responsibilities of each are very very different.  Yeah, I'm going to screw up.  Hey, that was obvious, since this is, after all, still ME.  I can handle that.  We're going to rub each other the wrong ways from time to time.  That's expected and we know how to get beyond that - had a lot of practice with that over the years.  I also need to see to PT's needs and such.  Oh, I can handle the food and clothing bits.  But I haven't got a handle on what they've set as guidelines for her in a lot of ways, nor more importantly, how much leeway I now have to alter those.

So ... who am I now?

Yet another reinvention.  I'm so very tired of it.  Bone weary.

Is There Something Lower Than the Underside of the Bottom of the Barrel?

If there is, that's where I am.  The oldest friend I have who's both female and on this side of the Atlantic has ovarian cancer.  Again.  For the third time.  Yeah, that means she's tough, since most women don't survive even one bout.  But she's also 61, and tired.  I don't know how much fight she has left.

I couldn't tell you the date or even the year, but I well remember the day when it dawned on me that at some point, I might have to do without her, might have to outlive her, but I was in my twenties when it happened.  Forty years ago, and it made my blood run cold.  It still does.  That was my first brush with mortality other than the vague general knowledge that old people stop being around.  The first time I got smacked in the face with what a bitch mortality really is.  Of course, there were later smacks, even harder - let me tell you, it's no picnic burying a son - but that one was my first.  I don't even really recall why I had that realization, just the affect it had on me.

I hate death.  Not my own.  I'm not frightened of dying.  Honestly, were it not for PT, I wouldn't mind too much.  But I hate death itself.  It shouldn't happen, not to anyone. (OK, OK, I'd make exceptions for Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer and a few others of that ilk, and I'd personally dispatch anyone I saw brutalizing a child with nary a second thought, but you already know I'm not a good person, nor very consistent and logical.)  But overall, I don't think death is right.  Ever.  I don't think we were meant to die.  I'm not going to go all religious and talk about falls from grace, so don't panic.

But my sense of the world tells me that it's wrong, horribly wrong, that death occurs.  Not for the dying, but for those left behind.  Who knows if the dying/dead will find anything beyond -- no one that we know of has made that journey for longer than moments and returned to talk about it in any verifiable way.  I know what I believe about it, but I can't prove it the way I can prove that my eyes are green or that rain generally doesn't fall upwards.  So, that's not what I'm talking about.  I'm talking about the affect of death on the living.  It sucks.  (Or as my sister has pointed out, creates a partial vacuum, since Southern Ladies don't say "sucks.")

I truly believe that if our childbearing years occurred after we truly grasp what it is to be bereft of those we love, the species would have died out millennia ago.  Who would bring a child into the world knowing that that child would have to suffer the deprivations of being left behind?

Pooh, the master philosopher, said it best.  "If you live to be one hundred years old, I hope I live to be one hundred years old minus one day, so I never have to live a day without you."

Maybe it's not death I hate.
Maybe it's life I hate.

Burrowing my way back under the detritus beneath the bottom of my barrel.

Love Is Harder Than We Imagine

I'm struck tonight by how very hard it is to truly love someone.  I mean, really love them, not just say the words, or get that giddy rush of electricity or even the weakness in the knees when you see them.  Love, real love, deep love, lasting love.  The love that forsakes not only "all others" as in the traditional wedding vows, but forsakes self as well.  The love that means erasing self.  Not putting the other person's needs and wants first but still keeping that secret scorecard, that tally of the soul that says, "so, I did this thing for him/her, so s/he owes me something in return."  Is that love?  I don't think so.  That's love's cousin, maybe.


But love, real love, means dying to what I want --- more than that, dying to what I need in order to live -- for him, no scorecards, no tallies, no "I rubbed your back, so now you should buy me chocolates", no "I really need just to hear your voice".  I can't even let him know that I have needs now.  In order to do what he has to do, he has to believe that I'm just jim dandy, right as rain, fine as a fiddler's fuck.  And I'm so NOT any of that.

I feel like I'm lying to him.  And I am.

Does it make lying all right if I'm doing it because if I don't, he'll worry about me when he should be keeping his head down since there are people all around who would just as soon kill him on camera as breathe?  I can stand being away from him.  Really, I can.  I adore him, after 40 years he really does still make me go all woggy and weak-kneed when he looks at me in that certain way, but I can stand being away from him for six months.  I can handle having to take on all the nitty-gritty stuff of life he's handled for years, the bills, the bank statements, even making sure the oil is changed in the car.  Can I stand lying to him for that long?  Can I keep up the facade?  Can I manage to convince him that I'm holding up just fine?

It's not like I'm worrying about what he might do while he's there -- I told him, and meant it and he knows I meant it, that whatever he needs to do to relieve stress is fine with me, that I want him to be able to cope with being in a damned war zone. It's not even that I sit around and worry that he might be getting shot at or the camp might be being overrun - though those are possible.

But I'm not accustomed to lying to him.  Not like this.  Doing without him, that I'm used to.  God knows that even when he's been here, he hasn't been *here*, present, involved, engaged with me.  Not for years, not even for decades.  But that was different.  That was more or less, "well, OK, he doesn't see the world the way I do" kind of stuff.  That was allowing him to be who he is, not making demands on him that he's not capable of meeting.

This ... this is way different.  I don't know that I could explain it, really.  All that other stuff was more like compartmentalizing, finding companionship in other ways, even intimacy without the physical stuff.  Like being sawn into jigsaw puzzle pieces, some of which connected to him and some of which didn't.  Now ... it's like having to hide the edge pieces from him, or the box top with the picture on it, or hell, even the fact that there's a puzzle I'm working on.  Have you ever tried to gather up puzzle pieces and slip them away because someone - maybe a toddler who would get into them and lose them - was coming over?  And yet still keep the bits you've put together, together, and the other pieces you've painstakingly sorted, sorted, all while hiding the fact that you even KNOW what a jigsaw puzzle is???  That's what I'm having to do.

And I do it for love, not to protect some secret.  I do it because it's what HE needs.  What I need is so very unimportant.

But I am so afraid I can't keep this up.  God help me, I cannot fail this man.  I must not fail this man.

My Brain Is Stupid; My Heart Is Smart

Lessons are hard to learn.  Some of them it seems I have to learn over and over, and in amongst all the other stuff is this one:
      I should trust my gut, my heart.  I should NOT trust my head, logic or reason.

I can be talked around to agreeing with dang near anything.  Most of us can.  (Hey, don't tell me you've never changed your political or religious views, or even what you like on a pizza, based on what someone else has said to you.)  My gut - the thing I used to call "my knower", as in "I know this in my knower" - that's harder to fool.

Sitting around today, finding ways to fill the emptiness in this apartment after my beloved left for Afghanistan, I realized that if we'd trusted our guts, our hearts, the way we felt about it, Precious Treasure would never have left our home.  Our heads got talked around.  OK, I'm not ascribing evil motives here or anything.  I know that Son & DIL had the best of intentions, both for PT and for us.  After all, it sounds logical that a kid needs parents who can run and do and fetch and carry and jump on trampolines and like that; it sounds logical that it would be easier to make the transition from being raised by grandparents to being adopted by aunt & uncle without having to do it when said grandparents drop dead or are unable to make any decisions more complex than which side of their mouths to drool out of, and before PT gets to be a teenager when ain't nuthing gonna be easy.  Sounds so very logical.

And it was so very wrong.

For us, for them, for her.  Wrong for all of us.  Yeah, the strains between S & DIL would have built up anyway.  Yeah, PT has had more fun at water parks and swimming pools and tickle-wrestling over the last year than she would have with us.  Yeah, it's been less of a physical strain for Beloved and for me not to be chasing around meeting with teachers and going to scouts and PTA and all that.  It's still been wrong.  PT has had more fun and less stability.  S & DIL have had some lessons in how stupid parents aren't after all and less time to figure out how to get a marriage to the "working within normal parameters" stage.  Beloved and I have had more time to ride the motorcycle, and less reason to get through the day without collapsing on the carpet in tears.  (OK, that's me.  Beloved didn't do that exactly, but he has done what passes for his equivalent of that.)

And this whole going overseas for 6 months thing?  Oh, don't even get me started on that one!  At least a dozen times a day - and he's only been gone 3 days - I've said (out loud and yeah, maybe my neighbors can hear me and that rat doesn't even have an ass to give anymore) "what the FUCK have we done????"  Him, too.

Yeah, I know.  Six months isn't forever.  We're old folks and can deal with this.  Mature enough to see the benefits and pull up our big girl panties and deal with it (though the elastic on mine is giving out).  Yeah, yeah, right, just hang on cause we're strong enough to get through this.  Even "hey, we're praying for you so everything will be OK if you just have faith."  Right.  Sure.  Now, all you folks who've said that - without bothering to take the time to really hear the pain behind our words - YOU try it, and then you can preach to me about it.  And especially all you "just have faith" folks.  Know what I have faith in?  I have faith that I'll get fucked over.  That's the constant in my world.

That and the love that Beloved and I share.

Oh, God, how I miss that man!

Why Is It So Different?

Hubby's left for his training stint.  Left this morning, same time he leaves for work every day.  We don't generally talk or text during the day, though we do email some.  So, this day is so far not one bit different than any other weekday.  But it feels different.  I have no idea why.  It makes no sense whatsoever.  And yet there is this void, this hole.  Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I feel "un-whole."

Six months of this.  And I can't let him know how much this hurts, how frightened I am for him, how terrified I am that I'll totally mess up our finances or make some other ghastly faux pas.  I have to make this easy for him - as easy as it can be.  I can't let him see the panic, the ache, the overwhelming sense of lonely futility.  He has to be able to go with an easy heart, certain that I'll be all right.  I won't be.  I won't be.  God help me, I can't do this.  And yet I must.  I have to.  I have to wave and smile and send him off with hand-knit gloves and the memory of a kiss.

And so, again, I die.  Shut down everything, wrap the shawls of numbness around my shoulders, stack the dry stone cell of forced hermitage around my heart.  Remember how to simply sit.  Not sit and think - thinking is far too dangerous.  Just sit, ticking the minutes away.  And yet I can't even do that.  I have to be present for Precious Treasure.  Somewhere, there is a toggle within me, an on/off gate for feeling, for living.  I know it's there.  I remember it.  I've used it many times before.  But it's dark and I'm alone and I can not find it.