Balancing your dreams; hoping ends will meet their means

"I have someone I talk to. Someone who is not Husband."

That was how I haltingly explained it to my sister-in-law and brother when I saw them a week after our grandfather died. I was still in something approaching shock. I didn't have a word for what I was feeling. I didn't know how to explain it. 

If anything, I was in a new level of shock. The phone had rung in the middle of the night. I knew it was my father, and I knew what he was calling to say. After he told me my grandfather had died, I hung up and thought that I needed to tell my friend. 

I had to physically stop myself. No. I needed to tell Husband. The person beside me in the bed. The person who'd also been awakened when the phone rang. The person who'd known and loved my grandfather for years, just as I had. 

I turned over and told him. Then I waited for him to leave or go back to sleep so I could tell my friend without Husband knowing about it.

I spent the next week wondering what this meant and packing for my trip to my hometown.

Husband told me he wouldn't drive me to the airport for the funeral; he had a party to attend. He did, however, book my plane tickets. Booking plane tickets always freaked me out. 

My brother knew something was wrong with me, because I wouldn't look directly at him. (My sister-in-law later told me that he assumed I thought he would judge me for whatever I was hiding. He was right.) I had one of those "car conversations" with my sister-in-law. You know, a conversation you have while driving, so you don't have to look directly at the person you're talking to and it's somehow OK to be a bit distracted. 

She asked if I was sleeping with my friend. I said no. That was so far outside my reality I wouldn't have been able to handle it. 

"We don't even kiss. And that's why I think this might actually be real."

I still am not sure whether this answer helped. She seemed a bit horrified. 

I told her more about my friend. The details that seemed to make her understand were all about our shared love of language. 

Then I told my brother. I can't remember what he said, but I remember feeling relieved.

I have two other brothers. I didn't tell them during that trip. I didn't tell my parents, either.

And it's important to remember that there were a lot of things I wasn't telling them at that time. They didn't have any context for what they were about to learn. 

The first clue

I had a friend. I knew he liked me. Or I suspected it, anyway. I had for a while. We spent hours together and were very close.

There were too many dangers involved in being direct about such things, so I talked around it, like a character on a sitcom, hoping we could eventually talk about it. But time passed, and so did the opportunity. I was going on vacation. I'd deal with it later. 

Family is important to me; I have invested heavily in both time and money in maintaining links to my family. Sure, my parents drove me crazy at times. But I still desperately needed a connection to them. Our planned vacation was to their state. I would be there for a week; Husband and Son would be there for two. My mother was just returning from a trip to our hometown to take care of my grandfather, who was nearing the end after years of decline. 

So I was on vacation, surrounded by people who meant a lot to me. I should have felt happy and refreshed. Instead, I felt an odd combination of anxiety and loneliness. 

I was confused.

Fortunately, there seemed to be a cure, or at least a treatment. My friend was also anxious and lonely. We both felt better when we chatted online. Which we did late into the night. We always had, but this was different, more intense. And then the next day would begin with anxiety and loneliness. I was confused. Right up until it hit me. 

It was almost a physical shock. I still refer to it as "hitting myself in the face with a shovel". I wandered, almost staggered, around. Fortunately, I was in a place where it's okay to wander, and I am known for walking everywhere. I tried to figure out what I was feeling. 

I was confused. There seemed to be too much at stake. And that was just in terms of my relationship with my friend; it hadn't occurred to me at that point that there would be any effects on my relationship with Husband or anyone in my family. 

I tried to sidle up to the topic with my friend. This was difficult, because we were in different time zones and had never been direct about what I suspected his feelings were, let alone mine. And I was supposed to want to spend time with my parents, who were dealing with the imminent loss of my grandfather and all of the family dynamics that accompany such a thing. There was a lot of white wine. Normally I would have been part of the conversation for hours. Instead, I ditched them and took my phone into the bathtub to text my friend. 

By the end of the week, I was deep in swirling confusion. I didn't know what it meant or what to do next. I no longer doubted how either of us felt. We had a connection we didn't have with anyone else. But, looking back, I was still remarkably unaware. I didn't doubt how I felt, but I didn't actually know what I was feeling. I wouldn't know that for months. I didn't know what would come. I didn't even know how I should behave with my friend when I next saw him. Something had fundamentally changed and wouldn't be the same. But the change had happened long before I realised it. After that, it was a matter of figuring out what the change was and what to do about it. And that wouldn't come for months. 

Admin

It has occurred to me that I don't need to totally lock the site down between posts; I can set approved users who'll never get the lockout screen. If you'd like me to put you on THE LIST (finally! A "good list"!), get in touch with me at my gmail address, on Facebook, or on Twitter. I think you'll need a Google account; I've never used this feature before, but it can't be too difficult. 

This doesn't affect people who get all of my posts by RSS. You folks probably didn't even know that I go into lockdown mode between posts. 

Curiouser and curiouser

I had someone I wanted to kiss.

This, I thought, was odd. I considered it rather dispassionately.

I knew I didn't like sex. There wasn't much point in even thinking about having any sort of physical relationship with anyone. In any case, I was married.

And whatever I had with the gentleman I wanted to kiss, it was something far beyond the physical. It was something realer, deeper, truer. I wasn't sure what it meant. I searched the Internet for help but found nothing.

I had told my husband something was going on between us. I couldn't explain what it was. It was something I had never experienced.

My husband had come home from a vacation and found me in the depths of swirling confusion. I didn't know what was going on. I only knew that in addition to not wanting him to touch me, which was nothing new, I didn't want to kiss him hello or goodbye. I had an odd sense that this would be cheating. This made no sense to me.

I called it "an incredible connection". I couldn't explain better than that. I didn't have a word for what we had. I reassured my husband that there was no need for concern. I wasn't sleeping with someone else. I wasn't even kissing someone else. We just talked. That was all it was. 

I didn't know how long it had gone on. Months? Years? There wasn't a day that was different than any other day. A fly on the wall watching us would never have been able to pinpoint a moment when things changed on the outside. The only thing that was different was that I knew we had something we didn't have with anyone else.

We went for long walks. We locked ourselves up together and talked for hours. We joked about shared interests. It seemed we had many. We liked to be close. We would sit in snowdrifts and on rocks. 

I introduced him to people I knew. They liked him. 

Truth be told, I was a bit worried that if I kissed him, it might break the spell of whatever we had together. It might make it crass, cheapen it. The fact that it was just talking made me feel like whatever we had was real. 

And there was also the small point that I wanted him to kiss me.

The last straw.

I hate debt. He knew that. I believed I would be debt free by 2020; I spoke about this often and called it my "40 and Hot" plan.

A few years ago, we were at a friend's house, and a beautiful new piece of jewellery was being displayed to many oohs and ahhs. I looked on and politely oohed and ahhed. The woman fixed her gaze on me. "Wouldn't you want your husband to buy you something like this?"

I am not normally asked such questions quite so directly. I shook my head. 

This set off a round of shock: "What? What would you rather he give you?"

I looked at him expectantly. He knew the answer. "She would rather we pay down debt."

He was right.

And so when I started searching my house and looking through financial statements, it took me a while to realise that the oddly un-round numbers I had thought were credit limits (they did, after all, correspond to my understanding of our credit limits) were in fact our assorted debts. Credit cards I didn't know existed were maxed out. My own credit card, which I'd thought had no balance, was maxed out. Two lines of credit I'd thought were closed when they'd been rolled into the mortgage a year before were maxed out. 

I hate debt. I had never wanted to have anything to do with the finances, because they stressed me out. The numbers always seemed far too high; they made me anxious. He always had an explanation. I trusted him. I let him do all of it. 

Until that day, I had resolved to attempt a "separate but together" divorce for the sake of our son. I thought we could continue to live together, avoiding awkward questions and making life easier all around. 

But that day, surrounded by drugs and credit statements, I knew that wasn't an option. I needed to cut my losses. Separate but together might not establish the separation I knew I legally needed. 

I was reeling. And I didn't even know how to get help. I'd just found spyware on my computer and knew he could read everything I typed. 

More than anything else, more than the dating sites, more than the porn, more than the spyware, more than the drugs, more than the freaky paraphernalia, it was the money that shocked me into action. I knew that I was legally responsible for half of his debt as of the date of separation. It didn't matter that I didn't know about it. 

I didn't know it until that day, but we would never have been out of debt. Foolishly, I had trusted him and signed everything he'd ever asked me to sign. My "40 and Hot" plan was really an "80 and Destitute" plan.

We divided the debt. I agreed to take the lines of credit (they totalled half of the debt). He was using them to "pay off" credit cards, which he was using to "pay off" other credit cards. I closed them. This triggered a panic. I didn't care.

Until that day I'd been devastated at my decision to leave him, wracked with what I thought was guilt and highly vulnerable to emotional terrorism from him and my family.

But after that day, I was steely, cold and resolute. There was no going back.