Steeling myself

A friend pointed out a rather nice story in the paper the other day. Her aunt and uncle designed and built a unique duplex after their divorce, one that allows the kids to keep their bedrooms while the dimensions of the house shift around them.

Pretty cool. The sort of thing I liked to think, long ago, was possible. The sort of thing I still like to think would be possible one day.

But that's not the point of this post.

The point of this post is in the seventh graf: "Why the marriage failed is really none of our business. But Monica explains..."

Ugh.

Yeah, definitely not a stranger's business. (If you know about this blog, you're not a stranger.) But I thought it was funny that the reporter first noted that it wasn't our business, and then went on to give a reason.

It's been about a year since my traumatic summer "vacation". I know I'm doing better, because part of me longs to see my family again. But part of me is in knots over what is to come. I don't want to answer questions about why. Not because the lie I will tell is particularly awful, but because I don't think it's strangers' business. It's not even family's business.

At some point, people decide that you have to explain why you're not with someone. I don't know if the magic time period is in years or months or, God help us, in days. I only really know that after twenty years, people think I owe them an explanation.

I feel like this is pretty intrusive; not only because I'll have to lie again and then maintain the new lie, but because it doesn't seem like it should matter enough to even ask. We're not together. If you're a stranger, you don't need to know any more. Even if you're not a stranger, you probably don't need to know any more.

Okay, not YOU. But I'm definitely planning to lie to everyone else.

I need to find a way to answer the question. I gather that "I dunno; how come YOU aren't married to him?" isn't acceptable.

So, yes.

This story has a happy ending.

Or a happy middle, anyway. The last time I tried to force a particular ending on a relationship, it didn't work out so well. Unless you count the way I forced it to be over.

This is not going to be my divorce blog. This is just going to be my blog. I hope that one day I will have a million and one things to write about again. Maybe one day I'll even tell people I have a website.

I am looking forward to summer at camp. I didn't have much of a holiday last year; this year can only be better. My family doesn't know the whole story and may never, but at least they seem to be past the "you are the bad one" bullshit of last year.

The bad one, you may recall, is the one who leaves. The one who is unwilling to work on the marriage. That's me. 

I won't pretend to be perfect, and I am willing to accept whatever blame is due to a person who falls in love with someone else.

We are going away next weekend; my favourite band is touring and I was able to match the tour schedule with my custody schedule. I've never been to Winnipeg before and am looking forward to visiting museums and exploring riverside trails.

I was my own Frog Prince

If I'd known that my black-and-white world would turn to technicolor when I kissed him, I might not have done it quite the way I did. I might have done it much sooner, or I might have waited, afraid of the change that would come over me and drive me to drop a bomb on my quiet existence. 

I had approached it cautiously, feeling it was both a giant leap and something I just needed to get over. Like jumping into a lake, I knew I wouldn't be able to undo it quickly. 

There's a moment in "Back to the Future" when Lorraine kisses Marty. She stiffens and pulls back in something approaching revulsion. "I don't know what it is. When I'm kissing you, it's like I'm kissing my brother."

When I kissed him (I need to find a handy nickname for the gentleman I've been calling "my friend") I suddenly realised that kissing Husband was like kissing my brother. It was an entirely different experience. It always had been. 

And it hit me that I hadn't fallen out of love with Husband at all. I'd never been in love with him to begin with. I felt great affection for him. He was an important part of my life and a member of my family. But he was like my brother. That's why I thought I didn't like sex, why it felt so violating and wrong. I should never, ever have married him. I should have broken up with him when I was in high school. 

That piece was hard for people to understand. They had a sense that we were, as my mother said repeatedly in her non-apologies, "a happy couple". We hadn't been unhappy, and I suppose we were a couple in the sense that there were two of us. 

I have tried to explain this way, sometimes unsuccessfully:

Dear blog reader, you and I could live together. We could be happy. I could do the cooking and you could take out the trash. We could raise our kids together. And that might be okay for a long time. But then, one day, you would tell me that you wanted to live with someone else. Someone you loved. And it wouldn't mean that you were rejecting me; you would still feel the same way about me that you did the day before or the year before. It would only mean that you didn't love me the way you loved the other person. And no amount of "working things out" (what an unhelpful suggestion!) would make you love me that way. 

And so when I realised this, I knew it meant I finally needed to leave Husband. 

My family said I left him for my friend. That might be a handy shorthand, but it's not really true. Things progressed in a way that made me realise I'd never really been with him. It wasn't about "hoping this new guy is worth it". It was about finally realising that I was worth it. 

I have never had a worse summer than the one that just passed

My family does not believe in divorce.

This is not entirely a religious matter, although several of us are Christians to varying degrees. (I am what I consider a cultural Anglican, and sometimes jokingly refer to myself as a "Prayer Book atheist".) 

No, we have limited experience with divorce, and that experience is not positive. By the time our annual family reunion came around, there was no doubt in my mind that I would not be staying with Ex. I did not want his relationship with my family to deteriorate like I felt mine had with his mother. (He had been sure to inform her that I was leaving him and what the circumstances were.) I told my family that Ex needed just as much of their love and support as they gave me, and that nobody supports me by being cruel to him. 

They responded with a vengeance. 

I have mentioned on this blog that I am the bad one, the one who decided to leave. And once I realised I had to leave him, there was nothing that could have changed my mind. 

Ex had started hacking into my accounts and knew that I was emotionally distraught about leaving him. I didn't question whether I needed to leave, but I did feel that it was -- well, not wrong, but perhaps the better of two potentially immoral choices. 

I did not expect Ex to throw me under the bus, and I did not expect my family to side with him. And I did not expect them to stand by as he became even more verbally and emotionally abusive than usual. They poured drinks for him and watched.

They'd found out almost by accident; that's a story I will tell some other time. By then I'd realised that I did not love Ex and had never loved him in any sort of romantic sense.  I tried to explain. This was unsuccessful. 

My father did not look at me for several days. He told me that it didn't matter whether I love Ex, because I'd made a promise to stay with him. That I was to blame; this was never in doubt but became clearer to him the more I tried to explain. I did not love Ex and cringed at his touch; it had always felt violating but seemed more so as I realised why. I thought my father would understand this; although that eventually came with time, it did not come last summer and I started to feel it was a weapon. "You weren't 'one'," he chided me. And, most infuriatingly, "You wanted to have a blog instead of working on your marriage."

There were moments when I thought my mother understood. Then she would be back to "Well, there are marriage vows involved..." and suggesting that she couldn't help because I'm not Christian enough to know what love is. (It was never specified how she knows how Christian I might be or what level of Christianity was enough to unlock this particular achievement. I suppose that deciding to get divorced is all of the proof that is needed.)

I felt there was nothing I could do to make them understand. The glimpse they got from Ex was partially accurate and I doubted there was any point in elaborating. After all, I was indeed leaving him. I was indeed involved with someone else. And nothing I said made things better.

And so when I started searching my house and realised the full extent of the insanity I was living in, I was certain I could not turn to them. 

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.