Happy 8th, to my not-so-little-guy!
You are one of a kind. May your creative spirit let you sail buoyantly over life’s roughest seas, and your integrity and boundless determination always bring you safely back to port.
I love you so much!
Love
And Now We Know
Elizabeth: “I think I’m going to draw a picture of what Dr. Claw might really look like.”
Me: “That reminds me. You have one more Inspector Gadget dvd coming in from Netflix, and that’ll be the last of them.”
Elizabeth: “I wonder if THIS TIME we’ll finally get to see Dr. Claw’s face!”
Me: “I don’t think they ever showed his face. I think it’s just one of those great mysteries of life that’s never revealed.”
Elizabeth: “Like the Onceler. You only ever see his hands and arms.”
Me: “Like how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a Tootsie Pop.”
Elizabeth: “Oh, I know that one. I counted once.”
Me: “You did? How many licks does it take?”
Elizabeth: “Four hundred ninety.”
How I love that child. She always goes that extra mile so the rest of us don’t have to.
In Which Debora Waxes Introspective Again
I’ve come to accept that a clean break with Steve isn’t one of my options. The marriage is over, but we still have kids together, and the more I stretch out into my new life the more I rely on him to take on a larger share of the parenting while I reconnect with other aspects of myself. He’s fine with this; the kids are old enough to come with him on some of his horeseshoeing rounds, and he seems to sincerely want to strengthen his relationship with them. So for the sake of the kids and general harmony, he and I are trying to be friends.
Being friends with Steve isn’t all that hard if you don’t expect stuff like honesty or reliability. He prefers all of his relationships to be superficial and free of any actual effort on his part, but he’s a personable and easygoing guy to be around. As long as you never mistake the friendship for anything meaningful on any level, he’s perfectly good company.
A while back I was talking to Julie about how easy it would be to be casual friends with Steve, if I could just figure out how to switch off the love that I have always felt for him. She said something that has stuck with me ever since. She said that even though her own ex-husband was an abusive jerk, even though her marriage was destructive and toxic and she can see how much better off she is without him, even though she’s with Josh now and they love each other dearly, a small part of her still clings to the old bond with her ex. She said she believes that something sacred and irreversible happens when you stand before God and speak those holy vows. They bind you. Your souls are inextricably knit together, till death do you part.
It makes sense. The Bible says pretty much the same thing. So, I have been trying to fit Steve into my new life in ways that acknowledge that permanent bond without being too painful for me.
Last Sunday I was feeling comfortable enough with the balancing act to invite him over for a family game of Clue and to toss a few steaks on the grill. (Due to a weird dealer error when the who/what/where cards were placed in the envelope at the start of the Clue game, it turned out that the lead pipe did it with a revolver in the the hall. That was just…odd.) Everything was going great until after dinner when Steve made a comment that brought all my happy thoughts to a screeching halt.
“Don’t think I don’t feel really bad about all this,” he said. “I took a perfectly nice girl and ruined her.”
Lovely.
“I’m not ruined,” I growled. “You’re giving yourself way too much credit. FUCK you. I’m going to be just FINE, thank you very much. I’m not fucking RUINED.”
Obviously, Steve’s comment wouldn’t have made me so angry if part of me didn’t worry that it might be true.
A few years ago I was talking to someone who had just broken up again with her on again/off again boyfriend. “From now on,” she’d declared, “If I ever get into another relationship I’m not going to be the one doing the sacrificing. I’m not going to be the one doing the forgiving and compromising and giving in.”
My thought at the time was, “Then you have absolutely nothing of value to offer a relationship.” Because realistically, that’s what all healthy human interactions boil down to: people compromising and forgiving and occasionally giving in, when the relationship is more important than the issue at hand. That’s ALL relationships, not just the romantic ones.
Steve’s comment upset me so badly because deep down I wonder if I even have it in me anymore to commit that way to anyone again. I’d like to find Mr. Right and remarry someday, but I’m not sure that I’m capable of taking that leap of faith one more time. I knew Steve for fourteen years before the first separation, and it turned out that I didn’t really know him very well at all. The next guy could turn out to be a child molester or something. I have lost faith in my own judgment. I wonder if have permanently lost my ability to give people the benefit of the doubt, to assume that they probably mean well, to shrug off thoughtless comments and actions as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I wonder if I can still give freely without expecting anything in return.
If I can’t do those things, I’ll never have a healthy, successful relationship. I really will be ruined. And I don’t know how to fix it.
The best part of this story: when Steve saw how his remark had hurt me, he apologized profusely and said it was a poor choice of words and he hadn’t meant ruined and he offered me a comforting hug.
And when I accepted that, he tried to turn it into a make-out session.
It’s like trying to be friends with a five-year-old that has never grasped the concept of impulse control. He just does whatever feels good at the moment and never thinks about the effect it has on others.
I refuse to let myself be “ruined” by this guy.
But I don’t know how to heal the part of me that he damaged. Maybe it just takes time, or maybe I’ll end up sharing an apartment with 47 cats in my old age, boasting emptily that no man ever got the best of me.
There’s a nice comforting image.
Categories: Life, Love, Marriage
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Second Verse, Same As The First
Now that Steve and I are separated (again), he has donned his Devoted Dad hat (again), and begun making time every day to spend with Luke and Elizabeth. From my perspective this is of the good; I firmly believe that kids benefit from having a healthy relationship with both parents no matter what the state of the parental union may be. Luke, especially, has become a lot more confident and outgoing and less…well…neurotic, in the past four and a half months since his father has decided to give him some actual focused attention.
Being the astute child that she is, Elizabeth has picked up on the rather fickle nature of Dad’s devotion (as in, it comes and goes in inverse relationship to how secure he feels in the marriage), and she’s been visibly cooling toward him. I can’t blame her, but it makes me sad anyway.
And speaking of our Tough Cookie, she took a big tumble yesterday.
Some backstory: ever since she was four or five, Elizabeth has liked to walk out to the horse pasture and shimmy up a front leg and onto the back of a horse or pony, letting it carry her wherever the herd took them. At first I was VERY concerned about this pastime, and considered putting a stop to it, but she always chose the nice quiet mounts and nothing bad came of it, so I relaxed a little and let her have her fun.
A couple years ago she came in complaining that Balki (an Icelandic pony we used to have) had tossed her off and hurt her arm. This was the same pony that gave her an actual concussion the first time she rode him, so we just told her to stick to the safer horses for her pasture jaunts from now on, and let the fun continue. (A week of “My arm feels better today, Mom”s later, I took her down to have it looked at and learned that she had been WALKING AROUND WITH A BROKEN ARM FOR A WEEK. Hence the “Tough Cookie” nickname.)
The other day I caught her trying to slip onto Mahogany’s back from a top fence rail. I nipped that plan right in the bud. No ridee Mahogany! But when I saw her hacking around on Marshall, I thought it over and decided not to fuss. Marshall’s young and green, but he’s also calm and friendly.
Okay, so yesterday I glanced out the window just at the right moment to see Marshall BOLT out of the corral into the pasture, and Elizabeth hit the dirt in his wake. I shot out the door and into the corral, calling her name. She was all, “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” but she wouldn’t or couldn’t answer my questions about where it hurt and what body part she’d landed on. Her knees were all scraped up, and she seemed very disoriented. I brought her in and settled her on the couch and shone a flashlight in each of her eyes, and her pupils responded normally. I suggested a warm bath (she was filthy from the corral ground and her scrapes were very dirty, and I figured she would feel better after a nice soak). She got in the tub, but then started wailing that her head hurt. I checked and found a respectable goose-egg on the back of her head, so I gave her some Children’s Tylenol and went to find her some clean jammies.
When I got back she was kind of zoning and sleepy. I helped her out of the tub, and she got dressed in slow motion; she just wanted to go take a nap. I knew there was a good chance she had another concussion (for those of you keeping score, that’s one broken arm and two concussions so far. CPS should be knocking on my door any day now), but I also knew that if I took her to the emergency room they would: 1. keep her waiting for hours before anyone attended to her, 2. most likely eventually diagnose a concussion, and 3. tell me to take her home, keep her quiet and give her plenty of rest. So I let her go take her nap, opting to spare her the stress of a trip to the ER. She slept and SLEPT and slept. I went in every half hour or so and nudged her until I got some sort of response, because there is a risk of a concussed person slipping into a coma if they’re allowed to sleep too deeply.
She seemed to feel better when she finally woke up around 5pm, and she had some supper. And then threw it up. And then threw again at bedtime. Steve and I talked back and forth on the phone for a while about whether taking her to the ER to check for complications would be worth all the additional trauma it would put her through. (The ER is in Murrietta, btw, almost 50 miles away down winding mountain roads.) Finally it was decided that I would sleep with her, and if there were any signs at all that things were getting worse instead of better, down we’d go.
She woke up early, around 4:45am, and seemed to feel a lot better, so we all heaved a sigh of relief. But around 9 or 9:30, she kind of crashed again. I called her pediatrician, and miraculously they were having a slow day and said they could see her in the office at 11:15.
The doc gave her a careful examination, including a rather alarming bit of hands-on skull twisting to check for fractures, but Elizabeth was unruffled by that. He confirmed that she had a concussion, but said that there didn’t seem to be any life-threatening complications, and that I should take her home and keep her quiet and give her plenty of rest. No running or bouncing or anything that might possibly cause her brain to slosh around in her skull for at least a week or two, and no riding horses, climbing trees, or anything that might cause another head injury for at least a month. So, the Tough Cookie’s on the sidelines for the rest of summer vacation. Poor kid. She threw up again the instant we got home, then went and took a long nap in the hammock.
She’s a little cranky.
So I guess our Summer Of Adventure will have to be limited to non-physically-strenuous activities from here on out. No swimming, bowling, roller skating, bike riding….Looks like we’ll be seeing a lot of movies.
Where’s that catalogue where I saw that child-size bubble-wrap clothing? I know it’s around here somewhere….
Done
So, last Saturday Steve and I reluctantly gave up and called it quits. He finally just said, “I don’t think I’m really cut out to be a married man.” The simple clarity of that statement pretty much summed it all up. In between the moments of passion and frivolous fun, being married to Steve has always made me feel so freaking lonely. He has a whole life going on that has nothing to do with me, and he prefers it that way. He is, by nature, a solo act that likes life in the social spotlight.
Like last time, the decision to separate has left me feeling relieved and liberated. Don’t get me wrong, I wish it could have worked out, but I don’t think it ever would have. No doubt the anger, grief, etc, will eventually make their rounds again, but for now I’m just breathing the free air.
Steve has always been such a weakening influence on the fabric of this family. Take Friday family movie nights, for example. This is a custom that the kids and I started during the first separation. On Friday nights we pop a giant bowl of popcorn, put on something from Netflix that the kids want to see, and snuggle up on the couch in a big pile together. Bonding time. Fun.
During the reconciliation, when Steve started joining us for movie night, it all changed. He didn’t care for the kiddie movies, so every week he basically turned it into a big inappropriate makeout session on one end of the couch, with the kids on the other end of the couch or in the big chair. The instant the ending credits rolled he’d pull me off to the bedroom for some “grownup time.” Fun? Sure. Family bonding time? Not so much.
In fact, he paid more attention to his kids during the first separation than he ever did before or after. When we’re together he has a way of making them feel alienated without even trying to. So, one more reason for me to not regret parting ways.
Shortly before we called it quits I happened to be with Steve when he received a friendly text message from his ex-girlfriend. Funny — he’d told me she’d moved out of state. He said he had no idea why she’d still be texting him.
I hate the way moments like that make me feel, and I hate how MANY moments like that — and much worse — there have been during the fourteen years I’ve known him. I just really want to never feel that way ever again.
So — I wish him the best of luck, but I need to walk my own path from here on out. Today me and the kids went to see “Journey To The Center Of The Earth” in 3D, and it was a hoot and we didn’t have to deal with Steve shushing the kids every time they laughed or shrieked as loud as every other freaking person in the theater was doing. And then we came home and it was too late to get anything done and too early to go to bed, so we popped a giant bowl of popcorn and put on a Donald Duck collection that had come in from Netflix, and we snuggled in a pile on the couch and made up for a lot of recent family movie nights that hadn’t felt like family time at all. And tomorrow night we’re going to take some sleeping bags and camp out in the horse pasture and roast hot dogs and marshmallows and sing goofy songs about great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts, and tell spooky stories and basically just celebrate the fact that the three of us are a solid team again and not a lonely, dysfunctional foursome.
Things don’t always turn out the way you want them to.
But I have to believe that sooner or later things turn out the way they’re meant to.
I have faith in that.
An Invincible Summer 