Marriage

In Which Debora Waxes Introspective Again

Posted on July 23, 2008 by Debora

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 | 4 Comments

Second Verse, Same As The First

Posted on July 18, 2008 by Debora

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….

Categories: Family, Horses, kids, Life, Love, Marriage | 3 Comments

Done

Posted on July 14, 2008 by Debora

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.

Categories: Family, kids, Life, Love, Marriage | 5 Comments

Summer Adventures, Part 2

Posted on June 25, 2008 by Debora

The last day of school was June 13th, and it couldn’t come soon enough for us! Steve and I picked the kids up right from school and took them down to Temec to see Indiana Jones, to celebrate. I was the only one who’d seen it before and I was a little concerned that Luke would have a hard time sitting still for the whole two hours, but both kids were completely mesmerized from the first frame to the last. Gotta say though, it didn’t help Luke’s fear of stinging/biting insects one bit. Curse those giant ants!

The following Tuesday, the 17th, we finally squeezed in our “spring” roundup.

It was wonderful to see the cows and calves all fat and happy again on the lush spring grass. Mahogany started out fidgety and spooky, but she settled down nicely as the morning progressed. And this was the first year that Elizabeth was able to really help with bringing in the herd, thanks to her growing rapport with Stormy. It was a good day!

It would have been a great day, except while we were there at the pasture the fuel pump on my car quietly died, and I ended up having it towed up to Idyllwild for repairs. They couldn’t find a new pump for it anywhere but at the Saturn dealership, ditto the fuel filter that they recommended I have replaced at the same time, so the whole thing ended up costing me just under $1000, including the towing fee. Yowtch!

Back when the kids and I were planning out our “Summer of Adventure,” we’d scheduled a trip to The Imagination Workshop for Wednesday the 18th. We weren’t sure what exactly it was, but it looked interesting and didn’t cost much for admission, so we wanted to check it out. When Steve heard about the outing he wanted to come too, so we made a family day of it. Which worked out well, since the guy at Idyllwild Garage said they were waiting on the parts for my car and I wouldn’t have it back until Thursday at the soonest. So we all went down in Steve’s truck.

The Imagination Workshop totally exceeded my expectations! It’s an amazing and delightful clutter of silly “inventions,” optical illusions, cool science and physics gimmicks, secret passageways and plenty of hands-on fun. I wish I had more pics to post, but something about the lighting in there confused my camera and almost all of my photos came out blurry. :^(

After we left the Workshop we stopped for pizza at a place we’d never tried before, called the Temecula Pizza Company. It doesn’t look like anything from the outside; just a featureless storefront tucked in between a Carl’s Jr and a Mobile station. But the pizza was INCREDIBLE! I ordered a personal-size piece of heaven with white sauce, smoked chicken, dried cranberries and two kinds of cheese (provolone and gorgonzola) that was freaking amazing. We will most definitely be going back there.

Thursday was the day I was supposed to leave for Laughlin with Julie and Josh, but they were having technical difficulties with their boat and weren’t able to get it fixed in time. They were still going to Laughlin, just not on the river part. After a lot of agonizing over whether or not to go anyway, I finally decided to bow out this time. The urban/casino scene isn’t really my thing, and I was afraid I’d feel so out of place that I’d dampen their fun.

The fuel pump didn’t come in on Thursday. The Idyllwild Garage guy said I wouldn’t have my car back till Friday. I told him that was fine, I didn’t really need it until Saturday anyway.

Friday Steve wanted to have a father-and-son day with Luke. They took a bunch of trash to the dump, did a couple of ranch calls (Luke likes to hand the shoeing tools to Steve as he needs them), and then they headed down to Hemet to get the truck’s oil changed.

While they were doing all that, Elizabeth and I saddled up our trusty (and not-so-trusty) steeds and went for a nice ride. It was fun to cruise along, go as fast or slow as we felt like, and talk together without Luke’s endless chatter constantly interrupting us. We might have to do this guy day/girl day thing more often!

All four of us arrived back home within twenty minutes of each other, and shortly after that I realized that somehow at some point my cell phone had fallen out of my saddlebag. Luckily the ride had mostly taken place on actual roads, so Steve drove me back over the route to look for it. No luck. When we got back we tried calling it, and it turned out that a friend of Steve’s had found it in the road near his driveway. He was nice enough to bring it up to our gate. Yay!

Since I was originally supposed to be in Laughlin that weekend, Steve had planned to take the kids to the Orange Empire Railway Museum on Saturday. With me not being in Laughlin after all, it was decided that we’d take my car and save some money on gas. Except! The fuel pump STILL hadn’t come in, and now my car wouldn’t be ready till Monday! Whee!

So we piled into Steve’s truck and headed to Perris. Steve’s parents met us there at the museum a bit later.

Luke was delirious with pleasure at being surrounded by all those trains and machinery. The rest of us were delirious with impending heatstroke. It was 107º in the shade that day, and we were not in the shade; we were in the broiling sun surrounded by hulking metal behemoths and often on black asphalt. I’m not normally bothered by heat, but that was like being in a toaster oven. And inside the trains it was even worse! Gaaahhhh.

Still, it was a great museum if you like trains. I forgot to bring my camera (!!), but Steve’s mom had hers so we got some nice pics. You can’t even tell how close to heat collapse we all were.

Sunday we all spent here at the house, hanging out and playing Clue. We just recently discovered that game, and it’s turned out to be oddly addictive. Simple enough for Luke to easily grasp the concept, but with enough opportunities for surreptitiously gleaning clues from other players’ careless remarks that Steve and I have begun to get downright cutthroat about it. Ah, the pleasures of clean family fun. 🙂

Monday my car was finally fixed, and we brought it home. Hooray!

During all of this, Steve and I have been doing the two-steps-forward, one-step-back cha-cha. Some days everything seems to fall effortlessly into place, and other days feel like one long struggle to mend an unmendable relationship. It’s…wearying.

We finally decided that it’s time to try marital counseling. So we picked a guy pretty much at random out of the yellow pages, and Tuesday was our first session.

We can’t decide whether that went well or not. The guy listened to our tale of woe, asked a bunch of questions, and finally said (rather dubiously, Steve and I both thought) that he could help us if we really wanted to try and make it work, and when did we want to start our weekly sessions?

Interestingly, the fact that a marital counselor appeared to be of the opinion that our marriage is probably doomed has only made Steve and I all the more determined to make it work. Apparently we both possess the “Oh yeah? We’ll show HIM!” reflex. Nice to know we have SOMEthing in common. ;^)

And now I need to get outside and get some work done in the yard, because it turns out that yardwork does not do itself while one is out galavanting around at museums and such.

It looks like the apricots will be ripe within the next week. Mmmmmm, apricots.

And that’s all the news here. I will attempt to get back to posting more than once or twice a month, so my updates don’t all read like novels. :^)

Categories: Animals, Family, Horses, kids, Life, Love, Marriage, Ranching | Leave a comment

I’m Starting To Think He’s Been Replaced By An Alien Pod-Clone

Posted on June 9, 2008 by Debora

Not that that’s a bad thing.

Random snippets of conversation this week:

Steve: “I have to run down to Temecula tomorrow for some horseshoes and stuff. Want to come with me?”

Me, clueless: “Me? Why?”

Steve: “Just to spend some time together. We could go somewhere nice for lunch while we’re down there.”

Me, automatically thinking of all the stuff on my To Do list around the house, then realizing that Joe Taciturn actually wants to spend several hours hanging out and talking with me. “Wow. I’d love to come!”

Steve: “Great! See you in the morning!”

**********************

Me: “One of these days I need to tear out that old furnace so I can use the space for things I actually use. Totally not looking forward to that job; it’s going to be a pain.”

Steve: “I could come over and help you with it. Let’s do it Sunday, I’ve got the whole day free.”

***********************

Me, wistfully: “You know, Dani and Steve do their weekly grocery shopping together as a family. I wish we could do that.”

Steve: “Why couldn’t we? Sounds like fun. We could even throw in something cool for the kids every week, like taking them to the park or the movies or something. I’ll start keeping my schedule clear one day a week, which day’s best?”

Me: [faints]

**************************

On that horseshoeing-supplies-buying trip, we even drifted into a political discussion and — you would have to know Steve and I to grasp the amazingness of this — neither of us got pissed off at any point in the debate.

It’s just…unnatural.

But I really really like it.

And that furnace? It would have taken me days to wrestle it out of there, but together we pulled it out in an hour or two.

Samuel Johnson defined a second marriage as “the triumph of hope over experience.” In my case hope hasn’t completely triumphed yet (it’s still neck and neck with caution and a deeply-ingrained skepticism), but so far it’s making a very strong showing.

I just hope the aliens aren’t going to want their pod-clone-guy back anytime soon. I’m getting rather attached to him.

Categories: Family, Life, Love, Marriage | 1 Comment