Outcast

The other day, DB was telling me how hard it is for him to take his children to birthday parties and other community events when he goes to visit them on the other side of the country, where his ex took them. He knows that his ex has told everyone that he cheated on her. He knows that he gets viewed as a player (which he isn't). His ex's friends give him the hairy eyeball, and the dads also look askance because they think he might flirt with their wives. He says he would go through any humiliation just to be in his children's lives. And it's true; he would. It's not easy, though. The shame and guilt are a huge burden, and though he did a bad thing, he isn't a bad person, so it's painful to be perceived as one.

I have been fortunate enough not to face that very much. Few people know for sure that I cheated on my ex, including my ex, and though I'm sure some people wonder, they're not going to say anything to my face about it. The few who I've told have actually been pretty accepting because they know my ex. The only person who has rejected me is my former BFF, and I think that has a lot more to do with her insecurities than with me, because I have always been a steady friend to her through all her dark places. I have close friends who don't know. I've contemplated telling them, but I worry. Does having cheated on my ex, and doing so with another woman's husband, bar me for life from the sisterhood of women? Does it matter that DB's ex was not a particularly nice woman? Probably not. Honestly, my biggest critic is me. It's hard to forgive myself.

I am lucky not to have been cast out by most of my peers. I am a good friend. I will pour you a glass of wine, give you a moment to collect yourself, wipe your child's nose, give him/her a snack, and turn on Nick Jr. so that you can hear yourself think. I am loyal and protective and pragmatic. I don't judge. I have no right to do that. But if you know what I'd done, would you still be my friend?

Day to day, all I can do is what I have to do. I raise my children, I advocate for their needs, I try my best to be a good mom and employee and friend and girlfriend and ex-wife. I'm not a predator or a fallen woman or any more of a sinner than anyone else.

I've reminded DB that everyone who's passing judgment on him has their own baggage. They have addictions or secrets or shameful pasts or affairs or embezzlements or bad debts or frauds of their own. Human nature is what it is. People are far more complex and duplicitous and tortured and beautiful and noble and horrible and conflicted than is really appropriate to discuss at cocktail parties. Those of us who've run the minefield understand that far better than most. I've come to the conclusion that it's pointless to try to control public perception of ourselves. While there's no point in airing our dirty laundry, people are going to think what they think, and we can either let our mistakes define who we are, or let our lives show that we have learned to do better.

What I Did Over Summer Vacation

I hadn’t meant to let so much time go by without posting.  It’s just that things kept sucking, and I kept not knowing how to talk about it, and then it got to the point where I wasn’t even sure how to catch up.

Kind of like that.

My ex still isn’t over me and has found every reason possible to stall divorce proceedings. In June, he told the kids that if Mommy married someone else that he was going to move far away from all of us. They were completely hysterical, and I proceeded to do like this to the ex:

I really miss him a lot.

Then, the ex managed to fall off a ladder and shatter the living crap out of his tibia. He had to have surgery and only just now got off crutches. Imagine for a moment that you’re power-washing the side of your house.  Imagine that you prop up the ladder, but there’s a bush in the way, so you set the ladder so that one of the top rails is against the house, and the other rail is out in mid-air with nothing to ground it.  And then you try to climb it.  Except you would never do that, because that would be stupid.

So, that jacked over the summer.  Don’t get me wrong, I feel sorry for the guy.  It was painful, and he’ll probably never walk right again, but sweet baby Jesus eating a corndog (thank you Neil Gaiman) was that a stupid thing to do.

What else?  DB.  He is a sweetheart, met my mother, has been spending more time with my children, and we will probably do Thanksgiving together with someone’s family.  He’s really a rock for me.  And he is probably moving to the other coast sometime next year to be with his children, who he misses desperately.  He has to go to them.  Of course he does.  And I am completely devastated all the same.

I can’t move out of state with my children.  Their father is a tool, but he’s the father they have.  To the extent that he can love anyone besides himself, he loves them.  Some days seem like a closer call than others, but on the whole I believe that taking him out of their lives would screw them up far worse than whatever he’s going to do or not do as a parent.  And, I was the one who ended the marriage.  I already broke up their home.  I can’t do anything to make that worse.  So I’m stuck here.  Unless I can convince the ex to move across the country, which is not outside the realm of possibility, but certainly outside the realm of probability.

In all of this, I had this picture that if DB and I could get out of our bad marriages, we could be together and have a daily life and a home.  We could help raise each other’s children and take out the garbage and pay the bills and fall asleep in the same bed nearly every night.  We could progress through middle age and enjoy our health for a couple more decades.  But the reality is that my youngest is 6.  I’m probably not going anywhere for the next 12 years.

I’m heartbroken.  Maybe I deserve it, but there it is.

The thing is, DB says he still wants to marry me.  He wants to figure out a way to make it work, even if we can’t live in the same state.  I know people do it, they’re separated for work or deployments or other obligations.  But how many people start out their marriages apart?  Second marriages already have a lower success rate than first marriages.  How much more strain can we take?

I don’t know the answers.  I just know that this is the only person I want to be with.  And I know we both have to do right by our children, and that trumps everything else, whether we like it or not.  Perhaps the reason I couldn’t write sooner was that I was hoping for some resolution to occur to me.  It hasn’t.  I think I just need to keep writing anyway.

Daddy Issues

So I just got home from visiting my parents, with my kids.  You know those sweet grandparents who are eternally patient and understanding, give you candy, take an interest in your life, and make all your visits fun and special?  Yeah, my parents aren't those grandparents.  My father is ex-military, and he was off the chain.  I expect an e-mail from him within the next 48 hours telling me that my son is going to be a sociopath if I don't "get control" over him.  That has happened before, and as you can imagine, it's super-helpful and really makes me want to bring the kids around more.  While The Boy is sometimes a pain in the behind, and while he does have some sensory processing problems, he's really no more annoying than other kids his age are, on the whole he does well at school and at home, and somehow my dad really brings out the contrary in him.  Perhaps it's the screaming, or the name-calling ("Mommy, Grandpa called me the a-word three times!"), or the jerking things out of his hands.  It never goes well.  My mom makes excuses for him, but I know better.  I was raised by this man, and I've spent hours in therapy trying to come to terms with it.  I can't subject my child to that.

I don't blame any of my actions or choices on my father.  I own those things.  I do think that he helped me to become an anxious, codependent person who has always been attracted to narcissists and has always given her control away.  The more I try not to be that person, the more I see the extent to which I have been that person, and how deep those qualities go.  Still, it's not his fault.  The anxiety is probably hard-wired and hereditary; I just never learned how to manage it effectively until now.  As for the rest of it, he didn't meant to feed those traits; he just didn't know any better, and he is extremely limited emotionally.  I am truly trying to make better choices, and take responsibility for the person I am from here on out.  I don't seek to control or manipulate other people by trying to be what they want me to be, nor do I resent people when they don't do what I want, or at least I try to realize when I'm doing it, and let it go.  Passive aggression is still aggression, and it helped to destroy my marriage, and it nearly destroyed me and my relationship with my children.  I am so glad to be free of it (mostly).

I don't know what to do going forward with my father, but I have to say that I am not tied in knots about it as I would have been a few years ago.  This man has actually driven me into panic attacks on multiple occasions.  He chooses to be an unhappy person who thinks the world is out to get him.  I choose not to participate in his pathology anymore.  He can seek a loving relationship with his child and grandchildren, or he can rain down terror every time he doesn't get his way.  If he does the latter, I have to protect myself and my children from him.  I choose to seek happiness and love and integrity, to find my way out of the mess I've made, to have a calm, peaceful, and fulfilling life, whatever shape it takes.

For now, that's going to involve having a cocktail, watching a little crappy TV, and reading a good book.  The rest will take care of itself erelong.

The Cat

Yesterday my 13 year old male tabby cat, who I left behind with my ex, died.  He was the world's sweetest cat.  My ex and I got him the year after we married, and he was our first baby (I always liked my ex for being a cat person).  Whenever I was alone and distraught, the cat would snuggle up to me and make me feel better.  I really believe that he knew when I needed the comfort.  It was torture to leave him behind when I moved out, but it felt like the right thing to do, both for the cat and my ex.  I have really missed him.  I always used my trips to my ex's to pick up or drop off the kids as a chance for kitty visitation, and he always ran to meet me to be petted and to shed fur on my clothes.

Earlier in the week, the cat started wheezing, and we thought maybe it was asthma or something treatable.  Turns out it was terminal cancer.  My ex was with the cat when he was euthanized, which I'm very glad about.  I'm glad that the cat had someone he loved, and who loved him, to see him through his last moments.  I had done the same with our other cat, also much beloved, a few years ago, and it was emotionally brutal.  I had a lot of empathy for my ex.

Tonight my ex and I sat down with the kids to explain it to them, which went about as well as could be expected under the circumstances.  I had brought a 3-ring binder, paper, crayons, and some photos of the cat.  We explained what had happened, hugged them, read them some books (Mr. Rogers could explain anything to a kid, I'm convinced), looked at pictures of the cat and talked about him, and encouraged the kids to draw pictures and write about how they felt.  We did a lot of hugging and crying.  I think we handled it the right way.  In the night, my son woke up and was upset about the cat.  He was at his dad's, and I'm glad the his dad did what I would have done:  curled up with him, stroked his hair, reassured him, and stayed with him until he fell back asleep.  This is the kind of thing I focus on when my ex annoys me.  He loves our children.

The cat represents more than just a cat, of course.  He was one of the symbols of our early marriage, how I felt in those days, one of our first cooperative projects.  I loved that my ex loved the cat, that he would sleep with us, and that sometimes I would wake up to see that cat, lying on his back with his head between ours on the pillows.  A lot of people "get over" their pets when their children are born, and though certainly the children were always the first priority, we never stopped loving the cat.

It is hard to let go.  My heart really goes out to my ex at this time, and I am glad to hear that he plans to adopt another pair of cats, who the children will get to pick and name, in a couple of months.  I'm proud that we were able to be there for our children and help them navigate through this.  It gives me hope that we can continue to cooperate and support each other.

Truth

I am a horrible liar.  Absolutely the worst.  I have all the tells - giving too much detail and then contradicting myself, fidgeting, stammering, looking into the upper corners of my field of vision, inability to answer simple questions.  It's a good thing I don't play poker.  How I ever got away with the enormity and duration of the lie I perpetrated is completely beyond me.

And that worries me.  I don't want to be a good liar.  I don't want to be a liar at all.  It is a bad habit, one that quickly gets easier with practice.  We've all known people who actually lose track of what is actually true vs. what they made up or want to believe.  That is not the person I want to be.  These are not the values I want to teach my children.

DB and I have been talking about this a lot lately.  He also feels haunted by this loss of integrity, not because of anyone else's opinion of what he has done, but because of his own opinion of himself. We are also hyper-aware that if we cannot be absolutely honest with each other, we will not last.  Truth is vital.

In my religious tradition (Reform Judaism), people are deemed to have a "good impulse" and a "bad impulse," and we always have a choice about which impulse to follow.  The more frequently you do good things, the easier it becomes to do more good things, and that is why we view someone as a "good" person.  It's not that the person has no negative thoughts or desires and never does anything wrong, but rather that he or she is good at recognizing and choosing the higher road most of the time.  The opposite is also true, so when we do bad things, repeatedly, it becomes harder to resist the parts of ourselves that are selfish and petty and greedy and lazy.  The good news is that we can always turn it around, but it takes work.

I want to turn it around.  I am making a conscious effort every day to be honest, to take responsibility for what I say and rebuild my integrity.  Every time I find myself tempted to "spin" the truth, I stop and ask myself why.  Of course, diplomacy and tact are still important, but never at the expense of trust and integrity.

If you're considering having an affair, or involved in an affair, I encourage you to ask yourself whether this is the kind of person you want to be.  Eventually, if you lie enough, you become a liar.  It's hard to come back from that, and painful and ugly to confront.  A little honesty now could save you a lot of trouble down the road.  That's the truth.

He Knows

In the course of negotiating a settlement with my ex, I finally found out that he knows that I am seeing DB, and that he knows who he is.  Truly, I wasn't really trying that hard to hide the fact that I'm seeing someone now, 2 years post separation.  I just didn't want him to know about the affair.  More than any legal or financial consequences, my biggest worry was that he would think that was why I left him, and it wasn't.  I shouldn't have had the affair, but I would have left anyway, and for good reasons.  Equally importantly, I didn't want it to interfere with co-parenting.  We have a good relationship as parents.  We can both go to our children's events and sit together without gritting our teeth.  We communicate about issues relating to the kids, large and small, long-term and short-term.  We've built up a lot of goodwill, and that can only help the children.

But, I'm pretty sure he does, on some level, know my relationship with DB started before the separation.  At least in hindsight, he has to know.  The signs were all there - the jumpiness, the increased texting and IM-ing, the distraction, the irritability ... I was like a textbook case, and the timing fits.  In fact, my ex said that he could certainly speculate about the timing of the relationship and whether it related to our problems, but he didn't care about that anymore.  I don't think that's true - he has to care.  It's more likely that he doesn't really want to know, that he doesn't think the information would be helpful.  And it wouldn't.

In the end, it was a productive conversation.  My ex wasn't angry; he just wanted me to know he knew.  I'm relieved that I don't feel compelled to hide a big piece of my life anymore.  I see his acknowledgment that I'm now in a relationship as a sign that my ex is starting to move on, and that is healthy for him.  If he is a happier person, my children will have a happier father, and I want that for them, and for him.

Now, underneath it all, he still wants me back.  I know this because he said so.  But, in the same sentence, he said that he would no longer obstruct the divorce settlement because he had realized it was what I needed.  Sort of an "if you love something, set it free" approach.  He has finally accepted that he can't force me back into his paradigm.

I truly don't hate my ex.  We were not well suited to each other, or rather, we were too suited to each other in the exact wrong ways.  [Cue in Prince's "When Doves Cry"]  He married someone like his mother, who would cushion him from taking responsibility for himself or others.  He emulated his father, a brilliant but absent minded and socially and emotionally inept professor who has no way of conceptualizing people on their own terms.  I married someone like my father, who always gets his way.  I emulated my mother, a chronically depressed martyr.  It's a typical codependent cycle.  Eventually, though, it seemed like I had learned whatever lesson I was supposed to have learned from that experience, and the situation wasn't going to change, so it was time to move on.

Now, what have I learned?  That's a question for another post.

Sleepless in the Suburbs

I'm marooned on the couch by my insomnia.  DB is sleeping peacefully; Stepdog is sprawled out on the floor beside me, snurffling through dreams of chasing rabbits; my children are resting up at their father's house for a cub scout snow tubing trip tomorrow.  I have a work event in the morning, but I can't sleep, and I'm realizing it's because I'm worrying the same set of thoughts over and over again.

DB is tortured by the fact that he is not part of his children's immediate daily lives.  He Skypes with them every day, helps them with homework, reads books to them, and hears about their days.  He is as present with them as he can be from 2,000 miles away.  He visits them as often as finances allow.  It kills him that he can't be with them more.  DB is in the military and must live where the military tells him to live.  When his ex took the children and moved across the country, unannounced, he decided not to put his children through a custody battle he might lose, and so now he is trying to be the best father he can be given the limits placed on him.  The day-to-day is tolerable, but he is deeply mourning the loss of the relationships he had wanted to have with his children.  I don't know how to help him, or if I can.

DB has to decide whether he wants to stay in the military, and this affects all kinds of other questions that in turn affect me.  There are big reasons to stay:  retention bonuses every year, possibility of promotion, and in not many more years, he could retire with a full pension.  Free healthcare for both of us for life (if we marry), and for his children until they're out of college, lifetime commissary privileges, good stuff.  Very low likelihood that he would be sent into the line of fire or for a long deployment at this point in his career.  We could probably designate a location and pretty much stay in and around there.  I support DB's desire to continue serving our country, and his career in the military is a big part of who he is, and for the market in his line of work, the military is sounding like a good place to stay.  If he doesn't want to stay in, I support that, too.  Not being in the military gives one much more flexibility and choices.

But, either way, I can't leave the place where I live.  My ex, the father of my children, is here.  I can't take my children away from a father who loves them and wants to be involved in their lives, however infuriating and inept he might be at times.  And DB could, via the military, relocate across the country, closer to his children.  I want DB to be closer to his children, not just for DB but also for his children.  There's an off chance that I might be able to get my ex to move, but it's a huge disruption to ask of anyone, and I've done enough to disrupt my ex's life already.  Also, my family (and also DB's family, and my ex's family) are all on this side of the country.  I can't realistically see how it would be possible or even beneficial for me to leave.

So I'm in knots.  It's not that I expect anyone to feel sorry for us, that we betrayed our spouses and now don't get to have a love-nest in the location of our choosing.  It's that I honestly don't see an outcome that doesn't involve a load of hurt.  DB tells me that he doesn't see a future without me, and that is reassuring.  But I don't want any children to suffer, and I don't want DB to suffer.  If he tells me that he has to move closer to his kids, and we have to be long-distance, I will do it.  If I can't be with him, I don't want anyone else.  I can't ask him to choose between me and his children, just as I know he would never ask that of me. But I want only him.  This is it for me.

Bottom line, I am glad I left my ex, but I still have to co-parent with him.  At the same time, DB wants to be a good father to his children, and I support that.  I wish DB's ex hadn't chosen her own professional and political interests over those of her children, but it is what it is.  I know that in the end, I have to do what's best for my own children and support whatever DB needs to do for himself and his children.  I will love him, and only him, for the rest of my life no matter what.  So here we are.