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.