man/dude/dawg

switch

The past few days I have been inundated with the number 117.  I think I've touched on that number here before, and don't really desire to again right now.  I see it every day.  But the past few days, it is everywhere I look, each time building on the time before, and I am hard pressed to decipher if this is a golden signal that things are going exactly as they should, or if it is the blinking light saying that something...quick...STOP!...is about to careen everything I know into oblivion.  The hour of the day has great influence over which of the two paths I acknowledge.

Matthew and I broke our relationship tonight.  Not the marriage part....but the other part, where neither of us could be without knowing the other would always be there.  The part where it was best if we renamed our marriage what it actually is.  Best friends.  I guess the road back to two can not be as smooth as we thought.  I guess I should have placed more stock in my gut feelings.  I guess I shouldn't have said yes, all the while my brain was silently screaming no.  I guess it changes when the list of involved parties starts to dance into itself.  I guess, just like I crave on any other platform in my life, everything can always change with this, as well.

I'm lucky that Devin is here right now.  His distraction has been exactly what I need.  His support has been exactly what I need.  On my nights off from the girls, we've taken to getting a drink and laughing hysterically at the chaos that is being a member of our family.  he makes fun of my porter and I make fun of his hard lemonade.  I'm starting to get it now, that family actually is something good.  That they are the people who will always be there.  That he is the person that will always be there.

I called him tonight, to talk me down, which ended up just amounting to him sitting on the couch while Matthew and I talked on the back steps, but I kept thinking that he was there, and that so many times over the past year, he could have moved a nanospace to the left, and he wouldn't be here now.

And so on the porch tonight, it became very, very clear that things between M and I are not as they seem.  it became very, very clear that the arrangement we came to, and the reasons we used to arrive at it, are not the blueprint for the direction M is heading.

And I'm strangely angry.  Maybe it's just now hitting me, or maybe it is hitting me all over again just harder.  maybe I am seeing the past ten years together as a solid chunk now; all of the pieces are falling into place; all of the little, tiny, easily overlooked things have rolled into a massive ball of goo, whose core was revealed tonight, and alarmingly void of regret.

And so tomorrow morning, after I drop the girls at school, and my "shift" with them ends, i will not see my house again until Saturday.  I will not see my girls, what they are wearing, or eating, or saying.  And on Saturday, when I return for my shift, it will be the last time I will do it.  They will bounce back and forth, and the two of us will have our own, 95% unrelated lives.

Our old house will be my house.  Our old car will be my car.  The counter in the kitchen that M refused to help me change, will be changed by me.  Just like it would have been anyways.

Saturday afternoon, the door to the last ten years will close for good.  I want to be sad.  I knw that at some point, I will be sad.  or maybe I won't.  maybe I've already gone there.  Maybe I will jump back to where I was once the anger subsides.

Broken.  Caput.  Maybe at some point, I'll actually miss him as a friend.  I'm near certain it will be quite a while...

bounce like rubber

Silence has two purposes here, and so it goes that the world blows up, and there is silence.  And then the world gets glued back together, and repainted, and someone puts all of the fish back in their pond, and again.  Silence.

The fish are all back in their pond.  I've spent so much time talking about the process in my real life, that the thought of replaying it all here just sounds awful.

Things are strangely back on track.  Granted, it's not the same track as before but alas, the smoke and flames have subsided, which has freed up way more time to do okey-dokey things.  Like hang out with friends, including Matt, and not have the conversation nose dive into cliche's and stigmas.  Unless we lead it there.  Which we do sometimes.

But mostly, we don't.  A large tribe of people, floating just higher than the excitement of the past few months.  And loving it.

(just to bridge the bad with the good...a useless post)

those times we mentioned

Yesterday morning started with a very early meeting between me, matt, and becky, the divorcecounselor.  I question the use for an 8:30 therapy session.  My only thoughts before about say, 10 am, have largely to do with coffee, and how bright the world is, and these socks?  Did I wear them yesterday?

It's no surpise then, that the only regular openings she has are at the time of day when neither of us can function, or articulate, or really even care, frankly, about anything more involved than going back to bed.

Matt and I spent most of the weekend discussing everything.  Not everything like the events that got us here, but everything like the bigger picture.  We had those holiday parties, and blew them both off in the end for two seats side by side at the only local bar that no one we know goes to with any regularity.

The analyzing went back years.  It was ah-ha moments, and oh yeah moments, and in the end, it was realizing that this whole divorce thing is nowhere near as bad as everyone makes it out to be.  Granted, there are many cases where ties have to be severed, and legal counsel is required, and the authorities, too...but this, betweeen matt and I, is nothing more than the renaming of something that has never fundamentally wronged either of us, now changed its purpose in our common lives.

When have we ever regarded the other person as something more than a friend?  When has our own needs ever come after the needs of the other?  Waking up the morning after those two marathon sessions, I expected to see much more carnage.  I expected risidual anger, and resentment, and wounded hearts to surface and throw our whole philosophy out the perverbial window.  We had a plan...a master plan...a script, almost, for how best to break the Chabe duo's marital ties.  Both of us stand behind it.  it is fool proof.  it is genius.

And so we got up Monday morning, to go tell becky how awful the institution of marriage is.  To tell her how much it was not beneficial to matt nor to I.  We took turns sleepily outlining the scale used to weigh the pro's and cons.  We explained how this divorce was nothing more than lending absoluteness to a feeling both of us have harbored for years.  The only benefits of marriage that we could see were tax/insurance gains, and the supposed ability to get sex with a safe, prescreened partner at any time.

The money isn't enough for me.  I've already proven the existence of the second one outside of a marriage.  "Becky...what do you think?"

She told us of her own marriage.  A fourteen years long, wonderful, rewarding experience.  She tried, quite subversively, to put doubt in our heads.  She told us how breaking a marriage doesn't end your relationship if there are co-parenting goals.  She told us that we would always, on some level, be accountable to the other person.  "Fine," I said.  "But now, I don't have to wash his socks.  And he doesn't have to call apologising and feeling guilty when he works late or forgets he scheduled an extra band practice."

"So you two want an open relationship," she said.  We both sat there considering the advantages of remaining married, yet having multiple sexual partners.  Somehow, that marriage word still made the whole thing seem unappealing.  Go figure.  We left our session, and then sat in the Tim Horton's drive-thru, agreeing that maybe we weren't going to benefit any more from our divorcecounselor sessions.  We have one more after the first of the year.  Hopefully, we can't invent anymore trauma between now and then to make Becky a regular in our life.  besides, her shirt didn't match her sweater on Monday.  How can I trust someone to help me solve my life's problems when they get dressed in the dark?  Are they qualified?

That meeting Monday solidified for both of us that this thing we are doing is going to happen amongst ourselves.  I need matthew as my best friend, and him likewise, but experience is already showing us that outside influence is pre-programmed to disallow such nonesense.  Outside influence says we have to hate each other, and be wronged by each other, and yeah...I know I've done a fair amount of wronging him, but so has he, and these things aren't, as a whole, anything besides symptoms of a much larger issue for us.

This week's goal is to clean the ding-dang office out.  Very soon, someone is going to have to sleep in here.  This will be one of our's private space.  it will be the room to hide in if it is not the occupant's turn to take the girls to school.  Roommates, we decided, is the wisest way to proceed through the winter.  The rules are simple.  If it's your part of the week to care for the girls, don't call the other asking them to bring home milk.  Don't drink the other's beer unless they offer you one.  No sex in the house.  if you're gonna ask a question, expect to answer it yourself, as well.  Love the girls.

Maybe our decisions are nothing more than glorified deflection.  Maybe blaming archaic, illplanned institutions is easier than blaming each other, or ourselves, for the demise of our marriage.  And yet maybe, that M word has just had us on its shit list all of this time.  I was speaking with a friend about it the other day, and she was saying how the two of us are just not the marrying type.  It's not the religious connotations, or the gender connotations...it's the limit on options.  It's the limit on autonomy.  it's the thing that half of us need to get by and be our best, as well as the thing that stifles and embitters the other half of us.

Whatever.  it works for some folks.  Some folks, even, like my mother, have it work for them several times.  I'm all set.  I'm not losing anything in this, nor is Matt.  becky can take her lispy self home and watch survivor with her husband.  me?  I'm gonna go back to shaving my legs again.  Even though it is winter.

Becky

A little over a month ago, Matt made an appointment with a marriage counselor.  It seemed the appropriate thing to do, if for no other reason than to train ourselves in the art of not hurting each other.  A few days later, I found out about the baby, which negated any tri-colored vision either of us had at reconciling.  At putting off the inevitable for a few more years.

After the baby, I begain referring to becky as the "divorce couselor", which was still mildly funny to both of us this morning, when we met for our first session.  Sitting in her office, those first few moments where everyone is waiting for someone else to speak, I had this smirk on my face that I couldn't shake.  It's one of those things where the sum of all of the parts doesn't seem big enough to hold all of the pieces.  I can take a section, or a day, and explain it, but to relive the past year...to condense it all into something small enough to give to someone else...is impossible.  I passed the task on to matt.  And sat there, drinking my coffee.

It turns out that counselors don't just tell you what you need to do.  You can't just walk in, tell them everything, and leave with a slip outlining your next ten steps.  That was disappointing.  About thirty minutes into our meeting, the gloves came off.  Not in a violent, or horrible way, but it became very clear that Matt and myself are both still harboring a lot of anger.  His seems to mostly surround Blake, and not even our affair, but more my handling of things since being found out.  He erupted into this tangent, about me loving someone else, and still talking to that person, and it went on, and on, until Becky cut him off, to say that we were divorcing.  I wasn't his business anymore.  He didn't get to know who I had feelings for, or what I did with them, and it hadn't yet occured to me that I didn't owe him that information.  I don't have to divuldge my every thought to him anymore.

He was taken by her comment.  He got quiet, so quiet that I could hear the let-down in his brain.  I could hear the disconnect.  I could hear him slip away, if only just a tiny little bit.

Today was mentally packing our bags for the trip away from each other.  I fear how dirty it will get before it is all over.  I'm confident that we both have things inside, supressed for god knows how long, that will surface.  I'm afraid of them all, but eager to have them gone.

We have two christmas parties this weekend.  One is for my work, the other for a local young proffessionals organization we both belong to.  No one will even see anything different.  No one will see that things are not as they always have been.  It's not an effort to hide it.  There's nothing to hide.  I think we're both beginning to understand that it has been, quite literally, years since we were anything more than best friends (with benefits...).  Albeit without the benefits, I don't see that changing.  I don't want that to change.  He doesn't want that to change.  And so once a week, from now until who-knows, I'll sit with him in a room, decorated with crystals and tacky picture frames and worn self-help books, to try and hold on to what is left.

fun.

step back

I was sitting on the couch last night when Matt asked me if I was still blogging.  I've passworded him out along with everyone else, and while the events of late have pushed him to finally start his own blog, and use it, even, like an old whore, the goings on of 259 have caused me to do the exact opposite.  lately I've been thinking that eventually, I will have to open this back up.  I will have to remove the password block, and people will read my sordid tales, more people will, even, judging by the recent surge in Google searches for this space, and I'm not quite sure I'll ever be ready for that.  I'm not quite sure I'll ever be ready to admit, over a universal forum, the extent to which I lost my mind in late two thousand and seven.

Every morning starts with confusion.  And anger.  And frustration.  And sadness.  None of these come as a surprise to me, but the fact that still, after two months, I am forced to ride their wave day in and day out is a suffering, useless task that has no end in sight.  yet in the middle of all of this is one of the central reasons I initially decided to divorce my husband.  I wanted more kids, and knew he never would.  It shouldn't surprise me that this is how the world chose to give me exactly what i wanted.  I should have known better.  I do know better.  I can't explain anything away.  I don't know why.  I'm beginning to understand that more than likely, I never will.

And so as cryptic as everything has been here since I closed down, as raw, and new, and undigested, and unexplained as the last several posts here have been, I'm closing my eyes and turning everything back on.  Be gentle with me.  Be kind to me.  Eventually, I will explain it all.

the sixth third

the summer I spent in the loony bin, I temporarily shared a room with this girl who had something called dissociative disorder.  essentially, something I never was privy to had kicked her brain so hard that from time to time, her brain would still shut down because of it.  sometimes, she was lucid, like in a group meeting, and her eyes would hit the floor, and she would look up again, and it would be obvious that she had no idea what she had just done.  she had no idea she had just grunted the names of everyone in the room while playing the air guitar with a couch cushion and a washable marker.  Except rarely was it that comical.

I've thought of that girl many times over the last six weeks.  The last six weeks being the same six weeks I chose to turn the lives of four people inside out, shredded into little piles of half memories and blind futures.

I thought I would never bring this here.  I wanted what was already here to be enough.  i wanted to keep the rest to myself, as a secret forever, but as it turns out, that is just not how this has all chosen to go down.  I look back to August, and how it was great because things downtown were taking off, and Boot was heading for kindergarten, and work was rolling smoothly, and then all of a sudden there is this shift, and while I know I am the spark behind the shift, the far reaching arm of those actions is still, over a month later, not accessible to my psyche.

And it has all honestly been one big catastrophe, only its the kind that keeps growing, like a wildfire that jumps an ocean, and then the planet, and before anyone can even open their eyes against the glow, it is all over.  Like a wildfire.

Before the latest blow today, I was numb.  I was speaking with someone this morning, and when I told them that I was honestly about five days behind on processing things, they nodded and smiled.  But did they really understand what that meant?  Can you before it happens?

At some point the events since my last post will, I am sure, all find their way here.  I'm sure, also, that at some point the password block will come down, but that doesn't so much concern me right now.  It just all needs out.

Late last week, Matt met with someone, and they were shocked to hear the chain of events up until that point.  There concern, which they pointed out to him, was that bad things always happen in threes, and we only had five.  We had Matt's job spiraling away, we had the resulting money issues, we had me, saying I wanted a divorce, we had M's car being broken into and roughly $1,000. worth of musical equipment stolen.  And then we had my affair. 

And so as he sat there, telling me about the sixth third, and how it was going to come, I immediately knew what it was.  Only I didn't let myself think it.  I still won't, even though I know without a shadow of a doubt what it is.  I wonder what it will do to a situation that is already hanging on by someone else's thread.  I wonder what it will do to Matt, and to the girls, and to myself, even, although as the instigator I have a hard time allowing myself to have self pity.

I think of that girl...and I'm waiting to wake up holding the marker.  I'm waiting for the doctor to say it is okay, and that every time is happens, I am one time closer to it all being over.  Even though, we all knew, he lied.

Autumn

When my brother Brian was five years old, we lived in Coloraddo.  One night before bed, he went out on the deck to pet the dog, who just happened to be having her evening meal.  The dog was mean and crazy, but really cute and fluffy.  And big.  And so my brother, being the one who will never be able to see past the tip of his index finger, thought it was a good idea to bend over and show the dog a piece of food that had fallen out of her bowl.

Only the dog didn't so much appreciate it, and she attacked his head, and I remember being upstairs in my room listening to some Paulaa Abdool, and hearing the dog growl, and then him scream, and I remember how in the middle of all of that noise, I could make out the low, frightened whimper of my mother.  I remember thinking that that was the worst sound of all.

And I ran down the stairs to the first landing, and just jumped from the sixth stair, and he was standing right in front of the sliding glass door, his hand cupped over his eye, and I remember the blood, pouring out from between his fingers.

My mom laid him down on the dining room rug, and peeked just for a second, for just as long as it took to pull back his hand and replace it with a towel from the kitchen.  I called the neighbor, and she came over, and off we went to the emergency room.  The whole way across town, my mom kept apologizing, and saying that she loved him, and demanding that we not take the towel off of his eye.  The two of us sat in the back seat, more fearful of her catching a glimpse of the damage than we were of the damage itself.

Yesterday I sat at work, willing myself to believe that what i was doing was for someone else.  I filled in all of the appropriate forms, and at the very most last possible moment, filled in the address, and then Matt and I's names.  And then I printed.

And then, because I was alone and safe in my office, I went online to download our forms.  And I couldn't even bring myself to read the links before clicking on them.  I just clicked, and printed, and watched one by one as they were spit out of my printer, focusing only on the hum and racket of the various printing mechanisms.  I watched as the printing cue grew smaller, and smaller, and as the last page fell onto the pile, I grabbed a folder, and threw the whole lot into it.

I shoved them into my bag  I've refused to look since.  I've refused to accidentally drop a pen, or my keys, or my phone, anywhere near that pocket.

This morning, I thought of my brother, and that dog that ate his eyebrow, and i accepted that for now, I'm still en route to the ER.

thechurchroad

I bought my first car before I even had a license, and so it sat in the garage for three months while I waited out my learner's permit.  I used to go and sit inside of it, playing the stereo, wishing I could just take the damn thing out on the road without my step-dad grading every stop and left hand turn I made.

The first day i was able to drive to school, the urge to drive right past and keep going proved stronger than I could suppress, and so I wizzed down the street to the coffee store, purchased something, and continued heading out of town.  I made it about a mile down the road, and randomly turned right, and then right again, circling all around until I was back at school, albeit fifteen minutes late.

It quickly became a morning ritual, if I was giving friends a ride in the morning, I would drop them off first and off I would go to fly over and around a small, winding, rural strip of pitted concrete known as the church road.  I'd play tapes so loud that I couldn't even think over them, and drink my coffee so fast that it burned my tongue, and smoke so much that I thought I would never be able to breathe again.  I quickly began to rely on those twenty minutes of nothing.

And maybe it all started because for my whole life, I have never been able to NOT think.  I have never been able to just have a simple conversation with someone about a new pair of shoes, and not have the periphery of my mind running like wildfire.

Catching air out there, doing seventy over those little mounds of pavement, it was all I could do to concentrate while the music rattled the seats and coffee threatened to spill on my bag of books.  It quieted the internal dialogue.  It had me hooked.

While I got older and my life grew more involved, so did my dependence on the church road.  At times I would find myself out there three and four times a day, just lapping the outskirts of town, changing the music to fit whatever it was I was trying to not process.

Everytime, when I made it back in to the stoplight, I felt like I could handle things again.  I felt like whatever it was that was coming, I could make it work for me.  And if it didn't, I'd just do the whole thing all over again.  And again.  Until I was clear.

When I went back to work full time, I immediately fell back into my old habit, even the part where I am late every day, only I have shaved that down to seven minutes, now.

Yesterday morning was no different.  I dropped the girls at school, and headed out to my right turn, and then my other right turn, and the car could not go fast enough, or high enough, and the music could not be loud enough, and as if all of that frustration wasn't enough, I learned that they have closed off the last length of road in my circle.  They had stolen five minutes of my journey until sometime next April, to repair a bridge.

It was pain, and panic, and indecipherable, but maybe all of those things were just being projected onto the road.  Maybe, just maybe, the road didn't do anything wrong.

Thoughts again continuing, trying to find another way.  Driving.  Coffee.  Finding okay.  Making peace with myself, just to make sure that someone....anyone...can.

sandstorm

The Mighty M spent Columbus Day weekend on a 4 day trip with his uncle, climbing Mt. Katahdin.  He used to do it as a boy, and has talked about it fondly as long as I have known him.  He jumped at the chance to go.

The night before he left, I dropped the girls off at my mom's house, as I also had plans to run away for a few days with some friends.  We all had too much to drink that night, and it was pretty evident by noon on saturday that no one was up for a trip anywhere.  Matt was already gone, and so I left the girls at my mom's anyways, and set out to have a few days of R&R all by myself.  Only I didn't tell anyone that my trip had been cancelled.  I hid inside my house, refusing to answer the house phone or open the door.  It was, quite simply, a hiatus.

I took a long, hot shower, and then wrapped myself in a towel and sat on the couch for what seemed like hours, just looking around at all of the stuff that has magnetized itself to us over the past ten years.  We have always been good about keeping the stuff at bay, we throw stuff away, we give stuff away, we try to keep things neat.  The past year, however, it has built up, and maybe that should have been an indication to me sooner.  Maybe I should have taken THAT as my first red flag.

And so I was sitting on the couch, and became overwhelmed with the idea that every piece of everything in this house is soaked in memories built with my husband.  it was a feeling of drowning, and despair; it was the first time ever I have actually allowed myself to hear what my heart has been saying for so long.  I sat there hours longer, until my hair was nearly dry, unable to move past what I was hearing.  Could I do it?  Was I just hungover and not thinking clearly?  Was the anxiety that plagued me when Griffin was a baby returning?  And then, most importantly, could I ever really forget what I had just realized?  Could I get up off of the couch and go back to the way things were when I went to bed the night before?

I could not.  I could never go back.  I could never erase it. 

I love my husband very much.  I care about my husband very much.  I count him as one of my closest friends.  I think that if we had taken things slower, and that if we had been older, maybe this could have gone on forever.  Maybe I could still be 100% sure that I am where I need to be, and likewise for him.

I've spent almost an entire month allowing myself to think.  I kept thinking that maybe I was in shock, maybe a few days would pass, and I would see some trigger somewhere and it would send me back to him.  What I have had to accept is that there is not going to be a trigger.  There is not going to be a second moment of clarity to wash away the first.  I simply have to let him go.

I'm not hiding it very well anymore.  The twelve pounds I've lost from not being able to eat aren't helping.  The hours of laying in bed unable to sleep, until all I can do is get up and busy myself aren't helping either.

I just don't know how to tell him.  I don't know what kind of person I have to become to walk into a room and turn his world inside out, with no hard evidence or catastrophe with which to back up my request.  I don't know how, years from now, I will explain to my girls why I screwed everything up.  I don't know anything else right now, besides that I have to do it.  But this is the sort of thing I always write about.  Listen to your heart.  Take a deep breath.  Jump.  And now, I wish I could be a hipocrite.

The other day, I was challenged to say in one sentence why I needed a divorce.  I racked my brain trying to come up with something terrible, or important sounding, and after sitting there making six or seven false starts, it left my mouth and made so much sense to me.  All of these years together, I have done nothing but take care of Matt.  I'm a nurturer by nature, I know that, but somewhere in there things have crossed, and our dependence on each other, especially his on me, has grown wildly.

And so as pure as I can make it, I need a divorce because my husband will do whatever I want.

He will follow me forever.  He will never allow himself to see me any way besides perfect.  He will swallow any desire, or dream he has if he believes it will not please me, and I can't be responsible for that.  I can't stand by him for the rest of our lives waiting for the moment he realizes that he could have done so much more.  I need to be his friend.  He needs to be his own person.  As much as he is going to deny it, he can never be that person if he is attached to me.  Every ounce of change he makes will always and forever be because I told him to.

I will never be prepared enough to tell him this.  I don't even know how I can live while he comes to understand this.

I reckognize what an asshole I sound like.  I am wholly aware of how calous, and evil, and self absorbed this all sounds.  I know I am over simplifying this here.  I know that I will not be able to completely explain what has happened to my brain until I am forced, by matt, to be accountable.  I know that even then, this will not make total sense.  But I know what I feel, and doing anything else besides what I am doing would be a dis-service to both of us.

And its this weird combination of numb and raw, like falling off of your bike, after the spray of bactine.  It's a saddness like I have never known.  It's a freedom like I have never known.  I wonder if I can handle any of it.

(I can't find the alternative.)