Almost Divorce Part 36: The change begins inside of YOU
Posted: 2012/02/16 Filed under: Dating and Relationships, Ramblings | Tags: Forgive, forgiveness, my personal catfish story, Relationships 2 CommentsThis series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here
A timeline can be found here.
How did you do it? This is the number one question I am asked about our reconciliation. I’m not sure I have a cut and dry answer for you Lovies, but I will try to represent and tell this part of the story in the same raw and no holds barred manner that I have given you the rest. But you simply must understand that this part of my world is a little more private, because it is the marriage I currently enjoy, instead of some bad fairy tale of the devil I willingly danced with. I always try to be very careful not to give other people’s secrets away in this public forum, unless those secrets were lies, and then well… you’ve already seen that part.
I’ve often said that I have a 1% husband. A Husband who is better than 99% of all husbands out there. He is MY husband so I suppose it is a good thing that I feel this way, but I want to get in writing those same type of caveat items that prefaced the r/gonewild and gone wild chat posts. My marriage is not perfect, there is no perfect marriage because there are no perfect people. There is also not a perfect person for you or for him, because neither of you are perfect. You are human, and as such beautifully flawed and always in some state of incomplete. There is no perfect mate, perfect time, perfect anything. It is a nice ideal to shoot for, we should seek to change, grow, become more, less, better whatever adjective you choose for whatever “it” is you seek to change. There are things about myself, Babu and our marriage that drive me absolutely NUTS! I fold them into this best life we are living because quite frankly that is simply just how life is. If you want happiness the first thing you need to do is let go of holding so tightly to whatever you think happy is. Here is a huge news flash for you Lovies, THINGS DO NOT ALWAYS TURN OUT OR EXIST IN THE MANNER YOU EXPECTED IN YOUR HEAD, LET IT GO AND ADAPT. Holding on too tightly to that expectation is only going to cause you emotional angst. Don’t wallow in that angst, if you spending time being pissed, angry, sad, or whatever other negative emotion you are harboring about what you wanted/expected/think you deserve you are only poisoning yourself and staying stuck. You are not a tree, if you don’t like something in your life, then seek to change it. And by the way the key to seeking to changing it is not in influencing or controlling others or the situation. It is in seeking to look inside YOURSELF and making the changes there.
Welcome to life. Put on your Big Girl Panties or Big Boy Boxers and own it.
Oh you don’t like that answer? Neither did I when I first discovered it. Hell, I have remind myself of my own mantra on a regular basis. The crazy bitch lives inside of me, right next to the pathetic one, the weak one, etc.. ALL of us have those little pieces of not perfect inside of us. Your first key is to spend some mindful time seeking to become self-aware. Examine yourself, reconcile yourself and learn to love yourself. Forgive yourself, forgive others. No one else can do this for you, NO ONE ELSE CAN DO THIS FOR YOU. Don’t like something inside of you, don’t know who you are, don’t know what is wrong with you, don’t know how your life got “here”? All of the answers to those questions are there, inside of you, if you will only put in the emotional and mindful practice of discovering them and working to tweak them in whatever manner you think is best for you. Got childhood issues, mommy issues, daddy issues, trust issues, control issues, whatever issues. OWN THEM!!!!!!!!!!!! You are an adult now, you are no longer owned by your past. Your past does not control you, your past does not dictate how your future has to be, at any given time you are in some control of the end of your own story. Don’t like that answer? Get the fuck over it and do the awful sometimes gut wrenching but so very worth it in the end work of change or choose to stay in whatever state of misery and stuck you are in. It is quite bluntly your choice. How badly you truly want it is shown by how hard you CHOOSE to truly keep working for it.
I’m no better than you, no more capable than you, I’ve just had to learn this the hard way and I’m passing along some already started on this journey notes. It is not easy work, it is not fun work, is is not short work. It is continual work. I promise the more you do it the better you will get at it. The faster you will see when you start down a path of old behavior or thinking, the less time you will allow yourself to remain there, and the faster and with more conviction you will be able to course correct yourself with LOVE instead of judgement and beating yourself up. You are never going to be perfectly the way you want to be, and neither is your life, your marriage, your kids, your job, your friendships or anything else in life, save a really great vodka and a good pair of designer jeans that transform your ass into something magical. I’m not special and I’m not always good at taking my own advice. If you are human, you can do this. Don’t underestimate yourself, your worth, or what kind of life you deserve to choose to live.
It may take medication, it may take finding a good therapist, it may take using other bad things to cope for a while, it may take running or kick boxing or Zumba or cycling. It may take a LOT longer to do than you’d like, it may be MUCH harder than you ever imagined and there will be times when you simply want to throw your hands in the air and say FUCK IT. Find in yourself the strength to go on, find GOD if you choose to believe in HIM and the power he can provide you in all things, find a network or even one true friend to lean on, find books to help, blogs to read. Seek these things out, trust in yourself and go for it. You will be amazed at how much “better” things will get little by little or sometimes even by leaps and bounds. All because you did, are doing, want to do the hard work of affecting change within yourself.
You are beautiful, you are worth it, you deserve your version of a good life and you need to love and respect yourself enough to make it happen.
Lesson #1 is over, the key to putting it all back together for us was that we each sought to change ourselves. More to come soon Lovies.
Almost Divorce Part 35- How The Husband became my Sweet Babu
Posted: 2012/02/09 Filed under: Dating and Relationships, Lovies | Tags: Forgive, forgiveness, Girl Code, my personal catfish story, Relationships 1 CommentThis series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here
A timeline can be found here.
This event was a game changer that came late in the game, the sick twist at the end of the story.
Being lied to at that level of magnitude is life changing. I made decisions based on those lies. I took actions based on those lies. I formed opinions, perspective, lived my life all based partially on 22 weeks of those lies. I don’t know how, if it wasn’t by the grace of God that I forced the vanishing mere hours before it would of been too late to turn back on being divorced. It was time to take a step back and do some analysis. Try to make some sense of everything from start to finish and figure out what I knew about myself and the situation. I literally had the driving need to revisit every conversation, every thought, every action and re-evaluate it with the new insight. I also discovered during those initial weeks of grief that I had put the job of dealing with the grief of the divorce on hold because I was distracted dealing with Paul. He had been partially right, I was using him to fill a hole, but it wasn’t a husband hole per se, it was a me hole. Once I had nothing to distract me, I started to process and deal with the emotions and grief from the divorce itself. Huge chunks of my time were freed when he vanished. Rituals were no longer the same, my physical and mental schedule was no longer the same. It was almost as if I was waking up from the wreckage. I was waking up broken and shell shocked but getting back up is my specialty.
Here I was alone, with a vanished sociopath behind me; and a man, the father of my children, my husband of 10 years, who still hadn’t given up in front of me. What to do, what to do? I was in control of the pace of the divorce, and after we talked we both agreed to put it on hold. I honestly felt I owed it to my children, our family and myself to really take a look at where we had been and figure out where I thought we might go. Figure out if I could forgive him for his portion of wrong, trust that he would be able to forgive me and that I could fall in love with him again and be content. I didn’t want to trap myself in something I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get back out of, because there was no fucking way I would be putting my kids through another round of this. If we decided to see if it could work it would have to be slow and with no expectations and without telling the kids or many others until we were absolutely sure. Before I go on I need to take a step back and give you some insight into The Husband and our story.
How The Husband became my Sweet Babu!
I met my Sweet Babu at work, this was the 90’s and we worked at a Computer Reseller that through mergers and acquisitions is now HP. Times were flush and the party was always raging. Hooking up, coupling, or marrying a co- worker was almost a requirement here. No one blinked an eye. Before I met The Husband I had slept with more than one sales rep, had one sales rep as a boyfriend for a while and been to countless parties held by vendors and co-workers. I started out as a 23 year old girl with no job and desperately needed one, who barely knew how to use a mouse and by the time I met Babu I was a traveling “fixer”. I went in to assess a fucked up situation, determined whose “fault” it was; ours, the sales rep, or the customer’s and implemented changes and controls to make things better so the customer would stay. I also gave presentations to potential new customers about what our portion of the organization would be bringing to the package. Before that I ran our largest account and a few smaller ones and had a reputation for talking business to the reps. I didn’t take their shit and I didn’t stand for them lying to our customers or setting us up for failure. I worked with mostly men and cussed like a sailor when needed. This was not only tolerated but also rewarded. I was placed in the Northeast Region as my territory and I thrived there. I was known for talking business. I was young (23-27) and I was pretty, I had a good amount of game, but I didn’t have half the confidence I have now. That came with good mentors, age, maturity, and self-acceptance.
Part of my job was travel, as in 3 cities in one week covering both coasts sometimes travel. My desk was often just a pit stop for a day or two before I was out again on the next plane to the next customer. I spent more time in town cars to and from the airport and in rental cars navigating cities like Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, DC and surrounding areas, Boston, SFO. I took one of the prettiest drives of my life in Connecticut. I had some of the best times of my life on that job, met some of the best women who provided amazing mentoring and got to see a lot of our country. It helped me feel not so trapped and filled with wanderlust to get the heck out of Indiana where I was born, raised, and still live. The frequent flier miles and Amex perks also paid for something like 3 full vacations for Babu and I, including the one to Fort Myers where I got my turtle tattoo and he burned the tops of his feet.
One day I badged in and started walking through the rows to the back room of our cube farm where my desk was, when something stopped me. There was this tall, dark haired dude in dress pants and a white button up standing in one of the team’s rows. I remember I stopped and looked for more than second and wondered who is that? He is yummy. We often had reps or vendors visit and more than a handful of them were yummy, so this wasn’t out of the ordinary. I may have asked around a little bit about who he was but nothing ever came of it.
Fast forward and one day my friend Dr. M tells me a new guy is going to be moving into our cube row. Dr. M is a TSE, a technical rep for one of the teams and the new guy is getting assigned to a team that doesn’t have a spot for him in their row, so he has to sit over by Dr. M and I. He’s young, Dr. M tells me. Be nice to him, he laughs. Babu shows up and he’s fine, but I don’t recognize him as the dude from the cube row in the button up b/c our dress code is business casual and he takes that to the lowest level possible. He sits there for several months and as I travel in and out of my cube we get to know each other. Mostly this is via him marveling at my business talk and being ever so slightly afraid of me. I am actually a very sweet and nice person and since there are just 4 of us in our cube row; me, Dr. M, the other fixer in my area who is also young and pretty and can talk business, and Babu. I’ve always shared my business pretty openly, Babu and I get to be coworker friends who talk about our lives a little and give each other shit. One day he comes back from lunch and brings me a big bag of Chili Cheese Fritos, these are my favorite kind. I don’t take this as a move, I was fairly oblivious to his feelings and I was also embroiled in my own boy drama at the time. He is also about 4 years younger than me, which puts him out of my scope because at the time I liked older, more established, better dressed and spoken dudes. I was in the process of having a bit of a dating life crisis though and starting to realize that maybe these types of guys and this checklist of things I was looking for were not really the best answer to finding a lifelong mate. I had just recently decided that I would go out at least once with anyone that asked and see where it went. Part of giving each other shit involved me relentlessly chiding Babu about his footwear and clothing. He had zero style. One day I am sitting at my desk and in walks Babu. He is dressed in dress pants, a button up and dress shoes. I laugh because I think he is doing this to be funny and prove a point and I respond “Oh, my Sweet Babu you look so nice!” This was the first time I ever called him that and in my head it is what Sally from Charlie Brown called Linus. Later in the day Dr. M turns to me and says “Hey, you know he did that FOR YOU, don’t you? He is into you…”. Wait..what??? Seriously? He has a girlfriend he hardly ever mentions in any way, but TJ ( the other fixer) and I know she exists. I start to ponder what this means and little things start to click into place; the Fritos, the breakfasts out, etc. So he is way too young in my book, and he has a girlfriend. But I have just been told he is into me and he is in a band and he also has a tongue ring and these brown eyes with these lashes that my son got in the DNA pool. Plus he is tall dark and hairy. I’m 27, he has a tongue ring, he is into me. I do what any 27 year old horny slut would do in my situation, I start flirting with him more voraciously via the IM system we have at work. Now part of that was voicing my concern about his age. But somehow it works out that on Friday night he is going to come over to my apartment and we are going to hook up.
He gets there and he is a nervous shaking wreck. He is WAY out of his element and is not capable of the walk in and start sexing me plans that were hanging in the air. It is actually quite sweet. So we sit on my couch and I am leaning against his big, I don’t it’s hairy yet, chest and we talk for a really long time. Eventually this leads to our first kiss and some third base action on my couch and floor and he leaves. He had told his GF he was helping another co-worker, who ended up standing up in our wedding, move. There are no discussions about what this means or doing this again, he just leaves. As far as I was concerned it was probably just a hook up and I’ll see him at the office when I get back in on Wednesday.
Tuesday night comes and I’m standing at the airport getting ready to catch the town car home when my phone rings. It’s Babu. He broke up with his girlfriend while I was gone. Oh holy crap, I just stole someone’s boyfriend. I’ve messed around with more than a few boyfriends in my time, but never actually stolen one. Wow, I tell him, that was a pretty bold move. I’m happy he did it I tell him, but he should probably plan on seeing other people besides just me since they were together for something like 2 years, basically lived together and I’m not really looking for anything super serious right now. That’s cool he says.
He then proceeds to ignore me and not date anyone else, and neither do I. We start out slowly and pick up speed pretty quickly. We hooked up in the beginning of August and by the time Labor Day rolls around we go away on our first weekend trip together. I get home from that and I tell him standing in my bed room, I just want you to know that I love you, I’m not expecting that you have to say it back right now but I just wanted you to know how I am feeling. I love you too, he says. The next week I started a merger rotation where I had to travel out to DC every week and stay Mon-Fri for almost 6 months. I was out there with a team of two other guys and we were ALL overwhelmed. I’m so exhausted and emotionally spent at the end of any given day that I don’t even have the energy to hold up my end of a proper conversation with Babu. While I was gone he was staying at my apartment and dog/cat sitting for me, then picking me up at the airport every Friday night when we landed and we would spend the entire weekend together. Every once in a while I’d need some alone time or want some time with my girlfriends but by the end of December we had the, I’d like to maybe consider making a life with you (too) conversation. We proceeded to do just that, started building a house together and got engaged on Good Friday, roughly 8 months into our relationship. We got married a year later after roughly 18 months of knowing each other. I was 29 and he was 25.
When we were starting this romance I was unsure. He wasn’t as educated as I was, he wasn’t as high on the food chain as I was, he was 4 years younger than I was. But being with him was easy. There was never any drama or games, there were no huge fights, he treated me like a queen and was wonderful in so many ways. Being with him was emotional salve, he said and did all the right things and backed it up with his actions. He was soothing my time and trips around the block battered heart and soul and I was growing him up. He became a man while he was with me and I was firmly attaching my heart, soul and life to him. Some small greedy part of me always wondered if I’d settled. I don’t feel that way anymore, but it took this ruin paves the way for transformation experience of Almost Divorce to land me here.
More to come soon Lovies.
Almost Divorce Part 34- All you need to know about sociopaths
Posted: 2012/02/02 Filed under: Dating and Relationships, Ramblings | Tags: BGP, Big Girl Panties, Forgive, forgiveness, God, Mental Health, my personal catfish story, Relationships 1 CommentThis series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here
A timeline can be found here.
This post could also be titled, Living well is the best revenge.
Let’s see where were we? Oh yes, darkness to day. It’s August 25 2010 and I am numb with grief. Life must go on as it always does when things come to an end, and as I stumble through it my mind is racing with thoughts of PJ. Realizations are hitting me both in a slow creep and a massive stab to the heart. My body has been trained to melt with lust when it thinks of him and my heart was so hopeful that things were going to be ok. It’s a combination of; Ok then, let’s pick ourselves up and move on, who was that masked man, and OMG WTF just happened to me. My soul needs to make sense of this, but as Tab told me, Sociopaths don’t make sense. I am alternating waiting for the other shoe to drop in his return and explanation and knowing that he is never ever ever ever ever ever coming back. Yep, mission accomplished, I am thoroughly mind fucked. I go through all the stages of grief, sometimes weaving in and out of one to the other and back again. I can only assume since he is choosing not to prove his innocence as quickly as possible that he is indeed guilty. But of what? Which things were lies and which things were truth? And then the hits start coming, sometimes it’s many in a day, sometimes it’s not for a few days.
The first hit: He owns a hand gun. He knows where I live. He has talked about putting me in his pit and joked on more than one occasion about chloroform. I don’t feel safe. That is such a great feeling to have when you are sleeping alone in a 5 bedroom house. At least I had benefit of an alarm system, a dog and good friends. Nothing like the first thought of your ex being concern that he is going to actually harm you. That felt great.
My previously mentioned emergency counseling session with Tab yields the following nuggets and to do’s.
- I have to create an answer I can live with
- I need to remember what I know about me, just because he did this doesn’t mean I’m not who I am.
- I have been violated and it is simply just not fair
- Suffering tempers us, ruin paves the way for transformation. In hind sight this is absolutely true and I would not be where I am in this moment, if PJ hadn’t done what he did. I am a better woman with a better marriage.
- My wondering=he wins.
- Maybe he truly was just that afraid. I have to find the pieces that fit.
So a few short days after he is gone I sit down one night and put on the BGP. I have spent 48 hours spinning and in reviewing the last few weeks before he vanished it is clear to me that the end was near and he was leaving clues. It is clear even that short time later that he is a sociopath and is likely married or at the very least has a girlfriend. So many little things all fit together and make sense now. My heart was in ruins, I wondered if I would have to go back to my husband simply because I would never be able to trust another man again. That sure sounded like a solid plan to reconciliation. That last sentence is sarcasm in case you people haven’t figured out when I’m kidding yet. I was pissed because I have more work to do and I’m fucking tired of doing work on myself. It is hard and exhausting. Some part of me promptly rejects the sociopath explanation because I don’t want it to be true. I know now that it is. I’ve come to that conclusion and acceptance of the conclusion. I have forgiven myself and Paul Jay Mathis.
By the third or so day the reality of the situation and what it may have cost starts to set in. I haven’t asked my ex if he is still interested in reconciliation because we were HOURS away from divorce when all of this went down. He may not agree to go back to marriage counseling, he may not agree to anything. I could be looking at a zero sum game here and I don’t even know what I want to do yet.
Here are some things I learned about Sociopaths based on my internet reading and one book I checked out of the library. I want to say the premier author on this subject is Martha White, but I’m not writing a term paper so I’m not bothering to look it up again. The information I found was very enlightening and helpful. And also very scary. I have an real life PJ example I could give you for almost every one of these things. Many of these are direct quotes from my reading.
- 1 out of every 25 people are Sociopaths, scary isn’t it.
- Sociopaths have no conscience, they cannot distinguish between right and wrong.
- They don’t EVER actually feel remorse or bad about what they do, they learn to fake it along with faking other emotions like sadness or love.
- They are often VERY good at faking it, often enigmatic, beautiful, sexy, successful people.
- They know when they are doing it that they do not love you, they are incapable of love.
- They are certified monsters, once their magic has had its effect there is only you and GOD left to pull out of that hole. TRUE DAT.
- They are not working with all their marbles, but often you feel like to admit such is to admit you are missing marbles too. This one totally explained why I felt CRAZY all the time when I was with him. He once told me, Oh i’m crazy doll, you know that. It was August when he told me that.
- Knowing that you will always return to them is what gives them a kick.
- They keep asking for another chance
- Control is their drug, it drives them it is like cocaine in their system and they need a victim.
- They are pathological liars, who are impulsive and tend to be alcoholics or drug abusers
- They claim crying
- In the back of your mind you know something is wrong, very wrong
- Do you think you’re in a never ending cycle of pain, where you feel as if you can’t free yourself of the relationship? Why yes, thank you very much I do!!!!
- You love him, can’t live without him, but being with him is one of the greatest tortures you’ve ever known.
- Vulnerable, single or divorcing/ed women are their PRIME TARGETS!!!!!!!!
- They have antisocial tendencies
- They can’t hold down a steady job.
- They suffer from low self esteem.
- They have been the victim of many situations, if not all
- They want you to feel as low as they feel about themselves and worse
- Being with them is mental horror and abuse
- If you are lonely and needy you are a big target, you are the only one who udnerstands him now
- Seldom admits they have a problem
- Low grade sociopaths start around age 15
So here is the deal. I am going to finish up this post about PJ and then we are not talking about him again. At least not in detail. We are going to focus on my reconciliation and then we will be done with this story.
I cried and thought my way through September, October, and November about him. The first Tuesday in December 2010, I was walking into or out of work, and I was having a conversation with God. As my feet hit the pavement I was demanding that GOD bring him back and make him look me in the eye and give me an explanation. I got home from picking MiniMe up from Girl Scouts that night to an IM informing me that PJ had shown up in Skype. I almost puked, but I held it together long enough to have a knee jerk reaction and request him as a contact, with a simple It is about time comment. Roughly 3 days later he accepted that contact request and then NEVER HAD ANYTHING TO SAY. I was told, but did not see that he actually went into chat one day and cammed up. I was told he was given a less than friendly reception from those that knew him. I had told more than a few people what happened. I started my 2nd chat career out of chasing PJ into chat that December. And I didn’t get out again until right before Memorial Day 2011. I thought about him every single one of those days and wondered if he was lurking in chat and watching me. The Big Guy happened in that time space and he was my rebound online relationship. As in replacing old memories with new ones, rebound relationship. I will not be giving any details about The Big Guy or any insight into that relationship or my feeling about it or him. I will simply tell you that my 2nd chat career ended when I….recognized that I wanted to be done with all of the bullshit and actually start some serious work to heal properly, decided to end it with The Big Guy when it became apparent that he didn’t understand no meant no and didn’t care to bother owning his actions. The same night I ended it, The Husband found out about him, but he understood that The Big Guy was merely a symptom of chasing after Paul. We came away from that set back and that part of our story in is our past. I’m a very lucky, very grateful woman. I could be in dead in a pit right now. Instead I am very much alive and writing this blog for your entertainment and education.
Living well is the best revenge and I am most certainly choosing to live well
More to come soon Lovies.
Related articles
- Psychopath Vs Sociopath (mademan.com)
- Sociopaths and Psychopaths: Can They Be Cured? (robertlindsay.wordpress.com)
- Sociopath – are you one? (insideasanemind.com)
- Love and Illusion: You Could be Dating or Married to a “Social Sociopath”: How Would you Know? (prweb.com)
Almost Divorce Part 33- Darkness Over Day; PJ’s “death”
Posted: 2012/01/31 Filed under: Dating and Relationships, Ramblings | Tags: Forgive, forgiveness, my personal catfish story, Relationships 1 CommentThis series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here
A timeline can be found here.
So here it was 3:46 in the afternoon. I send the why did you chose to ruin my life and how could you be so evil for nothing email. I don’t even have to wonder what is going to happen next, I already know the answer. It has been foretold many weeks prior, PJ is going to run.
And that is exactly what PJ does. He does not choose to respond in any manner, he does not choose to apologize or set the record straight, he does not choose to say Yep, haha, gotcha dumb bitch. He simply chooses to completely vanish leaving all questions and lies intact. I’ve started telling a few close friends what happened as it begins to set in. PJ faked his identity and when I caught him, he vanished. That is the truth and it is my standard answer I find myself repeating over many more times than I would like in my life. I’m on the phone with Sunshine around 6ish as I start to check for signs of life. This involves going into Reddit and looking around and sending emails I don’t want to send to accounts I know are going to come back as bounced because they no longer exist. PJ deleted his Reddit posts, he deleted his Reddit GWP account. I’m sure he kept the other creeper or legit accounts, but I have no idea what those are. He does not delete the comments he has placed on my previous posts, I thought that was a nice touch. He deleted his newest “real” Gmail account, he deleted his emoregw@gmail.com account. He cannot delete his Skype account b/c Skype does not allow that. He will choose to use that little tool to fuck with me some more in December.
The details of the next couple of days are kind of fuzzy. I don’t know if I had the kids or not. I know I was in utter shock and the waves of emotion were gathering under the surface. I was almost in a daze, there was a lot of crying but also just utter confusion as my brain started to try to make any kind of sense about how to handle this situation and still function. I know I had an emergency session with Tab. Is he a sociopath or a psychopath?, I ask her. Yes, he probably is, she replies. We talk about how there isn’t going to be any closure for me in this situation. Part of my punishment for being the one to end his sick game, is robbing me of what he knows I wanted most after him, closure. Sociopaths get their kicks from the torture and control, from the havoc they can unleash in your life , in your heart and soul. They get their kicks from creating chaos and pain for you and they don’t like it when their toys are taken away. Is my love Paul one of those? Yes, in my opinion he was/is. It’s a conclusion I fought every step of the way, but I knew it from the very minute I figured out I was being played and I’ve come to accept it through time, distance and writing this blog. That man tried to destroy me for his own personal pleasure. What he succeeded in was fucking with me and causing me as much pain as possible for as long as he could, and then leaving in a way that would set me up to mind fuck myself for him for another lengthy time period. And it worked, because I spent at least 15 months getting over something that only lasted 5. Tab explains to me that I am going to have to figure out what the end of the story is all by myself. I will have to process it, heal from and come to a landing place that will provide me the closure that I need. She does not expect that he will ever come back, ever tell me any kind of “truth” and ever care what he did to me. I am merely a discarded broken plaything that won’t cooperate and is no more fun. The fact that he called me “doll” is only more poignant.
What is it like to have a relationship where the guy tells you he loves you and you think he hung the moon and then he vanishes in the middle of lies? I was talking Shorty’s ear off in our hotel bed last Saturday night about just this very topic. I haven’t experienced any of these things I am going to compare this to, but in a few sentences I hope I have conveyed my point. I imagine it is similar to finding out after your husband dies that he is a child molester and the child he was molesting was your own. I imagine it is similar to how the character Anita Shreve created in The Pilot’s Wife felt when her husband was killed in a plane crash and he had a whole 2nd family stashed somewhere. I imagine it is similar to losing the love of your life while he was committing some horrible act, like fucking a hooker in crackytown and then getting shot by her or his pimp. Heinous acts have been committed against your very soul, and the perpetrator is gone and will never answer your questions. Intent can never be determined, apologies are not coming, healing and the path to forgiveness is all on you, except you are currently in some state of broken. Darkness over day. It is the largest destruction of my heart I have experienced. I’m proud to be intact and sane today.
I put my divorce on hold because I quickly come to understand that I must sift through the last 22 week of my life. I must examine and evaluate every tiny little thing that I have done that is related to PJ from start to finish. The Husband is in agreement with this plan. It isn’t a plan of we are getting back together. It is, I don’t know what just happened to me and I need time. The deluge of pain is coming, but for now I’m still in shock. The mental hits are on their way, but in those first few days all I did was cry, mostly whenever no one was looking, write things down as they began to creep into my brain or hit me from no where and ferociously research sociopaths. My friends were all very happy he was gone and the lack of sympathy I received for the situation was simply astounding. After all, they already knew all of this, I was the last one on board and I am guessing in their minds it was nothing but a good thing, my pain be damned. In fact, I often felt like I was expected to simply get over it, stop talking about it, pretend it never happened etc. I don’t do well with being told I’m not allowed to feel or act a certain way. I was left to heal mostly on my own. My grief was tolerated at a bare minimum. Only a very few would even entertain a conversation or not shut me down in some way with verbal or physical clues that they were not the slightest bit interested in hearing anymore. It was like, It was all fake what the fuck is your problem, just move on. I even had one friend laugh in my face, twice, while she told me that I was just mad that I was played. That felt great. It certainly did take me a very long time to get over it and refusing to continue to be silenced by choosing to start writing this blog helped. The moral of the story here is stay the fuck off the anonymous side of the internet and if you choose to go there willingly may GOD be with you because once you are entangled in whatever it is you find there, HE will be the only one that will be able to help you get out.
More to come soon lovies.
Almost Divorce Part 31- God Part 2: The WTF have I done moment finally arrives
Posted: 2012/01/24 Filed under: Dating and Relationships, Ramblings | Tags: Forgive, forgiveness, God, my personal catfish story, Relationships 1 CommentThis series is published no less than once a week on Thursday’s. Or you can start at the beginning here
A timeline can be found here.
So I started my journal, and used it to write down what I was feeling. The more I wrote, the better I started to feel. Monday night after PJ returned from his trip I found myself in chat and we started talking. We spent over 2 hours that night, just the two of us alone and chatting. It was 8/9/10 and we spent 11:12 together during that conversation. He was all <3’s and I adore you’s. I asked him what kind of a man he was, I told him God had been talking to me and shared some of my revelations from those summer showers. It was a great night, with good open honest adult conversation and PJ re-iterated that “something about you always brings me back”. We weren’t having any sexy time, it was all words from here on out until the end. The week progressed in a interesting manner. School was starting for MiniMe and I knew PJ was headed back to school as well. I logged into GWP on Wednesday and cammed up just to hang and talk to some of my friends. While I was in there PJ was cammed up, but not on camera. Instead was a view of some suitcases and him walking around packing. He saw me on cam before I could close it, but we did well and did not talk. On Thursday morning I was told he watched the meteor showers all night and missed me in the morning. Friday came, his last weekend home before heading back to school. The morning chat was no good, but by the afternoon when we talked we spent time reminiscing about our first e-date so many months ago. PJ was headed to the pond that night. There was a pond near his house that was good for swimming and reflecting, it was one of our created places of escape in the beginning. We often talked about being at the pond alone and together. Pond dreams was often a code word to symbolize that happy safe place when we were struggling. He was headed there to spend some alone time, I assumed before he went back to school. Saturday we spent time chatting and we were having a pretty great conversation. HE said it was n’t the happy place of escape he had hoped it would be. I imagine not when your life has been one lie after another for 5 solid months. I made a comment about we hadn’t had a Saturday where we talked and spent time together in forever, he ended the chat abruptly with “It’s sad too, because I’m going now” . I had long since stopped grabbing at bait like that, I said nothing and let it be. I wanted to scream, where are you going? But I don’t. 3:13 in the morning I got this simple message “do want”.
Sunday night I get a call from The Husband, we needs Mini Me’s lunchbox for school the next week. I run it over to his apartment, I’ve made that night drive more than a handful of times to sneak in, spend some time alone answering his numerous booty calls and then sneak back out. In all of those times I’ve never been caught there by my kids. I knock and he answers, I hand him the lunch box and out of n o where The Destroyer appears at the door. He looks up at me with those sweet brown eyes and says “I want to go home Mommy”. He is clinging to me and crying, he wants to come home and sleep. I’m floored as it hits me, I have banished my children to an apartment for half of their lives. I did this, with help, to my family, to my sweet innocent children. I mutter something as I back away from the doorstep and run to my car. I don’t know how I made the short drive home that night because the breakthrough breakdown was in full progress. I did this to my children, for what? There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow I was chasing, there is no PJ coming into my life, there is no happy ending here. I honestly think I moved from denial that night. I was healthier, I was stronger, I was ready for the pain I asked God to bring and get me through. That pain was coming in waves and waves of screaming and crying and frustrated ranting. As soon as I get home I only tkae notice of how very very empty and alone this huge house feels with only me in it. I start writing. I am alone and my soul is black, my heart is hard and angry and the cracks are starting to rupture. I am alone and I can finally start to see all of the crappy, shitty, douchebag dick moves PJ has pulled since we began. My heart is breaking for my kids, my heart is breaking for me. It is breaking because of what PJ has done to me, but I fucked this up myself. That night it hit me how very much NOT WORTH it the whole journey with him has been. I am still trying to figure out how I feel about PJ, I am trying to give myself permission to let him go, to walk away, to run away as far and fast as I can and never look back. That night for the first time in many, many weeks I think about the possibility of going back to my husband. He has started going to his own counseling, he is still willing and asking to work with me on repairing our marriage and make us a whole family again. I don’t know if I can love him again, I don’t know if he can ever forgive me. The sobbing and crying and keening goes on for what seems like hours.
Monday comes and my mind starts to focus. I am tired of feeling this way. I am tired of being this person, it just isn’t me. I hate feeling weak, sad and taken advantage of. I write ” It’s time to let this go and turn it over to GOD b/c he is probably the only one who can fix it at this point”. I get down on my knees in my home office, my chair is my altar and I pray.
PJ is still saying and doing things like he wants to be with me, even going as far as to make a big deal about noting what kind of flowers I like to be sent, pink roses or peonies. When he says, duly noted, my response is something along the lines of Yeah right, you can’t even call but you want to send flowers?
I started reading Eat, Pray, Love late that summer. That book couldn’t of come at a better time in my life. At first reading it was a little sickening and scary, this woman left her husband for the younger man and it didn’t even remotely work out. Everything I am reading is like she is sitting with me telling me her personal story and it all sounds like warnings and I told you so’s. Many many pages of that book talked to me and it was all perfect timing. There is a part in the story where she realizes that a friend she is trying to help is fucking with her. She writes about coming to that realization. I am going to see the movie by myself on Thursday, but it is Tuesday and I have an appointment with Tab. I’m down to bi-weekly and we discuss the current situation. She suggests that I ask PJ what kind of relationship he wants. So later that day I do exactly that. He has already returned to school and should already be in classes, but he isn’t showing up in the student or staff databases yet. He had to know I would be checking. His answer….I want you in my life in some way. I’m not htinking of the future. I can’t handle much more than just what we have right now. This floors me, I don’t know what we have right now, to me it feels like nothing. he follows with, The future kind of blows my mind at the moment. I’m mostly focusing on the past. He is getting dismissive and distant again, only this time I start to see it for the game that it is. All sorts of memory flashbacks throughout my life start to hit me. Men I’ve been in similar situations with, men I gave and gave and gave to only to continually get nothing in return. Men who just weren’t into me but either took advantage of me because they were d-bags or lied to try to make it easier on themselves. I am growing bored and tired of his games and at the same I I am upset he is pulling away again and so I start to chase him just a little with pictures. They get zero response. Wed night he is in GWP, but he isn’t green on g-chat and he has nothing to say to me. I’ve sent emails and he isn’t responding, even though in the last week he has said to me that he wants to be better about that.
On Thursday I go and watch Eat, Pray, Love alone. This is for the best because I cry through a good portion of it, during that movie it hits me. I AM BEING FUCKED WITH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I start to wrestle with what has been so obvious to everyone but me. PJ isn’t going to be calling, he isn’t going to be visiting on weeks I don’t have kids. I need to leave that be, I need to let go, I need to be free of his games and his lies. If I let go and move on I can have my heart back, just like that curly haired stick figure wanted all those weeks ago. I need to stop being so ate up over this mere child I had no business even talking to in the first place. It is Thursday the 19th of August and I am finally “there”. He is nice guying me, he has no balls to admit to me that he doesn’t see me in his future. WTF is “some way”? I am the back-up plan, he is hedging his bets, he is optioning me, he is FUCKING WITH ME!!!!!!! I cry myself to sleep that night.
Friday morning I wake up early because I have a go-live to prep for. It is still crystal clear for me. Everyone can see I am being fucked with but me. I see it now. He pops up on g-chat with some lame shit about “yeah we made it to Friday”. I don’t bite, I’m busy prepping for ago-live I tell him, if you have something to say then talk, otherwise I have things to get done. He isn’t exactly engaged in the conversation HE started. By Friday night I am sicker than a dog with a horrible cold/flu and pretty much confined to bed all weekend only rising to check on the kids and make sure they haven’t hurt themselves or anything else. I don’t know how single parents do it. I had my breakdown less than a week ago on the 16th and God is working furiously and quickly in me.
More to come soon Lovies.
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