a post in which i wine...I mean whine

 Yes. That picture is a warning. I am going to whine. Feel free to stop reading right here, right now. See you tomorrow!

But I figure blogging is my free therapy...where I say the stuff that I'm not quite strong enough to say in the therapy I do pay for. Yeah. Screwed up. I know.

This divorce thing had been years coming. It had crossed my mind in the early 00s, but not too seriously at that point. Then some mild adversity came into our lives (job related stuff) and we drew closer together. The years 2004-2006 may have been the very best part of our marriage. As to be expected, things settled back into the hum-drum. After all, by 2007, we'd been together for 20 years, married for 18.

Then there was knock on our door. The visitor was not unlike those creepy Orkin ads. The ones where the life sized roaches are at the front door? Our visitor was REAL adversity. The child who had previously just been challenge, what with all her brilliance, riddled with migraines, vision problems, ADHD and Aspie qualities. But when we opened that door she was the child with an eating disorder, who was failing classes, who was date raped, who attempted suicide, who was diagnosed with serious a never-ending, no cure, mental illness. Life was bleak. A bleak from which, it turns out, there was no recovery as a couple. I took on this next set of challenges...because as a mother bear there is nothing I wouldn't do for her, even if she drives me to complete and utter distraction. I started up that mountain of issues only to look around and find him, this alleged life-partner, drowning himself in drink. And not only did he retreat into his drinking and stubborn refusal to try and help, he made her worse. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I didn't see (or admit that I saw) that second part until days before I told him we were over.

And at some point there in 2009, not long after our darling girl turned 16, I knew deep down the marriage was over. But two things stopped me from calling it quits then. One, I hate failing at anything and just like I wouldn't give up on her, I wouldn't walk away without fighting for it. But, two, and if the point here is telling the truth I must admit it was a bigger factor, I was horribly afraid that if I didn't just accept him, I would spend forever alone.

The picture the doctors painted of Eldest's future were so desperate and horrid. There were these midnight moments when I believed them (and still do in the worst moments) because I saw the eyes of the other parents in our support group...the parents of teen addicts, teen mothers, runaways, drop-outs, kids who they had to call the police on when they got violent. GOOD people, who had done everything for their kids but like us...JUST like us, damn it...had a child with this illness. An illness that slowly robbed us of our golden girl and left a person we still love but frequently don't like; a person sometimes the irrational shell of who we adore. How does that grow from this little person? I don't know. But I can tell you that it will eat you alive if you spend too much time thinking about it.  (Which is also why I can understand Wasband's drinking even if I can never forgive him for it and the things he said and did.)


So back to the selfish point of this post, the second reason I didn't leave in 2009 is that I knew if I did, Eldest would never spend time with her father and it would all be on me. (Which, when I look back on it now, I know was true then too.) And I thought anyone, any sane man other than the one who was in this mess with me, would take one look at this situation and run. And I would spend forever alone.

So here I am after the leap...and the midnight moments still come...and I am filled with this sticky fear. A house...alone.



Photo from here.