Roller Coaster

I disappeared again. I'm sorry. It has been a bittersweet few weeks and it has kept me busy, and tired and achy.

A week ago Wednesday Tim and Emily closed on a house. It is a nice house. I am glad that they got it. On Thursday Tim and I spent a very long day packing his apartment getting ready for him to move. On Friday we went to Georgia for the wedding on Saturday. Jack and I came back on Sunday. On Tuesday, Tim and his new family, Emily and Nathan and I continued to pack the apartment. And on Thursday Tim and I along with two young men that Tim had mentored in Boy Scouts finished the colossal task of getting Tim packed into the moving van and the apartment closed out. I have come to the negative conclusion that I never want to go to another wedding and I never want to move again. 

On The Wedding: 

I have never really understood the need for the formal ceremony of weddings. It seems like a major cause of stress and a mammoth waste of money to me. I am sure that the practice began with families being pressured into showing off their worth by spending resources that would have been better reserved for daily living. Now little girls are brought up with the promise of a big day set aside to focus entirely and lavishly on her. Everyone, and I mean Everyone would be better off if people just signed the legal agreement and moved in with each other. This spending tens of thousands of dollars on a single day is Just Fucking Nuts!

There is only one hotel in the small town that the wedding was held in, and it is a basic Quality Inn, clean and comfortable; not luxury, but not bad either. It took Tim and Jack and I four hours to get there. Traffic was terrible and we were glad when we finally arrived. Mollie and Chris arrived about an hour after we did. The flight from Chicago was stressful and they had to drive through the same traffic jams that we did. After they arrived it was great. We all had dinner together and relaxed, enjoying the company. 

I woke up on Saturday morning to find that the refrigerator in my room had leaked during the night and a puddle had formed on the floor in front of it. I didn't think too much of it. Those things happen, but I knew that everyone would be in and out of the room  all morning and I didn't want anyone slipping on it, so I threw a towel over it to dry it up. We all had breakfast in the lobby and went back to our rooms to get dressed for the wedding. 

Everyone was gathering in my room to leave for the church together. Just before we were walking out the door, Ex arrived. He had driven all night from North Carolina and had not bothered to make a reservation at the hotel. Very, very typical for Ex, I was not at all surprised at his failure to plan ahead. But his shortsightedness had left him with no place to shower or change for the wedding. Since we were leaving I offered him to let him use my room. I had just gotten extra clean towels from housekeeping, so there was plenty. What happened next reminded me why I was glad that we are divorced. Instead of just saying thank you and accepting the hospitality, he pointed out that the refrigerator was leaking. And it wasn't just The refrigerator was leaking, it was Your refrigerator was leaking, as if my offer was less valuable because I had allowed the refrigerator to leak. I laughed it off, told him that the refrigerator belonged to the hotel and that I was taking no ownership of it whatsoever. Then I handed him one of the keys to the room and left, leaving him to decide if he wanted to accept the offer or find somewhere else to get ready for the wedding. 

I have been working with a counselor who has been helping me to understand the emotional abuse I have encountered during my life. I am almost embarrassed that it has taken me so long to recognize it. I understood the overt abuse in my relationship with Ex a long time ago; things like him refusing to leave work to take me to the hospital when I was in labor. But there was so much passive aggressive abuse that I never caught on to. And that abuse, subtle distain toward me allowed other people to treat me poorly also. I was rather shocked when I was confronted with it again over the refrigerator. And I had hoped that confronting a bully, even with kid gloves would be the warning shot that would let him know that the behavior wasn't allowed. It did not work with Ex. He wasn't openly abusive, it was more the annoyed pause when I asked a question, or the eye roll when I made an insider joke with my daughter. After getting home, I felt really bad about myself again, even though I had done nothing that was overly embarrassing. It took another session with my therapist to begin to understand the way Ex had undermined me. Sadly, I'm not even sure if he understood that he was doing it. Broken people break people. It's what they do, and in ways we are all broken.

On Moving:

I stayed with my son for eight months before moving into my apartment. I understood then the amount of things that he had crammed into the apartment that he was living in. But packing it all up and moving it has me with a whole new understanding of it. His home is kept clean and mostly organized, but I have come to the conclusion that I don't want to have more than I am actively using. And above all else, I never want to move again as long as I live. I hope that he and Emily will never decide to move again either. 

I spent all day yesterday resting and recovering from the past week. I also spent it contemplating the emotional roller coaster that I have been on. For now, I am happy to be alone with my thoughts. But I know that soon it will hit me that I am totally alone. I think I will take this one day at a time.