A disorganized rambling mess of thoughts

 I woke up at 3:30 again this morning unable to get back to sleep. We're doing this again. Ok. At least I haven't had a panic attack yet. That happens when the sun comes up. 

Last night I made the mistake of going through old pictures before bed, and it kept me up until past midnight and resulted in restless sleep. Why would I do this? Because there is no other time to do it. It's either that, or 3:30 am, or cut into precious little work time. So there is really no choice if I want to do the work to understanding how I am feeling about all this. By all this I mean the divorce. It is hard to talk about because I feel like I am doing too much complaining. Something keeps telling me that I "don't have it all that bad", that I need to just shut up get over it, and that I don't deserve to feel - whatever it is I feel about it. I know I made the right decision, but when that is called into question it brings up all kinds of negative self-talk and insecurities. I guess all the more reason to keep talking about it. 

I got all of the photo albums down from the shelves and spread them out. I wanted to see if I would cry looking at them. I also wanted to see if I missed him at all. I really wanted them to break me so I could get this over with already. Nothing of that sort happened. When I look at pictures of our wedding, honeymoon, camping trips, and all of the things from the first 6 years I feel nothing. It's as if I am watching a movie I've seen before, I'm just watching it, no longer really invested or involved. The first 6 years were good. Our relationship was healthy, and we supported each other.  However, looking at the photos from the past 10 years, since our daughter was born, bring up many of the painful memories and some confusion. Confusion because in some of the photos show him looking happy, and I am reminded that he really does love her. That is the most important thing. Painful because I remember all of the difficulties that started right after she was born and some of the terrifying things that he said. He hated his role as a father and wanted to leave. He wanted to "toss her into oncoming traffic" to make her stop crying. He said he now knew the true meaning of ball and chain, as he was looking at me nursing her. There was a lot more. There was even a time when I would not let him watch her when I needed to be at work, because I was afraid for her safety due to the things he was saying and the intense anger he was showing toward her. The transformation from a loving husband to whatever this was happened almost overnight. I was too shocked to react, and I had very few options. For the first time in my adult life I felt vulnerable and helpless. I was in the middle of grad school and working under the table to make ends meet while caring for a newborn. My recovery from the birth was much slower than expected, I could barely climb a flight of stairs up to 5 weeks after she was born. We were in threat of losing our home due to a combination of some bad investments he and his brother had made, and the economic recession we were still in. If I left I would have no where to go and no way to finish school or work. Moving in with family was not a safe option. Despite that I told him that if he was so unhappy he should leave, and his response was "but I love you". He said he wanted to leave me but would feel bad about it, so I suggested that we table the conversation until later. He also said that he still loved me. I took "but I love you" to be a good enough answer. If that was true, who was I to complain? It's embarrassing to even admit that I thought that way. There wasn't much room for thinking at that time, though. It was all about reacting. I did not understand at the time that a person can truly believe they love someone, and also behave in ways that are totally unacceptable. 

There were moments when he seemed happy, and I tried hard to make some kind of time for us in among doing a short sale (I worked my ass off so we could do this instead of foreclosing), continuing school and random work, moving us into an apartment, and learning to be a mother. I was really trying to keep up our relationship. However, I'm not sure how interested he really was, because he suggested that we give up on any kind of intimate life and just have a "platonic marriage". He was surprised when I said I would not be happy that way. I felt so rejected.  I felt like giving birth had somehow changed my relationship to my body, and I was finally somewhat normal, only to get the door slammed in my face. I know he didn't mean that, but it is how it felt. Things were never the same after that. 

I defended my thesis two days before our daughter turned two years old. I was selling things off to pay for her daycare the last month of the thesis so that I could finish on time. Luckily I landed a job with a non-profit a few weeks before I defended, and was able to to start the Monday after my defense. My daughter was able to continue her daycare and I borrowed money to to to Target and buy some professional looking cloths to get me through the first few weeks of the job. 

That November I opened up the conversation we had tabled 2 years earlier about whether he wanted to stay or go. He had continued to be miserable, feeling that I had "eroded his life away" somehow by having our child and focusing on getting myself a good job. He felt I did not make enough time for us and was always working. I was starting to feel resentful. I had pulled us through a complete economic crash, with a newborn, pretty much singlehandedly, and graduated, and gotten a good job to help better our lives, and he was still complaining. Now that I had a living wage and enough for daycare, I felt like I could think a little more about where we were going. He reiterated that he was miserable and wanted out, but could not imagine his life without me. I didn't sleep that night and went to work the next day, which was a Saturday. We had a 50 person corporate work group coming to clean a road and do some cactus planting. I remember that day very well. I was exhausted the entire day but ran back and forth up and down the road working with the small groups of volunteers and coordinating tools, garbage bags, and other items. I got a text from him saying he wasn't ready to give up yet. I was standing on the bed of the truck at the end of the day putting away tools as they were tossed up to me. I caught someone looking admiringly at me out of the corner of my eye. I thought maybe, maybe I was worth looking at. Then I put that thought away. 

When I got home he had decided that he would stay and try to make things work. Things did get better after that for a while. I started back on anxiety medication and some really amazing sleeping pills. I was wrapped up in work and caring for our daughter, who was 3 years old then. I started looking at some long-term budgeting, trying to build something more resilient so we wouldn't crash again. I tried to invent "strip budgeting" so he'd get involved. That didn't really go anywhere. 

During the next few years he took an over the road driving job to shift into another income category. I was effectively a single parent for those 2 years, through no fault of his own. I think it took a toll, though. We became more distant and he seemed to expect more and more from me in a domestic sense. When he came back I got the job in Safford and we moved here. He had never willingly done much of the domestic work, but he essentially stopped. He said he felt that since I was working in my chosen field, I owed it to him to do everything so that he could have his free time. I understand that there were times when he worked a 70 hour week, and I'd pick up the slack, that made sense. But the full burden of the domestic work had shifted on to me and he seemed to have no interest in ever participating again. He started nit-picking, and attempting to micro-manage my housekeeping. He lost all interest in spending time with our daughter or me and went straight to 'his room" when he got home. We had slept in separate rooms for a while by that point, and even our daughter referred to the master bedroom as "dad's room" and the guest bedroom as "mom's room". We had one wing of the house and he had the other. It was not purposeful, it simply evolved that way. I didn't give it a second thought, I was emotionally shutting down. 

In March, when the schools shut down, I had to move my work to a home office and try to make some sense out of our lives, along with millions of other parents. He professed that he "felt sorry for me" but did not offer to do anything to pitch in. I asked if he would help with her homeschooling when he got home. He said yes but went straight to his room and complained that he had to rest. That went on for a while. I asked if he could help fix dinner a couple of nights a week so I could get in another couple of hours. He said flat out no, he can't be bothered between when he gets home and when he needs to go to bed. I wondered why he has to go to bed at 6:00 pm when he gets up at 4:30 - the truth is he was just using the time to be online. He continued getting worse with the nit-picking, fighting with our daughter, and would not even look me in the eye for several months. He did not understand why the house was a mess and I had no time for him. I explained again and again that he needs to be involved so I can have some time. He had no interest. 

In July I sat him down and talked with him about how I was feeling. There were several reasons why this happened at this time, one of which was an on-line crush that I had developed, much to my dismay. I had decided that rather than make an ass of myself with online flirtations, I would use those unwanted feelings as a catalyst to confront the issues in our relationship. I told him I may as well be a single parent, at least I would be able to do things on my own terms without criticism. He asked me if I was seeing someone else. He thought I was being influenced by my sister, or my mother, or a friend. He did not understand why I thought there was anything really wrong. He tried to play on my emotions and guilt. I told him he needed to make some changes by picking one chore he would reliably do, and by spending time with our daughter when he got home, even if it was just watching TV. He argued that he could not do any chores because they hurt his back. I suggested laundry. He said he already does laundry, he puts it in the machine at least once per week. I said putting it in the machine is not doing laundry, it has to be folded and I am the one staying up until midnight folding mountains of it. He needed to fold it, not just put it in the machine. He said it was hard on his back because he had to reach across the bed to get to it. I suggested he move it closer to him so it was easier to reach. I could not even believe he was putting up this kind of a fight. I think that after everything, that was the moment that any capacity I had to love him just bottomed out. I was just done when I heard that. It was beyond clear what he was doing. I was drowning in a pandemic workload, and he was unwilling to lift a finger, in fact he was fighting me on it.  

I finally told him that if he could not do those 2 things, that would be it. He decided to do the laundry and watch TV with Amelia after work. Wow, I feel so valued. I'm worth reaching allllll the way across the bed to fold the laundry. Rising life and limb. Geez. And television with your kid. What a sacrifice. 

For 2 months he did the laundry and watched TV with our daughter. Their relationship improved, and for the first time they actually got along. She was soaking up the attention. That's not even sarcastic. During those 2 months I struggled horribly with the feeling that despite him finally doing the things I had asked, I was done anyway. I had just broken. And if it takes me giving him an ultimatum in order to do 2 simple things, well, that just wasn't enough. I hated myself for feeling this way. I wanted so badly to be happy and feel whole again. I wanted our daughter to have the family she had always wanted and finally thought she had gotten. I just could not do it. 

On September 16th I was walking our dog and picked up a perfectly round stone. I wrote the date on the underside. That stone represents the final decision. Someday I'll leave it in the quadrant of a labyrinth corresponding to this life stage. For now it sits on the shelf. In mid-October I had a root canal and came home to find him there early. He was in a good mood. I knew we had a rare space of time to talk before I had to go back to work and before our daughter got home. I thought why not both a physical and emotional root canal in the same day. That way I can compare them and see which is worse. Truth be told, the physical one was preferable. He agreed to attend a consoling session with me. In the session we went over the issues again. He said he would do whatever it took to keep the relationship going. I asked if he would do more to make things more equitable. He said no. That was it. He stayed until he got a job and apartment in Phoenix. We told our daughter about it a week before he moved. 

When I was helping him move he pulled out a drawer from underneath the guest bed and removed a bunch of my cloths. He looked at me and said "now you don't have to live like a hobo in your own house anymore." Weird. I guess our sleeping arrangement did make me feel like I was not really living in my own home.

We finished packing and I hugged him goodbye. I told him that I did not regret anything. It was the truth. I didn't regret marrying him, or trying to make it work. I just wish I had recognized these issues for what they were earlier. It could have saved us a lot of trouble. Maybe I could have had another child by now. That ship has sailed. 

The paperwork is all turned in, the house is in my name and the things I have worked for are protected, in case he decides to make any more risky business deals with his brother. It's not my problem anymore. The ring is off and I am letting the chips fall where they may. Let those who will judge, judge. They are not my problem either. Every other weekend we meet in Globe so our daughter can spend the weekend with him in Phoenix. She looks forward to those trips. She misses her dad. I wish she didn't have to. 

The truth is, though, that I don't miss him. I don't even miss anything about our old life. I am not lonely, I am actually so grateful for my time alone, even if it is filled mostly with work right now. When I see him I don't feel any romantic feelings or longing whatsoever. That door is closed forever, and I am glad this part of the process is behind me. He looks a lot better, too. He snapped right into taking care of himself, getting a band together, and taking up some pandemic version of a social life. He likes his job better and it starting to lose weight. It is a relief to me to see this. I am not angry with him, in fact I have no bad feelings toward him. He really was my best friend for a while there. I learned a lot from him. But I'm glad it's over.