Soul Side Journey

Unfortunately, on my long mad scramble to try and save my marriage, I lost a little bit of myself along the way. Yes, I did make some strides as a person, but I also ended up doing some things I said that I would never do. To try and save your soul mate, you might end up destroying yourself in the process if you aren’t careful. And then who are you saving? No one. I won’t get into the details, but I pretty much pushed every limit and boundary I thought I had put up in regards to certain things. I feel like shit. I haven’t slept well in over a month, save the few times I get to sleep in the same bed as my wife. I barely run anymore. I have only been to the gym twice in two weeks. I wanted to get my life back on track and my marriage fixed but I feel like its costing me my health and well being, and I need to seriously cut that off. I do not have an addictive personality. I can turn anything off. I just have to do it. And not to get carried away with this, most of this it 100% social. Its not like I am sitting alone, depressed and getting loaded. But I have always prided myself in being healthy, I just ran two ultra marathons this year for christs sakes. This behavior is kind of a slice of a larger issue: I am an addict, and my wife is my drug.

I took Cali to the playground today. It was lightly raining and there was no other kids there, but she didn’t mind. She is usually kind of shy because she is pretty small for her age. Once she makes a friend, they are pretty much inseparable though. Since Cal was born, taking her to the playground has always been a kind of happy yet sad experience for me. I see other parents, other couples laughing and watching their children play, it makes me feel envious. But I love to see my daughter smile and having fun with other children, its great because I don’t get to see her at her school except for rare occasions. But every time I take her to the playground, usually being the one at Uptown Station, I find myself wishing I was there with Samm and Cali. We have always had such different schedules it was always hard enough when we were on good terms. As we go forward and try to heal our little family, I am going to make playground visits as a trio a top priority. No more sitting on that brick wall watching the children play feeling the tendrils of depression seeping into my brain. All three of us deserve to have each other there, none of us should miss out on that kind of happiness.

So today was when it was finally her turn to show me something. The funny thing is, it’s her that was really being shown the truth about things. Let me just back up a second and relay some of the classy things that this other “boy” had to say to me. When I first found out about this bullshit, I sent him a text asking him to leave my family alone and that we were still married. His response? A rant worthy of a 16 year old. I was called a “dead beat dad” and an alcoholic loser who mistreats women. Yes. Sounds like he has me pinned. Oh, I was also told that because of me, my daughter would be on a stripper pole by her 18th birthday. I received plenty of other hateful, profanity filled text messages, and my mother in law even got one sent to her saying all kinds of horrible shit. Yes a real knight in shining armor we have here. So the whole world got to see what a piece of shit this guy really was, it was time for one final person to see things for what they really were.

I showed up to take her to work and that was when we had agreed to tell this guy it was over and to leave us alone. The message she sent him stated that we were getting back together and that she was giving her family a chance. She asked that he not speak to her anymore and even threw in a few kind statements like “thanks for being there for me when things were difficult in my life”. I am not an unreasonable person, and despite how little I think of this person, I respected that my wife at one point considered him a friend. But when the grass is cut, the snakes will show. The response was at this point, typical. Profanity. Belittlement. It was kind of scary to see how a 39 year old “man” of his age flew off the handle when presented with any sort of backlash to what he wanted. He told her to fuck off, me to fuck off, that we “deserved each other”, and that my wife was “daft” to be stupid enough to get back with me, and to never contact him again. He threw in a real comedy line, saying he was done “dealing with children”. That’s rich. Thanks for doing EXACTLY what I said you would do, and being the person I always KNEW that you were. It takes a real fucking loser to knowingly try and break up a family, so no one should be surprised this is how that kind of person would act. I even sent him a letter last week, respectfully and politely asking that he please leave my wife alone and that we were spending a ton of time together as a family trying to fix things. I included all of my Facebook photo albums (hard for that many pictures to lie!) and kept everything in the letter civil. No response. Figures. He didn’t care whatsoever that she was trying to fix things with me.

Oh, and the last thing he said yesterday was that if he ever saw me at a show he would “beat my ass and laugh”. Ok.

It was a really bad day today. The only good that came out of it was that I feel like I am nearing some sense of closure with all of this shit. It was time for an ultimatum and I now had every right to make one. Nothing was going to be the same ever again. For better or worse. What do you do when someone who has lied constantly gives you their word? You should probably say sorry and just walk away. Which I actually tried to do last night. Each time she grabbed my hand and said “No.” She loves me. I do think she cares about our marriage enough that she doesn’t want it to vanish permanently. But you can’t have your cake and eat it to. I don’t deserve that. Cali doesn’t deserve that. No one in this fucked up world deserves that.

Sigh. The problem with this entire thing is this: no matter how upset we get over things, no matter what we say to each other, within 30 mins we are sitting next to one another, going forward. Which is what happened last night. Smoking and drinking, going for a drive, and playing with our dogs. Ended the night giving her literally the best massage I have ever given in my entire life, for an hour and a half. A shit day that still ended with me curled up in bed with my arm around her waist. Its gonna hurt. Big time. But because some petulant child wont fuck off and leave my family the hell alone, I might be broken for a long time coming. I’m not saying I can predict the future and say without a doubt that we can live happily ever after. BUT what I am standing by, because of the changes I have made and the efforts to save my family, that it deserves a FAIR and HONEST chance.

I went to church this morning. After the car wreck, we were driving and she blurted out that she needed to go to church. This was the second time she had said that in the last week. I told her I would go with her, I had gone a few times since I got back from Alaska and I always felt better. Sometimes I was even able to sort through the messages and find some meanings. Its strange how no matter what the story is about, there always seems to be at least one part of it that I can apply to my life. I was hoping she would be able to do this too. I texted her to see if she was awake and would come, but she did not respond in time. So I still went with my daughter. I was pretty depressed this morning so I am not sure I was able to really focus on things like I should have. But the music was nice, it was a “new age” type of service with a band playing and it was actually pretty laid back. There were people with tattoos like me and no one was over dressed so I felt relaxed. I used to feel pretty uncomfortable around church and just out of place. I mean shit, I work for a band called EyeHateGod. There was definitely a part of the service that caught my attention though, about weathering the storms in life. You look around the crowd and you have to remind yourself that you don’t know anything about the person sitting next to you, about what fucked up trauma they are enduring silently behind the scenes. I guess that is what makes what happened next so crazy. The service ended and I turned to leave when a man approached me and asked me if I had a second to talk. I said sure, and he began to tell me that he was a part of a group for young men that met every Tuesday night to talk about getting through life’s troubles and become better people, better father, and better husbands. I honestly almost broke down when I responded to him, and I know he heard my voice crack a little. I told him what I have been going through lately, and he listened. When I was done, he looked me dead in the eye and told me that I had made the right choice to stand by my wife and not give up. The valleys that he described that each marriage inevitably encounters made me realize that I am not alone. The only thing else I can really say is that I hope he is right, I hope that I myself have been right, and that years from now we can look back at this and say it made us stronger.

I guess it was an ironic twist that I had written on the 4th about how last year I pretty much abandoned my sick wife to go have fun on the boat, and then exactly a year later on the same day I was taking care of her when she was going through a trauma. Redemption? I would like to think so. That is just too much of a coincidence if you ask me. I was able to right a wrong, and to me that is a huge part of all of this. From the moment that I arrived at the scene of the crash, I was by her side until this afternoon, almost a full 2 days later. Yes I felt torn, because here I was taking care of her, but at the same time knowing damn well she wasn’t mine anymore. Someone else was reaping that affection while I did all the heavy lifting. I am the rock that weathers the storms, the true trauma will be when I am washed away. We have put all the puzzle pieces of this marriage back together over the last 2 months, except for the one showing us as lovers. I even spoke to her about this after we left the ER. Her response left me cautious and confused. I wasn’t expecting tears and promises that she wanted to fix things. Do I believe it?  After the talk, it was like my old wife was back. Affection, love, and attention. In the grand scheme of things, it was just a moment… You have to be wary of what these kinds of moments might do to you. Like the old mermaid tales, singing a sweet song to lure you close before you drown. Or, it could be one of those ones where it ends happily ever after.