Where’s my harmonica?
A friend recently moved to Vermont. I spoke to him yesterday, and he was telling me about how very strange all the locals were. “I hear they get something called ‘winter blues’ because of all the cold and snow,” he told me. “Yeah, I know that happens,” I tell him, “But I’m the opposite. I love winter. I love snow. I love cold. I’m happiest in the wintertime. I can’t imagine it making me sad.”
But then I started thinking about how down I’ve been this month, and all the problems J and I have been having, and I wondered if I had lied to my friend. Could I have the winter blues? Well, yes and no.
I didn’t lie to my friend. It’s absolutely true that cold, snowy winters make me happy. But the thing is, I live in TEXAS. We don’t have winter, we have…coldish temperatures with infrequent ice, overcast skies, and an occasional inch-deep dusting of snow. There’s no beautiful winter wonderland to behold. A gorgeous cold night with a clear star-strewn sky makes me incredibly happy, but it’s not the same thing, and I don’t even get that often. It’s like the atmosphere is constantly threatening winter, but it never follows through. And maybe it’s that never-ended torment, that giant tease, that has lead to my own variety of the winter blues.
Here, we can have clear and sunny 80 degree days (like last Friday) followed by windy and unbearable 30 degree days (like last Saturday). At the moment, it’s 28 outside, with crappy freezing rain. My Firefox weather thingy claims it’s snowing, but freezing rain is all I’ve seen. Oh, and I had to walk the dog in it just a little bit ago, even though J had taken her out an hour beforehand, because she was whining and crying at the door. And then she didn’t even poop. And I sorta hate her and think she’s an asshole. Da na na na…
Warm and fuzzy
Folks, it’s been one hell of a week, let me tell you. There was more fighting and screaming and hurt under my roof than there ever has been. I thought my marriage was over. But, somehow, we pulled through it, and now we’re actually better than we have been in a LONG time.
I’m not saying it’s easy, and I’m not saying it’s a miraculous recovery. We’re not ignoring what happened, and we’re not ignoring the issues that caused the blow-up in the first place.
Neither one of us realized how little we talk these days. I can’t blame it entirely on school, but I do think that that’s a big part of it. But even without school, we haven’t been talking much. He’s on his computer and I’m on mine, and we haven’t been doing much together. We desperately needed both hobbies and communication.
As fucked up as it sounds, I’m almost grateful that things got so bad on Tuesday. The little fights never did anything to change us, to encourage us to work harder. They were easy to ignore. This one was not. Not at all. The fact that it was bad enough that I actually started telling people about it blows my mind. Anyway, it seems to have been a huge wake-up call for both of us. No, our marriage is not instantly fixed. But you know what? Neither of us wants to lose what we have, and we’re both determined to get back to what we were. We both married our best friends. We’ve both said that we want our best friends back. So that’s what we’re working on.
The past few days have been incredible. He’s been so thoughtful, kind, and passionate. I’ve started telling him every detail of my life. We’ve both come up with new things for us to do together. We’re able to look back at our fight and talk about how we felt, and why we did the things we did. I can actually see and understand his side of it, and he can actually do the same for mine.
No, we’re not fixed. But we’re better than we’ve been in months, if not years. And to top it all off, we’re running around the house like newlyweds. Ahem. It’s good. It’s good to have that back. My god, I’ve missed him. And with that…I’ve got something that I suddenly need to go do.
Numb
Things have since been resolved, and we’re working harder than ever on making each other happy. Yet, I can’t bring myself to delete this, because it was very much true at the time, and deleting it would feel like I was trying to hide things. I don’t want to hide things anymore.
Today was a memorable day, a day that I won’t ever forget, even if I live a hundred more years. A day when something of such epic proportions played out right before my eyes that my life, my mind, and my entire being will never be the same.
Oh, and we got a new president. Hurrah!
But a bit closer to home, the news was not quite so cheer-inducing. My husband is leaving me. For reasons I can’t exactly explain here, he’s leaving. And I almost believe him this time. And yes, there have been other times.
Pretty much every September, J gets into a terrible way, we fight, and he either tells me he’s leaving or tries to kick me out. And every time, I stop him from leaving. Not only do I cry and beg, but I physically stand in his way until the anger subsides. Every year, multiple times a year, since we’ve been married. After the time this fall, I swore that I wasn’t going to do it anymore. You can’t force someone to stay with you, and I’m tired of guilting him into not leaving.
I broke my own pact in December, when I once again begged him to stay. Our problem, though, is that we get over it, but we never address the actual problems that caused it in the first place. It’s like we had a bamboo pole that started to split, so we wrapped it in duct tape. The duct tape only holds for so long, and then we have to add more, and suddenly the whole damn pole is wrapped up, looking very much not like itself at all. And one day, it finally snaps.
I think the pole snapped today. I don’t want my marriage to be over. I got married forever. Divorce was not an option, not even something I considered. But I can’t make him stay. We’ve both fucked up. I want to work on fixing it. I want my best friend back. He rejects every idea I have, will not even consider counseling. I don’t think it’s right to throw away nearly 8 years without even trying, but he says we’ve been trying for years.
I love him. I want him. I don’t want this. I’ve known. I’ve known for awhile that it wasn’t right. Probably since…umm, when did I stop posting regularly? Yeah. But I didn’t think it would come to this, and I certainly didn’t think it would go down like this. What can I do? He means so much to me, but he doesn’t want to hear it. I’m flat out exhausted from trying to keep him here. If he doesn’t want me, what else can I do?
Oh, and my semester starts tomorrow. Yippee! My mind will totally be focused on school. Christ.
