In Addition...

It occurs to me that I have overlooked two topics, so before I get up to the present, I must address these two things: dating since my separation, and my relationship with Matt now, as well as his with Avery.

So, dating: something I thought I had finished (successfully)! I first got back “out there” when Avery was seven months old. I signed up on Match.com, because I really didn’t have any other way to meet people! Being in my mid-30’s, I didn’t have the network of single girls to go out with that I had back in my 20’s – pretty much everyone I know is married with kids. Most of my coworkers at the school were women, and when I wasn’t working I was home with an infant. So I signed up on Match, and my first few attempts were a little crazy! My life was full of drama at the time, and I really had no business dating! I was a mess. But I needed to feel attractive to men, to feel lovable, because at that time I was feeling unworthy of love. Not the greatest motive for trying to find a new “partner”!

I have had several semi-serious relationships over the past 2 years. Each of them was “fine” in its own way, but none has been the “right” one, which is ok – I am actually still in touch with several of them. I have realized that my agenda for dating now is completely different than it was back then, which is to say, I really have no agenda. I feel like, in our culture, there is so much emphasis on marriage, that it causes many young women (including myself) to try to turn every man into a potential husband, causing us to have tunnel vision. We can only see the “prize,” the finish line. When I met Matt, I was just about to turn 30, and I don’t think it was that BIG birthday that made me want marriage so badly – it was the fact that I was almost the LAST one of all of my college and high school girlfriends to find my “prince.” They had all gotten to have a wedding, and all that that entails – showers, gifts, the perfect dress, etc. It was finally my turn! I had had a VISION for my life, and that vision was becoming a reality.

Now, I am trying not to have a “vision” for the future. I am not looking forward so much to the day that I “find someone.” I don’t think my family understands this – people are supposed to want to be married, right? But I tried it and it really didn’t turn out so well for me, so I’m trying to just be more accepting of what life brings me. I am trying to be happy with myself, and my life, and my daughter. And I have never been so content with myself and my life before.

I think I am largely free from anger. There’s a saying I love, that I learned on an Oprah episode dedicated to anger, which goes: being angry is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die. That’s not to say that I wasn’t angry – I was angry for the better part of two years! But my anger never affected HIM. It did, however affect my everyday life greatly! Is it shitty, what happened to me? Yeah, it is. Was THIS the vision I had for my life? No way! But being angry about it doesn’t change or solve anything. I do believe that people are meant to be in pairs, that the highs are that much more exciting with someone to share them with, and that we all need help with life’s hurdles. But I’m not going to make that the ultimate goal. I’m going to simply be happy with what IS.

As far as my relationship with Matt: ugh. It’s fine, but for the past two years I have seen him four to six times per week, usually for only about 5 minutes as he picks Avery up, or drops her off, but still, I see him almost every day! As I have not been working and Avery has not been in daycare, the pick-ups and drop-offs have been at one of our houses. I guess we get along. We don’t communicate too terribly much, which I don’t think is right in light of the fact that we are BOTH Avery’s parents, and we will ALWAYS be Avery’s parents. There are always going to be things we will have to work on together as we raise our daughter. But he doesn’t feel the need to discuss anything with me, and he thinks I’m being dramatic when I say that there is a HUGE potential for her life to be very screwed up, as segmented as it is now. But just like in our marriage, he wants to do things the way he wants to do them, and he really doesn’t care what I think about that. When I look at him now, I honestly can’t believe I was ever married to him! It doesn’t even seem real. After all of this, there’s very little I find attractive about him. It makes me weary knowing that our lives will be connected forever!

Matt does spend time with Avery. He has her two nights during the week, after work until before work the next morning, and one night of each weekend (unless he’s away, which he often is), which is a full 24-hour period. His nights with her, however, are always scheduled based on whatever else is going on in his life. Whereas I plan my life around my time with her, he tends to plan his time with her around the rest of his life. He cancels or switches nights on a whim, which is very frustrating to me! I don’t have too many obligations at the time, but I am trying to have a life!

Avery seems to enjoy her time with him. In fact, for the past few weeks I have often heard that she “only loves dada” and not me, and that dada’s house is “funner” (the only concrete reason I have gotten out of her is that we have a black cat, and she wants a pink cat!) I know she is three and doesn’t understand what she is saying, but of course these words very hurtful to me! I feel like I have put my life on hold for three years, staying home with her to give her the best possible foundation instead of dumping her in daycare 50 hours/week, while his life has not skipped a beat. And he gets to be the hero. Daddy is SO FUN – woohoo! And mom stinks. I hope she grows out of this, and I know someday she will understand everything that is impossible for her to understand now.

I rarely say a bad word about her father to her – on occasion, I can’t help it (like last weekend when she threw a fit all the way home from his house because she wanted to be with him on HIS day, but he had left early in the morning to play golf, and I bore the brunt of it!), but I try to bite my tongue. I think it’s important for kids to take pride in where they come from, and if they are constantly bombarded with “your dad is a jerk” it’s bound to affect how they feel about themselves (which is essentially what happened to Matt and his siblings growing up).

The Second Year

Soon after Avery’s first birthday, my marital house went on the market (and sold in 1 day!), and we moved into my parents’ house. I LOVED my little house. But, although I was only 25 minutes from my home town, I hated the location of it. I felt very removed from my family, and as I have mentioned, I didn’t make many friends there. If I could have picked my house up and moved it up to Berwyn with me, I would have in a heartbeat!

But we moved into my parents’ house, and it was fine. Not ideal – it’s not easy to live in someone else’s house – but fine, and comfortable for me to be back in my home town, in the house in which I grew up. My parents had decided to spend most of their time in their mountain house for the duration of our stay at their house, which turned out to be a lot longer than any of us predicted! Avery and I spent the summer just hanging out – enjoying the summer, going to the Poconos when we could, going to the pool and the beach. It was great and I was trying to adjust from a year that had really taken the wind out of my sails! I casually looked for a job, and we really didn’t have too much structure.

Then, in November 2006, on the day that would have been my 5th anniversary (technically, it was – we weren’t divorced yet), my sister, Katie (my only sibling and best friend), saw a doctor for headaches and blurred vision she had been having for a few months. That day she was sent for an MRI, and it was discovered that she had a tumor in her sinus cavity, behind her right eye, which was pressing on her optic nerve. She was admitted to the hospital that night, and the following day the biopsy proved that the tumor was malignant. Our family was in shock, and immediately thrown into crisis mode. Katie had gone through a long, drawn out, and very painful divorce, and only a month before had gotten engaged to a really wonderful man. She has two kids who, at the time, were 10 and 7. We all thought her life had finally turned a corner to happiness.

In December, she was to have the tumor removed. She was told that there was an 80% chance that she would lose her eye, and much of the surrounding bone. We were also told that the surgery would take eight to twelve hours. In what turned out to be a five hour surgery, the doctors were able to successfully remove the tumor, and save Katie’s eye! It was a miracle, but it was only the beginning of a long and very difficult road. On December 22nd, she started 2+ months of daily chemo and radiation.

During this time, my parents were living with her most of the time. Not only was she a single mom, who needed help with her kids and household, she had to go to Jefferson Hospital, about an hour from her house, almost daily. This was not how my parents had anticipated spending these months, but luckily for all of us, they were both retired and available to do whatever needed to be done. It was very exhausting for them, and for my sister it turned out to be horrendous. There were days when my dad had to literally carry her down the stairs to the car to start her excruciating day once again. She lost weight, she lost much (but not all) of her hair, she had very little energy. She was angry, and she was scared, as were we all!

During this time I was at my parents’ house, about an hour away from my sister’s house, home with Avery, who was a year and a half old. There was little I could do to help – I was just barely succeeding at my own life at the time! It was an extremely stressful time for me, for Katie, and for my parents, to say the least!

At the end of it all, however, Katie was found to be cured! Not in remission, but actually cured of cancer. She still has frequent appointments with her team of doctors, and will have to be monitored probably forever, but over a year later, she is still cancer free. In October, 2007, she married Jose, on her 40th birthday! It was a beautiful celebration of life and love, involving their kids, his brother, and me and Avery. The whole day was lovely!

In November of 2007, Avery and I finally moved into our own place! Although I appreciated all that my parents did for us during those 16 long months, it is so great to have our own space. We are renting a carriage house about 3 miles from my parents’ house, in the town in which I grew up. It’s not huge, but it’s ours (for now) and it has everything we could need, including a yard where Avery and I can play, a back patio where I have a grill and some patio furniture, and a little garden (which I planted in the Spring, and is now horribly overgrown!).

This brings me up to the present – I promise future posts will not be so lengthy!

A Brief History of Us

My daughter, Avery, turned three a month ago.
Soon after she was born, in May of 2005, her father left me. Not her, just me. (Although, truth be told, he wasn't around much her during first four months.) The first two years of her life were pretty difficult ones for me, but I made it through, and I keep saying I am going to document everything, from my perspective, so that hopefully, some day, she will have some understanding of what went down. This seems like as good a way as any to achieve that end.

The short history of me and my ex-husband is this: we met in 2000, and it was a whirlwind romance. We were instantly inseparable, and I thought that finally I had found the partner I had been searching for. My family thought he was a prince, and everyone thought we were pretty perfect together (I think - do people really tell you the truth about these things???) Moreover, I thought he loved me like I had never felt loved before. He always said to me “you’re the best,” and I believed that he really thought that (and I think that, briefly, he did). We were engaged within nine months, and married nine months after that.

I think we had a “regular” marriage. The honeymoon definitely ended when the honeymoon ended, but we seemed to be good together. We fought like normal couples - maybe more than some, definitely less than many. But I have (had, with him, rather) a temper, and when we fought, I yelled. Because of his (crazy) family history, yelling was unacceptable to him. That’s not saying he didn’t yell at me – he did. He just didn’t want to be yelled AT. Most of our fights were about his “absence” from the house. What I thought was excessive absence. Yes, he traveled for work, which was unavoidable, but when he was not traveling, he was either playing golf (followed by drinks with the guys), or at the same club playing cards (including drinks with the guys) until all hours. I felt very lonely in my marriage, and especially so during my pregnancy. Certainly none of these enormous life experiences was living up to my prior vision of it!

As it turns out, there was another reason he was at the club - his soon-to-be bride, Bonnie. While we were married and during my pregnancy, it turns out he was sleeping with a (very young!) waitress at the club (yeah, her name is really Bonnie - ugh). She's not a waitress any more, and they have been living together for most of the past three years. Did I know about her?, people have asked me. Did I know what was going on? The answer is Yes. And No. I sort of did – there were signs – but who wants to think that of her husband??? What kind of man DOES that? And when I broached the subject with him, he told me I was crazy, or ridiculous, or hormonal (nice thing to say to your pregnant wife, huh?!).

So our daughter was born. My pregnancy had been fine, but I had some difficulties during the final week of my pregnancy, which necessitated several trips to the hospital, and ultimately an emergency C-section. In light of what I now know was going on with him, and only in retrospect, I realize that he was already mentally checked out of our marriage by then. My medical “problems” (trying to safely bring OUR child into the world!) were frustrating and annoying to him. If it would have been an option, he would have been on the golf course instead of holding my hand in the O.R. (Yes, I'm aware there are many men who feel this way, even in “good” marriages, but I can't understand that).

Let me interject here that at the moment of her birth, Avery was the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on, and I was instantly and deeply in love! Her dad and I did share a very lovely and tender half hour alone with her in the recovery room, during which time we chose her name. We had decided on Eliza, after her great-great-grandmother, but when we looked at her we both remarked that she didn’t look one bit like an Eliza! So after some discussion (also involving the nurses), we decided on Avery Page. She was (and still is!) the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen, and even the doctors and nurses all commented on what a beautiful baby she was! I came to know her little cry very quickly, and every time I would hear a cry out in the hallway, I would say “No, that’s not her… no, that’s not her… yep, that’s her!” and in she would come!

Fast-forward through six very difficult weeks (not excessively difficult, just difficult in the usual “first six weeks of a baby's life” way) – 4th of July weekend, 2005. We have a fight. A stupid, normal fight: he came home from the golf course to greet his sister and her family, who were swinging through on their way home from a vacation, and then he was going BACK to the golf course - I mean, come on, was I being unreasonable, or was this really necessary?! I thought I was not talking to HIM. For three days I thought I was the one not talking to HIM. As it turns out, HE was not talking to ME. We finally sat down to “talk.” To resolve the fight, I thought. And he informed me that he DIDN'T WANT TO BE MARRIED ANY MORE. Um, what?!

That summer was pretty shitty, as you can imagine. Here I am with a new baby - hormonal, exhausted, confused, out of my mind, and alone, my husband gone, for a reason that was beyond incomprehensible to me (we weren't “right” together, according to him - mind you, I still didn't really know about HER). I spent most of the time crying, and trying to deal with a newborn who was also crying! Horrible, awful, terrible, horrendous, miserable, dreadful – none of these words comes close to describing that horrible, awful, terrible, horrendous, miserable, dreadful year.

But it was also a wonderful, amazing, terrific, extraordinary, marvelous, and incredible year. Being Avery’s mom is, by FAR, the best thing I have ever done. It is awesome. She amazes me every day! She is beautiful, and very bright (yes, I know, every mom says this about her kids!). Her first year was a year of wonder for me. She is a very happy girl. Today at three, she is very chatty. But even then, she was making noises non-stop! I always played music for her as she was going to sleep (Sade usually), and as soon as she was able to stand holding on to the railings of her crib, she started dancing!
My favorite time of the day during her first year was our morning snuggle time. When she woke up, I would bring her into my bed with me, and it was just such a serene time. We would cuddle, and drift in and out of sleep. Now she wakes up full of energy and ready to start the day, but back then we had a good half hour in the morning to hang out in peace.

During her first year, Avery’s dad lived with a friend and finally got his own place, but it wasn’t anyplace he could take her (I never saw it, but he called it “Fight Club” – nasty). He spent time with her at our house, and sometimes I would hang out, crying in the other room, but it was better for all of us if I tried to be elsewhere. Eventually, he got an apartment, and when Avery was about 6 months old, she started sleeping over with him.

During this same year, I was teaching French and Spanish at a small, private, Catholic school for girls. That part of my life was wonderful! I had accepted the position literally 4 days before the start of the school year, and I was a first-time teacher, dealing with everything else in my life at the time! Somehow, my ex had led me to believe that if I had a regular job, it would help to hold our marriage together. Obviously, it did not. But those girls and the other faculty members were my angels! And none of them knew what was going on in my life. It was such a peaceful place to work – the other teachers were very kind and I still stop in to visit on occasion, 2+ years later.

And the girls were awesome! I taught French to girls in pre-K through 4th grade, and 9th grade Spanish I. The little girls were so much fun – eager to learn and full of questions. And the big girls were not always that well behaved (and I didn’t have much energy left in me to be an effective disciplinarian!), but they were a really terrific group of young ladies, and I enjoyed spending time with them during their free time, as well as in the classroom. I think (I hope!) the girls could feel how much I truly cared about them! I know I was supposed to be there to be serving and leading them, but the girls really helped to keep me sane during an extremely difficult year!