Off The Track and Into The Ditch

Well Back on Track month has hit a slight glitch because my husband has decided to leave me. I could go into a lot of detail about the D&Ms, the various topics, the way our lives have been for the past few months. For me it can be best summed up as, “We have two small children, one of whom wakes me up three times a night, we decided to move house and I had to renovate a house at the same time. Plus you’ve had depression for a year now and frankly I’m so tired I have to schedule times to cut my toe nails and even then it doesn’t happen. So yes, couple time is a little thin on the ground.” He summed it up as, “It doesn’t make sense because you’re perfect on paper but I just don’t love you anymore”. Succinct, no?

A large part of me at this point is divided equally between;

1.) Wanting to hit him. A lot.

2.) Wanting to kill him.

3.) Wanting to run away.

4.) Wanting to gloss over it all and pretend nothing’s happened.

5.) Wanting to throw myself at his mercy and beg him to stay.

I know myself quite well. I know that these feelings will get 48 hours to battle it out and then the very tiny part that isn’t the large part taken up by those five things is going to take over. And that small part is the part of me that secretly agrees with him and knows that the only way we will ever be together in the future is if we’re apart now. And the even tinier part that relishes the idea of not having to involve anyone else in my decision making process ever again and can’t wait for shared custody so I can ditch the kids occasionally and remember what being hopelessly drunk is like (much like Indian food I expect – sounds like an exciting prospect at the time and then 24 hours later you remember why it’s been six months since the last time you ate it.)

I am, of course, devastated. I love my husband dearly and I’ve spent a long time encouraging him to be happy. I probably wouldn’t have done that quite as much if I’d realised that happiness means him not being with me, but that’s all water under the bridge. I think, now that there is 24 hours between me and the earth-shattering moment when my heart broke, that we are both quite obliging people and we do far too much of what we “should” do and not enough of what we want to do. And we spend a lot of time trying to make each other happy instead of ourselves.

It is my desperate, fondest hope that by giving ourselves space and time we will remember why we were together in the first place. I really hope that he decides that I’m not perfect on paper and that he loves me anyway. I want to go back to dreaming of a future together instead of planning one apart.

My daughter’s birthday wish this year was “I just want to be with my family forever”. I don’t want to tell her that it won’t be true. I tried. I really did. I told her Mama and Daddy weren’t feeling very happy together and she told me not to worry, we’d feel better in the morning after a sleep and then we could all go and have pancakes for breakfast. I thought my face would crack. Even now, as I write with my throat and chest constricted, I hope that I can avoid trying to explain this to her again.

I suppose that when this sort of thing happens people look to take sides and assign blame. As much as I’d love for there to be a bad guy, and for that bad guy to not be me, I think the truth is that we’re both just in a really sad situation where no one is at fault. I certainly don’t think I’m the only one that’s hurting.

Anyway, basically Back on Track month is still going to go ahead but it’s going to be a lot harder now because there are so many more things that I’ll need to recover. I don’t think that dwelling on this and agonising over what happened is going to help me so I’ve decided that I’m going to keep striving to be happy and let my relationship with Charles run its natural course, whatever that be. There is one positive thing in all of this – I’m so traumatised I can’t eat and I’ve finally lost some bloody weight. Hurrah!