I don’t feel as devastated as I normally would after we fight and he’s left.  I did go farther than I promised myself I would. I didn’t really want to fight with him at all.  But at least now that he’s gone I don’t feel crushed and empty.  I felt like I had more clarity when I talked.  I asked questions.  And the answers were pretty much the same as they always have been and so I drew a line.  I said, no, I will not be a part of this, I don’t want this ball in play.  This does not resonate with me and I will not be in relationship with someone while this is still happening.  I’m backing myself up.

I wish I hadn’t even come this far.  I don’t want to have to debate two different points of view, two different ways of seeing.  I don’t want to convince anyone to change, they’ve got to want to.  I don’t want to persuade someone to understand where I’m coming from, they need to want to know.  I’m tired of war masquerading as communication.  If I have to fight then I’m trying too hard to be heard.  Someone who wants to really know listens even when you whisper.  And if something isn’t my style, I can just simply pass it by.  I don’t need permission or consensus.  I feel it, I know it to be right and that’s enough.  Less talking and more acting.

This tempest of a storm called a relationship.  It swings from dramatic good-byes to hellos and cuddles and caresses and it’s dramatic and would make a good book or song, but it’s nothing real.  It’s a roller coaster ride.  It’s entertainment for the night (not necessarily good entertainment) but it’s nothing to stake any weight on.  I can see that now.  It’s like a game we play.  Let’s break up, let’s move in together. Let’s have space apart, let’s eat dinner together.  Let’s touch and squeeze, let’s debate and yell.  Let’s walk away, let’s come back to us.  A dance.  A play.  That never leads anywhere.  “It’s okay to know it’s not your A-game,” a friend once said as he shrugged his shoulders after hearing me lament about it.

It’s not that I can’t commit.  Not like it once was for me.  I can’t commit to something I don’t want.

When my knee started hurting last October someone told me, “Knees are your moving forward parts.  When you’re having trouble with them it means you’re resisting.” (Funnily enough, the person telling me was the same person I felt I needed to move forward from).  When I told my chiropractor that he said incredulously, “What, don’t you WANT to move forward?!”  Well, yes I did, I felt, but I also said that the moving forward entails leaving something behind and that was what I felt I had the resistance to.  I’ve never been good at moving on.  I mean, I look like I am.  I’m very good at booking tickets, jumping into cabs, walking away, saying “I’ve had enough of this” to many people on many occasions.  But as I’m packing, turning the corner, taking a few steps, or out of the situation… I.am.shaking.

I have a deep sense of loss, instilled in me at an early age as I watched my dad storm out of the apartment with only his guitar on his back and his blood running down his knuckles from punching my parents’ bedroom door.  I was four.  And I think I’ve been wrestling with transitions ever since.  Once I’m on the plane, out of the cab, to my next destination or with the next person, I’m totally fine.  It’s that free falling, trust calling phase in between that is so emotional….and painful in my knee.  And I can see that this space between complaining and fed-upness and actually having something new is important, valuable, and you’ll miss it if you’re impatiently focused on why isn’t what’s next already here!  My receptors aren’t open yet, I’m not a match to it yet, I may think I’m ready, but I’m not.  I’ve still got work to do; and when I release and just get busy doing the work I find it’s got a beauty all it’s own.  And I know when it passes.  I feel it, like watching clouds clear the sky for the sun.  Just like that.  And I wonder what I was ever so worried about.  And all I feel is freshness and gratitude.  And I don’t care that I didn’t have a date for Valentine’s Day or that there’s this zit on my face that won’t seem to go away.  I’m new, the purpose has been served, the storm is over and I walk as the new person I was wanting to become.

Even though it may not be perfect, even though I might be messy, even though I think it might not be well received; I want to write.  Writing helps me know myself better, writing helps me be vulnerable, writing helps me process, writing gives a chance that someone might feel the way I do and we can connect.  If people waited until something was perfect (or their definition of perfect) there’s just so many great things we would be without.  And sometimes, things start off being not so great, but work themselves into perfection, and that’s a beautiful thing to behold.  I will not always be all together, I may not be having my best day, but I will be me and I think that’s worth sharing.  I think that’s worth all of us sharing.  I saw a really amazing artist once who gave a talk on her work and she touched me deeply.  She had such a certainty about her expression and it was regardless of what others thought.  In fact, it seemed that when people challenged her she only became more clear and certain.  She expressed herself so well because she knew herself so well.  And she once said in an interview that missteps are as important as successes.

Today I worked on the house.  I didn’t feel that great or all that motivated but I found a level that I could rise to and I did that.  I did what resonated with me and ended up enjoying it so much.  I applied more coats of poly (clear coat polyurethane) on the woodwork around the windows and trim and O.My.God. – that wood just became more and more beautiful!  It drank it up like dry soil with water.  I felt that I was nourishing it, restoring it to its original beauty and it was very fulfilling.  As I write this, I feel that’s what’s happening to me as well.

I also helped Prem with the plumbing of the dishwasher and had a great talk about the idea that there is a Voice offering guidance but there is also a Grace offering you help when you feel you can’t follow it.  It’s like both roads are okay and it’s showing me that I used God to help me make choices with the idea of right and wrong; and that’s just not how I feel about it anymore.  I feel like my mind in alignment is powerful enough that anything can be made okay.  Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and as much as I thought I was over all this Hallmark bullshit, I felt really quite affected by it all.  Maybe because a new impossibility between me and Malcolm has arisen and it’s freshly apparent that we can’t even hang out casually anymore – he doesn’t want to.  For him, it becomes serious if we have sex.  Which is too bad, cos I really like our sex.  I think it’s like the glue that’s been holding it all together for me; that, and the fact that I seem to have dramatic relationships and it’s definitely got that.  Anyways I’m walking into the co-op, feeling what I’m feeling and trying to be gentle with it all and I hear in my heart, “it’s gonna be okay and it is okay.”  I wrapped myself in that like a warm blanket and I let it comfort me even today.

I was talking with my German friend who I call Schnooky and she was saying how I remind her of this friend she used to have in Germany.  She too was in a relationship with a guy who she really wasn’t committed to and who really wasn’t committed to her.  And one day she got a job in Berlin and as she was driving there she had the sense that all would be well.  She ended up eventually meeting a guy and they married and had a child.  I don’t know if that will be the specific outcome for me, but I feel the levity that this story affords me and I let it be another source of comfort.  And I know this.  I know I can’t lose anything I really want – but I’m also amazed at how much I can miss something that I never truly, in my heart really wanted anyway.  It’s this crazy sense of loss we have.  I also know that I was with a guy in Italy who was very certain about how he felt about me and how he wanted to be with me and I didn’t feel like I could have that kind of relationship, “didn’t feel like I was that kind of a girl,” I ended up telling him.

I would definitely play that differently now.  And as much as I have lamented not playing it differently, when I’m being tossed and turned around by the current, crazy one that I’m in, I know I couldn’t have played it any differently.  I played it according to who I was.  But I’m different now and I want different, and that’s why this current chaos is drawing to a close; because it’s no longer a match to who I am.  And, as fun as who I am has been, I’m ready for more.

We’ve been winging it with a lot of the kitchen design.  We just kind of go into the store, find something we like and make it work; that got us a nice countertop but lots of hassle installing it.  For the kitchen addition, it’s been decided to spend more time and energy on the design phase.  This has been WAY more fun!

By a series of serendipities, I ended up at Home Depot on Sunday morning.  Someone goofed up dates and so I couldn’t do the thing I came into town to do and it was suggested that I go do some shopping.  Gladly.  There was a display of kitchen cabinets at the front of the store and some workbooks on design with invitations to make appointments with designers on staff.  Good that it was at the front because I don’t think I would’ve gone looking for them.  They looked better made than the cabinets we had at the house, which we were already seeing were probably not the right size if we wanted space for a dishwasher.  I got excited, took pics, and grabbed a workbook.  I spent the night measuring and plotting and drawing and googling….geez, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there!  Seems like the whole kitchen idea is really elevated past just a place to store, cook, and eat food.   A place that someone wants to be, feels good being, inspired that they can tackle this new recipe and they want to do dishes.  “I want a sexy kitchen,”  I declared at my New Year’s Eve party.  A place where a woman would wear a silk teddy, hold a glass of wine and exclaim that she would LOVE to cook for you people!

Well, that all crashed and burned the next day when the sale ended, there was no staff available, and the dept. head couldn’t care less about any of it.  I remembered that the district manager, Lou, a lovely Italian guy with a thick accent from New York, had been a customer of mine when I was still bartending shortly after I bought the house.  He gave me his card and said if I ever needed anything to just call.  I talked to the store manager first and he was lovely and said he would honor the sale price.  I got a great store employee, Amy, who sat at a desk and played on the computer with me even though it wasn’t her department, she felt my pain and my passion and was willing to give good customer service.  She was like my sister from another mister.  I think you just gotta find your people in this place.  They’re here.  and you’ll find them.  If you’re not busy being annoyed by the ones you don’t click with.

The next day we go in and meet with Cary, a guy who clearly knows his way around designing a kitchen.  He takes my sketches and our ideas and puts them into a program and out comes a virtual design of how it’ll all look.  I knew there must be a way to see it before you build it!  I have a great time with him.  I feel like an artist, imagining, visualizing, sculpting.  I feel uplifted by the whole experience.  And that’s what I want this house to be; my life to be.  I don’t want to spend anymore time scraping in the dirt for crumbs or reacting to things that don’t match my verve.  I want to rise above and move on to what I know in my heart and see in my mind.  If I can see it, then it has been given me to do it.  Let me follow it and glide by the obstacles with grace.

I have to keep reminding myself of this, because I keep finding myself limiting myself!  I can’t have dinner out because I have company coming – so I guess only one fun thing a night!?  And I just ate out the past two nights – so I guess there’s a limit on how much I can go out.  “Spread it out” I tell myself.  “What the fuck does that mean?”  I tell myself back.  ‘Spread it out’, so it’s limited then?  I know I’ll never be satisfied within a limited idea.  Here’s just another one to be rid of.

I think this limited way of thinking is even worse – it becomes a limited way of doing.  “You attract what you think about,”  I read on Twitter recently,  “Not what you want, but what you think about.”  Wowz, that’s hit me.  I’ll attract limited now.  Great.  Which it felt like I had attracted today.  I feel a bit like I spent part of the afternoon with someone who was repeatedly letting me know in a few different ways, that he’s not available.

I’m never really sure what to do with this information.  I could pull a Meg Ryan in Joe vs. the Volcano, “I have no response to that.”  I would like to at least get to the point where I don’t react to it.  I did start to detach, but then felt bad, re-engaged, and then just ended up pissed.  It felt like it was a no-win any way that I played it.  Maybe it was a win.  Gavin and Emily came over and now I’m chillin and writing; grateful for how it ended up at least – so I must be on the other side of the miracle.

Welllllll, the floor stain job didn’t come out the way we thought so we ended up putting on another coat.  Funny, when we were first talking about stain, I wanted to go with something darker; and now, here we are.  I think it looks sexy.  It’s hard for me to keep positive when someone else  gets upset about it not going to plan.  But, maybe that was the plan, and we just don’t know what the plan is.  God knows that’s been proven time and time again!

And now it’s off to Madison because my sister is on her way from the Zoo(what I call Kalamazoo, MI) and I want to spend Christmas Eve Day bopping around in the holiday spirit and awaiting her arrival.  Mom and Dennis are going to a holiday open house, “evidently not THAT open cos we’re not invited”, she says and we laugh.  So it will be just the two of us and I’m looking forward to some sister time.  With no one else around.  A rarity.

I feel bad leaving Malcolm behind (does going somewhere without someone really have to be called, “leaving behind?”  He’s not a mitten I’ve forgotten in my school locker for the weekend for goodness sake.  We’re having Christmas apart as people who are no longer in a relationship do.  It’s what’s appropriate.  I remember the day my mom texted me to ask if Malcolm was coming, ‘assuming you’re still together’.  At this point, I don’t know why anyone would assume it.  My sister says it’s basically a flip of the coin.  I’m glad she can laugh about it.  God knows she deserves that after all she’s heard me complain about it, and I hope I can too one day.

I am so in the spirit today.  The weather is quite mild, what those in Wisconsin would call mild, and I’m on my own going wherever I please for as long as I please.  The shops all have generous sampling of yum food and wines, everything is decorated and lit up, most people are in an extra good mood….I really groove on it.  I love special things.  I buy lots for the party and a vegan pumpkin pie and coconut whip to take to my aunt’s for Christmas Day.  It feels like a movie.

Later, Sara and I take turns googling restaurants that may be open and candlelight Christmas Eve services.  We’d love to go to Peace Lutheran’s like we always did when we were younger and lived around here, but decide that the drive to Sun Prairie is too long (it’s probably only 20 minutes) and the service to late (it’s at 11) and sometimes trying to travel back in time doesn’t work quite as good as you think it will (this, seems the only valid point and so I give in and go back to googling).  We  end up at a Laotian place in the Atwood neighborhood and have wine and curry.

With some time to kill before the service, we browse through Walgreen’s Christmas clearance shelves – it’s like the only thing open, and even here, we have fun.  My nephew Gavin says that we regress to our 8-year old selves when we get together.  As we get older,  I think that age gets older, but still….we can so easily go back to laughing easily together.

I’m a little behind on stories…the holidays take on their own timeline.  The refinishing of the floors, as scary as it seemed, is complete.  And I think I was being taken down to some original material as well.  So many things were colliding: holidays, family, relationships, the time issue of my sister coming to visit and us wanting to be able to stay there.  And the early holiday party for Julia, Malcolm’s daughter.  This all stirs, but it’s a nice stir.  I see me trying to get it all right, and how that drives me and those close to me nuts; so I stop.  I remember what’s really important; being together and seeing what happens.

Coffee has been renamed “liquid inspiration” as I try to get paint colors right for the back bedroom.  I go from a Caribbean green to several versions of orange to “Afterglow”, a color that is like inside sunshine and accents nicely the trees that you look on out those windows.  In the Fall, it would be breathtaking.  I go the chiropractor and he has to brush himself off after he adjusts me.  “Good thing your appointment is at the end of the day”, he says.  I talk to him about his reclaimed wood floors more than I do my spine.  I move my air mattress from room to room and spend a lot of time bent over, with a paint brush and rag on the floor.  I talk to my friend Peggi on the east coast for hours of it.  We talk about relationships and trying to see what we want, what works, what doesn’t and letting go of what doesn’t just because.   She makes me laugh.  She asks why it’s taken us so long to figure it out,  I say because it feels like it’s pretty new to look at things like we do.  Deeply and honestly.  Beliefs and self-concepts are the carnage that this process can cause and so it takes awhile to uproot such long-held ideas and practices.  For me, it’s like learning to write with my left hand.

I get dressed to go to the holiday party at the High Rock and I can barely keep my eyes open.  I’ve just put the final coat of polyurethane on the two bedrooms and that’s a big step closer to having a real bed and my sister and I sleeping in it when she comes up in a few days.  I run into my boss from last summer and he asks where I’m working now.  I say nowhere.  “I’m flipping a house.”  “You just never know with you,”  he says, “I’d love to have your life.”

I love having my life.  Even though everything is dusty, even though I sometimes have to get dressed in the garage, even though for awhile I had no toilet while the bathroom floor was being retiled, even through all the blood, sweat and tears I’ve put in.   I own appliances!  (Doralee just cracks up when I exclaim that)  I own a house.  I don’t pay anyone for it every month.  It’s mine (well, half mine) and the freedom and creative juice that allows for me feels amazing.  And I want to remember that.  I write to remember.

The other day I was driving to it and Melissa Etheridge came on the radio.  This woman was the constant companion of my early 20s.  She wrote anthems for my life, or so it seemed, and she was taking me back; to college, to boyfriends, fiances, various medical crises, my first nephew Gavin being born and me relocating back to Madison, my life coming together and falling apart in a constant dance.  I was winging it.  And as I came up to the house, all warmly lit from the inside as it was getting dark, I felt my own time warp of all that has happened in the 20 years in between.  What a life I’ve had, how I didn’t know all that was to come….and I hope to share it all with you, by writing and remembering.

 

Sometimes I think that this is the craziest way to do it.  Buy a house, then break up.  Go to New Zealand for his mom’s funeral and realize before you even board the plane in Chicago that maybe this isn’t such a good idea.  Maybe he isn’t going to open up and share this experience with you.  Hasn’t he shown that he’s just not that kind of guy?  But you hope, and each new situation seems like a new opportunity for something….. well….. new.  Yet it always ends up here.  Right here.  With me wondering what the heck I’m doing here.  Again.  Giving myself to someone and something that I’m not even sure I even want.

Sometimes you’ve gotta step totally in before you know.  You watch from the sidelines and you think about it, you weigh it, you discuss it, but eventually, you just have to play.  There’s no other way.  You’ve gotta make a move; then, you’ll know.  I love him, but I can’t be with him.  And today, that hurts a little again.  My mom wants to know if he’s coming for Christmas, and the neighbor wants to know if we’re moving in and although I feel clear when I say “no”, I also feel a little sad.  Like the sound of some glass breaking.  Like some disillusionment.  Like if only I had tried harder.  But I don’t want to try harder.  After all this time, it’s either happening or it’s not.  I gotta let it go.

It’s tough.  Almost as tough as sanding the floors for the last 3 days.  To be around him feels as though I’m crossing myself sometimes.  Like I’m breaking a promise.  Like I know what I want, but I settle.  Like I don’t really feel that I’m worth it.  This pattern goes way back.  It crossed my mind driving home tonight that it’s like I feel I owe someone.  A debt.  A trade.  That I alone, myself, am not enough….so I have to add something.  Tip the scales.  A bonus.  It’s weird.  It’s also somewhat familiar.  And it’s a rude awakening.  And it needs to stop.

Otherwise, I’m just a whore.

Sometimes it doesn’t sync up again.  Sometimes you tell someone you can’t do it anymore and they don’t try to change anything and it doesn’t get any better.  Sometimes the road that curved to lead you together is now drifting you apart.  And you see signs of it everywhere.  And there’s nothing you can do about it.

“After five months of us saying we didn’t know what we were going to do with the house we bought – flip it, live in it, rent it – it’s become apparent that living together in it is not an option.”  I tell her.

“Does he know that?” she asks me.

“Know which, that I can’t live with him or that he can’t live with me?”

“Both” I guess

“I’m pretty sure he does.”

It’s not easy buying a house with someone you’ve been on and off with for nine years, then going to his mother’s funeral on the other side of the world and realizing that it’s probably not going to work out for you two.  Then trying to fix up the house and trying to hold out hope that maybe somehow it will bring you closer, but all it does is show you how different you really are.  But then there’s a glimmer, you feel heard and things change.  So you don’t renew your lease and you move in with him until the house is livable – a shower at least – and he’s great at that.  He’s great at those big moments of needing to get your shit out and into the garage waiting to make the house a home.  Practical stuff.  But all the emotional stuff, forget it.  Can’t share it, can’t understand it, and doesn’t really have time for it.  So when it’s time to put some things from your packed bag into his dresser drawer, you end up taking them back out again because it just doesn’t feel right.

It’s not easy deciding to sleep on an air mattress on the floor surrounded by dust and drops of texture from the ceiling but it feels a little bit easier than that.

And I can diffuse the intensity.  I’m learning that if I don’t participate in conflict then I don’t have to spend so much time complaining about it afterwards.  I’m learning to handle this with some gentleness and grace.  And that even though you’re in it as a partner with someone else, you’re actually still 100% responsible for it all.  If you find yourself looking out there, look within.

The only thing missing in any situation is what you have failed to bring to it, A Course in Miracles says.  It also says that you can’t be asked to give anything that you don’t already have.  Help me to rise to the occasion.  Help me to find and provide whatever it is I seek.