Opening My Daughter’s Sores
By: Third Act
Tags: Dating, Divorce, Relationships, Separation, Family

Looking after myself causes pain for others.

Image credit: pxhere

Today I return to prose, having told my story with some poems. Today I’ll expand a little more, on how I open my children’s sores.

Divorce and separation

My oldest daughter is once-again not talking to me. She is upset that I have decided to start dating. Perhaps I should not have told her, but I thought to myself honesty is the best policy. I thought that if she found out by accident, it would be even more damaging. It seems some hurt and conflict in life is just unavoidable.

The crux of the hurt is that while my wife and I have not slept together since the beginning of the year, we have only been separated since June, and the divorce was only filed in July. Therefore, my daughter cannot believe that I would start dating so soon, and has accused me of wanting to date for a while and just waiting for the right timing. My wife has accused me of dating as a manifestation of an ongoing mid-life crisis, never mind that I have been faithful to her, and mostly loyal to her, for 30 years, and she is the one who walked away from the marriage and filed for divorce.

Of course, there is no logic in such arguments. It is all emotion. It is whatever feels good at the time and brings some relief to the discomfort of heartache. My wife suffered emotional trauma, and her words are the words of a person still angry, judgmental and accusatory. Every conversation is a justification of what she does. Every justification an indictment of me.

The bigger issue though, and one I hope my daughter will one day understand, is that relationships do not end when someone files for divorce. That is simply ceremony, a civically condoned way of signaling the larger community that from this day forth, two people will be parted by government sanction. Relationships die much earlier, in small and large ways.

For my wife and I, we never communicated well. There was love, there was joint sacrifice, there was support, tender moments, carefree holiday experiences, and many other decorations you would expect in a loving and caring relationship. We never learned how to fight well, and we never learned how to heel hurt from not fighting well. After 30 years, accumulated unresolved hurt was too much to overcome. When I decided my desk job no longer bought meaning to my life, it was the straw that broke my wife’s back, but the relationship was over way before then.

The relationship was over when I would get frisky on a Saturday morning, and would spend the rest of the day agitated because I was rejected. This only happened a few times, but it happened enough that it stuck in my wife’s head. The relationship was over every time I would suggest to my wife that she do something other than what she wanted, and she argued without concern for my needs that I was thinking about it all wrong. The relationship was over every time she came to bed and spent half-an-hour on Facebook instead of spending the time with me — even though I had bought to her attention how hurt I felt by this. Perhaps the relationship was over before we even met, when my Mother physically and verbally abused me when I was young, and I failed to resolve that hurt. Perhaps the relationship was over when my wife’s father called her stupid or denigrated her for having a different opinion than him.

Maybe the relationship was over when my wife’s parents were divorced — there have been three divorces on my wife’s side of the family and none on mine. It is the second divorce for my wife. My parents had a troubled marriage, passed on bad communication approaches to me, but they were chronically Catholic and would never consider divorce, though they did appear to grow closer after the children left the home. My wife’s parents were also Catholic, but the mother took the kids and left the house in the middle of the night. Who knows what mark different examples of marriage and relationship leave on children?

My wife had many endearing qualities for most of our marriage, and most people who meet her respect her as special. I am heart broken by the loss of my best friend, and I crave for a chance to get our relationship back to what it once was. That craving though denies the reality of the relationship. Two people who bought enormous baggage to the hard work of marriage, and two people that together did not have the capability to heal each other’s wounds, and created many more new wounds in the process.

All things considered, it is a small miracle that we lasted for 30 years. We should not be standing on ceremony now. It is time to take what we have learned and move on to people who have the emotional intelligence to deal with our issues. Yes, we have to work on our issues, and I can see the argument for waiting until I am “fixed” before I start dating. I’m not sure I will ever be “fixed” though, so I go forth and explore what people may be compatible with me, fingers-crossed, hope for the best.

Two steps forward,

one step back.

I propel my life outward,

so I do not spiral downward.

Yes, it is messy,

not the clean sheet esteemed.

An ordinary man who has lost his bestie,

true loneliness for the first time since my teens,

I long for the years in between.

It is not that I am blameless,

guilt-free, without regrets or shame.

It’s just that I have sat on this couch for six months or more,

and it is time, to move on from hearts broken and torn.

I am sorry for the wounds of my children and how I open their sores,

but it is time for me to get off the floor, before I turn into a corpse,

from spending days and nights ruminating on all, my own sores,

until so depressed, I take up with a whore,

or permanently exit, the main stage door.