tears, blur, morning

He and I have a lot of grief to deal with.

The loss of our twinned identities for so many years at the same corporation.  The hell our lives were thrust into after his layoff — the fact that the company was that cruel to think that they could lay off a husband and expect the wife to stay on?

That was 2000, but, then the hardest part came.

For me.

I had spent hours and hours working to build my practice.  Hours and hours and hours all for free after work at night and on Mondays.

Nothing but work for others.  All my life.

Like a slave.

Nobody cared either, or saw or knew.

Then our parents began to pass away.  His father in 2001, my mother in 2002, his mother in 2004.

I think in 2003 I gave up psychically.

What I know is that marriage is a blend of two people.  This is 27 years of time.  We began to date in November of 1984.  We married on December 21st of 1987.  We bought our house in 1988.

I know that he will have to process his grief over his parents by himself.  He has their house, and yesterday he went there.

I feel less tension this morning, but a lot of tears.

Our relationship should have been the central thing all these years and it wasn’t.  It was all about “others.”

This morning is hard and blurry because who am I?

It’s been many years since I’ve known that part of myself.  The part that was just me, without helping others first.

He borrowed against the house after the layoff.

He knew what was coming.  He planned for himself.

That is the hardest this morning as I look around he house and what isn’t.

Yesterday I was down in the harbor and I talked to someone I know about all of this.  She told me how she survived divorce three times, and how having a horse saved her.  She said, “it has always been I can’t,” in her life — but that the horse taught her how to love.  I grew up riding them too.  I loved that.

I’m beginning to think that this time period was about my being enslaved to pay for real estate and I don’t know — that is a really hard truth because all these years there has never been the money.  For anything fun.  This morning I am wondering about that, because, fun should have been the first thing.  Fun and love.  And our house.

He had two marriages before me.

I’m going to paint the walls first.  The house will be sold.  There is nothing here to show for the last years, just memories of when we got it.

I asked to be the apprentice to the woman in the harbor, so I am wishing for that now.

I am wishing for a place where I can regroup and find myself again — also to learn self-sufficiency and how to not give up myself ever again — or give myself over like I did ever again.

I feel sort of erased completely?

I do.

As if my separate identity was erased here.

This cocoon I have been in has been so sad since 2000.  I almost didn’t want to go on, but there are worse things that can happen to people and so I am thinking of that right now.

The first thing I will do is paint the walls.  Over the years i bought cans and cans and cans of paint, but somehow nothing got painted.

All I want to do is paint.

I feel like I can do that by myself, now.

It’s like I fell off a map — and now I have to refind my place.

Maybe he feels like that too this morning.

I know that both of us have to deal with what happened separately because it is different for both of us.