Why I Cry

It has been over 6 months since my husband came back from Oregon and asked me for a divorce. He has a long history of fucking around on me but I knew this particular one was different immediately. And it was, he is now practically living with her, her kids have had the talk with her and her ex about her relationship with my ex, and he seems to have no problem being 600 miles from our children. Sending money, barely calling, and not showing interest in the happenings of their lives is the way he shows his love.

So of course people ask why I am still mourning him. Why do I let him affect my mood and my day? Well my first answer is that I have depression stupid, like I can control my thoughts. Believe me, I have tried. Positive thinking, affirmations, even the cold hard truth isn't enough to set my mind straight. I believe something even more dangerous than just having depression is an optimistic person with depression. Hope can crush you, hope can have you hanging on for dear life to a reality that shouldn't be. Hope can make you see good in something where there is none.

My ex, Mike, was nice enough to move us down from Oregon to my mom's in California, with the promise of a better future with him. He then went back up to Oregon for a month to fix our car that couldn't make the first trip and started a relationship with a friend he'd had for a while. He came down, guilty, his mind made up, and asked for a divorce. Now, I'm not saying things were good with us because they weren't. We had had many arguments in the months leading up to the move, specifically about his time, his staying out all night drinking, and his lack of want to be around us. So there were definitely red flags, lots and lots of red flags. But he kept saying he needed to spend time with all these people because we'd be so far away and that the boys and I would have him around so much in Sacramento that we'd get sick of him. (A promise he uses often and never actually follows through with. That was the promise for the move to Oregon too.)

But I was with this man for 17 years. We'd gone through ups and downs, been there for each other through hard times, brought our families together, experienced a love I thought made everything worth it. But it was naive of me to think that he could love anyone nearly as much as himself, that he could put anyone else's happiness ahead of his own for even a moment, that he could commit to being the half of him that is a great father and husband. Because when he wasn't fucking around, he was amazing, he was attentive, he showed that he loved us. But he has always had a conflict in him between the man he thinks he should be and the one he is when he lets his walls down. These two people are at odds with each other, totally incompatible. It's kinda funny because one of his reasons for leaving me was that we've never been compatible. But I was compatible with family Mike, not party Mike and party Mike became his default in Oregon. I tried to get him to understand that if he could find balance he could have both, but obviously balance was never achieved.

But back to me. I am now living with the kids in my mom's house, surrounded by history and memories shared with the person I'm trying to escape. I sleep in the room where he protected me from my dad, where we took care of our newborn second son after Mike was laid off and we had to move back to my mom's, where we made up so many times. I take baths in the room we would talk about our day and laugh and unwind. I walk to the backyard and see the playground he built for the boys and the pool where we taught them to swim. I drive to the store on a road we took family walks and taught our oldest to ride a two wheel bike. I drive past a place where we had a public sexual experience one fun night, multiple times a week. I can't even look at it anymore. And those just scratch the surface. I am in an ocean of good memories, floating out to sea, trying to keep the kids afloat while I'm hanging off the edge like Jack in Titanic.

I think of all the plans we made, even as we drove down to Cali the day we moved, and think how none of those will come to pass. I think of all the times I've already had to be both parents, how I've seen the kids do something I wanted to share with him so we could laugh together and how much I could use his help when the kids wake up sick in the middle of the night. I think of all the sacrifices I made for our future just to have it taken away from me. Most of all, I think of the best friend I lost, who probably never really was my friend because who treats their friends the way he treated me? And then I just feel stuck. Stuck in the dark, feeling alone, wishing I could go back to the days when he was just fucking around on me, and its so pathetic.

I know how it sounds and that is a huge reason I feel the way I do about myself. I feel like I was conned. Conned out of a life with someone who truly loved me, conned out of a father for my amazing children, conned out of a friend I thought I always had. I feel betrayed and jealous and this deep and intense anger. My heart actually hurts. There is a tightness that won't go away that I know will fade with time, but time is the problem. Time allows me to think, to dissect what went wrong, what I shoulda, coulda, woulda done differently if I had another chance. But time also allows me to see the time I wasted on a man who never deserved me in the first place. I've gotten to a point where I know this is the best thing for me, but I'm still so goddamn depressed about it. So why do I cry? For so many reasons.