Thinking it Through

I guess it started on my walk this morning. I was mumbling to myself about what a huge mistake I had made marrying my second husband. Fourteen years of misery. (With some wonderfulness...) but in the big scheme of things I fell in love with the wrong guy and tried to make it more than it was. Just a nightmere of a marriage. I knew on the honeymoon that I had made an enormous mistake. I even had my bags packed and was going to go back home but I stayed. (I can go into all the stuff that he did wrong and believe me there was an avalanche of stuff and he is not a good man...) but the thing is I am learning to take responsibility for my actions and that I am not blame free. There were two of us. And I stayed. And kept coming back for more. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. That was me. Completely insane. I lost everything too. Even had to declare personal bankruptcy. Talk about apt metaphors! Anyway I survived it and I did learn enormous lessons about me, about love, about relationships. And in some way that horrible mistake was my path. I needed to learn those things. And everything I went through made me into the person I am today. The one in a wonderful perfect for me relationship doing all the right things. So the big thing about having gone through that second marriage is I had given up. I thought he was my only chance to ever be married again. And that I had to marry him and stay married. Or I would always be alone. God there is so much I could write about from there but I guess what I started with is that if I had just trusted that the right person would come along I could have avoided all that and here I am at 60 with the exact right relationship for me. A little late. But here. Just like my mother died very early. That was her path. That was mine too. I had a wonderful mother but only for 13 years. Now I have a wonderful marriage (we are living together) and it is more like marriage than either of my two official marriages...So it is happening for me late in life. But the point is today I am in a great relationship. Everything I had ever hoped for ....dreamed, fantasized about. I have it. Jeff. OK> so I was going on about the magazine I write for and how I could have botched it if I had not kept the faith....(see I did learn from that bad marriage...) and the magazine I would like to write for....and the piece I submitte. I need to get dressed for work and go but this is where i will take up: scheduling changes at RIS no more than that...and we cant know what is going on at More and if they ever even got it. so I need to also learn patience.

and faith.

Pig in Mud

I am so completely in love. Jeff. He is my wonderful. The man I was always supposed to be with. Lucky me. Sometimes we just look at each other and giggle. I am 60 and in some ways even though I have been married twice and had a third about to be husband Jeff is my first real boy friend. He is 68. So it can happen. Of course he was married for 40 years who by all accounts was a saint. So I digress to give her some credit right up front. She probably did all the training and nurturing. And he has an amazing 90 year old mother who also must get lots of credit here.

Now to Jeff. He is perfect. Kind, handsome, tender, bright, funny,loving silly athletic and just larger than life. And he is humble. I have never seen him try to be something he is not. He walks in a state of grace. He is honest. He is unassuming. And he has all his hair. So this is my life.

How do you meet such a man? Where do I even start. The short--very short--answer is J-date. I met him on-line of all things. Something that just four years ago I would not have considered even briefly. I was out of my mind at the tail end about to spin completely out of control trying to be god knows who. I was just leaving my insipient alcoholic stage emerging with a full blown problem and convinced I was the only human in the world. I had just left my second husband who to be fair was a terrible choice for me and incredible teacher. If it is true that we learn from our mistakes he had volumes to teach me and that he jumped in with both feet is serving me well today.

circuit overload

I am on circuit overload. Doing way too much. No time to write, take walks, buy new dog food or cat food...or people food for that matter. And I am paying for it. I only made two meetings this week too. So when I forget about me I start feeling it right away. I suppose this is good. If I want to feel good I have to take care of myself and that of course means doing less. Taking fewer commitments, making fewer promises. When I am like this I tend to get sharp. Screetchy. And my stomach gets tied up in knots. So I need to stop. Take stock. OK. That is what I am doing. I did not do my pt but at least I checked in and wrote even these few lines are a something. And tomorrow morning I will get to one of my favorite meetings. Today the meeting I finally made it to felt crummy. I kept thinking there was too much testosterone but of course it was just that I am off. It would have been a fine meeting if I had just joined in and shared instead of resisting. It really is an inside job and I better take better care of mine. It is also Yom Kippur at sundown tonight. Atonement. Ammends. Must be similar things. Are sins the same as character defects? Maybe.

chilly sunday

This morning Jeff and I had a quiet leisurely breakfast and Jeff told me stories about his sons when they were 10 and 11. Baseball, little league stories. I love these. He was such a good father and Lois must have been a great mother. The boys are amazing men today. But back then I love it when Jeff tells about each one. He says Robbie was the most beautiful baseball player in the world. He was perfection. Eric too in his own way. Perhaps more powerful, less graceful. But this is not about them right now. It is something random. Jeff was telling in the telling of the boys and baseball about a camp they went to for the summer. Jeff taught tennis there. Anyway one of the heads at the camp he tells me was an alcoholic. He woke up groggy and slowly because he had been drinking the entire night before. And he was slow and out of it the next day. I wasnt like that. I only remember having the whirllies once. And only once do I remember passing out. Towards the end of my drinking career I was at a shower for my daughter-in-law and they kept filling my glass. With snowflakes. (Those are cosmopolitans only made with clear cranberry juice instead of red. ) Anyway when we got back to the house I went upstairs to the bathroom and apparently laid down on the tile floor and passed out. No one knew I was drunk, I was apparently making total sense, and just laid down. When Wiley realized I was upstairs and had not come down he woke me up and I got into bed shoes and all. This does not mean I am not an alcoholic just that our common perception of what an alcoholic does is off. To be sure there are zillions of alcoholics who get drunk and behave badly. And I did now that I think of it get very very drunk--two bottles of champagne--and drove drunk and got a dui that was lowered to reckless driving. I almost never drove with alcohol in me after that. I never thought I was an alcoholic then either. I went to a probation officer and reported in once a month for six months. She talked to me about her compulsion: buying clothes. She said she had closets full of clothes with their price tags still on bunches of them. I listened like the good little people pleaser I am, trying to make sure that she liked me and never really talked about myself. My take away from all of that was that it was ok to drink just not to drive if I had anything to drink.