Thank You

I don't think people know how much they mean to me. I should tell them, but just thinking about it my nose is tingling and my eyes are welling up. Any little thing is likely to bring me up short.

Why?

Because I have a hard time believing I am worthy of thought, consideration, affection. The significant people in my life have gone to great pains to teach me that. My kids though...they are everything a wounded heart needs. But I still tell myself, children love their most awful parents. I loved my mom. She was not good for any of us kids.

So, I am trying to get through this feeling of being undeserving. I look at the words and actions of my kind friends and know, if I could just bypass myself, reaching out to them means they reach back.

Every little thing is so significant I feel as though I owe my life for the kindness shared with me. It is really, truly and deeply felt by me. Appreciated even if I don't have the words or ability to express it to you.

Old emotions return

Early in the summer of '92, I said goodbye to P. I remember standing on the chair in the dorm lobby, just looking into his eyes, wanting the moment to last forever. I was set to spend the summer working in a factory earning money so I could return to college the next year. He was off to 13 weeks of boot camp. I just wanted to hold on and not let go.

This weekend, I was taken back to that time. The kids were in bed, I was sleepy too. But I knew I had mere hours left until P. was to leave for an extended period- again, 3mos.

I sat on his lap and looked into his eyes. Suddenly, almost 15yrs melted away and I was that 18yo again looking at her 18yo beau, missing him before he was even gone. All the wrongs we had done each other disappeared. We were just two kids, in love.

Again, I have long hours to think of him. Where before it was standing at the controls of a factory machine, my mind wandering, now it's staying at home with the kids, trying to keep my mind on task. I worry about his safety and well-being again. I long to connect with him, as I have almost every day for the last 15yrs. Here's the person I have literally spent my entire adult life with, no matter the problems, arguments, heartbreak...there's a connection there.

Most of you know we are having problems, contributed some by my ongoing depression and some by his own issues. Being apart makes those problems harder and easier. I dwell on them, yet I feel like there is a reason we are so strongly connected. The ache of being apart reminds me of one of my favorite moments in Jane Eyre:

Rochester tells Jane of his feelings of her pending departure:

"'I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you--especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you--you'd forget me.'
Chapter 23, pg. 221

If only those feelings were so easy to live through. If only the forgetting was so easy. At least this time I have my kids to share my love with. They have given me more smiles and snapped me out of the doldrums more often than I care to admit.

saying goodbye

One more post for the day (on a roll, huh?)

Recently I left a group I have been in for years. I got to the point that seeing interactions/non-interactions was a negative experience to me. Let me emphasize: to me. It's all about my perception and what I could handle. Individually, they are fantastic women. Even as a group, just wonderful. But the particular dynamics weren't something I could handle in my life at this point.

I didn't want to leave in a huff of drama, like I have seen others leave email loops. The melodramatic good-bye posts are often really a ploy to get others to beg them to stay. So I just quietly left, figuring nobody would notice/comment for awhile.

What was there to say? No matter how I say it, it would seem like an accusation. Ya'll aren't meeting my needs at this point and I would like to move on instead of trying to live in the past and recapture the golden years. But that reads wrong, since (as the old break-up line says) its not you (all), it's me. It's my lack of the social ins and outs that other women seem to have. It's my fear of asking for help while intensily longing to have very close connections. I don't expect anybody else to meet my needs as I often don't even know what my needs are.

I just wanted to leave while leaving was a strength for me. While I was doing it for the right reasons, to decrease the negative feelings I have. The only problem, is because I have seperated myself so quietly, and I already have a habit of not reaching out, I fear that I have cut myself out of their lives completely rather than just this aspect of it. And par for the course, I don't know how to fix it.

disquiet

Some days, when I appear all peaceful inside, underneath feelings are churning so much I can't even tell one from another. It's when I want to connect with someone else, but I don't know who or how. When you can't even name what's going on to yourself, how can you talk about it with someone else?

I've been told I overthink things, and I'm sure that's right. I suppose though, that I would rather overthink things than be a person who never thinks about anything. I've seen those people and their lives seem incredibly boring.