๐ถ๐ถ๐ธ // ๐ถ๐ป๐ผ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
You might be inclined to believe, based on my first post, completed just minutes ago, that I see only the negative here. That I am only drowning in trauma, swimming in it. That I am self-harming. That I am in trouble.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
But Mister Blue paid my rent because for minutes, I tilt my head. For the promise of a few more half-hour visits, I finally handled something that another me would have maybe been evicted over. The moral me. The one who would never do this sort of thing. She cried to strangers at welfare offices, scared about what small humans would eat and confused at how to get the job to get the home to get the help to get the job to get the home to get to who.
If you found yourself in that situation and didn't once look to one of those born-in members of the patriarchy to save you, you're a better woman than me. Here's your one change, Fancy.
To be fair, I was raised for marriage. My mother was a broken woman, and it took this work for me to see the myriad ways. Think of that what you will, but reducing the myth of sex and body shame has happened more in the last two years of this work than in the twenty years of medicated therapy that went before them.
That's not an indictment of modern medicine. I have real medical needs, and having them met in a new state has been hard. I'm candid about my history, and that makes mismanagement easy. I'm a liability, and I don't lie about it. I think that honesty should make people trust me. It doesn't. People like to be lied to.
I want to say everything. I want to tell all the truth.
Yes, this work that I do breaks my heart. But I also need to tell you that when that happens, the sad songs seem like my mother's voice. It feels like something not ancient or trustworthy, but fragile and afraid of all that is new. Why has my body so readily adapted to the sexual puritanism of my idiom-speaking mother while also clearly rejecting so much else about her? Well, because society reinforced it, I suppose.
I am not here to preach feminism. I still find echoes of internalized misogyny in my thoughts. I can't speak to what particular sensitivity of wiring made me seem so much more submitted to my parents' words than, say, my husband to his. He seems to naturally have a less burdened understanding of when his parents were right and wrong, and doesn't much judge them for either. He's very good at letting people be people. Sometimes I mistake it for lethargy. Sometimes I truly believe he doesn't pay enough attention, and sometimes I feel wrong for that.
He appreciates the moment more than anyone I know. He has known the worst of me. We are perilously, tragically codependent, or proof the Greeks were right about the first humans. I have my hypothesis.
But we love deeply. We have perspective. We have fun. We are rational. We understand that even the DSM has limitations, as does the doctrine, as does the law. Not every living person can conceive of a love that doesn't involve physical possession or sexual fidelity, much less one that exists in a space where some of what's happening is ugly. We do not seek to abuse or exploit.
I do struggle with my own convention. He isn't a very hard worker. He doesn't like it. For someone whose entire model for love involved earning and proving and excelling, it can be hard for me to feel loved by him. We talk about it. A lot. We know we can't sustain this.
I am giving him time and me time to recover, but first... this is where we are.
I have an exit strategy, but it requires abstaining from the very gentle medicine I've been managing my mind with since actual medical care got so ornery. My last dance with Mary Jane is long overdue, and that's... another can of worms.
Maybe that's why the sudden posting. I feel more coming. Maybe this is a one-night-only thing. Handsome bought another cartridge... made another whole fuss... he keeps sort of designing fun "grand finales" in the morning, but by nighttime, we've just smoked again. I'm only doing it because I think he's afraid of my exit strategy.
But I gotta tell you: I'm afraid of his.
Nothing I'm saying here hasn't been said to him. Yet. But those urges are coming. I am definitely biting back words. Sometimes because it's hard to know when your trauma brain is right. I've been overly suspicious. My "gorgeous absent-minded husband" narrative can be replaced with wondering what I'm allowed to expect from a man, but that also seems like a narrative I absorbed more from TikTok than my own spirit. I am not that loud inside. I play at it, or I get sad, or I fall apart... but I do not want to make anyone prove anything. I don't want to be a person that hangs on stereotypes and old traditions. Not when I know now how much they sand down.
I came here and handed over something so heavy... but I also have grown here. Maybe in spite. Maybe because. But I am not ready to stop growing, and right now, I do it with Handsome. And right now, that means a few more months of this. But only if I stop with the stupid weed.
I can say things all day about the vibe surrounding my green abstinence. I am an adult, and it's me choosing to inhale. My overall sense of unease surrounding him could be codependent projecting. It could be completely accurate. Either way, it is still me inhaling.
If I want to leave this work, I want to do it for a job that I want. The job I want requires that I pass a hair follicle test. The hair follicle test needs me to have 3โ4 months' worth of marijuana-free hair.
For two years, I have hinted and stroked and hoped and talked and adjusted the shape of what I would want or accept in a marriage or a life. I have given great detail. It is not terribly much. We do not have it. But leaving would mean losing him, and even if he is not the husband of my dreams, he is my absolute best friend. He wants to be the husband of my dreams, and if I can just stop being so fucking mad at him for arriving here... maybe I can right the ship. I know I shouldn't have to. But remember that girl who crossed state lines to fuck her friend's husband? She wasn't always the hero either.
Because another thing this work has taught me is that I can... I can look at this man I love and I can understand that sex is different for me now than it was. I've said as much. Not to corner or condemn him, but because I needed someone to witness what was happening. Sometimes that started fights or made him defensive. Sometimes, he was so worried I was building the wrong narrative in my head that he ignored the one we were creating. It happens. I've done the same. I will absolutely offer mercy when it's a sin I know so well.
But not forever. Not anymore.This work taught me the value of time. How transient it all can be. How everything and nothing can exist simultaneously. How the things we mystify most become powers ruthlessly wielded, and we end up in a world of criminalized desires and stolen consent and confusion when it could just be a world where ducks act like ducks... I come away from a few minutes in the regular world and have to pontificate.
If you made it this far... I can say... this has been... fucking complicated.
Sometimes, it is so ordinary. I go into a room. I do a thing that's grown pretty easy and burns calories and genuinely makes a person walk taller. I even sometimes help with the date idea or the birthday gift, and I know for a fact I have made a marriage better when the truth would demolish the marriageโand that's a lot to hold. But it's a lot to look at in the light.
How easy it is to make a villain. Usually of me. Second of him. No, I am not subscribing to any frigid wife shit. I have just been a frigid wife. This work has taught me to imagine the life of my first husband when he was married to me. It has made me examine my own marriage.
I came from a catholic+agnostic-turned-evangelical household in the rustbelt. I was raised to be a white-dress-wearing wife. I was raised to cook for six. I was raised to smile. I was told I had a pretty face and big bones. I was taught to clean my plate.
And once, when there was a new kind of spaghetti sauce that I didn't like... when I forced it down... when it made me sick... when it came up and onto the plate...
My half-brother and sisters don't know what it's like to watch the light change on a dining room table while you try to eat and keep down a dinner you've lost once, while a man twice your size watches, "raising you like he was raised." And because they do not know that man, they cannot know me.
Because it wasn't them staying home from Catholic school when those skirts didn't cover the strategically placed welts. Did you think I meant placed for the uniform? That was secondary. These wounds were designed to be harder to comfort. Designed. It was admitted. A shared technique. If you beat them here, they can adjust their sitting. If you do like this...
The 80s were wild.
The eldest daughter, parentification... there are words now for it all. I am learning them again. Not as an addict desperate to flee. Not as a young mother trying to stay alive. As a woman of a certain age who sees things a little differently now. Who has tried a lot of ways.
I wonder if I would even want out of this work if it wasn't for how everyone else hates it. Maybe I'll moonlight. I need time to decide. I'm going to pay the bills another way for a while.
Somewhere in this, there is another truth: he is a brilliant, skilled writer of fiction, inventing a really lovely world. In a pre-capitalist existence, I would take my love for the work I plan to do and happily not be assigned a gender paradigm. I would take my nurtured-into-martyrdom logic and happily support my writer husband. I would be the woman behind the man because I am communalโespecially when there are no wolves at the door.
But this cycle was complicated by my own myth. When my trauma caused me to look at my husband for rescue, when I hurled around blame, I used language about what he allowed to happen. I was still not facing my own truth.
I was still saying yes. I was still saying, No, baby, it makes sense for you to write your book and I'll just keep dancing.
Because I was the girl who ate that fucking spaghetti.
And now we both know. It is crazy and it is beautiful, and it sometimes also feels like weโve said everything now. Because now, it is just time to get there.
So he keeps planning this grand finale where the weed gets smoked, but I end up here, writing about whatโs next for me. Heโs in the living room. Maybe thatโs how it will fade. Maybe this is a whimper. Maybe weโre just catching our breath, but I am never looking at him or anyone else like that again.
Not in a hard or angry way. In a real way. The actual truth: this is you.