Just when our relationship got to the point where I wanted to run and run and run...he dropped 20 inches of snow on us and made sure I could run absolutely freakin' lutely NO WHERE!
What do two adults do when they are facing serious questions about where they are going and whether they are going to try going there together? I don't know. Because last weekend was not two adults. It was many adults all stuck in the same, thankfully large, house for a couple of days.
(BTW, the bright spot was a wonderful visit with my sister - whom I love beyond measure, as well as my brothers and my sister-in-law.)
So we fought. For several days. In whispers. We got hardly any sleep. We dredged up every issue we could think of and when we ran out we invented some. There came a point in the midst of this that we decided that we were ended. We could not continue. We were done.
Then we looked out the bedroom window at the acres and acres of pure white snow and we realized that of all the things that felt wrong, splitting up felt the most wrong of all.
We ended up staying a day longer than planned which turned out to be a good thing because we were able to take my father to the hospital for his hip replacement surgery. As Chris sat there quietly, patiently, with me and my mom and my dad I realized that he's a good guy. Not perfect. But good.
Good because he knows that in the world of places I hate above all others, the hospital is right at the top of the list. And we were there for HOURS waiting for dad to go into surgery, get out of surgery, come out of recovery. Even with a lunch break in the middle (Cheesecake Factory - Red Velvet Cheesecake!) it was too much time for me. So when I said "I want to check out the gift shop" what he correctly heard was "I need retail therapy NOW!"
I walked through the doors of the gift shop and made a beeline for the jewelry counter where I scored 3 pairs of absolutely fabulous earrings.
I slept like a baby Monday night/Tuesday morning. 3 days of fighting, several hours in a hospital, a trek across still not great roads, and still no freakin' clue what what happening next with us - I was exhausted. But while the fighting was done the talking was not.
It is a week now since the worst of our battle and what we have to work with are a bunch of analogies because we aren't broken, we:
- Are like several beautiful necklaces all tangled up. Time to tackle it one knot at a time.
- Like a car stuck in a rut. We need a fulcrum (he had to actually explain to me what one of those is - I understood the intent but had no idea it was a tool!) to help us get unstuck.
- Are able to work through much of the junk we gunk up between us BUT need to occasional poke to make sure we actually DO it.
At the end of it the visit to the counselor was a good thing - not because the visit went well but because it forced us to decide head on if *we* are worth working on.
We have a long way to go before we are anything approaching perfect - or even completely comfortable with where we are or where we are going. I still don't know if we're going to end up together in the long run. But then, does anyone?
My favorite quote in all of this was from Chris. He said "You are so rational when you are dispassionate. I like it when you are irrational because at least you are passionate." In short, he needs me to be as committed to us as I need him to be.
Meanwhile on our left hand ring fingers are two white gold & diamond rings. Our Christmas gifts to each other. We picked them out - he for me and me for him - with no input at all from the other. We weren't together.
And oddly the designs are lovely, elegant, and very similar. Eerily similar.
They are promise rings. A promise of a commitment to each other - to us. They are the visible reminder of the decisions we made out of last weekend's "fighting." Because what I realize now was that we weren't fighting each other...we were fighting *for* us.
NL
