No, this is not a post on being environmentally friendly. I'm going to beat a metaphor into the ground. I've always loved Kermit the frog. I'm rather fond of the color green.
There is a family that I envy, I'll call them the Barnes, who have been foolish enough to let me into their inner circle. There are five of them in the nuclear family: a mother, father, two girls and the youngest is a boy. This is the same configuration as my family, and like my family, the parents were young when they had their kids. The mom and dad are about 18 years older than I am while the kids range from six to ten years younger. I get along famously with all of them. The oldest daughter is the one whose child was baptized this past weekend.
Mom Barnes and I have a lot in common. We carry guilt in similar ways, are wounded by our childhoods much the same. We don't really discuss the specifics of our past much, but the shared horror bonds us. She is one of the few people I can be quiet and upset around and have her understand what I am feeling without words. Of course, it also means she knows when I am in trouble when I am trying to hide it, and I don't always like that. Her husband completely adores her. He is one of the coolest people I know. He also happens to think I am one of the smartest people he has ever met. He knows a lot of really smart people, so I take this as the highest of compliments. He's a man's man and he's also a real daddy to his daughters. Not the kind that does things he ought not.
The kids are just plain wonderful. They are gorgeous, the stinkers, and nice. The oldest married a man who has money. She is his trophy wife, which is sort of funny as she is his first wife and he is only 34. He treats her like gold, as he should. The middle daughter moved to L.A. a few years ago with her awesome husband and I miss her terribly. When I spoke to her at dinner the other night, she mentioned how glad she is that I now live near her parents and brother because it makes them happy for me to be near them.
The brother is a decade younger than me and has a wicked sense of humor. I'm pretty sure he has a little crush on me, which is just fine as he is pretty hot. I like to tease him about how much older I am than him because it makes him all flustered and protest-y. Gotta love that.
The Barnes are exactly how I wish my family was. To be able to see it in practice gives me hope, but it also tickles my green-eyed bones. Although jealousy sounds like I would like to take what they have from them, and I love being a part of their group - would be broken hearted if it ceased to be. Wistful is maybe a better chosen word.
A woman I went to rehab with was considering ending her stable relationship with her boyfriend because although she loved the guy, she felt bored. All her other relationships with men had been tempestous. This woman had been sexually abused by her father, and while that secret had haunted her life, she admitted that some part of keeping that secret made her feel special. Without that feeling, that excitement, she didn't really know how to have a relationship. Her name wasn't Wendy, but for some reason I kept wanting to call her Wendy. There's another woman in my current AA group whose name is not Wendy, but I want to call her that also. She's on husband number six.
A couple years ago, I watched the movie Peter Pan starring Jason Isaacs (who I think is sexy as all get out), and I thought there were some seriously incestous things going on between Wendy and Captain Hook. I'll have to rewatch the movie because I think there is some connection in my head for this daddy thing and growing up and playing house with a self-centered boy in green named Peter. Not sure. I know I still have many secrets, some I have even kept from myself, and I cannot be well until they are all out. I wonder if I look in the mirror, I will see a girl who I think should be named Wendy also.
I'm not enamored of the idea of mowing through two husbands before reaching 40. Whenever I read that the divorce rate is greater than 50 percent, I always think that seems impossible. But, shit, I already contributed to that statistic once, and I am likely to again. Yet I still wax poetic about finding the right connection. WTF? No question I have an overwhelming desire to be truly loved by a man. Is my current quest simply thinking the grass is greener where ever my feet are not?
To achieve the intimacy I am searching for, I need reciprocal affection. Do I set my cap on waiting for my prince to come in, whispering promises of whatever it is that I think will quell the loneliness? This seems a ridiculous idea. On the one hand, I am trying to learn to be less self-sufficient, to allow people to love me and help me. On the other, this sort of neediness apalls me. Frightens me.
Although we may have a BINGO here about why I choose people who can't actually love me at the get-go.
It makes me think of the delight parents take in a child that the priest spoke of the other day. I always knew that was missing in my childhood. Realization of that lack came to a thundering head when I had a child of my own. My love for him was enormous, and there was no more room for the glamour that my family was loving. But facing that ugly truth was and is, well, ugly.
Now I'm faced with a similar dilemma: admitting I am in a passionless marriage. But I really should not be comparison shopping for greener pastures. Rather I should know when this one is in a drought and all hope of rain is gone. The futility of sticking around is obvious. As several readers have mentioned, a lot of this sorting out is best done with counseling. I have a great therapist to talk to. I don't know about marriage counseling. I doubt it is something my husband would be interested in doing.
The commonality of my first marriage and this one is that in both cases I felt as if my husbands had little understanding or interest in who I am. Their primary attraction to me was how I made them feel about themselves, how I loved them. My therapist has conjectured that, for reasons of my own we have yet to fully uncover, I have chosen men who cannot see past themselves to love me. I think, maybe, traipsing off after my best friend would end me up in that same stew.
The bottomline is that I feel like I am giving up pieces of myself, the opportunity to experience something wonderful. Being alone is not the worst thing I can imagine. The not inconsiderable downside to that is the impact on my son. I could throw in a gardening pruning analogy here, how cutting back the old, dead growth is good for new growth, but I've already overdone the green analogy. That would be pushing it, even for me.
No perfect answers. Time to just chill a little and feel out what I should do next. See if any brilliant insights hit me. I think, though, I'd rather be lonely by myself than lonely with a husband. There is something soul sucking about that state of being. I've gone to the dry well one time too many and I am tired and parched now. It's time to move on. The process of doing so seems extremely daunting.
It's more a matter of courage to change than it is anything else. I've got a cushy thing going here. But even cushy gets uncomfortable when it feels like it is swallowing you whole. It's a formidable task to stay verdant if your heart never sees the light of day.
element opened up to a compartment containing that element. Geek decorating. I think you can now get your own with just photos 
inside the compartments.
