Day 189

It’s been a few days. A week? More than that.

To be honest, I am not sure how many more entries there will be. This blog is an exercise in vanity at worst and an ill-thought of implementation of a diary format at best.

No.

I haven’t lost any weight this week.

I will have, in the space of a few days, gone back to the progress I’d of made if I’d only lost a pound a week since I started.

And, as we all know, it’ll take just one comforting meal to lose even that bit.

And I’m not sure I care.

My husband… he’s a good man. He’s been through a lot. His family wasn’t the most supportive towards shows of emotion, and apologies were rendered with a punch to the shoulder. He went to military service at eighteen, saw seventeen people blown apart before he reached twenty-one. Spent days without sleep, on a ship that may have been sinking underneath him, waiting to see if there would be a second attack. Suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in a time when the military told him there was nothing to be done about it… Fears unexpected death, had to get meds that have robbed him of vital parts of himself  just to keep the panic attacks away…

He’s a good man. He tries.

But I don’t think he sees me anymore.

“I love her patience.”

That’s what he told the adoption agency he loved about me.

He loves that I stand by him.

I do not know that he loves me.

After doing the absolute minimum to help me with getting everything ready for the adoption process… After a month of lying to me, twice, about where he was during the day because he “needed some alone time” and didn’t think I’d understand... After leaving me at home, sick, after a six hour drive, because he needed to get away…. He tells me he wants to talk to me about his independence.

And it leads to things like “Wife, you’ve asked me before whether we might be better friends than married….” And, “Husband, what are you unsure of? Me and you? Or me, you and a baby?”

“…All of it.”

He doesn’t remember saying that.

I do.

Then again, I was very upset at the time.

Then again, he didn’t seem to realize that separation means an end of a marriage. A separation. Not just a break.

Long story short, I waited. Within twenty-four hours he was texting me to say he thought he might have made a mistake. Might have just lost his best friend and his wife.

But he still didn’t know how to verbalize what he wanted. What he’d meant.

I wait.

Forty-eight hours later, we agree to meet up at the house..

And he is over an hour late in showing up because he fell asleep.

The conversation was simple.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“I want to be married,” he says.

“Okay. What else?”

“I don’t know.”  

Fine.

So I came back to the house, but did  a rough split of it into two apartment areas. And he says wants “the chance to win you back”. But not together. He still wants some distance. To deal with things. He’s never paid his own finances, scrubbed his own bathroom, experienced things for himself. He went from High School, to the Navy, to married.

I understand. He’s never lived a life on his own. During rough times, I miss the good old days of being on my own, as well.

But … he isn’t on his own.

There’s an us now.

But the first night after that discussion, he tells me he’ll be home at six.

I’m thinking maybe we’ll watch TV together, catch up on Doctor Who. Get a pizza. Be a couple. It’s been a long time.

It feels like forever.

That’s worth pizza, right?

Fuck the diet.

We’ll get a  pizza.

So, I’m home at six.

And I wait.

And he comes home at eight.

They never talk about this in the movies, you know.

What do you do, when the one thing you need, is something you’ll never get?

I love him.

But he doesn’t know how to express love back.

If he loves me as anything other than a big sister figure even in the first place.

And I can’t fix that.

I can’t change that.

I made a promise. He’s my husband. And he is legitimately hurting. And he is legitimately trying.

But I need him. And he just… doesn’t know how to be there… and doesn’t … maybe doesn’t want to.

And, naturally, being a sane woman…. I know what this means for the adoption.

I will never have my own children.

Now, I won’t have any child at all.  Or at least… not before I’m forty. Before I’m so old that a birth-mother will be less likely to think I’m going to be good enough.

I’m getting ground down. Soon I’ll have nothing. No beliefs about myself as valuable. Everything … slowly but inexorably taken away.

…Rich Mullins would say that’s where you meet God.

And CS Lewis would say that the decisions I make now, now that there are circumstances that warrant decisions, decide who I am. The type of person I am in adversity molds me more than the type of person I am in contentment.

So.

Here I choose.:

I am the type of woman who does her best to support her husband, who is a great deal of pain.

I am the type of woman who does not over-burden her friends with constant complaining.

I am the type of person who chooses to follow a God whose presence, if not nature, has been logically proven to her by the observations of the universe around her.

I will be kind.

I will be just.

And I’ll keep walking.

And… I’ll eat a bologna sandwich for lunch and grilled cheese for dinner – staying on diet even though it hardly seems to matter anymore.

See, internet? Don’t worry. I kept this entry on topic.