Priorities and tests of strength

[MJontheMend]

I hear you, Mojo. I'm not thinking that his stunts were explainable or acceptable.

When I think back on that incident, I realize that the reason I made excuses for his behavior so often was that I was just embarrassed to admit that I had such a lame husband because it reflected poorly on me. Right before they took me into surgery, my hospital bed was surrounded by a crowd of observing med students and others and they gave me the phone to contact my H. I had to make an excuse for him in my mind so that I could smile and signal to the medical personnel that it was okay to proceed because I was alright on my own. I'm better off as a single woman than I was when I was married because I can fill the space held by my cardboard cutout of a husband with real others or my own functioning. Yesterday I woke up in my cute little apartment which I can afford on my own without having to worry about some PAL quitting a job. I was feeling rather horny and I didn't have to worry about some PAL's LD and just gave my long distance lover a wake-up call for some aural affectionate man-handling which he was quite a bit more than happy to provide. Then I spent some QT with my D16 rewarding ourselves for moving heavy furniture and driving the big scary van on our own with sushi and pretty bed linens and funky Ikea lamps and now we are feeling quite cozy and content. One of my near future goals is to do the kind of traveling that I missed out on in my 20s. If I find myself alone in a hospital in Outer Mongolia, I'm sure it won't be pleasant but it will jive with my worst-case-scenario expectations and I will deal with it as something that I packed in my own life suitcase. When we talk about becoming more differentiated, I think we are in a sense saying that everyone should pack their own suitcase in life, at least when it comes to the basic necessities. On the evening I stopped packing my H's suitcase for him, he chose to no longer accompany me on the journey and that's alright. I should have done it years earlier and thereby avoided hearing a lot of whining about wrinkled shirts.