Not really piecing and trying not to jinx it, but

[Freckle6]

Thank you Burt!

Since it's been so long, it's actually easier to squash down my expectations and to let things flow naturally rather than trying to hurry them up so everything can be "normal" again and we can forget about this whole little hiccup in our marriage. You know, how we all hope our spouses will have an about face and come running back to us after a few weeks of separation.

Journaling some more. We IMed for a while tonight and the conversation got to be about our cats. I have two cats, one of which one was we adopted 14 years ago together (her sister died last winter) and I got a kitten this past summer. He has a 2 year old cat also. Anwyay, he talked about how if our cats were all together we'd have to decide on a consistent feeding schedule/routing. Mine get mostly wet food and his is dry food only--not a big deal in the list of issues to blend households again if it comes to that. But it was nice to hear him talking that way.

He also asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I told him that honestly the best thing would be for the 3 of us (him, I and our 5 year old boy) to spend some of it together. I put the "some of it" part in there because it's probably too early to jump right back into the whole extended family thing and I'd probably rather not go that far yet myself. He actually said, "I feel the same way....give it to him!!!"

I'm very, very close with his parents still. They've become like another mom and dad to me after this all started and they still go all out for me on Christmas like they did when we were together. We've just been having "covert" get togethers all these years instead of the old Christmas day dinner and gift exchange thing. My family has no ill will towards him either. I've never trashed him to them (that's what this board was for!) so other than them not liking that he hurt me so badly, I know they'd welcome him back with open arms as well if I was happy. But it feels too soon to me right now. We'll see how it unfolds though. It's still 2 weeks away.

Another side topic of the cat conversation that came up, very unexpectedly, was religion. Neither of us come from religious families and have never been religious ourselves. I attended Catholic school through 6th grade, but mostly because my parents didn't like the public school where we lived. When we moved to a more rural area when I was 12 (to the school where I met my H) and I went to public school from then on. We were married in a Catholic church and mass because despite my ambivalence about religion, I always envisioned a Catholic wedding for myself (maybe all those years of Catholic school... ) and anything else didn't feel like it would be "real". My H isn't Catholic (baptized Methodist), but went along with my wishes for our wedding.

Tonight when we were talking about our cat that died last year, I said that it was hard to explain death to our son (then 4) without any religious base. Our son hasn't even been baptized. I always planned to have him baptized Catholic, but the Bomb came when he was 6 weeks old and it was the furthest thing from my mind back then so it never happened. So, tonight he said, "Then let's take him!", meaning take him to church. I told him that was the last thing I ever expected to hear from him but he said as long as he had some say in it that we should go. He asked if I wanted to be Catholic. I told him I technically was but I wasn't set into only one denomination. He said something about all the kneeling in a Catholic mass and I made a risque joke about that and he said, "I'm trying to pick our religion and your mind is on sex! Though I like that!" The "our religion" part was another nice validation of his current intentions.

Boy, am I long winded! I come here to get this all out though because absolutely no one in my real life knows anything about this. I don't want to get any of our families' hopes up or get ahead of myself. But if I keep all this inside I mind goes every which way.

For now I'm taking it day by day and am grateful for what I have at this moment. There are times when I feel my wall and porcupine quills come up (a good example was last week when he canceled the Saturday night plans because he was freaked out), but then I try to remind myself all the reasons I want our relationship to work out and for us to be an intact family and try to figure out what to say or do based on that being the goal. It was that line of thinking last Saturday that made me let him know that I was sorry for being short with him and appreciated his honesty and left him with the "friends still?" low key white flag. And dammit, it worked that time!