Living with groundlessness

[AntoniaB]

Punkin you always have the funniest thing to say :-)

Just sitting here musing tonight before I take my ambien...incidentally my mood is much better the day after I take it, and I'm more productive, so clearly the better sleep it affords makes a difference.

Anyway this is what I think hurts me to this day the most. My XH killed my hopes and dreams, specifically, the ONE THING I wanted more than anything else in the world was to "mate for life." I mean that was really important to me. I am sure that it's because I met him at 19 and had been a virgin till then, him too, and this was something he and I despite not being "religious" really put a lot of stock in and felt really good about.

I just picked up Julia Child's book to read and just like practically every other book's acknowledgements, she thanks her husband of this huge number of years. That's what made me think of this...that I will never get to be "one of those people" anymore who look back and say that I was married to the same man my whole life. It's just gone, poof. Unless I decide to remain celibate, I'll not have been monogamous "for life" as I wanted to be. I don't know if I ever said this before here, but I dedicated my first book to XH and there it is, every time I open it or teach from it, the dedication where I say "I love you--forever", which was engraved on the inside of his wedding band. There it is, staring me in the face, the fact that he ended up becoming a liar and he broke the vows and turned away from me.

It just makes me sad. I know that when your dream dies you have to come up with a new dream, and when the goal you had is taken from you and there is nothing you can do about it, you have to accept it, but somehow it just feels like whatever I come up with now in this area of my life will be second best, a consolation prize because you ended up choosing a liar for your husband and you didn't know any better 2 decades ago.

No matter how many books I write I can't run from this fact and I can't erase it. It just feels like there is a black mark in my permanent record, to use a school metaphor, and it's written with permanent ink.