Thank you, friends, for your thoughtful posts. Unfortunately, circumstances have made it impossible for me to focus on them and respond in the way I had been thinking before the latest update. Maybe I’ll find the wherewithal to get back to them, maybe not. Please don’t think I’m ignoring your insights – I’m not; I’m just whirling with new data at the moment:
SM called on Sunday night while S. was over working on the house. S. picked up the phone and talked to her for two hours. He came home and immediately told me she’d called. He looked horrible, distressed - he had had a few beers before she called (with a friend who had come to help work on the house). He told me the following: He told her about us, about the baby, that he was happy about becoming a father, that we were moving in together. He also told her he was unhappy with me.
I asked him what she said. Her reaction, according to him? He said, “In the end, she said, ‘I’m sorry things aren’t better.’” For some reason, he also found it necessary to share with her our agreement that he not contact her. He told her it was because she had “been an issue” in our R, that we were working on it in T. He told me, “She had an issue with an agreement not to talk to somebody.” I said “Well, that’s really none of her business. She doesn’t realize why we might have that agreement, that stopping contact with the affair partner is part of the healing process in a R after infidelity.” He said, “Oh, no, I think her issue was more with control, that it’s controlling of you to dictate whom I contact,” and I said, “Exactly. If she were anyone else, it would be controlling. I’ve never asked you not to be in contact with anybody, except her. The reason she thinks it’s controlling is because she doesn’t understand that your R with her was infidelity in our R.” We talked for a long time about the call, and I managed somehow to thank him for sharing with me, that it was brave of him to tell me right away and to answer all my questions.
However, in a subsequent conversation (last night) he started digging in his heels about this, claims not to have understood that he wasn’t supposed to talk to her if she called (huh? I asked him if she were calling twice a week and they were talking for an hour each time, would he feel like it was violating our agreement), and basically got very angry with me, continuing on the “controlling” vein, picking and picking at what I was saying. I finally said, “You know what? If you don’t agree that you shouldn’t be contacting her, then don’t make the agreement not to. That’s fine. Do whatever the hell you want. But what I’m saying to you and what you’re not understanding is, it’s not acceptable TO ME. I don’t have to deal with it. I can choose to leave this R.” Upon which he had a mini-meltdown about how could I “choose to have this child together and then threaten to take her away” from him – that it was “blackmail.” I said in no uncertain terms that I had no plans to take her away from him at all, in fact I’m getting this D so that there is no paternity question expressly because I’m NOT taking the child away from him. I benefit from staying in the M (health insurance is one thing). I said that that had to be separated from our romantic R, and that I didn’t have to be in a R with him other than as a parent, I didn’t have to accept his actions.
Now, today, she has shown her true colors and e-mailed him. She stated that she is ignoring the no-contact rule, and went on to say how sorry she was for him (and how sorry she is for HERSELF(!?!) she wrote. Here’s part of the mail (isn’t there some really ugly color I can put this in? Let's try Poo Brown).
I can't stop thinking about our last conversation. And what is going on in my mind seems to be a mixture of going back in my own history, in ours, trying to grasp and in part understand the presen[t], feeling sorry for you, also for myself (let's try to be honest:)), and wonder what "could be done" if life is actually about doing at all (seems more like finding a way through what's happening anyway sometimes).
I'm ignoring the not-getting-in-contact-part for various reasons trusting you in telling me what to do or not if necessary. And what I'm doing is just talking to you for a bit, as if we had a conversation, without a direction, an end point or an universal conclusion. I wish you were closer that I could hear your voice, see your face while we both talk instead of just me, and still, writing (to you) is/has always been something special for me, a moment to focus, to gather oneself.
Thinking about last night brings me back to the very beginning, to where I saw you first in [England where they met], where I called you from a phone booth in Berlin in between two lectures unable to imagine your life in NYC (where you had gone back to after your visit at [her now-X-BF’s]). Why these old days... I remember emailing to you back then, and one topic we got sort of in contact through was: your unhappy relationship with [S.’s X-GF before the one before me]. Many aspects of this make me think today, why about this subject - I guess, because it was an easy way of sharing things and getting to "know" the other person indirectly. I remember giving you this book by Anais Nin, THE HOUSE OF INCEST. And I knew exactly why, today I still do - because it seemed to reflect so well, so pure, so relentlessly the torment and confusion we are facing in relationships at whatever stages they might be. And it was a bilingual edition…
For a long while I was fascinated by how we talked, how sensitive this person I had talked to over a couple of wines at a party and danced with later was. [which happens to be the night they ended up in some dark corner making out for the first time]
This was part 1. More is to come later, according to her. This was just her lunch break musings. So I await the receipt of this e-mail by S. (which could be today, or next week), and our T appointment tomorrow morning, hoping the former comes before the latter. I can’t sit on this another week. If it doesn’t come up before T, when it does come up I will ask for an appointment immediately. I am also asking to see the e-mail. I’m tired of half-truths. I want the true information to come from him, not from snooping. And if he refuses to show it to me? Well, that’s all I need to know.
I’ve been numb since Sunday night, but now the feeling is starting to come back and I am PISSED. I’m trying to keep to myself to avoid lashing out out of anger, but I am getting angrier by the moment. It just goes to show, S. just doesn’t get it, or he doesn’t want to. He wants to have it all – an intimate friendship (with flirtatious tension) with her, and some kind of R with me. Maybe he doesn’t care about the R with me at all – he just wants the baby. In which case, the focus of T needs to shift from our R to how to navigate co-parenting.
Lovely, isn’t it? And I had been giving her the benefit of the doubt as an innocent in all this, but now I see that even when she knows about us, she doesn’t have the common decency to respect our R and BUTT OUT. The sweet memories she’s trying to evoke just make me sick.
