Sorry for not posting in a while, but I've been away...
Last C session was a good one. We again got into a "let's beat up Zebra" session, I felt cornered by C, W sat there. C has remarked a couple of times how she's noticed how much we "care" for each other, how we "protect" each other. Anyway, this "cornering" started when C asked how the time since the last session had gone... I said we really hadn't seen each other much, W had been out. Well, the truth was I had been out. Work got busy, and I was not home. Work has been terrifyingly slow for months, so I just forgot that I'd actually been away from the house... a break in the routine. And, W HAD been out a couple of nights... Out generally means out sometime between 6-8pm, home after midnight. Same pattern as from the heat of the affair, just home a little earlier. C homed right in on my resentment of this, even tho I don't really feel much overt resentment anymore. It's just what is... C wanted to know how this makes me feel. Finally, I said it makes me feel abandoned. W goes out, comes home after D and I have gone to bed. Night after night, or at least 2-5 nights a week (it's gotten a lot better in the past couple of months). I told C that there was a time that I KNEW what she was doing from snooping... that I read the recap of the gorey details. (I didn't say this, but it was like reading porn, except my wife was one of the writers, and a participant). Anyway, after months of that, I knew that almost everything I heard from her was lies and deception. I had desensitized myself to all this for sake of my sanity. I had no choice. Then, she said she would end the affair, that she would work on us. But, the social patterns, the nights out, the late nights really changed little. I told C that I had learned to trust, but that sometimes it just crashed in on me, and I got a bit flipant in my remarks. I told C that W still went out, even admitting that sometimes he was there, and to top it off I was shackled to the house as caretaker of a small child and couldn't checkup on her if I wanted to. I told C (and W) that sometimes my ability to blindly trust was tested and challenged.
When I finished, W had a tear in her eye.
C gave us an exercise. We were to hold hands, the one at a time, one of us closed our eyes as the other stared at the other. Then, the looker described what they saw, felt, thought. I learned that W cares about me. Deeply. She said she really wants it to work. She made it clear that she knows it's still a lot about her. It felt pretty good, but hard. Actually, I like the C sessions that feel hard. that make us think.
So, now I've been away for a couple of weeks (talk about trust....). While I was gone, she called me more than I called her, and she sent me mindless little cute notes on my cellphone text messaging. Nice, warm, fun stuff. We had lots of fun chats, even when I had to cut her off and run (Cellphones do have there good points). When I got home this morning sometime after 1am, she came down and sat and chatted. I had been in a timezone 3 hours removed, so I was well awake. She just came down to chat. Nice.
This afternoon, she was going out with D, but D bailed out. W came into the living room where D and I were sitting and said "Well, I still love ya, but I'm off". I spun around in the chair, thinking of course that W was talking to D, only to see her looking at me with a huge sh-- eating grin on her face... She came over to where D and I were sitting, put her arm around me and gave me a squeeze, and gave D a peck on the cheek. (Did all this really happen?!?!?, Naaaaa......) That, too, was really nice.
So, I'm back to watching the baby steps. Two weeks away.... sometimes you have to remove yourself from the situation to notice the progress. Sometimes you have to detach and maintain your distance....
