Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

I think…therefore I’m dangerous.

An Example of the Mentality of the Losing Party

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This is just too perfect an example to pass up.

You know, I really didn’t want to blog about politics this season. I’m sick of it. The fighting, the lies, the way our country has become divided on ideology. But when I scrolled through the content on the Tumblr site, White People Mourning Romney, I just couldn’t pass this one up. To me, it succinctly identifies what’s wrong with too many people on the right: they just don’t have a freaking clue what they’re talking about:

Stupidity is Sublime

Points:

  • Obama has been president for nearly four years. If he were going to “screw us over,” don’t you think he would have done it by now? And no, the Affordable Care Act (AKA ObamaCare) is not screwing us over. It’s making it possible for more people than ever to have access to affordable health care.
  • Obama is a Christian. How dense can you possibly be to not believe this? I suppose you want to see his birth certificate again, too. You can deny the facts all you want — as Romney did — but the facts remain the facts. The truth will prevail.
  • Australia does not have a president. It has a prime minister. As a Constitutional Monarchy, it also currently has a Queen.
  • As you tweeted your nonsense, Australia’s prime minister was a “she” (Julia Gillard) and not a “he.” And she doesn’t tolerate misogynistic bullshit like your GOP idols do.
  • And you really want to go to Australia? Where the lowest tax bracket for foreign residents for 2012/2013 is 32.5%? Doesn’t exactly fall into the GOP idea of low tax rate, does it? The reality is that the U.S. has some of the lowest taxes in the world. But that’s not good enough for you folks. It needs to be lower so we have to cut back on services and let everyone fend for himself.
  • You feel like America is no more? Well, yes, America from the 1950s is no more. This is the 21st century and things are different. If you can’t keep up with the times, you’re not likely to enjoy the real America much anymore.

Good luck moving to Australia. When they do your background check and see the bullshit you posted on Twitter (and likely elsewhere), I don’t think they’ll let you past the immigration barrier at the airport. Besides, they want people who can contribute to society, not whiners and complainers who are looking for escape from imagined oppression.

I’m closing comments on this post because, frankly, I don’t want to give visitors a place to argue about this. And I have far better things to do with my time than moderate the bullshit comments I know this post will attract.

The Woman Scorned Playlist

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I’ll let these ladies sing it for me.

A while back, I got into a conversation on Twitter with @flymaine about the pop artist, Adele. I’d heard the name but didn’t really know much about her. @flymaine provided a link to her music video, Rolling in the Deep, on YouTube. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch:

I watched the video and listened to the lyrics. Could she possibly be singing about an unfaithful partner? I tracked down the lyrics and read them. And when I got to this, I cried:

The scars of your love remind me of us
They keep me thinking that we almost had it all
The scars of your love, they leave me breathless
I can’t help feeling
We could have had it all

This is what has been going on in my head since the reality of my situation hit me: While he’d been bouncing from one dead-end job to the next, with periods of unemployment in between, I’d been working my ass off to achieve a goal for both of us — a goal he helped me set for our future. While he was dealing with (and complaining about) the nine-to-five grind, I was doing my best to make us financially independent and get us a great place to go and work and play together every summer. But when it came time to join me as he’d promised he’d do, he made excuses to stay behind. And then, while I was gone this year — my best year ever — he dumped me for a woman he’d known less than a month.

We could have had it all — we almost had it all — but now it’s all gone. It’s still hard to believe.

The rest of the song pretty much covers what comes after the pain: the anger. I have that, too. Hell, it was almost as if she wrote this song with my situation in mind.

Or are there that many women out there who have been burned by men they loved?

And that got me thinking about the Scorned Woman Playlist. A list of songs that express what I’m thinking and feeling about my situation. I bought Adele’s song from iTunes and added it to a new playlist.

I already had another song for the playlist: The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Hit ‘Em Up Style. I bought it about two years ago, back before I ever thought something like this could happen to me. The only video I could find was this live performance. It rocks:

This one is a lot more fun — and definitely more upbeat — but these lyrics still make me cry every time I hear them:

There goes the dreams we used to say
There goes the time we went away
There goes the love I had but you cheated on me
And that’s worth that now

There goes the house we made a home
There goes you’ll never leave me alone
There goes the lies you told
This is what you owe

“There goes the house we made a home” — that line hits hardest right now. As I pack and store and discard the things I added to our house to help make it a home, the place we made together is disappearing before my eyes. Every day it’s less like the place I spent the past 15 years of my life. Less like the place I worked so hard to get paid off by the time I was 50 and he was 55 — so we wouldn’t have to be slaves to nine-to-five jobs to pay a mortgage. So we could go into a sort of semi-retirement while we were still young and have some fun. Together.

In this song, the woman scorned gets revenge with a credit card. I wish it was that easy.

@flymaine also suggested Carrie Underwood’s Before He Cheats, but I’m not a big fan of country music. And her other suggestion, KT Tunstall’s Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, doesn’t quite say it like the two I’ve got.

Any other suggestions? Remember the theme: a woman scorned. Use the comment link to share your suggestions; I’ll add the ones that I think fit to this blog post.

Grief Counseling: A Note to Friends

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I need your help; here’s how.

As some folks might know, I’m seeing a counselor to help me through the grief I’m experiencing at my separation and divorce. As I discussed in a recent blog post, the man I fell in love with is dead, at least as far as I’m concerned. Grief counseling is helping me deal with that loss.

My counselor gives me “homework” to do after each session. I did last week’s homework today in preparation for our next session. It consisted of two parts: a reading assignment and a worksheet. The reading assignment had some information I want to share with my friends — most of whom have been extremely supportive. (Even if you’re not one of my friends, if you’re experiencing grief or have a friend who is, read on.)

The reading assignment was a four-page flyer titled “Coping with Loss: Guide to Grieving and Bereavement.” It covers what you might expect: a definition of grief, a comparison of grief with depression, a discussion of how trauma affects grief. It also covers the “five stages of grief” — if it’s possible, I’m going through three of them at the same time, with an occasional dose of the fourth! I found the discussion of the suffering part of grief, with a list of the emotional and physical symptoms to be right on target. Unfortunately.

But what I want to mention here is some of the discussion regarding the support of friends. I’d like to quote a few passages that I highlighted.

Let people who care about you take care of you, even if you pride yourself on being strong and self-sufficient. Especially if you live away from family, true friends will have the shoulders you cry on until you begin to recover. (emphasis added)

Those of you who have seen me at my emotional worst will understand this. And I need to say again how much I appreciate those shoulders. Thank you. Your friendship means so much to me and is really helping me through this.

Some friends are a lot less comfortable with my emotional lapses. They’re not accustomed to seeing me upset, let alone crying. They feel helpless — and I really can’t blame them. But this passage offers some advice:

If people don’t know what they can do to help, tell them, whether it’s to go with you to a movie, cook you a meal, or just hold you as you cry. If someone is uncomfortable with your displays of emotion or need to talk about the person you lost, gently let him or her know that talking out your grief is part of your healing process.

And it really is.

The main thing helping me right now is staying active. I’m busy at home, packing for my upcoming move, but I can’t pack all the time. Going out with friends to dinner or a movie or even a drive or hike is really helpful. And if I can keep my mind off my woes, I’m a lot less likely to get weepy.

The final point is one I need to share with the folks who are trying to be helpful by sort of blowing it all off:

Don’t let other people tell you how to feel, and don’t tell yourself how to feel, either. Your grief is your own, and no one else can tell you when it’s time to “move on” or “get over it.”

I will eventually move on and get over it. Really. I know I will. But not anytime soon. It’s something I need to work through at my own pace. Please don’t try to rush me.

So many friends have voiced their confidence that I’ll come out on top and recover quickly from this setback in my life. I know they’re right but I’m also glad they’re telling me. It’s good to hear it, it helps me stay confident when things are looking bad.

It’s the support of my friends that I depend on as work though my grief. Thank you.

Saving the Cape Honeysuckle

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A final dedication to my home.

Cape Honeysuckle
Cape Honeysuckle photo from Wikipedia.

Last spring, when it looked as if my husband and I were going to get through our marital difficulties and make things work, he and I spent the good part of a day reworking the back flower beds that I’d created with stacked bricks years before and planting cape honeysuckle plants. We’d had some luck with these plants in the corner of the front yard. Their tubular red flowers attract hummingbirds, which I love to have around the yard.

We planted eight of the plants and watered them regularly to get them established. My husband subsequently added the beds back to the irrigation system so they’d (supposedly) get watered regularly.

Dead PlantsUnfortunately, my husband didn’t spend much time at our Wickenburg home over the summer. That was pretty obvious from the condition of the yard and flower beds when I returned. He’d planted a vegetable garden, which was mostly dead. And five of the eight cape honeysuckle plants were either missing or reduced to dead sticks. Everything was bone dry. When I checked the irrigation system, I found the spigot turned off.

I turned the spigot back on, but the system doesn’t seem to be working properly. It trickles water to the plants at an odd schedule that isn’t sufficient to keep them alive during the heat we’re still suffering through in September and October.

Although I’ve given up on manually watering his vegetable garden — he planted mostly peppers, which I really don’t like anyway — I’ve been watering the surviving cape honeysuckle regularly. My efforts have paid off. The three surviving plants that were fading have recovered and seem to be growing again. The others, of course, are beyond help.

Whatever happens in the settlement for my divorce, I know one thing for certain: I will not be living here much longer. Instead, my husband will move back in with my replacement. She’ll sit on my furniture, use my kitchen appliances, and bathe in my garden tub, as I did, on winter afternoons with the sun coming through the glass block window. She’ll sleep with my husband, perhaps in the bed I shared with him all those years.

It’s painful to know that I’m so easily replaced. But at the same time, it really says a lot about the conscience (or lack thereof) of a man who would so easily put another woman in the home he shared with his wife for more than 15 years — and the conscience (or lack thereof) of the woman who would have no qualms about taking that place.

Yet despite my pain, I continue to water the cape honeysuckle. To me, they’re a symbol of my dedication to my home and my relationship. No one spends hours in the hot sun preparing beds and planting shrubbery for a home they plan to leave for good.

I thought I was going to stay. I thought I had a future here. I thought I had a future with my husband.

I may have been wrong, but I’ll tend to these plants until I’m gone.

The Man I Fell in Love with is Gone

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And I don’t know who this other guy is.

Yesterday was my second court appearance for my divorce.

The first didn’t really count — it was just an appearance to set dates for the appearances that would follow. My husband and I both showed up with our lawyers. Neither of us got to say anything of substance to the judge. They set dates, we wrote them down, the judge left, and we left. Simple.

Yesterday’s appearance was different. Yesterday, we were each put on the witness stand and questioned by the two attorneys. At stake was who would be able to live in the house and use my hangar until the divorce was finalized.

I don’t want to go into detail about what was said and done. Two reasons. First, I don’t want to save the experience forever on the pages of this blog. It was extremely painful to me on so many levels. Second, my lawyers would probably scold me, depending on how much detail I provided and what I said. It’s not worth pissing off my lawyers or getting into trouble. My legal team rocks.

But I do want to briefly touch upon what I realized when my husband came to the stand and began answering questions that he and his lawyer had likely rehearsed in advance: he was not the man I fell in love with.

It’s funny, in a way, because it looked like him and it sounded like him. But the things he said were not the kinds of things the man I fell in love with would say about me. The man I fell in love with loved me just as much as I loved him — if not more. He always spoke kindly to and of me. He always defended me.

This man, however, was in attack mode, bending and stretching the truth (almost beyond recognition) to make a case against me. The man I fell in love with would never do that.

No Real Surprise

I don’t know why this surprised me so much. I knew the man I fell in love with was gone. I knew it this summer.

In June, while going through a pile of papers that I’d brought with me to Washington to sort out when I had time, I came across two greeting cards that the man I fell in love with had sent me years ago. They were the kinds of cards people in love share with each other, sometimes for no apparent reason other than to express their love. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but I do recall one of them mentioning “love” and “forever.”

I sat on the floor in my RV, looking at the two cards and thinking about the man who had sent them to me years ago. And as I thought about it, I realized that that man was gone — dead, I thought. The man I’d left in Arizona in May didn’t give me cards or flowers or anything else for no special reason. The man I left in Arizona spent most of his time glaring at me when I did something he didn’t like. The man I left in Arizona seemed almost too eager for me to leave.

So I wrote a letter to the man I’d left in Arizona — who is apparently the same man who showed up in court yesterday. I appealed to him to remember the old days, the days when he told me that I needed to “make it happen,” the days when he was an idealistic dreamer and inventor. I asked him what happened to that man. I told him what I suspected: that that man was dead.

I didn’t know it, but as I was writing that letter, the man I’d left in Arizona had already found my replacement. His response to my letter arrived in my mailbox, forwarded with my mail, the day after my birthday, the day after he told me he wanted a divorce.

Right now, all I regret is sending the man I’d left in Arizona those cards. They’re gone now, along with the man who sent them to me, the man I fell in love with. I’d really like to have them back to help me remember him and the way things were.

The Upside

Amazing as it may seem, there is an upside to all this.

Listening to the man in the witness box bend and stretch the truth to build a case against me was like a slap in the face — a slap of reality. Although he’s spread the word among family and friends — and even to me in email messages and written notes — that he still cares about me, that’s so obviously not true. It’s just another lie in a long series of lies that were likely spun to put me off guard about what’s to come. The man in the witness box doesn’t give a shit about me and the 29 years he and the man I fell in love with spent with me. The man in the witness box is simply seeking revenge for imagined offenses. The man in the witness box cares only about himself.

And knowing that now, without a shadow of a doubt, will help me begin my healing process.