Getting Out

 "...and I don't think it was the idea that I would miss him...Sometimes I think I was afraid that without him my life would just be the same, or even worse, and I would have to accept that it was my fault.  And it was easier and safer to stay in a bad situation than to take responsibility for getting out. "

    -"Beautiful World Where Are You"  Sally Rooney

In the past, I have felt and stated that my biggest fear is being alone.  Looking back, that actually seems quite odd to me, because there are so many lovely facets of being alone.  

Alone, you have a blank slate of interactions.  You can choose your input more precisely.  You can manage and enjoy your time without trying to cooperate with someone else's version of alone.  Can you actually also be safer being alone? Safer from the deep hurts that tear at your soul if you let someone else in to muck it up?  

Looking back, maybe I felt afraid of aloneness due to cultural expectations and teachings that existing alone translates to existing in failure.  And I do not like to fail.  That is an exploration for another day. 

I've swung far to the other side of the pendulous arc at this point in life.  

Threats of leaving me from M. used to hold tremendous fear and desperation to change anything I needed to just to convince him to stay with me.  Was that old habits?  I think I actually felt for a long time that I needed and wanted him so deeply that I agreed to start making concessions and burying my own desires out of sight so they would not continue as temptations to contradict his.  It would have been nice if they'd lined up with his, sure, but increasingly as I lost sight of mine, they didn't.  I suppose desires need to be nurtured and defended against competing demands.  I did the opposite with mine.  

Threats of leaving recently illicit a longing for him to fulfill them.  

Even these last couple days with us mostly avoiding each other and him presumably having time to consider our situation, he is not making the magnitude of concessions that my past self made to his threats of dissolution of us.  He's continued to game, sleep odd hours, order DoorDash (even from a place he knows I dislike, so didn't order me anything), and leave dishes for me to clean up.  More than that, though, the behavior of dissatisfaction and offence seems so habitual that I'm not sure he can change it. Complaints about the state of the crowded refrigerator replayed.  Anger and irritation replayed when G. got in touch with me instead of him and when I checked on him to talk, he was laying on his couch in the dark so I assumed (incorrectly it turns out) that he was asleep. 

One of his latest additions to the litany of his irritations and criticisms is accusations that I'm "poisoning our daughter against him."  I'd faded into passive listening mode at that point in the shouting, but that brought me back into sharp awareness, "No!  That's all you."  He didn't hear me of course--with his ears maybe--but definitely not with whatever part of him chooses to actually hear and believe that another person might have a valid thought.  

Surprisingly, yesterday after storming back downstairs after G. had to go before he could talk to her, he more calmly appeared to retrieve the DoorDash burger and fries and then cared to check in to see if she felt better after her tummy ache earlier in the day.  He ate at the table, asked what I'd done that day, and then questioned why parts of it took so long in a tone that told me he felt displeased by my choices.  I'd spent hours at the Farmer's Market writing and thinking and listening to the music and eating some of my favorite goodies.  I guess he thought I should have been available to him when he woke up late, waiting for him, wanting to spend time with him.  

I'm starting to see the gaps here.  I've felt that success for us looked like him not being upset or angry about something.  I'm realizing that when I told him where I'd been yesterday, it might have occurred to him to ask if I'd enjoyed it, what the music was like, if I'd seen any friends there, what I'd been thinking--so many possible questions to show interest or care, maybe even concern.

I've expected too little.  "And it was easier and safer to stay in a bad situation than to take responsibility for getting out."