How the big day went for me

Tonight was expected to be R.'s first night of making love to S -- the woman he met and spent the weekend with while I was in India visiting my sick mother in law. It's impossible for me to know if they actually did make love ... except for the feelings that swept over me in the night. It's hard to say if they were feelings of him or a release from pain sent from God. During the times we were away from one another -- both before he came to F. to live and when he was only five minutes away, I often literally felt his pain, his sadness, his loneliness and I would feel a lightness when he was at peace.

It will be hard to describe the feelings ... but they began with my own pain, throughout the day. I was sitting in McDonald's and thought of the beauty of what they would share, imagined it. I also truly felt the hurt that I had toward R. for pursuing this relationship before we had ended ours and started to cry. I went to Sam's Club after that and just felt almost dead. I was walking around in a daze, with voices roaring in my head -- I can't do this -- it wasn't that I couldn't think of them together, more that I just didn't feel like I could do anything but curl up and die. I felt miserable. I came home and posted a note to my online support group -- a big pity party -- but it offered no relief. I tried to pray in the car on the way home, but I couldn't seem to connect much. So then I went for the next best form of relief ... my sexual addiction. I found a website I love to chat on and wasted the afternoon talking to horny men and women. It was amazing how much lighter I felt ... just releasing something from myself.

After that I was able to get up and wash the dishes, take a shower, cook dinner and be productive. I noticed at one point though my body felt a surge of something good, but hard to explain other than it felt like the feeling of being embraced and kissed and happy. I wasn't near a clock at that time ... but a bit later I looked at one and realized that most likely I had felt that about the time R&S began their evening together. It didn't make me cry or feel sad. I just went on about my business. In fact, now that I think of it, I remember a time in the afternoon when I thought of S., a woman I don't know, and thought how excited she must be ... thinking of the weekend and the evening with this kind and loving man. So there were feelings of lightness.

In fact, when my husband came home, I was there to greet him, opening the door and welcoming him home. I have been so irritated with him, irritable to the point of unmanageability and controlling, so it felt good to at least to actually want to open the door. We had a few moments in the night, where I was snappy -- but I would say that overall I was able to feel, for the first time, some affection for him. We enjoyed a long talk in the evening. Our lives are a bit chaotic right now ... and we talked through things without me trying to direct, control or feel judged and fearful. In other words, we had a person to person conversation.

I had asked him if he wanted to see a movie, but we had dinner to late to go ... so we talked instead. That was fine with me ... I just wanted to push away any thoughts of what might be happening with R&S -- and do it with things I enjoyed. As it got later, but not really even late enough to go to bed, I began to desire sleep. I slept lightly on the couch for a while before going to bed around 10. I remember taking my meds and thinking ... please just knock me out cold.

But they didn't.

Instead I lay in the bed, next to my husband, scooting my body close to his like I used to do with R. -- just needing to feel the touch. Even though I didn't get the same response from him that I would get from R. ... the touch felt good, the skin to skin connection. But then I rolled over, and the thoughts of them flooded my mind. I wondered if she cried the first time he entered her, the way that I had, because it was the first time I ever felt that a man truly was making love to me as a person. I could imagine -- no, more like feel -- the rhythm of their bodies, not in a naughty way of imagining two people having sex -- just relishing in the experience of a beautiful scene. And at some point my body began to tingle all over and it was as if a flock of butterflies or birds were flittering all over my body, covering my body with feelings of the tips of their wings all over me. I felt engulfed by the experience. It lasted for what felt like a long time ... and the emotions surrounding it were both elating and relieving. Again, it's hard to describe, and hard to know what it all meant, but once it was over I felt comfort, and soon fell asleep.

Now I am awake again. I woke up and my first thought was of them laying together in the night ... feeling the feelings I had felt, his body close, so close. I felt a mixture of sadness and sweetness. I thought of how I had told R. I didn't want to hear the details of their sexual encounters and realizing I didn't need to hear them, I could imagine them and feel them just fine without his descriptions. I wondered again if she had cried. Making love to R. is a beautiful experience ... I couldn't help but wonder how she must have felt, and I felt a kinship with her, an affection of sorts. I turned over and looked at my sleeping husband, touched him and felt an affection for him as well, something I haven't felt in ages.

And now I sit here in the night, writing these thoughts ... wondering what I'll think of them as the days pass by. At least I will remember them.

Past

I pulled a journal out of one of the boxes I am attempting to unpack this morning ... and read this entry that I wrote May 22, 1996:

Today I begin to remember my childhood -- all of it.

I am now 27 years ol. The seems so young for me. I feel much older. But then I have never felt as if I were the age I was.

My first recollections of my childhood are when I was probably 2.5-3 years old. I was living with my mother, stepfatehr, and brother in a little trailer in C'ville. We lived behind my stepfather's parents house -- my grandparents.

As a child I would "run off" to my grandparents house all the time without telling anyone. I would get a whipping from my dad.

I remember swinging on a handmade swing on the oak tree beside the trailer. Once I leaned back and hit my head. It bled badly -- but I remember thinking that it was worse than it was, because my family kept saying I busted my head open. That seemed very gruesome to a three year old.

I remember at night I slept on the couch in the living room. While I was supposed to be sleeping, I would squint my eyes and watch TV. Star Trek was always one. This was before my mom went to work to help make ends meet.

I remember playing in a big mud hole that my uncle Vernon had in his front yard and Momma giving me the only spanking I ever had with a belt. I told her she had left wood in me when she spanked me with a switch. I think Momma whipped me and my sister (who was born 5 years after me) with a switch because Daddy told her to. She whipped all my older brothers and sisters with a belt before Daddy came along.

I remember my brother N. building a tree house ou in the woods behind the trailer. Those woods and viney areas -- which were once piled with junk and old cars -- are now replaced by a pond and a fence. Daddy cut down all the trees. I never remember those old cars being hauled off -- but I know they are gone.

I remember after I got older playing in those old cars -- the station wagon and the old red car, like we were driving.

I remember playing with Johnny P. and Jimmy. Johnny would stick mushy persimmons down my shorts. He was mean and I always got into trouble when he came over (which he did every day until my dad told him not to).

I remember that we had a storm cellar that we went to when it stormed. It was underground and I remember vaguely when Daddy was building it. When it would storm, the cellar would be full of people -- family and neighbors. We'd light candles for light. We stored potatoes and canned goods in the cellar and there were blocks on the floor because there was always water on the bottom of the cellar.

I remember once Daddy wanted to punish me and he told me I was going to have to sleep in the cellar all night. I was horrified. It was dark and scary down there. I was probably about four years old. He walked around the outside of the cellar making sounds like a panther. He thought it was funny. It is one of my most vivid memories.

I must not have been scared of anything as a child, because no amount of punishment ever worked. I do remember being terrified that night in the cellar though. Momma was at work when it happened.

Momma and Daddy had a blue GMC truck when we lived in the trailer. I think Daddy always kept a new vehicle because he didn't know how to work on one and he was insecure about that. Being a man means knowing how to work on a vehicle.

I remember that when Momma went to work we were in financial problems. I don't think I really knew that at three, but I knew that for some bad reason Momma had to work nights.

Daddy and I stayed home by ourselves. He would cook me chicken noodle soup or chili for supper and always teased me that I was going to grow feathers and turn into a chicken.

Grandma and Grandpa had a big chicken pen where they had mean chickens and nice chickens. I always wanted to check the eggs but I was afraid of the mean chickens. I liked getting the different colored eggs -- but I can't remember if Grandma and Grandpa had those chickens or if we did later on.

Grandma Susie died when we lived in the trailer. I remember very little about that although I have a very vivid picture of my Grandpa barely being able to walk at her funeral. I don't remember the reaction of my dad and his brothers and I don't remember my own reaction. I was too young to understand. I remember that not long after she died, my family, including my new sister, moved into the house where Grandma and Grandpa had lived. Grandpa lived in the trailer. But I don't want to skip that far yet.

I remember laying on the couch at night and being scared because I could see the shadows of all the trees that surrounded the trailer coming through the windows.

I had the same dream over and over every night. It was about playing out in front of the trailer by the oak tree and some man coming to kidnap me. The dream never showed who it was -- only a man. I dreamed it every single night that we lived in that trailer. As far as I know, it's the only recurring dream I ever had.

###

This is all I ever wrote in the journal. I never went back and wrote about the rest of my childhood. I just stopped.

It's interesting to me now that I know I wrote this to begin healing from the childhood sexual abuse that I suffered at the hands of my stepfather ... but I can remember clearly that I was afraid to write down on paper what had happened to me. I was scared and ashamed that someone would find it and read it -- and I didn't want anyone to know. At this point I had told one person -- someone I'd never see again -- what had happened to me. I was also just beginning to seriously date the man who is now my husband.

It's also interesting that some of the things that I wrote here -- particularly about my brother living with us -- I barely remember now.

Something else that struck me was what I wrote about my mother going to work ... I said that "for some bad reason" Momma went to work. It was on those nights that she worked that the abuse first began. I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday the first time my stepfather called me into that tiny bathroom of that trailer and asked me to touch his penis. I can remember the words he said to me, but I can't remember how I felt, I do remember that it wasn't good. I was three.

And as I think about this ... I think about my obsession of never being in debt again, the hurt I feel when I see others suffering through financial difficulties and unable to manage, the shame I have felt about growing up poor and living poor for the early years of my adult life -- it probably all relates in some way to this time in my life where financial difficulties meant extreme pain for me -- pain I could not share.

Now

I made the move this weekend to be with my husband. Several of my regular readers asked ... "Do you really want to go?"

I'm not sure if I wanted to go or not ... but it was the only decision I felt like I could make.

And after I got back from a trip with my husband to see his dieing mother (who has since passed) and told R. that I was leaving ... he told me that he had met someone else, had spent the weekend with her ... and almost right away I could tell that his loyalties had already shifted.

I spent the next two weeks with him ... almost every minute I could. I bought him a used Cadillac for less than $5,000, and gave him enough money to stay afloat for a while. I had been so worried about his financial condition ... and I just couldn't bear the thought of him being stuck on the side of the road, with no one to call. I may look back on this as a stupid decision. He said he would pay me back a little at a time for the car. If he never does, that's OK too. I just needed one little peace of mind as my world seemed to be falling apart.

There were a lot of tears during those two weeks, a lot of recollections of all we had shared, and how amazing it was we had shared so much over the past year -- despite the fact that I was married the whole time, and him part of the time. The night before I left ... just a week ago tomorrow ... he began to make love to me. He brought me to climax, but then stopped. I knew why he couldn't bear to finish, but we didn't speak of it. He was seeing her the next day, for the first time in those two weeks. After I got here, I asked him about it, and he confirmed my theory. She was his future, I was his past. He didn't say that, I did. Instead, he apologized for hurting me. I just absorbed it.

Now I am here ... the things that have been wrong in my marriage are still wrong. I am still a sex addict ... and have been "playing with fire," -- this time with women -- I think because I just don't think I can trust men at all.

But I've been going to support group meetings every day ... and will continue to do so.

Today I began to work on the house, and yesterday I spent some time grocery shopping. Tonight I'll cook. Life will regain some normalcy and I pray that I continue to grow. There's a part of me that wants to pack up and leave ... go back home to my family, my friends. R. won't be there as my lover, but at least he would be there as my friend.

That's it for me folks. More to come.

Overwhelmed

There is so much churning right now. My mother in law died this week, I am in the process of leaving my job, going to live with my husband (who is all alone, grieving his mother's death -- she and the rest of his family live in India) again after two and a half months of being apart, ending a relationship with a man I have been heavily engaged with in a "love" relationship for about a year, and looking ahead at major changes as I leave my home state, which I just returned to a little more than a year ago. I truly feel overwhelmed.