Look at what it's like

when it all come apart.

A couple of days ago he took off his wedding ring again. Handed it to me again. Tossed it, really. Again. In a casual gesture, like you would toss the remote. And I went after him again, again, again, even though I said I wouldn't do it again, couldn't take it again.

And we made up, again. I cried in his arms, again.

But I haven't put my wedding ring back on, and I haven't given his back. And finally I feel like my heart, my stuttering arrhythmatic heart, has been lacerated just enough or built up just enough scar tissue that this just isn't hurting so much this time. And all I can think about is how to get enough hours of work in so I can pay for the house on my own, and whether I can wait until our next therapy session to tell him I am done, and how to time it so the kids won't be around when he's packing.

It's not that he's a bad man. He certainly didn't start out a bad man. But being with me is making him one, and I can't live with this. He was inexperienced in relationships, and I am not a starter wife. I did the drama, the cheating, the threatening to leave, the ultimatums, the irrational midnight arguments with other people, when I was inexperienced. I have a good ten years under my belt of being responsible, the bill payer, the child taxi, the grocery shopper, the appointment maker. I don't have it in me, I don't, to stress about not being free. I don't have it in me to argue about responsibility. There is no argument. It is just there. Someone takes it. There is no room for resentment, no room for "this is not how I pictured my life". Life is harder than it seems from a distance. Parenthood is harder. Marriage is harder. We make choices, and sometimes we find out later that the choices we make lead to something that is a lot more challenging than we imagined.

That is growth. You can fight it, you can resent it, but you can't take back your choices, you can never go back to the way you imagined it would be. You can't keep punishing the people around you for the disparity between your youthful imaginings and the way things turned out. And if you do punish them, if you hurt them, you can't expect them to just bounce back, endlessly, forever bouncing back into your arms with a forgiving smile and a boundless libido. People are real, tender, breakable things that need to be nurtured in order for you to get nurturing back out of them. They are not computer programs that can be fixed in a day. If they are wounded, they need time to heal. If you pull open the wound again and again and again in your frustration, it will never heal, and eventually, if they have the choice, if they have a sense of self-preservation, it will override the love they feel for you and they will do what they have to do to get the respite they need to heal, even though it means walking away from you for good.