He doesn't love me anymore, and it's breaking my heart.

Phoenix

It was an incredible day here, balmy and gorgeous, and we decided to check out the Columbia Slough (http://www.columbiaslough.org/) because we are thinking about "adopting" a section of it. The awesome thing about adopting the Slough is that you get to go out once a month in a canoe or kayak, provided by the Columbia Slough Watershed Council, and you paddle your section and take notes on the changes you observe since the last time you were there.

The Slough has always been a magical place for me. When I was a kid it was just a 15-minute walk from my home... and I was always warned "Stay away from the Slough, don't touch the water or anything that's been in the water, it's filthy and it will make you sick". And at the time, it was true... it was vile, toxic water, polluted with human waste and other less savory things. I used to make the trek down to the Slough anyway, down the street, through the park, through the old part of the neighborhood, through the undeveloped part of the neighborhood, over the highway, across the train tracks, through the industrial strip, through the big chain-link gate, and finally clambering over the landfill to reach the tangled, murky, trash-filled water. I would sit on the city's discards and eat Chick-O-Sticks while watching sickly carp thrash in the warm, stagnant shallows.

Now, the Slough is vastly different. Through the efforts of a small and determined group of conservationists, my Dad among them, the Columbia Slough Watershed Council has gained members and support, and today the Slough is a far different place, with clean waters I don't have to be afraid to dabble my feet in, and frogs and ducks and healthy fish. The banks are lush with greenery instead of garbage, and in the summer droves of people come to paddle their kayaks, canoes, and inflatable rafts. There are two large lakes connected to the Slough, and although enclosed entirely within the industrial region of Portland, they are still oases of nature, screened from the massive Port activities by oaks and cottonwoods.

I am glad to see a place whose magic was evident to me as a child, even through a haze of pollution, restored to a modicum of its original natural beauty.

The girl with a girl's tender heart

She is not malicious. She is not calculating, she is not manipulative. She is not unreasonable. She is not making things up. She is not crying because she is trying to make you feel bad, she is crying because she feels bad.

Look at her. She looks like a girl. A woman, but we call ourselves girls. A mother. She is hard as iron, tough as nails. She endures like a mesa, bends like a fir in strong winds, stands upright after the storm. She is soft; she has curves, warm breasts, smooth arms, a nape on her neck that is made to be nuzzled. She is pretty. She has lips for kissing, eyes that can call for silence or snap and rage or fill with tears.

And she cries. A lot. More than she thinks she cries, because girls are made for crying. Crying and loving and holding people. And her heart is a soft, soft tender girl's heart. As strong as she is, as tough as she is, her hard hard heart softens at a moment's notice, and lets in the biggest baddest wolves as long as they talk gentle, move slow, and tell her the right stories. Because girls aren't made to be suspicious, aren't wagers of war or hostage negotiators. And it's too bad, because the hostages are our own hearts, our very tender not-lying-when-they-cry hearts.

Girls are amazing. There is no code; we are deceptively simple. We will tell you, in plain simple words, what we want. Love me. Be there when you say you're going to be there. Tell me what you want from me. If you listen, you can hear it. Don't complicate us; we aren't speaking in tongues. Don't pretend you don't understand. Don't pretend you never heard us. Just listen.

Just listen, and remember that inside the girl you are looking at is a girl's tender heart. Try not to hurt it. And when you have it, remember that she isn't very good at guarding her heart, so that will be up to you. That's a thing a man is good at.

Missed opportunities

I miss my little brother a whole lot today. I don't know why it hits really hard sometimes... I can go months without thinking about him much, and then every so often I'll have a really hard day.

Today I keep remembering the opportunities I didn't take. The time when he was 16 and he wanted to spend the night at my house but I didn't let him. The letter I forgot to send, when he lived in Seattle and I lived in Oakland and I was going to invite him to come spend a week with us but somehow I just got too busy.

The poetry I never shared with him. I didn't know he wrote poetry too, until his funeral.

I know it's not good to dwell on what would have, could have, should have been, but of all the things that have happened in my life, the only things I long to go back and change are the times I let a chance to connect slip by.

I don't miss the relationship we had, I miss the relationship we didn't have. Shit. God, let me never fuck up that badly again.

Oh, no. Not this time.

Things have been pretty good. Counseling has been helping.

But I fucked up, you guys. Oh no.

I fucked up. Something awful.

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.

The marriage yo-yo

I don't really know what to do, or if there's anything to do.

Maybe it's marriage and family. I know that for me, having kids changed everything permanently. It took away my freedom on an elemental level, and I've had nine years to adjust to that. I can gain a facsimile of freedom by planning everything in advance. He never planned to have kids... I did. That's a huge difference. I always wanted to have kids, and the sacrifice of my freedom to have them doesn't feel like such a sacrifice, most of the time.

I'm feeling very afraid right now. And very worn out. This fear of him leaving... it seems like every time I start to feel secure it comes up again, every few weeks, and I'm in a tailspin. I feel like I'm in the classic position of every woman married to a noncommital man; afraid of being left alone to raise my kids. I think I'm numb to the fear of losing him, the person he is, his love, because I feel I've already lost him, or in some part of my heart I've come to stop fearing his loss because it hurts too much to believe it might not happen. Hope kills, right?

I was alright on my own before, I'll be alright on my own again, even though my heart will never be the same.

Looking back I realize that I probably should have had an abortion when I got pregnant with the sprout. Marriage and parenthood weren't in his life plan. I sacrificed the status-quo of my own little family by dragging him into it and having the sprout, and there's no way to return to that old balance.

My heart hurts and I don't know if I can live through any more of this up-and-down and still be a functional human being. I feel like he needs to get his life in order and decide what he wants, what he needs to do in order to be happy. I feel like he needs to do that somewhere else, not here, not with me. Not for him, for me. I can't handle it, emotionally. It's killing me, it's tearing me apart. My distance that he hates so much is a shell I wear to keep my insides in.

I don't know anyone whose life has worked out according to their plan, their vision. Mine certainly hasn't, and I struggle with that sometimes. But I have a responsibility to figure out how to be happy in the circumstances life has handed me, and I need to try to pursue that happiness. The only way I can figure out to do that, at this point, is to ask him to go do the same, in his own way, in another place, under another roof. If he decides that his happiness involves me and the kids, there is always the possibility that we can give another go at being happy together. I can't promise that I'll be up for it, but I am not going to close the door to the possibility.