Normality is shredded

Another day, another hang-up.

There I was walking along on my way to work, nice as you like, when the thought of bumping into my ex-husband pops right into my head. As per usual, this is followed by an imagined conversation.

I like to believe that I'm over him, so my conversation starts that way. In my head he’s wanting to talk to me, so I say “Look, go away, I'm not interested. It was a long time ago.” But he's still there in my head, and the conversation soon degenerates with me saying the type of thing that I'd like to think I'm above.

We were a couple for 10 years, and then married for 3. Towards the end he became a friend of Bill W and decided he wanted out of the marriage. Asking me to divorce him as I had grounds, I said “No!” whereupon he said “In that case I’ll divorce you.” To which I said “I don’t think so, you don’t have grounds.” Then he told me that his divorce lawyer reckoned that my occasional partaking of the peace pipe constituted grounds. What choice did I have? I divorced him.

5 years have passed. I still have dreams featuring his chaotic behaviour, where Bill’s other chums invade our home, normality is shredded, and the penny drops for his family in slow motion. Then there are the waking moments where my thoughts get tangled up in what I would say if I just bumped into him.

“I don’t want this.” I hear the words spoken, then realise they fell from my lips. I whimper quietly in my own head. It’s true – I don’t want this.

Let that be a lesson to you children: Life seriously messes you up. Just say no.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A confusing smorgasbord of antipathies

I was born in the 70s. That gender could have a separate definition to biological sex wasn't a question that had hit the general public consciousness,  so I grew up in a gender normative environment at a time when biological sex and gender were considered to be the same and immutable. Sixty years after the suffragettes started the feminist movement, my mother's generation pushed the cause forward.  My mother taught me to ignore society's sexist prejudices. I learnt from her to not limit my ambitions or accept being treated as lesser. Fast forward another two generations and sexism is still ubiquitous, if less blatant, and it still blighting women's lives around the world. The place we find ourselves in now, where we are challenging the notion that biological sex and gender are the same or that is gender is immutable, has been a long time in arriving. If it mirrors the slow progress made by the feminist movement, there could be many decades of struggle ahead, and stil
Read more

Why, oh why, am I puffed up like a balloon after my operation?

I'm swollen around the chest area as I'd expect after the double mastectomy - there are some sloshy seromas building up which I've been told not to worry about - the seromas should self-resolve, and if not they can be drained with a needle. I was particularly aware, as I woke up this morning, that my face and neck feel quite puffy. My eyes feel all crowded in by swollen eye lids. I feel like I've gained 10 pounds around my middle too. This swelling has been developing since my operation three days ago. I thought it was my imagination until I looked in the mirror and saw a big round moon face looking back at me. Why, oh why, am I puffed up like a balloon after my operation? Thank goodness for the internet. While it can on occasion lead us down dark alleyways, often it can take us straight into the light... It seems evolution provided a way for injured animals to lay up for a few days to recover from traumatic injuries. With an injury hormones are released which
Read more

Brimming with possibility

The day after my last post I fell ill with flu, which delayed my operation by two weeks. I'm now two days post-surgery, back home, and recovering. I had breast cancer operations in 2001 and again in 2008. Those were traumatic experiences, my post surgery recovery was tainted with feelings of loss, and fear for the future. Each of those operations were just the heralds of more debilitating treatment - the long hard slog of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Following on from that were the yearly scans and tests to check for new cancers and secondaries, a regular cycle of building tension as each appointment came due, plunged back into the medical world for the tests, then the gruelling wait for results, hoping to hear those precious words "all the tests came back clear" and feel the giddy relief once more. This has framed the last 18 years of my life. I allowed it to box me in. I focused on getting through each day. I made no long term plans. I did not peer in
Read more