Fear

There is an ache that has taken up full time residency in my chest and often it expands to such a girth that I fear my internal cavities cannot withstand the pressure. I have to find the saddest or the most seductive song and play it loud so that some of my longing and disquiet can find its way out and relieve that pressure for a short while. I think a lot about leaving. I know I could never do it and live with myself, I could never be apart from my children for very long, it would be too devastating but there are days when I think about checking myself into a psych ward just to get something of a vacation from these children. Some days I can’t stand them for long periods of time and I don’t let them near me because I can’t breathe. I think I must be the most awful mother there is to tell my children to leave me alone, to feel so resentful, to want to punish them for hampering my life so. If they were gone truth is I would wander aimlessly and feel uneasy, uncomfortable in my skin, not as confident. I would be half a person. It’s comedy really, that I feel half a person with them and half a person without them. Lately I fluctuate between wanting to jump off a bridge or making out with someone. Probably I should opt for the latter…find a babysitter, go to a bar, drink some tequila, set my sites on easy but appetizing prey and corner him. I’d have better luck in a smaller town.

I have lost sight of what it is I am supposed to be doing right now. Am I supposed to be ruminating on my marriage and figuring out if I want to salvage it and how? Am I supposed to be working on myself and putting thoughts of the marriage on the back burner or am I supposed to be working on myself and moving on? My husband called from Afghanistan last night and asked if I am dating anyone. After nearly two months of brief, terse conversations finally he asks a question that eludes to the glaring fact that we are separated. I thought it would open the door for us to talk about how we’re feeling so far, what we’ve realized in retrospect, what our positions are on divorce etc…. But after I told him I wasn’t dating and answered his “Why?” he said it was a good place to end the conversation. There I was thinking we had just begun. But he has to compartmentalize all of his emotions so that he can work 12 hour shifts seven days a week in weather that rarely goes below 100 degrees in hostile country. I get it. He gets that it is hard for me. We shoulder it and trudge on in our separate directions. He says he will be filing for divorce as soon as he gets back and though I expected it, it still sends a shock through my body to hear it, a rending sensation that next morning I realize has added to the ache. Even though an actual divorce is at least a year in the future, I still feel like things are moving at a dizzying pace and I feel a need to steady myself before I go hurtling down this avalanche. I feel entitled to have some time, some space to figure myself and everything else out. With him it’s black and white, I’m in or out and there’s no alternatives. If we’re separated then it’s divorce and I’m scared. I’m really, really, fucking scared.