Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you ...

Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything's okay and everything's going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out when
You think everything's gone wrong and everything blows up
In your face -Alanis Morissette - Ironic

I have been at a bit of a crossroads—and as I am wont to do, I get rather blog quiet when things in life overwhelm…I’ll not apologize, I’ll just give fair warning to y’all that I am back so you can resume humoring me in earnest again. 

Or being patently passive/aggressive and just ignoring me. 

That’s okay too.

I dealt with the loss of a parent recently, and everyone said how well I was dealing with it.  The thing is, I wasn’t (am not) dealing with it well at all—I am just not one to share all that gut-wrenching, raw emotion with the world.  So I just excused it with the explanation of how, since said parent was in hospice for so long, that I had plenty of time to come to terms with their eventual and expected passing.  It’s so much easier to lie that it is to share that.  Even my husband was/is fooled by my “strength”. 

He recognizes I have moments that overwhelm me with grief and he’ll give me a hug, but I don’t want his comfort especially when every time I was upset about anything during the past year plus, he’d ask me if I was planning on using this sequence of events as an “excuse to cry”.  Yes, he can be quite the motherfucker.  He pretty much sealed that label when I was driving the 4 hours to hospice with my youngest so we could have what turned out to be our last visit with the beloved parent/grandparent.

He couldn’t/wouldn’t come because of work obligations.  I get that.  But don’t call my cell when I am 3 hours away on the way to my parent’s death bed and scream at me about how the computer isn’t working and how I must have done something to it and I need to make it work and make it work now! (I was on speakerphone btw since I was driving, so my babygirl (18yrs) got full witness to the madness).  I had, by this point, started to quietly bawl and just shut down.  When he finally spent his rage out over an 8 year old computer, he asked me what was wrong since he was getting flat, monosyllabic answers from me.  When I stated simply that I didn’t care for being accosted and accused about something as stupid as an old ass computer that just needed to be restarted to “fix it” and I was upset he stated, hand to God he did, “You don’t have anything to be upset about.”

What. In. THE. Fuck?!?!?

REALLY?!?!?!

My daughter practically choked on her coffee.  So startled that she literally spit it out on the dashboard.  I held my finger up to her in a shushing manner so she would not start screaming at her father.  I know my child—she is so very much a mini-me in her reactions that she is easily anticipated and understood by me.  Anyhow, I shushed her and made the appropriate murmurings to placate the crazy man I am married to.

Once the call ended, in that brief silence in the car, I felt the universe shift and realized that there was well more than 3 hours and 200 miles of distance between us at that very moment.  My daughter stated quite simply, “He really doesn’t have a clue how to be supportive, does he?”  I don’t remember exactly how I answered her, but I know I made some sort of excuse for him by telling her that everyone deals with grief in different ways and that her daddy’s way was with anger.  Whether or not she actually bought it, I don’t know.  I do know I didn’t want her to start hating him for being the only who he seems to know how to be.  And we’ll see how long I can pretend to everyone that everything is okay—fake it til you make it I always say.  It’s worked thus far.

Things with Tripp are still full on, and he has been the one stabilizing factor in my world as of late mainly because he doesn’t want more of me than I can give at any given moment. He dropped everything to be there for me when I needed him to be.  He told me how his heart just dropped when he got the email at such an odd time, how he knew before he opened it that it wasn’t anything good.  He was the first one to hug me and tell me how sorry he was for what I was going through and just let me cry myself out.  By the time I was getting ready to get on the road, I was actually able to smile and even laugh a little.  How the man is just a soothing balm to my soul—inexplicable.  I just love him for just letting me be fully me.

How well he just gets “the who that is me” totally amazes me sometimes—but then, we don’t live together and have the day to day drudgery of married life.  I doubt we'd fall into that kind of day to day that a lot of marrieds do--just a fact, unproven but none the less a certainty.  We joke a lot about how we’d never get anything done if we did share living space, except each other.  And we’ve discussed how the spare room would be full of Liberator furniture—he has a real liking for it.  Especially the one that has all kinds of hook-up for various restraints.

As it is, we don’t have a secret little love nest where we can stash that kind of stuff, so we make do.  He told me this morning he ordered this: there's 5!! (hopefully the link carried over…if not, paste this into the browser: http://www.amazon.com/Enabler-Thrillo-Valentines-Lovemaking-Combo/dp/B0035KQOAC/ref=pd_sim_hpc_9 ).  It’ll be fun to figure out what works for us and what doesn’t.  I know the man though and I expect I’ll be laid over it in doggy fashion more often than not…and my little MacGyver wanna-be will no doubt figure out a way to have me restrained somehow.  Not that I mind—not at all.  I can’t decide which of us likes me being essentially helpless more…but one of these days I am going to turn the tables on him and shackle him to the headboard.

Then we’ll have a talk about ‘torture’(in nothing but the feel good sense)…

And spanking his ass for a change…

Just sayin’…