We Other Women Have A Grave Responsibility

Past, Present (and Future?)

Once upon a time, mostly as a therapeutic exercise, (before he showed back up again last October), I wrote Chi a goodbye letter. It had a lot of wonderful points in it. Maybe I will post that up here sometime as well. One thing I remember from it, and from that time in general, is the sense I had of making sure I was treated right and not screwed over, and this idea of how much better I was for him than Rory. Boy, what  a difference a little insight makes. 

What I know now is that an affair is the result of not one, not two, but three people not recovering from some pretty significant childhood wounds, and that in looking at it the way that I had (which, let's face it, is the way ALL us "mistresses" view The Battle Over The Married Man), I wasn't seeing all the stories in the situation or all the aspects of it there were to see.

In being so sure we're the Right One and She Isn't, or in being so wrapped up in making sure we're treated right and not used or hurt (and those are good things to be looking out for, to be sure!), many times we aren't seeing how what we do is actually harmful, not to the wife--that much looks obvious but is debatable in some situations--but harmful to this suffering person we're calling the love of our lives. 

Make no mistake, if the guy we're with is stepping out on an established relationship, he's not doing it because he's healthy. He's doing it because he's got some pretty serious problems, and if we can step back enough to see what those are, it makes our own path, in terms of what's highest and best for all three parties, a lot clearer. If you read the second post in this blog and look at the attitude I had then, then contrast that with my new, revised goodbye letter, you might see what I mean.

Dear, sweet Chi,

I just want to reiterate one more time how glad I was to hear from you, how much I value you in my life, and how glad I am we met. Maybe that sounds a little weird considering, but I've learned so very much in the years since our relationship took a turn towards the more serious. 

I love you and adore you as much as I always did. However, I have learned a lot, and if you'll bear with me, I'm going to take you on a couple of side trips through things that happened to me while we were apart, in order to illustrate a point or two. By the time I get to the end, I promise this will make sense. 

Side Trip One: Jane. Of course you remember Jane. If you read my blog, you'll know what happened with her, but if you don't, I'll try to be brief as I summarize this. You know I "inherited" another writer's group when the previous owner stepped down. In trying to attract members, I, unfortunately, invited Jane. (I thought better after I did this, but too bad, she remembered and came anyway.)

Of course you remember how she acted. Well ... I started out thinking she had improved. I'm sorry to say that, after giving off that impression for a few months, she got worse than she ever had been. Others in the group got treated to every sentence beginning with, "I'M published," and, "MY editor said," and "I've done blahblahblah so *I* know." She would talk on and on and on for twenty minutes without ever stopping for breath.

I kept hoping she would get it and alter her behavior, so when people complained, I made excuses for her. Secretly I was afraid of confronting her, because she was so much like my mother, I knew how she was going to react, the same way no one else wanted to confront her because they knew how she would react: stunned, tearful, and hurt, of course, because she was so nice and after all, she IS published and therefore knows more than anyone else. They counted on me to rein her in, and I didn't have the skills to know how, so I sat there and watched one member after another drift away, while I hoped if I worked with the difficulty, she'd change. 

Eventually, only three people were left: me, Jane, and a self-published author named Judy who put up with Jane because she knew so much about self-promotion and she got a lot of ideas from her. But, strangely, the nicer we were and the more we put up with Jane, the worse she got. She snubbed Judy at book fairs several times and was just plain rude and horrible to her a couple of other times.

Finally, we sat her down and spoke with her. I told her that everyone else was gone, citing her behavior as the reason, and if she drove one more person out, I was going to have to ask her to leave. I outlined several areas on which I would like her to work. One was talking over other people for twenty minutes at a time, one was the boastful bragging, and the last was starting and maintaining arguments. (Jane now does not believe in ever using the word "was," will introduce grammatical errors into her work rather than use that word, and started not one, but two, thirty minute arguments about the use of this word.) So, we spoke and it looked like this discussion went well.

Sometimes Jane was okay, but mostly we saw the same behavior. Judy and I were thinking about just disinviting her permanently, when the following happened:

One day Jane came into group with a story she was submitting to a contest at a magazine. By this time, we had a new member, Nick. We all read the story and had the same comments: Good story, but it's a knockoff of Jurassic Park. Nobody will ever publish this.

Jane was furious. (Well, rather, she was humiliated, which then made her furious.) She brought in a copy of the rules of the contest, which made it clear that, believe it or not, she had actually done what the magazine had asked for. We were all flabbergasted. (Wouldn't you be?)

Then she started an email war with me because I had not somehow divined what the rules of the contest were and I thought she was stupid enough to submit a Jurassic Park knockoff to a magazine. Of course I defended myself--who would ever imagine a real magazine would actually run a contest for Jurassic Park knockoffs?? (Clearly, someone is desperate for readership.) I got the response that she was so hurt by my assumption about her that SHE was going to leave. Since all was lost anyway, I let her know some of the complaints others in the group had had with her behavior. Jane went, Don't worry about me, I'm just fine, but you're harsh delivering critique and you're not a kind person anymore, the way you used to be.

Wow.

Here I was, starting out with no friends at all after Simon died, losing all the new friends I'd made in order to baby her, and in return, she showed complete and utter oblivion to the facts and kicked me in the teeth. Gee, thanks, Jane. We don't have any new members and I still haven't met anyone new to have as a friend, so I essentially lost all my chances at building a new life with new friends, in order to coddle a person completely unable to step back and reflect on her own behavior, who kicked me harder and harder the nicer I was to her.

The coda: After this, Jane contacted Judy to return her last set of pages to her. Judy met Jane at a restaurant to pick up the pages. Completely forgetting all the times she had been rude to Judy (probably because she had no idea she was being rude), Jane asked Judy to keep trading pages over email. Judy said no, but she was still half an hour getting out of the restaurant, even though she only stood at the table and didn't even sit down. Why? Because Jane monopolized the conversation and gabbled and gabbled and gabbled at her for half an hour. RIGHT after I'd just told her six people left our group telling me they were sick of her not knowing when to stop talking. (And she'd responded by saying, "But people always interrupt me and that's rude!" To which I'd said, "But you talked at them for twenty minutes and no one else at the table could say anything.")

*sigh*

Side Trip Two: My mother. Of course you know about my mother; you read most of the novel I wrote about that situation. 

Right about this time, I started speaking to my brother again (sort of), and noticed my mother posting on his Facebook page. It was mentioned that she was back in counseling again and had been for a while, and I started to wonder if I had actually done the right thing in cutting her off over ten years ago. People can change, I thought. Once upon a time she said nothing was wrong with her and she'd never go back to therapy, I thought. It's been ten years, I thought. Maybe time had made a difference. 

And then my cousin in Florida private messaged me. Did you see this? she said.

It was a family picture my brother had posted of the Christmas after we had each gotten married. That was the Christmas both of us were on the outs with our mother because of some very outrageous behavior on her part. We had both gone to visit our uncle and grandparents without her. My brother had posted the photo up with a comment about how it was of happier times.

My mother had been molested by my grandfather. This came out while I was in high school, and we had many conversations about it while I was in high school and college. I had been very supportive of my mother then, and I was up until I had to part company from her due to her outrageous behavior just prior to the Christmas in question. Seems like she'd remember the many many many conversations about it we'd had. I even went to one of her therapy sessions with her!

My mother had posted on that photo that everyone in it was her enemy, because they had disowned her because she disclosed that my grandfather had molested her, and that she thought my brother should take all such family photos off of Facebook. She did not make this comment private.

I did some surfing around and saw that she had done this to a number of photos I was in.

I posted on one of them and said that no, that was NOT the reason, and on another I posted that she really ought to think before she posted on Facebook, because a post like that said a lot more about her than it did about anyone else.

I next heard from my cousin in Florida, who told me my mother had replied with so much blistering invective and graphic details about the molestation that my cousin couldn't even read it all. She warned me about it and advised me not to read it. I went and looked because I was curious (I had read similar from Mom before in emails), but even my brother had written, "I know," below my comment and taken Mom's down.

Wow.

So now we're at the end of these little side trips, and I'm going to use them now to make my point.

My point is how oblivious these women both were to their own behavior. How they kept doing the same thing over and over and over again, even when it was not doing anything helpful for them or anyone else. Neither one of them is able to step back very well and consider any other points of view, or that there might be some other way of looking at the situation. Even when people got more and more direct in pointing out what was wrong, they couldn't see anything but what their own feelings were telling them was reality.

And a lot of times those feelings actually came from something parents and family had done a long, long time ago, and not from the reality of now. 

My other point is that I've observed that, when a person was like this, it didn't matter how nice I was to them, or how hard I tried, this way and that way and this way, to help. They always turned on me, and I got kicked in the teeth no matter what.

I've observed that I tend to attract this kind of person over and over, and I never seem to learn my lesson.

Well ... this time I've learned. 

I'm not saying I don't love you. I do, very much. I'm not saying I don't want to be with you. I do, very much.

What I am saying, is I've learned that I need to pull way, wayyy back, and watch for signs of this happening.

Are you going to be yet another of these people who can't achieve any kind of self awareness or perspective on your situation other that what old childhood feelings and old childhood shame and old childhood guilt are telling you is just like the way things have always been? Because all those feelings come from sick parents, and sick parents never leave a child anything good. Yet they model to the child that it's the child who is wrong.

I'm aware that this is a very tall order, but it doesn't look like you've made a whole lot of progress with this as of yet.

I can't tell you what to do.

In order for me to feel at all comfortable with the idea of us as an eventual couple, however, I would need to see you doing some work with your early childhood, about the atmosphere in your home growing up, and about what you decided as a young child about how lovable you were, what relationships are like, what your responsibilities in a relationship should be, and how you're supposed to feel in a relationship and how that's supposed to come about.

It would seem that you've spent an awful lot of time in the past three years worrying about fixing other people's feelings and not enough time on fixing your own, an awful lot of time worrying about how your life looks to other people and not enough time worrying about how it feels to you to live your life, an awful lot of time trying to solve other people's problems and not enough time trying to solve your own.

I love you very much, but I have to say that I don't care if you're married, divorced, or widowed, this kind of approach to life's problems and people's feelings is a recipe for disaster.

We've got some very tough problems, here. I'm going to be looking very hard to see what your approach to these problems looks like. Have you learned anything from the past three years? Are you going to be my mom or another Jane, unconsciously recycling symptoms over and over and over, accepting them as The Truth and never stopping to think about why you're doing things and whether your reasons hold water or not? Or are you going to be like me these past three years, reading and journaling and researching and working and learning and flying high, high up into a bird's eye view of problems and how they came about, and how else you can look at those problems in order to make wise decisions?

Because I'm here to tell you, I'm done with my mother and I'm done with Jane. I'm fifty years old and I will not tolerate another person in my life who lives the way they do. I can't. I've suffered enough damage from unconscious people who run like robots on old childhood feelings and just can't see themselves at all. Who just can't see that they need to take a step back from what they've always thought and felt, and research what happens in healthier families and how healthy people look at the same situation. 

Mom/Jane kind of behavior is a trust-killer, a relationship-ruiner, and a life-destroyer. I've worked extremely hard while we were apart to identify old childhood programming I always thought was the truth, and to stop and think so I can figure out what's destructive before it hurts me or you any more.

I don't work this hard for someone who cannot or will not. So it's up to you to decide what kind of work you are willing to do, and whether the therapeutic community you are now in is helping you overcome your problems ... or just helping you recycle them.

I have some great resources if you are interested. I will not tell you what to do.

It's entirely possible that even if you do make some changes in your therapy and acquire greater insight, you may still decide you want to stay in your marriage and keep your family the way that it is. People do, every day, even when their marriage is not satisfactory and they have no reason to hope that it ever will be. 

The important thing, and the thing I will be looking to see, is that the decisions you make are made from a heart that's truly at peace with everything those decisions mean, and not a heart that's letting itself be abused or taken advantage of, resentfully saying, "I've made my bed and now I have to lie in it." To my way of thinking, health might sound something like, "I know Rory is the way that she is, and I'm just going to stay with her and love her anyway the way she is." If you can truly do that, do that, and more power to you. A lot of people could not, but only you can decide what's right for you, and what YOU will TRULY be happy with.

If YOU are TRULY HAPPY with any decision you make, then so am I. Don't worry about me. I have lots to do, and I will be fine.

I will not be happy with any decision that sounds like, "I have to because so-and-so will blahblahblah." That's not a healthy decision made by a healthy heart based in healthy reasoning. Keep working until you can make a decision the RIGHT way ... the healthy way.

I love you and I needed to let you know this. Any relationship I agree to will need to be a healthy one, or one grounded in solid work in therapy with a decent chance of becoming healthy. I still love you, but I need to see a good, solid working attitude that's willing to dive into some codependency resources and information about healthy families, and think more objectively about the past three years and your situation. If I see unconscious Mom or Janelike behavior, I'm outta here for my own good. 

And that doesn't mean I don't love you. I'll be very sad about it, but what it means is I won't repeat ill health anymore. If you mean to keep repeating ill health, you don't need me in your life. You can stay home with Rory or pick any idiot off the street and keep being codependent and stuck in low self esteem.

My world is a place to work hard and get well. A person with that attitude has the attitude I stick with. If I don't see that ... well ...

I love you and I hope you choose health.

But I can't make you. (That would be codependent.)

Love,

Ridley

Big difference, huh?