Knots

I realized today - with gut churning certainty - that I am utterly unprepared for the day I find out that my ex is dating again. It will happen, eventually, and I want to be ready. But I ain't gonna be. It's gonna sneak up on me and slap me so hard that I won't be able to breathe, and I will be down for the count -- at least for a while. And everyone in my life will suffer alongside me because of it.

As I was picking up our daughter from his house this afternoon, I noticed a wood and bead bracelet on his wrist. It was clearly not something the kiddo made, and it's utterly unlike him to randomly wear "jewelry." I asked him if it was a mala (Tibetan Buddhist prayer beads), though I knew it wasn't because I wanted to know where it came from. Of course it wasn't my business, but I wanted to know precisely because it's odd for him to wear adornments of any kind, and my first thought was that it was a gift. He said it was just a thing...a little Pike Place Market thingy.

This would have caused my radar to start pinging like crazy, except that his mother was in town not two weeks ago, and they had gone to Pike Place Market. Given that, it seems unlikely that it was a gift from a female friend. Of course my darker being immediately thought that maybe he WAS dating someone and he was introducing her to his mom already!! Nothing like the voice of paranoia to make a girl feel fresh and confident.

I banished those thoughts immediately, but the fact that they were there, loud and clear, tells me that I have to deal with this sooner or later, and I am totally unready. The thing is, I want him to date. I want him to move on. I want to know that he's healing, and that he won't be alone for the rest of his life. Except, of course, I don't, and therein lies the conflict. Some part of me wants him to forever pine away for me. I want to be irreplaceable. Who doesn't?

My own guilt is all wrapped up in this like fat, juicy fly in a web. I want him to find someone so I know that my leaving him for someone else (to his eyes, anyway) didn't leaving him forever gutted. If he's happy and partnered, then my guilt at my own happiness without him is less piquant, less sharp. I want to know that perhaps the fact that I tore his family asunder has led to something as good or better than what he had.

The flip side is as I said above: I don't want him to find anyone else, because I want him to pine away for me, missing me because I am the best thing he ever had. I want him thinking he should have done more to keep me. I want him to see his role in the events that led to my departure from our marriage. And then there's the whole weirdness wrapped up with the idea that some woman I don't know will be involved in our child's life. No, I'm not worried about his eventual choice -- he'll choose wisely. I have no fear of that. Nor am I afraid of being replaced, really. It's more the idea that my daughter will have a relationship with another adult woman and I'll have no say in the formation and development of that relationship. I won't be able to guide it; I'll have to trust him to do that, which I do, but it still leaves me feeling squidgy.

I know that everything I feel when the time comes will only be a reflection of what I've put my ex through. He's had to silently deal with me having a relationship with a man I never could stop loving - a man I loved before I even knew my ex. He's had to suffer the pain and humiliation of finding out that he was never my first choice - that he was second best in my heart. He's had to watch as I moved out, moved on, took his daughter from his daily life, and lived for myself. He's had to hear his daughter mention the man that I love, hear her say how much she likes him.

Every time I think of how I'd feel if someone told me that I was their second choice - that they'd 'settled' for me -my insides twist up and I feel like dying. And yet that's what I did to him, and dammit, he didn't deserve it. For all his flaws and inconsistencies, he did not deserve it.

The karma on this one is gonna be a bitch. Even now, after two years, I wish I could go hug him and cry on his shoulder and tell him how sorry I am. I wish there was some way for him to know that I didn't want things to happen this way, that I tried, and that I wish things could have been different. I wish there was some way I could make up for it.

As it is, the best I can do is hope that someone out there will make him first in their heart.