my sophie's choice

When I don't write here it's sometimes because things are going well enough that I don't need this secret space of mine. Sometimes it's because I'm frustrated that the situation is the same. 

The situation is the same. Roi is an emotionless robot (he says so himself), Kyd is emotionally unstable, Lexie is doing ok but full of anxiety and dragging her feet on leaving the nest, I want to leave but am financially dependent and despite multiple resumés having hit the inboxes of hiring managers for jobs I am qualified for I get no call-backs, and every option I consider leaves someone hurting. 

It's like a lesser version of Sophie's Choice. Roi doesn't want Kyd here at the house - at all for six months because he was too chaotic, doing drugs, not working, and not meeting Roi's standards for how much work he should be doing around the house. Same story, different day on all fronts. 

So Kyd managed to find a job and a summer apartment, but lost the job and his apartment sublet is ending in two weeks. Predictably he's now depressed and angry and wants to come home and I can't let him. Even if Roi hadn't put his foot down, or I was on my own, I'm not even sure this would be the right thing for Kyd. I have gotten him into treatment numerous times only to a) have the therapist tell me/him that Kyd is fine, b) have the "expert" tell me Kyd is the worst case they've ever seen, they don't know what's wrong, or how to help, or c) Kyd sabotages it in some way. This last time I got him into neurofeedback and he didn't show for two appointments (once because he was fighting with his girlfriend) and he was doing drugs while getting treatment. So really, is letting him come home actually going to help? 

And yet not having the option tears me to pieces. Not having the option feels every kind of wrong. 

In itself this seems enough reason to leave Roi. Yet if I leave Roi now it means going to stay with my mother or father - both options mean taking Lexie out of her school and away from her friends, her life, her boyfriend, and everything she knows. 

Hence the Sophie's Choice. Which of my two young adult children do I say, "sorry, can't help ya"? There are some who would say "BOTH" because they are both technically adults. This should end the my having to make decisions based on their needs dilemma. There are some who would say, "Kyd" because otherwise I'm enabling him. I will never understand the distinction between enabling vs. loving-kindness, but that's another post. And still others would say, "Lexie" because it's time for her to jump the nest. 

The fact that the answers differ tells me one thing. No one knows shit about shit and reality is far more complex than advice.

p.s. I realized that last line may have sounded like an aggressive swipe at commenters loving support, but it was really about the line-up of "experts" who insist that we regular folk don't know what we're doing and they do. That still doesn't make it sound any less aggressive but I have my days where I'm tired and fed up and feel completely helpless and I get angry that there seems to be no help right here, right now. 


Sigh. I probably shouldn't be allowed on the internet right now. 

I'm in Trouble

I'm in trouble. I have been floating in this limbo with Roi for so so long. Not floating, that's the wrong imagery. Locked into it, trapped in it, wishing to flee and holding that wish down with an iron grip the way one grits their teeth and locks the tongue to the roof of one's mouth to hold back bile. 

Lexie and I speak in code: "LBR" - life before Roi. How we were dirt poor and struggling but found happiness and beauty despite it. How now we live in a luxurious home so full of light and so devoid of happiness. She wants out too. 

The trouble being, as its been, my lack of a secure job. I've sent out resumés to no avail. And every silence makes me despair but I press on. This is not the real trouble. The real trouble is when my tongue slips and the bile rockets forth through my gritted teeth and Roi is made aware of just how much I can't tolerate being with him. Because then what? He wants to dissolve but I have nowhere to go except home to my parents, ripping Lexie from everything she knows where she is. Her school, her boyfriend, her friends. And while she wants out it is not so intolerable to her that she wants to leave the geographical area. She wants us to find a sweet, bright little home nearby - but that's not within my means now. 

Amidst all of this I am still employed by Roi and I have such resistance now to that work that it makes my skull ache. Every time I sit down to do the work I want to scream and break things, throw my computer out the third floor window and watch it smash on the lawn below. Tears leak out from the corners of my eyelids and I try, I try, but in an 8-hour work day I wring out an hour's worth of work - two to three on a really good day. And Roi hates me for it, is so resentful. I get that. It makes every sense in the world that if I need money that I should at least do the work I have in front of me. Beggars shouldn't be choosers. 

And while Roi and I agreed that the best thing that could happen for this situation is for me to find a job, he squirms every time I make the littlest progress. If I take a day to job search, to send out a handful of resumés, and I feel good for a second, like maybe I can do this, he calls a meeting to talk about work and our finances. Every time. If I call him on it he twists so that I can't find anything wrong. He's just trying to do what's right, and then I feel crazy, unhinged, damaged, and helpless all over again and I have to dig my way back to a bit of stable ground to catch my breath and start the process of resistance and force anew. Strap on the nearly empty oxygen tank and hope I have enough for the dive.

Kyd is struggling again too, and he needs my oxygen tank but I can't spare a drop. 

If Roi Had a Blog

I found this in drafts from about a year ago.

I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety over this work situation. I've got to do more sales and bring in more work, yet I'm depleted of the necessary energy after having to manage my recovery AND Briar's complete dysfunction around work. She's screwing up royally but I can't talk to her about it. She is unable to take direction or criticism. 

We went to lunch today where I hoped to extract from her her intentions around work, and come up with a plan that might work for everyone involved. She couldn't look me in the eye and stubbornly refused to share her thoughts on the matter. Next thing I know she's bawling right there in the restaurant and I don't know what I've said. 

three weddings and a monk

Last night I got together with a few friends from my alma mater (an all women's college) and we sat around talking about lives, politics, social issues, and of course reminiscing. At some point it came up that I wasn't at a certain event, or had left early, and I felt my stomach do the old familiar drop as I was stung by the memory of why I wasn't there. 

It was a reunion event a couple years ago, and I had set out in the early afternoon for festivities, but as the day softly receded into night I began to get anxious about how many hours Roi had been alone so when the festivities were being moved to another venue, I took the opportunity to bow out. 

I wanted to stay with my friends, but I couldn't. My head was so tragically wrapped around the addicts in my life. I hadn't always been this way, but as their disease progressed, so did mine. Or rather, in the case of Roi, as my knowledge of the extent of his disease progressed, the more sick I became. And I started missing out on things. 

Like:

I had to cancel an expense paid trip to take part in a science of mind discussion with the Dalai Lama and a dozen or two major scientists from around the world because Kyd had pulled something that made it impossible for me to go. I missed the wedding of two very dear friends because I was afraid to leave Kyd with anyone, afraid to bring him with me because of how he might act. I missed another wedding a year later for the same reason, and then I missed the wedding of someone else very close to me because I couldn't, just could not bring myself to leave Roi alone for that many hours now that his addiction had come to light.

Roi had given me ample reason to fear leaving him alone. As I uncovered transgression after transgression after transgression there were any number of things he might do with too many hours strung together without supervision. When I would go out with my girlfriends, he would call old girlfriends and lovers. When he went to meetings, he would stop at strip bars on his way home. When he was left alone for a whole day he would spend it cruising Craigslist for erotic dancers and masseurs. When he told me he would be late coming over it was because he was on the phone with a woman. When he would say he was going to bed it was only a half truth; he would get in bed and then surf porn. If I went away for more than a day he would spend that time at beaches or parties or bookstores cruising for opportunities to meet women, but also to just look at them and maybe glimpse a little more than he was intended to. 

And if I didn't go away, he did. It seemed there was always a reason he needed to be away, and it was always, always, imperative. He guilted me at every turn. To say no was to be selfish, to deny him. In his mind...in his mind it wasn't, however, selfish to sleep with a woman in Jamaica while I was at home dealing with Kyd's first major legal trouble. It wasn't selfish to have a sexual encounter with a woman in New York while I was by my son's side in the hospital. 

I feel sick when I write these things. But mostly now I feel a fierce, concentrated anger that has nowhere to go. So I dance for hours until my legs and neck and back ache with purified pain. I kickbox the shit out of the punching bag in our backyard. I swim until my thighs and arms burn. I hand it over to my therapist in small choking doses. I walk away from Roi and Kyd again and again with a sweeping motion of my arm as though I can wipe away the pain they bring entirely. 

sweating bones

The days still flow on by, a relentless passage of time. I've watched movies, danced some more, cried on the therapist's couch, held hands with my daughter, laughed about things, walked out on a conversation I couldn't have (and then walked two and a half hours to home), gone swimming, drove in a thunderstorm, cooked things and then ate them, stayed up too late and slept too late, and conversed with various friends.

These days are my life such as it is at this point in time. 

Therapist says I have a resilient little brain that is responding well to treatment. She says I am different already from when I first came to her. I feel it too and we smile at each other. It's still only the beginning, which is frustrating at times, but I am determined to not just come back, but to come back reinvented - stronger, wiser, softer, grounded and fierce. 

I feel closer to letting Roi go. The "thing" of Roi. He's more sober than he's ever been and that's different. I haven't once caught him ogling another woman, haven't smelled alcohol, haven't seen the pinpoint pupils. Yet he is small without these things. A deflated, simpering thing dragging his wibbly soul around in the length of his arms which hang limp at his sides. One might think he's depressed, and that in itself is depressing; that sobriety doesn't suit him.

He wants to be happy. He wants to be happy with me he says. But his sad discontent drapes over his shoulders, sagging them and when I look at him, I think, "I just can't". 

Roi has a white, pasty, piggy-eyed friend who moved to the Philippines to live out his days in financial luxury and sexual decadence. He's already gotten one girl pregnant, and to his credit, is supporting her. Of course it hasn't stopped him from continuing to fuck as many desperate young women as he can in between working and sleeping. Roi says he sounds happy. I want him to feel sorry for his friend for having to buy a proximation of love and acceptance in a foreign country away from family and friends. An awkward clinging hope that somewhere in Roi is a noble man, but that's how I got here isn't it? Hoping for something to be what it's not. He doesn't pity mr. pig-eyes, he thinks its swell that he "figured things out". It probably means that when I leave Roi will pack his bags to solve his money, love, and sex problems. I won't want to know, but I'll know. I already know. 

A sadness sweats down the inside of my bones.

discombobulated and slightly cranky

Life with Roi over the last couple of days has been decidedly un-newsworthy. There have been no discussions about how we should move forward. There have been no conversations of consequence at all. He has remained optimistically cheerful as though he can heal all that is wrong between us with a stupid grin and light conversation. 

I haven't the strength or the stupidity to open the topic. 

I did thuggishly announce on separate occasions to both Roi and Kyd that I refused to be in the middle of what is required from each for Kyd to remain here long enough to get on his feet, and to Roi's credit he talked to Kyd on his own. Kyd was not open, to his own detriment, but I cannot enter into that fray any more. Kyd belongs to me, but the house belongs to Roi, and while I have thoughts neither takes my advice so I just can't be involved. It makes me crazy when I try to solve their problems. 

Wanted: Life GPS

I am startled by Roi's return, literally. He has come home nearly two hours earlier than he estimated and I jump in shocked surprise when I find I am not alone in the house. He laughs and apologizes and we hop and bumble awkwardly for a moment in our too small kitchen. He thrusts a plastic wrapped bundle of flowers towards me, opening and closing his arms. I feel like a rabbit suddenly exposed to the gnashing teeth of a wolf and I can't stop moving around the foot or so of space around him to pick up a dish, throw a scrap of paper away, rinse out a cup - so he admires the flowers himself describing his selection to me and how they look ever so much better here in the natural light from the window. 

I flash my teeth quickly and take the flowers from him as I sweep by. I think I throw a thank you in his direction, but I'm not sure. The flowers I drop in the dining room on my way to the front door with a bag of garbage. 

We spend the next hour passing each other as he unpacks and I scamper room to room spotting things that need to be returned to their proper places. Twitchy, skittish laughter accompanies each passing and we toss explanations up into the air around us about where we are off to next, and what might come after that. 

"Just tossing this into the laundry", and, "just going to go through all this mail", and "I've got to get to the recycling center before they close", and "I seem to have caught this cold so I'm just going to lie down for a bit". 

After he naps we lunch at a local cafe and gawk words at each other, one moment sharing a laugh over something and the next moment sliding our eyes toward the window or the food when we come too close to edges that still cut. He tells me about the archeology lecture and the tiny Maine island that was discovered with a 1940's schoolhouse still intact and untouched with the last lesson still on the chalkboard as though the children might return the next morning to sit at their child-sized desks. He asks about my children. He lights eagerly upon the topic of the new Woody Allen movie thinking it safe and I announce brutishly that I've sworn off Woody Allen. I insist that we go see Harry Potter instead. 

"Of course, of course", he says. 

There's no better way to avoid someone you're in the company of than at a movie. 

Back at home we discuss the lives of our friends, by proxy to talk about ourselves. His friend won't be coming to stay for two weeks after all because the friend's new puppy isn't getting along with his cat, but also that it's at times too much to be around our "oscillations". Roi glances at me when he says this, and I am washed over with a small wave of grief and knowing. I see in my mind the last five years of push-pull desperation weaving through so much of our relationship. 

Is it even possible that we could ever be easy with one another? Why shouldn't we? Our intellectual interests are symbiotic, we are physically well-matched, we entertain one another well. Why should this be so hard?

Roi tells me about his other friend, an addict, who has recently hacked up another relationship and has decided to love heroine instead. I cluck and wonder aloud if this friend might not be avoiding commitment. Roi nods and explains how he realizes that one must commit to one life, and in his case he has decided it is with me, if that's what I want, of course. I can't say what I want. 

What's more, he continues, the addict must make a decision to recover. That he may still stumble, but without the decision he will always dance with the right foot in, while the left foot heads for the door. We talk philosophically on these matters, as though we are like-minded individuals who had just met at a dinner party, as if it is not our lives we speak of, as if the consequences of our theories are not ours to bear.

The Crazy Has Passed

It may not have been as linear, or intentional, or as graceful as WomanAnonymous's recent trigger handling, but the crazy has passed, and when I think about it, I did handle it in much the same manner as WA. I was just a lot more clumsy and messy about it. 

Progress, not perfection. 

I emailed Roi this morning that I was sensing a shift and would like to know if a shift has happened because I want to know where things stand. 

He called pretty promptly, and once I heard his voice I'm convinced that this time I got hijacked somewhat in error. I do think there is a shift in Roi, and though he didn't acknowledge any shift, he did say he's not really looking forward to coming home because he just really likes the small-town island and he wishes he could live there. 

Translation: Roi has had no real responsibilities while there, no one to be accountable to, no questions being asked of him, no expectations of him. He is cooked for every evening and other than helping with clean-up, no real chores. 

It makes sense I would feel a shift, and in the midst of my freaking out I considered this very real, viable possibility to explain it. But my brain is still vulnerable, and once hijacked everything careens out of control too bloody fast to get a hold on. The writing helps. You help. Recovery work has helped. Therapy is helping. But I am not yet able to catch the trigger before it kicks my feet out from under me. I am not yet able to trust that these extreme feelings will pass. I am not yet able to fully trust in the process of healing. I do not yet have faith that I will be returned to myself intact.

Now that the crazy has passed, and I'm reassured that Roi is not about to turn cold, I feel just a little guilty that I need Roi to hang in there so that I get to call the shots of our separation if that's what I decide I want. I just need to feel a little bit of control. 

Shift

I have been seized with anxiety since yesterday afternoon's email from Roi, and the more I try to calm it, ignore it, distract myself from it, move away from it, the tighter it's grip on my intestines. Once in this mode everything begins to get attached to it. If I email someone and they don't email back I start spinning into anxious explanations for why they aren't emailing me back. If I do manage to talk to anyone, I berate myself after for not asking about their day or otherwise acknowledging that they have a life of their own. Or I pace (if standing) or toss (if prone) for hours going over what I said. Was it crazy? Too much? The more I feel anxious, the more I feel desperate, and the more I feel desperate, the more I feel anxious. 

This mode is probably what led Barbara Steffens to consider PTSD as a more viable explanation for the behavior and response of partners of sex addicts. It is what I call, "having my brain hijacked" and I cannot begin to help anyone understand how torturous it is. 

Before sex addiction, I had anxiety over things, but it was manageable. Big events like my divorce, or the first time Kyd ran away from home so he could be free to party, certainly would send me into a tail-spin but it seemed normal. Normal as in these are the types of major events that are understood to throw a person way off their center. And I bounced back on a predictable and normative timeline. Especially considering the utter lack of outside support. 

So when I can't get a grip on myself, can't steady myself, can't stop the waves of anxiety and panic that come up when my partner says something so seemingly innocent, I know there is something very different about what being in relationship with a sex addict has done to my well-being. Yes, trauma and various abuses stretch back from the present in a nearly uninterrupted line to my childhood, and clearly that primed me for the current state. But nothing unravels me so quickly as the complex set of behaviors of sex addiction. 

Let me just pause and say, "Motherfucker". 

I've sleuthed for the source of my most recent anxiety and realize that it isn't being triggered by the library. It's being triggered by a shift I'm sensing from Roi. A shift I predicted and told therapist I was anxious about right when we started. 

Roi's core issue is not really sex addiction. It is a steady state of flux that he doesn't know how to manage. He has no inner compass, no set of values, he changes his mind easily and given whatever the context of the moment. He doesn't know how to be, he doesn't know what to be, so he follows an arbitrary code based mostly on attraction and repulsion. His sense of a person's value is determined by hard, material measures that he can understand like wealth or education level or physical attractiveness or what club someone belongs to.  He cannot understand values he cannot see such as integrity or love.

This means he is easily swayed. The addictions only add to his floating morality.

So when he left for these three weeks and I began treatment, I said to the therapist that I was a little terrified that I would find myself in the vulnerable place between broken and whole when Roi had a change of heart for the umpteenth time, that he would turn cold and try to force me out.

And that's what's triggering me. Not the library so much as feeling a shift in his attention. I have no idea what is prompting it, I just know I feel it.

Well Hello Uncomfortable Feelings

Awesome therapy today calmed me down considerably, gave me a bubble of peace from which to draw air. Yay for therapy. 

Then I got an email from Roi. 

Mundane niceties ended with "I'm attending an archeology lecture at the local library at 7:00". 

And then I remembered why depression can be considered a coping mechanism. I'm not comfortable with the feelings this innocent statement brings up and I'd prefer not to be having them. I'd prefer not to be scrambling for healthier coping like taking a bubble bath or doing the dishes and just doing the dishes, no thought. 

I got through the, "don't worry, there's no real beach where I'm going", followed a few days into his trip by, "I went to the beach today. Oh yeah, I forgot there was a beach here." I shrugged it off and went about my day. 

I got through seeing the stunningly beautiful black woman at the local Trader Joe's and the thoughts that she was exactly Roi's type and everything I'm not. I leaned over the freezer and grabbed three packages of my favorite green chili chicken burritos, took a deep breath and kept on shopping. 

I got through my trip to the local swimming hole the other day with Lexie and seeing the guy who had positioned himself behind a group of college girls, who was clearly alone, who was not sunning or napping or swimming or reading or doing anything really except staring at the girls. I got through wanting to ask him what he was doing. I got through convincing myself he was a creep, and projecting Roi's behavior onto him. I got through wanting to confront him or to tell the girls there were being subjected to his leering gaze and didn't they want to kick sand in his eyes? I got through seeing Roi in his place, and it didn't help that the man was about the same age, height, build, and coloring of Roi. I took Lexie to the other side of the beach and we played fetch with the adorably muscled pup that frequents that side of the swimming hole. 

So perhaps it's because I solved one problem, at least in my own mind, and that simply made room for other unresolved stuff to make an appearance. Or perhaps I'm addicted to pain and seized on the first opportunity to wallow in it. Or perhaps I don't have the black void to float in to avoid the sharp edges. Or perhaps my instincts are dead on. 

But that one little statement set my mind to spinning cogitation. Round and round. All the memories of innocent statements that were carefully crafted fronts to seedier motives. He's been frequenting this library for two and a half weeks now, and for a sex addict who can get a phone number at a local dive pizza parlor in less than 20 minutes, twice, and who has a history of acting out in libraries and bookstores and at beaches, "I'm going to an archeology lecture at the library at 7:00" holds too many other possible meanings. 

Additionally, he's been talking a lot about how much he loves the library, and how he's starting to get a glimpse of the "that small town community peace you so often speak of". It so happens that this library was transitioning while Roi was there. The original library had burned to the ground 20 years ago and the new building was just unveiled last week. There was a ribbon-cutting ceremony and Roi attended. He also helped drive boxes of books from the temporary library to the new building. 

None of this sounds remotely like anything Roi has ever done or would ever do. 

He loathes helping to move things. He has never expressed an interest in our local happenings. He has never expressed an interest in archeology. In fact, I imagine it to be just the type of topic that would bore him to death. 

And the really, awful, shitty truth of all of this is that it could be exactly what he is saying it is. Or it could be just like so many other seemingly innocent cover stories that mask an opportunity to act out in some way. A myriad of ways. An emotional affair. A seduction. A fantasy. Other forms of acting out I'd prefer not to say out loud.

Either way, I'm pissed to be in this place again. I do. not. want. to. be. in. this. place. I am angry that his actions in the last 5 years have stripped so much innocence and groundedness from my experience with him, or in the world generally. I am livid that I can't shop or swim or hear about his attending a lecture without having to employ deep breathing to keep my head from exploding.

"I'm Sorry"

Roi called the other day about money matters so I had to take the call. It's the first time we've spoken since he left other than one call about work (I had to take his place at a sales meeting). 

He said he's been taking the time away to reflect on everything and it all boiled down to that he's sorry and he wants to step up, "man" up. I listened to his long dialogue mostly in silence. I searched all the corners of my body to find what was coming up and came up empty-handed. 

It's not that I don't believe him. I think in this moment, at this time, he is truthfully sorry and I've wanted to hear that for a very long time. Too long a time. My ex-husband was very sorry after too long a time too. I was already gone from him when he finally lifted the veil from his eyes and saw the wreckage his drinking and control had caused in our marriage. 

I can't say I'm already gone from Roi. I honestly don't know where my next steps will take me. My conscious thoughts on the matter are that I don't want to make nice with someone who I told every step of the way that I was faltering under the weight of his continued addiction and all the flavors of betrayal it brought, and the deep wounds in my family centered around Kyd's alcohol use and bold self-destruction. I don't want to make nice with someone who, for whatever reason, was so callous to my descent. 

But where I am with Roi is something much different from those conscious thoughts, because it has to do with where I am with myself. I am in the underground of self, excavating old bones, meditating in the charnel grounds, and patiently gathering up. 

I won't know where I am with Roi, or the world, until I've come back from my work.