I can hear my son on the couch playing Youtube videos. He has told me to go back to bed. I have wept all night and he knows and he is being kind and also self-serving, because Youtube culcha is naughty funny grimy slinky.
So this me, now, separated, living in a little house in Aloha street. Welcome! But how to begin again here, in this blog that was begun when I was a (mostly) happy wife, building the dream home within the old home's walls, with a man I sometimes referred to as this ship's Captain?
I left him two months ago. Tired, too tired of being the lone hand on the big boat. Tired, so tired of being lonely in a marriage with a man who who had grown complacent, entitled, and small of spirit.
So I built a smaller boat to better fit my solo hands and it has been fine, even grand at times. My son my first mate, and on we go, rough riding but oh such views. And I thought my love and care could carry every one, and that I could cope.
In here are old blogs about the building years. I am glad to have them. I have been out of the home for two months. I left it because my ex cannot afford to move and still keep a part time roof over our son. I have left him there so that he could still be a Dad as he tries to get more work to support himself. Two months and yesterday I found he'd ensconced a woman in for a little love-nesting while I had care of our son.
letter to my ex:
I didn’t go looking, and even when I found it my head grasped all these other ideas: oh that’s my red silk scarf and those lanyards from Tracy and my birthday party. I picked them up, but they were wrong. I saw a red shoe and picked it up thinking these things were mine, foundlings you had put together to give me. But the shoe was wrong too. Then the bra, my fingers finding this satin greasy feeling. Wrong again. Then it began to dawn on me, ‘not mine’, as I found the dress.
And in moments something clicked. Your assumption you would
leave our boy with me for 5 days until new years day, and your rage when I
countered that. You planned for her to be around a few days. A few pairs of
undies in the basket in the study I once loved. Sleeping together. Cocooned in. The intimacy of that speaks of long build.
I have cried all evening and night. Not your concern but I
will have to get my bro to help me look after our boy today, I'm tapped out.
What you’ve done is smashed every positive memory I have in
the home I left when I left you.
Wrecked it.
So, I hope for you that it worked. That in fucking her there,
and having her stay, it exorcised me fully and fast.
I hope that when you lie in the bed we bought with wedding
money, in the room we painted surrounded by the pictures I framed, under the
chandelier that has my childhood memories, all you see is her reflected in
those crystals and the gold. Her body, not mine. I hope you can see Diane by Klimt and not remember
Windsor.
I hope that when you walk the hall along the wallpaper I chose
and the pictures I filmed and framed, you see it now only as she did, that the
house is quirky and that the mum and baby photo is nice.
I hope that when you sit in the backroom now you hear her
voice not mine, and that the making of the shelves with my dad is eradicated by
the presence of her.
I hope that the bath now is soaked in her image, a picture
there of a woman drinking the coffee you made her, lapping away at your little love
offering. So intimate. I hope when you sit along our son there you don’t, any more, remember
him and I in that bath with bubbles and toys. Just her. No back-story any more
of finding the tub on the roadside. No image of my Dad up to his knees in floorboards,
or me pregnant on the toilet.
And I hope that the veranda is the same, clear of me, clear
of Max, and the pear tree is no longer a story of triumph but something she just looked
at.
So yes, since you fucked her and made intimate moments in
the home we built and that you live in with our son I hope it worked to serve
you well. I truly do. You chose exactly that. So that is what you now have. You
chose to make intimacy there and I hope it resonates sweetly for you.
That house now is nothing to me, only a roof over our boy's head. Handovers at the door. I’ll return the house key so you can feel free to
keep making new memories to eradicate the old ones, the ones you made with your
ex and her family.
It’s a good bridge out, to exorcise the young excited couple
from the home, the new parents from the home, the Max from the home. It will make
selling up easier.
***
So there is my rancour and oh it feels good to pour it here. It is freeing. I am free, I am going to rebuild, for I am my Mum and Dad's bright strong girl with hands and shoulders for making, and love big enough to billow out the sails.
