In Reply to: i can see that.. posted by ray on February 12, 2005 at 09:04:14:
It took me forever to emege from the Family fog and during that time my wife and I fought like cats and dogs. It got so bad that I got home one day from work to find her moving out - ha. (cause I was blaming her for alot of our ills.)
At first (when I saw her packing) I was furious! "What? I spend my life compromizing it, waiting for you to come on line and get a life, be a team player, and now you're leaving? Two days later I thinking, "Great! Why am I grieving something I so want out of?" Man! that was it! I got over grieving that crap in an instant. I felt like a bird let out of a cage and I was ready to start dating again.
Apparently, her take on the whole situation was: "This is just a redemptive separation. We'll talk and work things out and," well, whatever. My take on it was, "GOOD F**ING RIDANCE!" We got back together a month or so later. I promised I wouldn't blame her for anything anymore, grrrrr. But somehow, in the back of my mind I'm thinking, "I'm going to regret this." It wasn't long before some new stress came up (probably something financial at that time) and she's right back at it, flipping out, yelling and screaming and throwing things and I'm thinking, "Go ahead, yell and scream and do whatever, but I'm not rescuing you anymore. I'm going to do what I know I have to do and you can just go to hell for all I care. Nothing pleases you and you won't help yourself. F**k you!" She ended up in the hospital a few hours later, damn near dead, she got SO OUT OF IT! By that time I could have cared less if she woulda died. Honestly, at that time, I wish she would have. That's how bad it got/was.
Something snapped in her after that hospital visit though. It was almost as if she had become a babe, you know, like when we first joined the Family. She decided to fight back, fight her way out of whatever it was that she was so angry about all the time. I'm thinking to myself, " Like, why didn't you decide do that 23 years ago when you first joined the Family? We could have avoided all this nightmare." And then I'm thinking, "What's wrong with me that I'm putting up with all this crap? Why have I stayed? Am I stupid or what?"
I have since come down off my selfrighteous horse, and she has since climbed out of the hole that she had been cast into, and we both got out of the family fog so there is no cult and no doctrine to do battle with on top of everything else. It's just healed her and healed me. Now everything is negotiable. I'm not sure what's going to come of that just yet. We have begun to meet, sorta, I guess, and have had some very intimate times. We'll see. Based on what we've come through together as a couple, one could say that it is a definition of love. It used to be a very codependent, sick love, but we're over that kinda stuff now. She is she and he is he. She's stopped needing to be rescued at every turn, and I've stopped the enabling. Now it seems about the only mission we have in our hands is to finish raising our skattered to the wind kids, somehow.