Pain Remembered

Every time Dash has left the house since telling me he is to be sworn in I panic. My insides fill with anxiety like ants on a trash heap, swarming, squirming - busy, busy, busy making mountains out of mole hills.

My brain goes into overdrive on a seek and destroy mission, looking for that piece of intel that will seal the doom that he is leaving me not for the Army but our relationship. It would seem that every detail missed is a negative I count to back-up one more reason to distance myself.

If I can't find something to be angry about I find a way to feel nothing. It has felt that even he is doing the same to me, a defensive mechanism I thought unitl . . .

He just came into this room with his daughter Mishka, who for the last 6 years has only gotten to see her dad every other weekend for not quite 48 hours each visit. He came in here to show her that every single scrap of art or memento she has given him is kept. I suddenly felt very stupid. Very selfish.

Very stupid because in an instant what he was really feeling washed over me, (maybe I imagined it - maybe he couldn't hold that door closed because the emotion inside is to big - it really matters not if our connection has been so raw of late that neither of us can feel the other like we used to and I thought it was open enough to get this right) an emotion I knew all to well 8 years ago every single day for 3 years after my son AJ went to live with his dad.

Pain. While you are present with that perfect piece of you, who adores you as only a child can - you know as fantastic as these precious moments are that they need must end, you will have to give them back and you can't help feeling like your organs are slowly being ripped out through your nose.

You bear this with a wistful smile as they look upon you with joy because as sad as you feel you won't ruin it for them, not this minute, not this hour, not this day - not EVER! We do what we must to cherish and build these memories knowing they will give both joy and immense pain later because we wouldn't trade an ocean of tears to not have those experiences with you.

It isn't me he is blocking out, he isn't running away from me or leaving me. He is building damns to hold back the flood gates of the next 30 - 90 day period where he may or may not be able to see her. This isn't about me.

. . . and guilty because I am being (all be it MOSTLY silently inside my head) selfish by counting trivialities and drawing conspiracies in my own mind. None of which matter in comparison to that pain. I remember it like a cloak of death as Ron Weasley would say "like I'd never be cheerful again".

I'm so sorry I didn't see it before and so relieved I saw it before I said or did something stupid.