Love-In

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These days, my wife and I communicate daily, often many times per day, either by phone, text, e-mail or the odd conversation through our car windows in a parking lot.  We have much to talk about;  raising three teenagers is busy at the best of times and we also talk about our jobs, house-selling issues and the division of our "stuff."   Despite all this contact, we rarely see each other face-to-face for any length of time.

In the past two months, her tone in these conversations has been kind, funny, thoughtful of my feelings, compassionate, helpful and oddly hesitant.   She's been so sweet with me that is is nauseating.  I just don't get it!

After one such conversation, I turned to a colleague (who was within earshot of my end of the conversation) I said, "Fuck... if I'd have known that she would be this nice, I would have divorced twelve years ago!!)    It's the truth.

It is a stark contrast from some of  my posts from 11 months ago when my wife finally realized that my gayness could not be just "wished" away.  She just moved out of the house permanently but the kids stayed with me.  I hadn't yet come out to anyone but my wife had already known about my attraction to men for about a year. 

It was pretty painful reading... it was a pretty bleak, desperate time.   In fact, some of the crazy behaviour was just too upsetting to blog about and I had "un-posted" several posts I had written at that time.

After she moved out,  I was on the receiving end of much abuse, sobbing, screaming, throwing of furniture, name-calling, slamming-down of the phone and threats to burn down my house with gasoline.  There'd be a lull of a few days, then the abuse would start up again.   You must understand that at that time, she felt that she had lost "everything" in her life in one fell swoop... the husband she once loved and thought she knew, marriage and her home.  Worse of all, she thought she had lost all of her children, the most important things in her life.  The devastation could not have been more complete.


Yesterday, we worked together for about 4 hours;  she was the head volunteer running a community charity event and they were short their mandated quota of workers.  She asked my daughter and I to work at the event as well.  I actually had no desire to work at this event and would have much preferred to spend the Sunday afternoon wanking off working around the house.  I did it to spend time with my daughter, keep the peace, and to help raise a few thousand dollars for a worthy cause.

As we arrived at the event, I was very stressed-out especially when my wife seemed highly distracted and wouldn't look me in the eye.   I later thought that this was mainly due to the demands of her job at that time, particularly difficult for a person with A.D.D.   Later on, we did speak in more friendly manner.  During the event, she brought me something to drink and thanked me profusely when I left. 

I would never have thought we could reach  this state of friendliness.  It's like a love-in.  Good friends and colleagues who know both of us are now predicting that we will end up as good friends, maybe even best friends, one this is over.  I'm still a bit doubtful about that... we'll see... but they may be right.