Consequences

Many years ago, I was younger and much more naive, I wrote about a lower case someone and his fixation on a woman I didn't know. Now, I fear, there have been consequences to having critiqued that situation and I have to take the lumps. My frustration was with one person, but the other seems to have taken offense, and why wouldn't she, really? So, there.





There are lumps aplenty these days.





Resonances also abound. For example, CUPW, my ex's former employer, is where my ex learned to negotiate. Where he learned to fight. Tooth and nail.





Astrologically, I am in a period where something that I began 7 years ago is coming to conclusion . . . and I'm trying to figure out what that was and if I have done what is necessary, or not. Perhaps not, considering how stressful this low-key summer has been.





I'm reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. I realize that grief does maintain a stranglehold on the "survivors" for a very long time. I'm still in the midst of mourning the end of several lives that passed in the last 10 years. Is the later part of one's life always a time of mourning?

I have to try, I know, to identify more strongly with E's son, who is also in mourning, but whose mourning for his lost family and the break-up of his parents results in his ignoring me and bullying A. Whenever he criticizes, blames, or directs A, the hair on the back of my neck bristles. I have to hold myself very still in order not to pounce on him. Later, after the little boy is gone, I usually pounce on his father, who claims to have heard nothing and sees his son as completely innocent. It is a frustrating situation.

I have to continually tell myself that relationships take time. Even after two years, E and I are still getting to know each other, in fact, more so now than ever before and the real work of our relationship really is now, in the midst of these emotional scuffles.

In the midst of my own considerations, I can't help but wonder where my ex's (ex?) partner is now that their house seems to be sold. Has she bought another house in Montreal? Has she moved there with her son? Is she now living what I was forced to live four years ago? I know it will be a far easier proposition for her because 1. she has a sizable income, 2. she isn't dealing with my ex's hatred and litigation, 3. she is living 2 hours away from what she lived here, which I think probably wasn't the rose bed I thought it was.

Anyway, I have a rose. I planted my first rose bush and today a small, fushia-coloured rose is just beginning to bloom.

So, there are lumps, yes, and roses, too.

June?

How did this happen? It was summer for a day and now it is fall-like again.

Thankfully, E and I took that sunny day for a mini-break in Montreal, where we lounged around the Omni Hotel' s pool and ate great food at Italian and French bistros. At night, we sat out on a patio above Crescent street, waiting for dance bars to open, but I couldn't make it. I had to clip back to our hotel by 10:30, my second toe bleeding form being sliced diagonally from nail to base by my high heels. Still, just getting away from here and all the accumulated stess of being here, helps shift me away from feeling strained to feeling more energized.

If I'm not careful, though, summer will slip by and I'll wonder why I didn't notice it going. That happened last year. I was so mired in job stress and legal negotiations that nothing good seemed to register. It takes real effort to focus on the simple and beautiful sometimes.

While mowing my hayfield the other day, I discovered two raspberry bushes growing in the middle of it. I think I should probably relocate them to the dead turf area at the back of my garage where they can run wild and supply me with ample summer fruit. That's a simple and beautiful thing, I think, so long as it works . . . lawn care is a continual challenge.

So, is life care . . . all the little components of it . . . which I'll tease out later, because they still seem to much to deal with . . .work, partners, kids, parents, food and fitness, health generally, ex's . . .

My ex is still acting nasty. Yesterday, he sent my daughter to school in an unsuitable outfit and another parent I ran into at the grocery store said, "She was cold this morning. You weren't the one to send to school, were you?" Exactly. My ex can't seem to think beyond himself to imagine what his child might need in a day. On Monday, he sent her to school without a lunch.

Yet, yet, she is a happy child and I can take comfort in that. We have fun doing all manner of simple things and life is always, at least somewhat, beautiful.