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.