I WISH I WOULD HAVE CHRONICLED the last two years of my life. I am so disappointed that I gave up writing through what we would be one of my most significant life lessons in the last decade. I got busy, I fell in love, I refocused and I lost this piece of myself.
Here I am 22 months later, almost 12 weeks since the beginning of the end of Mr. Greaseman. I have worked through the stages of grief, the betrayal, the heartbreak. I have lived through the sleepless nights, the overwhelming despair, and the need for answers. I have found my own closure without any help from the man who packed two suitcases and left my beautiful life forever. I have survived... another one.
I am not going to give you the details of this false fairytale I lived over the last 20 months. I don't feel the need to immortalize in print any of the reasons I fell so deeply in love with this man. I am going to tell you the lesson I learned when it ended.
I have to give credit where credit is due. The first person to see the life lesson at the end of this was non other than My Fabulous Ex-Husband. Over the almost 10 years we have been divorced and co-parenting we have learned how to love and respect each other in a way I think most married couples would envy. Our ability to communicate and support each other is impressive. I am so #blessed by him being in my life.
When the bottom really fell out with Mr. Greaseman and My Fabulous Ex-Husband had a chance to sit down with me about how this would affect Our Daughter, he said something that I didn't give a lot of thought to in the moment but it rings so true now. "Sunshine you have to do your due diligence, I don't think you really vetted him enough. It took me 5 years to pop the question."
He was right, I didn't give this enough time to really know the person I planned on spending the rest of my life with. He gave me enough of the pieces to the puzzle that I didn't realize how little I understood about his past. I was too busy falling in love to step back and really see the nature of this person. To understand who it was I was tying myself to for the foreseeable future. I trust my gut and I thought I was right about the character of this man but there was a pattern in his behavior I could have no way of knowing - He genuinely fell in love and I think he firmly believed it would last but he has no concept of true love. Love to Mr. Greaseman is the happy feel good chemical reaction in your brain that lasts the first 12-18 months. By month 20, his bags were packed and I was a puddle of brokenness on the floor.
It took getting through the heartbreak and self pity of trusting this man to really see this lesson come to light. It also took some late night Facebook stalking and few life hacks to gain further information to see what I was never told and could never have known: He has done this before.
Everyone has a past and as you have read mine is sorted and littered with the ghosts of boyfriends past. BUT pasts are important, without a knowledge and understanding about what has happened in life we cannot learn from it. This is why we study history, so it does not repeat itself.
I took his hesitation to talk about what made failures of his first marriage and the "few" significant romances between that and me, as slightly comforting. I didn't feel the need to divulge every man in my last 10 years of being single. I was in a really healthy good place and I was ready for love.
The personality differences between us were easy enough for me to adapt. I made necessary adjustments to counteract the insecurities I could see. I am sort of a chameleon with my personality, I can be happy in all types of relationships. I mistakenly identified his dependency as co-dependency. I looked at that as a form of security for me, as opposed to what it truly is, a man that needs someone and if those needs are not being met to his liking, he will seek out someone else to meet them. It was not the egomaniacal sociopath that I had so much experience with, this was a man with genuine intent to fall in love and a need to have a companion but without the knowledge, loyalty, strength, or raw ability to make a real relationship work.
He had a whole lot of give up in him and a whole lot of needs that no matter how hard I tried to adjust, I could never meet them all. After all, I am only one person and lord knows my needs were not being met either. But I am a mother and the one thing we are good at is surviving. We know how to take care of everyone else first and put ourselves last. We can push through some horrible circumstances if the ends seem to justify the means.
So this morning, early because I like to keep my Facebook deactivated most of the day I decided to see if Mr. Greaseman had been up to anything new. He and I are still "friends" probably because mine is deactivated most of the time so its kind of hard to unfriend someone you cannot see. I recently came across this hack that is you search "photos of whoever" you can see everything that is public they are tagged in, even if they have it hidden from there timeline or in another album. So I use this to see if there is anything new going on and it was interesting to see some of the old.
Today, something changed. The live in girlfriend that predated me by a year or so has made all of her photos with Mr. Greaseman public. This led me to her public wall, where all of these photos and posts were available for me to see. It was like looking into a crystal ball 2 years too late. I have looked her up before and none of this was there. I am not sure what changed to make it available today but I have to thank The Universe for putting this new information in front of me.
It was like a mirror image of our courtship. The trips, the gifts, the holidays, the house, the flowers, the concerts... It was all the same. It was like I just slipped into her place and he continued on as normal. Their relationship was so similar in appearance it was eerie. The only difference I can see, is that since I make probably 3 times what she did, we lived like the 1%. The significant duel incomes allowed us to have more and do more on a grander scale. The other difference is I am better at closing deals, so I have a 3 carat 17k engagement ring to remind me that I was worth just a little bit more than the last love of his life.
Seeing it all there, in pictures frozen in time it was heartbreaking; yet cathartic. It was like the final piece was chiseled away from my heart and now I could begin to rebuild. The healing could officially take place because for all the blame I have thrown on myself the past several weeks today I finally saw the pattern that was never available to me before. It was the story never told and without all the facts, I made the best decision I could.
For the first time, I see the lesson: Love truly is patient and with time you can trust it. If you choose to rush into the feelings and embrace the passion of the beginning one or both of you will, most likely, fall out of love as quickly as you fell into it. Lesson learned, or so I hope.
One more thing: Don't stop writing. Your clearest thinking comes from reflecting upon your own words and thoughts. I'm back y'all!
