So my weeks tend to start around 5pm on Sundays… I know, an unusual time, but that’s how it is. Either I recieve my children back into my home at this time or STBX picks them up to go to his house at this time… and so this is the demarcation between the time I am a parent and the time I am lonely. I have the cats, I have friends, but for the most part I miss my kids the weeks they are gone and crave the weeks they are here.

And so begins a new week for me.

The kids are home, I don’t necessarily need to deal with the ex for a while (other than the 2 weekly calls they are to make to him, the Festival of Trees perfomance that GirlChild will be in on Saturday, and the exchange next Sunday) other than the occassional email where he pokes at me for some reason or other. Its good not to have to deal with him all the time, almost like when we were married and he was gone to the mines for a week at a time. Gods, you know that your relationship has failed when you can’t wait for your spouse to go away and leave you alone for a week!!

So, anyway… the week has so far started off with a bit of a bang (laugh).

On monday, despite having checked my cell (which I use as an alarm) I slept in and we didn’t get up until 7:20am. Which, isn’t all that bad, except, but we usually leave the house for the babysitters at 7:30!

So I ran around getting the kids up, the laundry in (GirlChild had an accident in her bed when I turned on the light and she suddenly woke up…oops), made sure they had breakfast to go, their lunches, and started supper for us (crock pot pot roast) while Boychild got his things together and fed the kitties. Of course, with my luck, the windows on the car were frosted, so I spent another 5 minutes dealing with that!! Oh the joys of almost winter.

But the rest of the day was relatively uneventful, as days go. I processed the pay and time cards and had that sent off to the payroll department by 10am. I found another contact in the hotel industry, and she managed to find us 10 rooms (all at the same hotel) for the December 4th night that we needed, so it looks like the Christmas party is on again … if only I can hunt down DEFINATE numbers and names of who is and is not going to attend. Which means I will have to deal with my tires this weekend if possible because I’d rather drive down there and then I could check out the wool store and the Chapters while I’m there before driving back… oh the joys! If I get a day off for this I am spending it doing my OWN thing and not worrying about getting a flight back!

And so I wrote a few diary entries for my Open Diary (because there are just things that don’t need to be out here for everyone, and I don’t feel like being accused of throwing things in the face of the purple elephant again).. and I got caught up on a lot of things, and I got home and picked up the kids and inspected the pot roast (next time I think I will use more water or the “med” setting, but it was overall good). I started the potatoes and made the gravy and defrosted the buns.

While we were waiting for supper to cook I knit a bit, chatted a bit, and read a chapter of “Inkheart” to the kids.

Supper over, I plopped GirlChild into the tub and read another chapter of “Inkheart” to her while she bathed. Got her out, got her dressed and hair brushed out. Then I ran the water for BoyChild (since he needs privacy now that he’s and went to wash the dishes in the kitchen. Apparently in the 5 minutes between starting the water and coming in to check on the water, BoyChild decided to do something with the tap, which resulted in the shower knob on the tap being pulled right off.

Sigh.

So now I have to figure out how to fix that…

By the time they were both washed and dressed it was bedtime. So I got them set up for tooth brushing. Then we did the books, the songs, and lights out…

Thank GODS!!

---

I have had so much to process from this weekend, never mind the past week and the past few years that have come back to haunt and hurt, that I have felt the need to write a LOT more lately than I have in the past 4 or so years. And though I know there is no point in dwelling on things — there is no openning for dialog anymore, there is no chance of talking to the friend ever again and I need to let it go — I still think on it and wonder if I could have done things differently. The conclusion is the same, I did what I needed to do at that time and had hoped that I hadn’t cut the ties completely. But I did… and now it has to be over for good. 

Lately I have been reviewing my online strategies. My former friend is one that I will never likely come across again, and part of that reason is that I do a lot of dialoging online (what with having the kids around every second week) through various IM type things (ICQ, AIM/iChat,GTalk, Y!, Skype… yes… I do a lot of that). I am fairly easy to find online, if someone knows my aliases and knows approximately where to look for me. I am a networker, and yet, I ‘hide’ in plain sight. I am everywhere, but getting a hold of me is harder than it sounds becasue I don’t always answer and I am so used to being pinged and checked and talked to that I am also used to deleting users and denying access to me. I don’t have a landline phone, so I am harder to pin down and my address is not accessible in the phone book.

I have other friends who avoid being identified online. Who use only what they need to online and stay off otherwise, prefering to only interact with live people. I have a few friends who are online more than I am, preferring online interaction as their primary contact point. And I am in the middle. I use online interaction a lot – I actually LOVE getting email and having email discussions with people, I IM, I talk to people on Skype, I blog, I post on OD, I do twitter, and I am randomly doing a podcast. But my goal is always to reach out, to connect, to weave new friends into my life, and reconnect with people I haven’t seen or talked to for a long time… and ultimately meet up and interact in person. I crave meeting up with new and old friends. I love talking in person… and I like getting out of my house and moving beyond myself.

But I have always been a person who is both very private and very open at the same time. There are things, deep hidden things, that I hold sacred to myself, things I will never discuss because they are MINE. Like precious pebbles, I have never spoken or written about these things — secret shames, secret joys, sheer unadulterated moments of happiness or sorrow — because they are mine and I do not need to do so. There are a great deal of things that I have never spoken or written about (online or in a paper journal) and I never will. Some are in regards to promises made, some are just the unwillingness to commit the memories to words that will always be incomplete. It is how I am. I have 10 years of memories on open diary, and yet there are significant moments and periods of time I have never written about. Same with paper journals… I have 20 years of paper journals saved in my home… and yet I have things  do not wish or need to open up to eleviate the joy or sorrow, and so I have left them unsaid…

Somethings will always be only mine…

But there is a perception that, because I write so much, I write everything, I spill everything out for everyone to see all the time, and that has never been the case. I write a lot. But there are still things that I will not write about, not even if I thought they were private and only I could read them… because I know better than that. If it is something I don’t want anyone to know about, if it is somethign I want to keep only for myself, I do not write it out anywhere — not a text file on my computer, not a note to self, not in the daytimer or secret diary or journal or using secret codes. I need these things for myself and to share them would, in some way, diminish who I am.

I have a geis on me, a sacred promise to keep the secrets to myself. Its been the primary cornerstone of my life. It drove STBX nuts that there were things I never talked about… things I thought were too insignificant to discuss, the tiny loves of my past, the stories of me that have so far contributed to who I am today. I keep my silence… I practice my craft, and I try to create myself around the pearls of my experiences. Some of the most beautiful things have been created by the layers of joy and pain that come from being able to hold silence in your words…

That has been something I have been thinking about, a lot. Is it a matter of trust that I have hidden from so many people? I know I am different to different friends. I have shared memories with some that I lack with others, secrets deeply entrenched between us since childhood, teen angsty fights or fears, and the hurts of adulthood… and yet with others things have been on the surface. So what makes the best type of friend? I don’t know…

But it does hurt more when you have to lose one that knows your deepest fears, when you have to turn away someone who can’t know you because you need to hold things sacred and private.

I’ve always known that…

 

Even facing “death” can’t slow down my life too much, there is just too much going on, and although I mourn I move and grow and reclaim. At least the attempt at reconnection, rejection, acceptance, and reflection have done one thing for me — I have been able to reclaim one part of my past and reintegrate that shard of who “Pam” was into who “Pam” IS now…

As anyone who might be reading can tell, my writing has flourished in the past few days. It might be shocking to anyone who only knew me in the past 5 or so years to know, but this used to be a daily practice — NaNoWriMo would not have slowed me down too much just because for years and years I wrote an average of 5000 words a day between my website, journals, Open Diary, and emails. And I lost that feeling… it corresponded to the downfall of my marriage as well as the pressure I felt to get rid of that part of myself by getting rid of my friend. And there were months I didn’t write at all… nothing more than the notes of a bored housewife — lists of groceries, cheques, and reminders.

It’s a reclaimation for me. I have accepted the loss, I have accepted that it is my responsibility to become who I am. I no longer have the option to bounce my words off a trusted person, and that has forced me to seek that approval within myself. Its been a hard process to get through, and like all things I go through, I have now given myself permission to fail and get up again and dust myself off.

I have a feeling that I will need to rely on that promise to myself a lot. As an Aries I tend to jump first and think later — or I think and think about something, get someone ELSE involved and tend to walk away or get fired up for the NEXT project. But it also means that I hold myself to high standards, and that means that when I fail to live up to my high standards I tend to stop trying.

And that’s not good.

And because it is friday, I have decided that I will adopt a new “tradition” of reviewing my week for its goods and bads.

Good stuff:
-got an email address for my former friend. Gathered up my courage and emailed him an apology for the loss of his friendship (thankfully before I thought about it TOO much). 
-Recieved response email from the former friend. While it did not allow a renewal of our friendship or opportunity for openning a dialog between us again, it did offer forgiveness. And I was able to offer him forgiveness. 
- I finally mourned the friendship as a loss rather than something just on hold if I could reach out for it. Knowing is better than not knowing in my world. 
- Found my words again.
- went on dates
- knit up a storm on the scarf
- almost completed the socks, so they will be ready to mail out this week for my mother’s birthday
- went to the gym and really felt good about things for a while

Bad Stuff:
-being rejected by my former friend, even though I was completely expecting it and I know that I deserve it, that it has run its course and that it is a done deal.
- mourning
- feeling the confusion that comes from doing the dating thing
- dealing with K and his hurt, and not wanting to revisit my mistakes with the former friend by doing the same thing with K
- feeling pressed for time all the time
- not having a lot of time to clean my house, meaning that I have to do that all day Saturday because its one of those things that needs to be done
- waking up several nights worrying about death (oh the season of death)
- waking up several times with calf cramps
- trying to find a way to book hotel rooms, at this late of a date, for the company Christmas event that is Dec 4… and knowing that my manager’s promise to find rooms in Regina (since he lives there on weekends) didn’t happen and with a metric TON of work on my plate I can’t spend hours phoning around, especially since I do not even have a COUNT since the manager didn’t bother to hand out the Christmas event invitations to the guys this week! ARGH…
So that is that…

I have so much to deal with for this weekend… I’m sort of looking forward to somethings, and not to others.

I am not sure what my plans are for tonight. I seem to be double booked right now — I had been trying to meet up with someone for a few weeks and missed an email last night. I was hoping to meet up in the day on Saturday (thus avoiding having to do the cleaning thing) but he is booked that day… and so he asked about tonight. The only thing is that usually G and I go to a scrapbooking late night crop the friday nights I don’t have my kids.

What to do, what to do?

I am really kinda hoping that I get to see the one guy that I have started to become seriously interested in this weekend as well. He might not be able to get into the city, and I know that its not really possible for me to drive out there to meet with him because my car is not likely up for it until I fix my tires… and if I stayed late I would have to drive 45 mins back into the city in the dark on the highways. It is unlikely I will know until sometime Saturday (although I am hopeful).

I have to do some of my podcast… I will do that Saturday after I get back from the gym. I will clean my house, knit and do the podcast… and I will start making the christmas cookies. I also think that I should get my groceries and make a meal plan up. If I decide what kind of cookies we can make then I have something that the kids and I can do in the evenings after supper that is sneaky in incorporating math into their daily lives (laugh)…

And although I feel bad at having finally lost my friend for good… I know that in some ways it is HIS loss as well, because I am a great person again and he’ll lose out on that as much as I will be losing out on his friendship.

Its ALL good…

 

I think it is always good to reflect on passings and endings. And as I have finally come to the ending of a friendship that I had been desperately holding onto, it is time to reflect on that relationship and let it go. In a few weeks I will make the final cut, and ritually “bury” the past forever, so now I am in the last stage where i have accepted its dead, gone, cold and flatlined and that it happened a long long time ago. 

 
And so I need to look at it for what it was, the good and the bad, and see what lessons I learned from this friendship; what can I take with me and move forward with, what do I leave behind, what changes can I make to avoid losing touch with other people in the same way? These are all critically important in the process of accepting this loss. 
 
I know it seems very silly, to write about a friendship that *I* ended years ago, and moreso to write as if there were any valid hope of things being revived. Until this point there was still hope, because we had been through this before. But the first time we went through it we didn’t have the same issues that we did this time. This time there were entanglements and promises, shared pains were lessened, and hurts were caused, things shared that should not have been shared…
 
I live with the knowledge that this is the second time I sought him out as a friend, and this time he (rightly) soundly rejected my seeking. Its the death, not unlike the death that would have occurred if either of us had left this world. At this point the person who was my friend is gone, and the “me” that was his friend is gone, and we are strangers from this day forth.

Still… there were lessons to be learned for me:

I have learned the bounds of the friendships that exist between people and within time. Friendship, even the ones that feel the strongest, crumble when they are not tended and treated carefully.

Having him in my life openned me up to the use of words as a daily tool. It was partly through our use of email (even though we lived in the same city and talked to each other in person every day) exchanges to examine ourselves, the world, and the situations in which we lived, that I grew to use the words that I had within myself for my own explorations and healing. Although the “letters” we sent are now gone (STBX having destroyed my computer files in order to humilate me) I do fondly remember openning up my email box and finding a muli-page exegesis on whatever he was reading or exploring or opinion altering rants on the state of affairs of his professors. He was the first person to respond to my verbosity as if it were a good, rather than a tedious, thing. He may not be the ONLY one, but he was the very first to encourage the wordiness and the writing as normal and purposeful.

He introduced me to the world of math, with a patience no one had with me before or after. He called bullshit on me when it was necessary, and took a sideways approach when that was needed. He was the one that truely got me through calculus… not to mention getting me through accounting, computers decision making, and statistics. I don’t know if I was ever able to assist him in the ways he assisted me.

He was there the time I found out that I was pregnant, and through the terror of that moment that changed my life. He was there while I worried about dealing with STBX’s anger at the timing, and was the person who called my mother to support me when I needed her.

And he was the person I turned to too often, the response to an email that always came, the solace in knowing that somewhere, out there, there was a friend connected to me by all these common threads and whom I had known would respond to an email… until the day he didn’t.

And I know that I needed it. I needed to face rejection, the way I had to make him face rejection, even though there was nothing I wanted less than to lose him from my life. I know that I didn’t want to lose him, but I could not keep my life the way it was, and I could not keep him in my life or stay in HIS life. He needed to be let go, he needed to move on because I knew that due to my situation I was a toxic prescence in my life. And I have learned to watch how I am with my friends, because of that situation. I am more careful of my relating to others, because now I am more afraid of openning myself up and hurting others than I used to be.

He forced me to grow up, more than anything else. There were things that I had no concept of, that I was placed face to face with through our friendship. I learned a lot about my strengths, although belatedly, and my weaknesses. I learned things that I like about myself and I faced darkness within myself.

But it was not all good, and that is something to remember this far out. Neither of us was perfect, we started our friendship as children on our own for the first time in our lives, and we parted as jaded adults who knew too much about the world and the mistakes of our modern society. And it that process of growing up that caused the choking, grasping, toxins that killed the friendship like a pernicious weed.

I realize that, now, as clearly as is possible.

By Yule I will have let go of the sadness of the loss of my friend. He is no longer out there… and we are dead to each other

As it should be…