Just an ordinary break-up

You’ve been here before, I tell myself. Trying to breathe more slowly. Stop the anxiety pit from clawing its way out of my body, like it’s been threatening for the last few weeks.

Does anyone else feel like this.

This feeling when going through a break-up. This one different, because kids are involved.

I watch my oldest daughter with my soon to be ex-partner. Her little voice, her laugh. She looks like him. I think she and her sister are the most beautiful beings in the world.

She knows something is wrong. She’s been coming to me and hugging me more often. Telling me she doesn’t want me to leave, even though I have not been the one that has talked about going anywhere.

Our other daughter is too young to understand what is going on. She still smiles at the both of us, clapping her hands when she gets a smile back. Too young to have experienced the happy times. Brunch dates with him and I, our oldest sitting next to one of us. Smiling and talking, sitting on a patio in the warm sunshine. Watching movies together as a family, gently arguing over what we’re going to watch until we all agree on something. Take-out delivered right as a soft rain hits the windows outside. We used to walk together all the time as a family. Say the thoughts that have been going through our heads to each other. Value the other’s reaction to them, and care about what each other thinks and has to say.

Last night he spent the night at his friend’s house. I took care of the girls, gave them baths, put them to bed. Our oldest ran into our bed in the middle of the night and curled up on his side. Her legs eventually reaching out to kick me as I lay awake watching the light from the street lamps outside creep its way through the tightly drawn blinds. Sick with worry. Fear.

Is that why breakups are so hard? We’re afraid of the unknown. Or at least I am. I’m already mourning the loss of the promise that we had together, even as I know realistically that promise has been out of reach for a while now. We spent this entire weekend fighting. I cried myself to sleep Saturday night. He didn’t reach out to hug me, not once.

I wonder if he feels the same way that I do right now. Sick. Frail. Brittle. Like someone could bend me in half and I would shatter into a million little pieces. My heart oozing out over the pieces, too messy to be held, unworthy of being carried by someone else. Maybe I am unloveable.

Am I too difficult to get along with? I’m always the one that apologizes first. In every relationship I’ve ever had. Even when I feel like there is something behind why I get mad, when I do it backfires on me. I’m in the wrong. It’s your behavior they say, like I am some disgusting feral beast. Like I am violent, abusive. Even though I try extremely hard to control my “outbursts”. Even when I don’t hit anything or lash out. Instead I try to make myself as small as possible. I cry to release, not get attention, as my ex-husband would tell me incessantly. You’re pathetic, you’re just trying to get attention.

It felt like I was doing something right for once. Dating someone younger than me, but really nice. Nicer than anyone I’d ever dated before. We sat on the rooftop together and meditated the weekend I got pregnant with our oldest daughter. Talked about how lucky we were to have found each other. How we couldn’t wait to start a family together. I felt lucky then.

When I think back to what got us here, it’s such a wild web. I don’t think I’m always right. I also don’t think I’m always wrong either. Maybe we should all just find people that are capable of loving us in exactly the ways that we need. That evaluation being the only thing that matters.

I have abandonment issues. I’ve known that for a while now. I’m terrified of being left, not being loved. I have a ton of younger siblings. Sometimes I play with my daughters and close my eyes and give the child-self that is still in there a great big bear hug. I hit an age where I was still a toddler and no one played with me the way I play with my girls. I know that for a fact, because I can still feel it sometimes. The longing and sadness in my bones. I take that feeling and I wrap my arms tight around my babies. I love you so much, I tell them, kissing their heads. Drinking in the gifts that they are in my life. They have done nothing wrong here, and I do everything I can to not be whatever version of myself that I am that is destructive to them or in front of them. That version of myself that is not worthy of love. I don’t want them to ever feel that way in their own lives, to anyone. Ever.

It must be exhausting to love me. I crave compliments, external validation. In the last four years I can count on one hand the amount of times my partner said that I looked beautiful. Maybe even less the amount of times that I saw him looking at me and could feel that he loved me. My soul craves it. I’ve talked to him about it, knowing even as I did that through the reverberation of my voice he couldn’t hear me. That was not the way that he showed love. He didn’t understand it. More so — he didn’t feel it or he would be saying it. The thoughts never cross his mind.

I find myself wanting to text him. Wanting to explain myself. Feeling hurt. Destroyed. Since he got to his friend’s house he did not text me even once. Not even to make sure that the girls were ok. Just floated off into the ether. The texts that I did send him earlier yesterday are still left unread.

I’m a human being and old enough to understand that life is messy. Everything continues to flow, ceaselessly. Sometimes within that flow are changes that shake us to our core. One moment we know something. It’s a solid knowledge, it feels unshakeable. The next moment it’s on the move again. Am I going to chase after the solid feeling again, even as I know it’s gone? It would not be wise of me. Even as my heart wants to, is desperate to fill the chasm that was created with something, anything, that would stop the pain.

They say that time heals all wounds, and I’ve been here enough to know part of that is true. But I do wonder about the residual damage. I’ll never be new again, untainted. I’ll never be able to meet someone and hand them my heart without all of the accompanying baggage that goes along with it. Without them looking at what I have to offer, and hoping that they can see through the tarnish. Hoping that they think, even when I don’t, that there is pure gold underneath.