John,
There comes a time in everyone’s life where we are encouraged to digest a nice overused cliché and take a shit or get off the proverbial pot. Having someone coerced in to making the decision for me, I have decided to take a leap of faith off said pot. For what am I doing here really?
They say that it is impossible to be in love with two people…and that you wouldn’t fall for someone else if you were still in love with the initial person. I am not so sure that I agree with this….but only because I believe I may be in love with two people.
This whole situation began after my ex-fiancé decided that we were not meant to live life until death do us part. At least that is what we haphazardly decided on that very uncertain day many years ago. This prompted me to do what any normal male would do….seek out another opportunity. However, as luck would have it…or rather karma…I wound up seeing too much of this other woman and accidentally, well…knocked her up. Soothing her nerves that I would be there for her and for our unborn child was what I tried to do, while still trying to reconcile with my ex-fiancé. As you will learn though…I am not good at playing both sides.
Making the decision to stick by my now wife, I was blessed to become a father…a blessing I am uncomfortable stating is not such a blessing to me. Don’t take this the wrong way, but having children was never appealing to me and now that I have children…I am still waiting to develop this paternal instinct. Does this even exist? Or is this the feminists’ way of saying that we are equal?
Either way. My wife and I got married and then if one little guy wasn’t trouble enough, we added another one to the mix…and now we are an unhappily married family of four! Because isn’t this the American dream!?
Shortly in to our marriage and the joys of parenthood, I decided that if three other people completely dependent on me wasn’t enough to take care of…surely adding another female to the mix would be. And within approximately a year of me stepping outside my marriage, my wife stepped out one day with me. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking….they share the same name, same style, same everything. Other than the support and love they have for me. See, the whole time I was resisting my wife and preventing myself from learning how to understand her so we could understand each other, I was gaining the emotional nourishment from the other woman. She supported me in ways that were unclear another female could ever love me. It was this sense of unconditional love that I’d only experienced with my own father. Resisting the urge, which I have had since the beginning, to up and leave my wife …I tried to make things work.
But everyone knows that the pieces are so hard to glue back when there was no foundation to glue them to. My wife and I met on uncertain ground and tried to create a family on this ground. And now I am starring at rubble and trying to determine how to even put back these pieces.
The confusing thing, I guess, is that I am contemplating how they would fit back together. I can’t honestly say that I could imagine my life without my wife. She is the mother of my two children and a great mother at that. But, at the same time, I cannot imagine giving up the other woman.
One hand loves my children unconditionally and one hand loves me unconditionally. I mean, the writing is clear on the walls as to what I should do, and which hand I should go with. Despite lacking the parenting gene and the patience of a saint, which is apparently needed when micromanaging little monsters, they are my sons. What dad isn’t thrilled to have one son, and I was blessed with two. The irony of life sometimes, right?
So, as I started off saying…I think it is time that I planted my feet down, right smack in the center of this disaster I created for myself. This whirlwind of life I am allegedly supposed to be caring for…and maybe, just maybe, start caring about myself. Love is seriously just an emotion. It is a response to a feeling we get when another person or thing makes us feel a moment of bliss. It is indescribable by most, but artists try to capture its every movement. It is a novelty. Something that not everyone finds…despite the lies plastered all over social media. Love is art. Beauty is most definitely in the eye of the beholder and for that, the person you choose to love should be just as special as you find yourself to be.
But, therein lies the problem at hand. See, regardless of my elite demeanor….and sometimes better than thou attitude, and controlling nature….I am really scared to be alone. I am so scared to be alone and to be abandoned that I typically break people down so badly that in my mind it prevents them from being able to stand on their own two feet without me. I make them think I am all they have because in essence, they are all I have. Most Freudians would chalk this up to having mommy-issues….and rightfully so.
It is like I don’t trust, subconsciously of course, that any woman will ever love me because my own mother has failed at this. We have a relationship, but a special one to say the least. It is not traditional in any stretch of the imagination…and while this is fine…while I have become as successful, if not more successful than other people who share my similar situation…I seek out a woman who has not only the power to harm me, but the experience of harming me. Instead of allowing them to hurt me though, I control them. Threaten them. Manipulate them. Unless, they prove that they love me unconditionally. But even then, it is too much for me to expose myself to and I end of retreating back to my wife.
And, unfortunately in this moment…that is what my fate has chosen. Not because I don’t love the other woman. Not because I am even in love with my wife. But because….well, to be honest, I assumed writing this letter to you, John, would make things clearer. And really, all it has done is made me realize new things about each woman….and here I am…back at square one.
[Written by Elle for a dear friend….]