Oil streaked daisies covered the living room wall
He put water-colored roses in her hair
He said, "Love, I love you, I want to give you mountains, the sunshine,
the sunset too.
I just want to give you everything as beautiful as you are to me."
'Cause they were painters and they were painting themselves
A lovely world.
So they sat down and made a drawing of their love, an art to live by
They painted every passion, every home, created every beautiful child.
in the winter they were weavers of warmth,
in summer they were carpenters of love.
They thought blue prints were too sad so they made them yellow
So I sat down to write and for several minutes nothing came and I got up and walked away. I keep coming back. There's your metaphor. Tough post today.
Jacob and Sam are off on a day trip, a motorcycle ride to the lakes. A guy thing, probably so that Jacob can seek some guidance from a close confidant and maybe so that Sam can throttle some sense into Jacob at the same time. It was Sam's suggestion that I get a day off from Jacob without weight, without being provinces and days apart, just barely out of arms reach, but enough. For a day. I gave Sam my promise I would just hang out and work on hobbies and write a bit and eat some more of the pears he brought over. Some time alone because Sam trusts me.
Time alone I've barely had.
Time to think about why I'm completely helpless and dependent when Jacob is around and just about perfectly fine when he's not. To reflect on issues Claus runs in circles with. Pills, no pills, low, pills, no pills, low, pills and what the fuck are you doing, Bridget?
I feel like I'm on the power trip of the century and yet I'm not steering the boat. Every time I try to take control I can't seem to manage it and have to step down and let everyone else take over. I've proven I can't be trusted with my own wellness plan. I'm fed supplements and directed to eat like a child. I'm given easy directions to swallow pills and I don't just so I can have control over something. I'm driven to appointments and parked in chairs and asked to spill my guts to strangers and told when to go to bed and when to run and mostly I want to cry.
And why am I not trusted? Because I act like a child. Shhh, don't upset the princess. She'll break into pieces and then what will you have? Jacob lets me get away with it, for it simply reinforces his image of strength and power. Something he clings to when he feels helpless and lost. In the very same way I cling to my fragility as a way to maintain innocence from any real sort of responsibility.
There I said it. I can own it. I can eat those words and admit it because I want him to still be here when I wake up tomorrow for the rest of my life.
Every time we make huge progress in our selves and in our relationship we go through an adjustment period where things seem to fall apart briefly while we incorporate the new and good and find places for those things in amongst the dark and the baggage that's piled up to our ears and we usually wind up throwing out something we no longer need, some type of issue that just up and dies. It's good, but it's so hard. A brief suffocation. This time we were ready for it and that's the best progress ever in the history of the world.
It's very hard to gloss and here I am trying to peel my skin off while standing behind a curtain for modesty. I don't have other words to somehow keep counseling private and yet deal with it.
Jacob again threw a surprise iron on the fire that I thought was long gone and then he had the nerve to yell at me in that office that I should be the last one to be surprised and that was when I walked out yesterday.
His obsession with me.
It's worse, not better. I still can't wrap my brain around it, but I've always known about it, if that makes sense. He always was obsessed with me, and I used that, and I wrapped him around my finger so tightly and yet he still went off and did his own thing and he seemed to have such a good handle on it and then when we got together and got married I figured it was impossible to be obsessed with your own wife.
And I was wrong.
So very wrong.
He is positively weakened by it, by me. He has changed his life in extreme measures to be with me and even then he changed careers to look after me and to help me get better while he got worse, quietly. He's worried about the slippery slope all the way downhill tumbley-fall he's going to take when the day comes that he acts on the urges he has to control me.
Control me like Cole did.
Maybe there is something in the water here.
No, there's something in the Bridget and it ruins people.
I can't think about it, it's too overwhelming. He can't not think about it, it's all-consuming. I asked him if I was his God of the moment because I was angry and he swore at me. Sometimes I think he hates me for what I have done to him. He'll tell me out loud that he doesn't, without even hearing my question first and it's frustrating. I have power over him I've never known exactly how to work, and he has a weakness for me that somehow gives him strength.
And we've got an army of professionals, well-meaning friends and oblivious family who all think they know what will work for us and we're about to ditch all of them. Because we did better when we had less help. No one can agree and this is impossible.
Oddly, the less help I have always had, the fewer places to hide, the better I fared. Because I feed off the attention, and because life is easier without the reminder that I brought down the giant with a smile and he'll never be the same.
I'm eating crow today, for breakfast, lunch, dinner and possibly a bedtime snack. It's an all-day buffet and I'm stuffed but I'll keep eating it until he sees that I love him for him and I don't want all this other bullshit. I just want us to be left alone. He wants us to be left alone too but at the same time he's afraid of himself.
I don't think he has anything to worry about. He's proven himself a million times over and I trust him with my life, understandably because he's caught it in his hands already, like a reflex, like a precious gift that he's been given and I can't picture him ever doing different and so we talked at length over the past few days about deeper things, if you can believe we can get deeper than anyone has previously dug. We needed lights and miner's helmets. But we agreed on one thing.
A leap of faith, taken together.
By the end of the month everything will be gone, my precious Claus, the marriage counselling we've quit three times already, the perpetual prescriptions I ignore, the directions and exercises and advice and afterthoughts, the meddling, the experiments and the constant beat-down we've put ourselves through in the name of happily ever after, when happily ever after went and started without us. We've given it almost a year and so it's time to get moving.
All of it. Gone.
So we can just be.
Just be us. Jacob and Bridget. Pure and simple. Iron & Wine.
Dumb and Dumber. (Okay, I couldn't resist).
