You know how I always say I can't allow myself regrets because regrets will eat you alive? They serve no purpose other than to inflict pain. They are supposed to teach you things, as if the road not taken might have been the wiser choice and you'll do better next time.
What if there is no next time?
What if the chance is gone? You're too far down the road, there's no more detours, forks or off ramps? You can't and won't go back. But then in the distance you think there's one more shot. One last tour off the beaten path.
I am selfish. That is why. Not selfish? Smart? Dumb? Oddly not allowing myself to get carried away on romance. But I can't resolve this inside my head and neither can he. And getting carried away on romance that very one time in April has permanently marked me as impulsive. The one time I do anything impulsive brands me permanently.
So we struggle together and separately. This one is bigger than we are. I'm afraid it will wind up being the one weak spot in the fabric that makes up Bridget and Jake as a unit.
Oh why does this have to be so hard?
The regret? He..
Christ I'm hyperventilating.
He..(anyone have a paper bag?) He wants me to have his baby.
Don't roll your eyes until you have finished reading. It isn't so simple.
He loves the kids. And he wants one more. He wants a tiny creation of our love. A permanent one, since life is rather fleeting for us and a human being walking around changing the world and loving and living made up of our combined genes would be the ultimate expression of our love for each other.
Besides being possibly the most beautiful specimen of blonde ever to grace the human race, a baby would signal how not to fix a broken life.
It's too romantic, even for me. Aside from the glaring fact that we're still married to other people and will be for a while yet, there's already two kids in the middle of this broken home. And yes Jake loves those kids like they are his. They practically are his (oh no more rumors please) and he has had a big hand in helping raise them from birth and he loves them. But I know. They aren't his. They are another man's children and no matter how you rationalize it, it's not the same and never will be. I know there are step families and adopted families and everything is terrific but right now in the headspace we are in, it isn't the same for the purpose of his argument. And I see that.
I'm selfish. Jacob did not say I was selfish. He knows he wouldn't have to say much to convince me. It would be different this time around. He would be here. Is that enough? We've come so far. The kids are old enough now to brush their teeth when told. To try new foods and walk down the street without me fearing they'll run into the traffic. To have their own money. The baby stage is far far behind us now.
Okay so I am selfish. I have never done pregnant very well. I took diclectin through both pregnancies just so I could get my head up off the floor. Hell, Jacob has held my hair back while I was sick when pregnant, thanks to always arriving at the best times. He's got absolutely no shame. I get huge. I swell up. I wind up on bedrest. I have terrible deliveries with complications. I had PPD after Henry. It was so difficult.
The thought of going through any of that again on purpose ruins me. I can't do that again.
But then I look at this man and I think of having HIS child and I want it very much. For he is 35 years old and would be the best father on the face of this earth.
And bitter Bridget said that once before. How do you move forward when you fear you'll repeat the same mistakes you made before? I don't have faith. I had faith before. I loved Cole so hard I feared I would kill us both with it. We had it all and I'm too bitter to assume that wouldn't happen again because life with Jake is a thousandfold more intense, more beautiful, more loving, more perfect. But what if I wake up? What if he decided tomorrow that he made a mistake? After what he has done in his life on behalf of us I shouldn't be thinking like that but I've had so many surprises I didn't expect in the past few weeks I wouldn't be surprised now to find a beanstalk and a golden goose in the backyard. And a talking donkey from Bremen town for good measure.
Why am I living this life in slow motion? If I went for it every time would I be happier? Having exhausted all forms of life without Jacob I found out that life with him was worth it. Even if all I ever get is this two months of broken happiness it's enough for me and yet once again I'm rigid-Bridget, unwilling to close my eyes and leap because I am all too aware of what happens in life to people who are impulsive, and yet had I been impulsive before now, before 1998, I wouldn't have put the extra 3 people in my life through all this pain. The pain of breaking up one family for another newer one. A younger blonder model. Oh my god I'm a reverse homewrecker and this is my midlife crisis.
Wait, Jake is my full-on adultlife crisis, if given the decade of chemisty. But he's not and that's a stupid label. He looked at me in that coffee shop in 1997 and told me he wished I wasn't married. I should have gone back to his apartment that day and slept with him, then told Cole, and then gotten a quickie divorce. But that's a regret. And if I had done that I wouldn't have Ruth or Henry today and I wouldn't change that.
So now what?
Does Bridget squeeze her eyes shut and jump and hope she's safely in the deep end or does Bridget hold to her guns and demand that life not get any more complicated. knowing it will quietly break his heart like it has twice before, because he watched me bring home two babies already and wished that they were his. The laws of the universe that make it so there are two tiny recreations of the life of Bridget and Cole running around and none of Jacob and Bridget, which Jacob secretly sees as the penultimate expression of his love for me, are riddled with ironicies aren't they?
And that, my friends, is regret.
And it's a regret with a ticking time clock, he wants a baby now. After waiting so long to be together there's a renewed sense of urgency, a need to find and exert some sort of control over our circumstances, a need to place a permanent marker in our history together. Which is the sweetest thing in the entire world to me, when he puts it that way. But it's still a phenomenal task. With huge risks. But life is a risk, right?
I know all I have to do is say I can't and he'll let it go. And I will always have to look him in the eyes and know that I denied him the one thing in life that he ever wanted besides me, or because of me. Not sure if I can do that. What gives me the right to do that?
And this entry will give him my side. Not because I am that passive/agressive that I would use this space to argue my position on a huge subject but because he reads this daily and I write a lot more eloquently than I talk and somehow even without expression or tone I can make my thoughts known. Or without interruption even. He doesn't interrupt though, he sits and waits a few beats and then counters. But this is fresh from the inside of my head, and my heart. The edited version doesn't hold the clarity I have through writing it down. We have talked about this into the early morning light too many nights.
And he doesn't want to waste another minute. He said I have brought him to his knees once again.
And I just might have written all this out and wound up talking myself into it. Lovely.
I need to go lie down.
