wednesday, april 25, 2001
anniversary

today is saxy's 6 month anniversary being back in the house. not too long ago, life together like these last 6 months would have been just a dream. there would be no hope. there would be love but a love over shadowed by hurt. we lived in a house full of tension, anger, hurt, sadness. my kids didn't smile, they and i were miserable. how can one hope in a situation like this? i couldn't, the children couldn't. after nearly 3 years of almost nothing but arguments and tension, i finally gave up. my hope had been crushed. i filled out the paperwork and served him. it was over. and i did my best to hold onto two things: my eldest smiled and the house became a home. we could live there, comfortably. the tension was gone.

i don't know why i gave him this last chance, other than i really do love him and always have, and that he desperately wanted to make it work. when we had no hope, he held on. he didn't seem to understand why we were so unhappy, but once i took the drastic measure of actually serving him with papers, he desperately wanted to understand and to try to fix it. he realized that this family was what he wanted and was willing to do what it took to keep it. suddenly the months of threats became real. i had been pushed too far and he now knew i had a limit. what he feared was that he had found out too late. maybe all that became more and more obvious over the nearly 3 months of being separated. i know his pain was obvious, and i hated to see him hurting. but my kids came, and always will come, before anyone else. yet, somehow, he broke through my resistance and the day i was supposed to schedule our actual court hearing i decided to give him one last chance.

and, love of my life, i am glad i did.

these last 6 months have been as different from the last 2 years as night from day. that sounds so cliché, but it's true. it's not that we don't fight. we do. not as much and not as violently, but we fight. this is normal, healthy even. no marriage is without conflict, it's how we handle it that makes the difference. and it's not that he understands the problems all the time. he doesn't. the biggest difference for us is that that evil, mr. hyde part of him seems to be very buried. or gone. either way, saxy is the saxy i knew and fell in love with at the community college, with a few less rough edges. he laughs and plays with the kids, even kitten. he's learning to share his toys a little. he is finally working on becoming a part of the family rather than trying to control it. control does pop up now and then, but he's never been a father before. it is hard enough to be a parent when you grow with a child. i can't even imagine how hard it is coming in not only not having grown with that particular child but also not ever having been a parent at all. he's working on picking his battles with kitten (he and she seem to mix like oil and water), and he's working on developing relationships with them. a huge step forward from before.

no eggshells on the floor of this house. hope is in the air again. the kids still smile.

whatever finally broke through so that i gave him this chance, i am glad it did and i did. i love him, i see hope for our future i feel we belong together. i always have. and it was so hard, to feel that feeling that somehow he and i fit and to have the problems we were having. not that i expected perfection in our marriage. being married before, i had long since grown out of that. but i didn't expect the hell it became, especially with someone that just seemed to be so right as my partner. in school we had so much fun together, most of the time we seemed so connected. oh there were problems. he needed to learn to let go of his jealousy, which he has done fairly well.

and he must have felt the same way. saxy smoked both marijuana and cigarettes when we met. my first meeting with him was as his math tutor. he was late. as a tutor, we would wait 15 minutes, then could either see if someone needed tutoring as a last minute thing or go off and do our own thing. i tended to sit in the tutorial office in one of the cubbies doing homework. he barely made the 15 minute cutoff. we hit it off well and he began to hang out with me and the friends i tended to spend time with between classes. once he heard a friend ask me about a fella that had walked me to my bus the previous night. i believe my response was something like, "he's cute but no go. he was stoned out of his mind when he took me down there and i won't have anything to do with that." apparently saxy, an mj smoker at the time, went home that night and smoked his last bit and hasn't touched the stuff since. i didn't ask him to stop, he chose to do it before he even called me the first time. i didn't ask him to stop smoking cigarettes, just told him he'd have to smoke outside because of my asthma. he stopped anyway.

we became pretty inseparable on campus pretty quickly. it all happened so fast, but it all felt so right. i had a friend tell me to start thinking with the right head (a phrase i thought was reserved only for men, but ok), but, while i will admit we were/are a sexually compatible couple, it wasn't like that. yes, i was swept off my feet. but it was so much more too. i couldn't even begin to explain it. i can't begin to explain it, because it is still there, this unidentifiable something that makes us so right for each other. i was devastated when things progressively got worse after we got married. i questioned my ability to pick a man and my feelings. when our marriage fell apart i had my crises in judgment. suddenly all those instincts and the empathy i relied on to judge people became suspect. i had no idea how to figure out who to be friends with and who not to approach anymore because the very things i relied on were suddenly no longer reliable.

somehow we made it through this dark period. somehow we came back together. somehow we made it.

i love you my saxy-love. i am so glad you are back home. you are the love of my heart and my body. you are my soulmate. i see a future with you again. i love you.

happy anniversary.