I don't want to cage him in.
I don't want to restrict him.
He is who he is.
I do have my own needs. I need to have honesty and communication in our relationship.
I need to be emotionally close. I need him to spend time with me, to say nice things to me again. When he is with me, I need to feel loved as though I am special to him.
He can't understand why I don't like the idea of DADT. I told him it just doesn't sit right with me, I have had the wool pulled over my eyes so many times in my life, been played with as though I am some dumb dora. I may seem like a reserved dumb dora type, but I am actually rather intelligent and need to be treated with respect.
I don't want to make big rules for him, for his other (future) partners. I don't feel that is my place. If we go into a polyamorous relationship, I don't feel I have the right to decide what happens and doesn't happen with his other relationships. Our relationship will change, that is a given, whatever happens I have to stay a strong stable person for our children, I am the rock in their lives and it's necessary I stay that way.
I've been reading More than Two and read the part about accidental pregnancies. I hadn't thought in terms of what happens if he was using condoms and his lover still fell pregnant but now realize that is still a possibility. Would it be so bad if another child came into the world? My line of thinking and my feelings are ridiculous given the fact that I would probably not feel this way if he had children from a previous relationship. It does sadden me to think of someone else doing the same thing with him. Is that selfish of me? I don't know. I know other women have wanted to raise children with him. His ex-lover whom he had an affair with while I was pregnant was very sad that she had a medical condition that meant she should not get pregnant. She was actually jealous when my son was born. I felt angry when I found out she was having an affair with my partner and was sad for herself that she could not have a child with him - BECAUSE I felt she had no right to be like that considering she was having an affair with "my man", she should go find her own.
I know it's silly of me to have felt that way. She has right to her feelings just as I do mine. I still feel a sting over it though. Perhaps it's because I thought that time period in our life was very different to the reality.
Foolishly I dreamed for something I could not have with him. I wanted a life he is incapable of giving.
Sure there is growth to be had in allowing our relationship to form again in a new evolution, without the expectations of old. But at the same time, I wonder what my place is in all of this? I am very confused. I have all these old paradigms in my head and struggle with seeing things in other lights. Perhaps it would be easier to navigate if we didn't have children, I don't know... I wanted to grow old together, I wanted us to raise our children together as partners, as a team. Where do I fit into all of this? Where do the children?
The uncertainty is so difficult to cope with. I told him years back that one thing I crave in my life is stability. I never had it as a child. Every day was fraught with uncertainties. I would smile one day and be praised and the next be clobbered over the head. I could say one thing one day and the next be beaten with a wooden plank for the same thing. I got kicked out of home as a teenager, not knowing how to navigate the world (the world of was the flesh and the flesh was bad - the world was evil and other people are not to be trusted) and not knowing who you could trust and who you could not. I only had the clothes on my back and an empty handbag. I had to eat out of trashcans. I could not go home. I had no one and nothing. I had become worse than being invisible, I had become a dead person, a ghost. "Dead people can't have children," my mother later told me, "I have no daughter ****, and I have no grandchildren. She died a long time ago."
My life disappeared in the matter of hours. I went from working in my father's business, having an ok day doing the job I'd been assigned, to having my brother appear before me breathless and white, "They want you up at the house. I think you're in big trouble." I walked to the house, the blood draining from my head, I felt weak, I knew what was coming, they'd discovered my writings again, and I knew it was the moment I'd been waiting for. I couldn't/wouldn't lie any more to protect myself from the punishments, it was that moment I would hold onto my integrity for all it was worth. And my moment came, I thought I would die that day. I lay on the ground being kicked over and over again and I found peace. I lost everything that day. A matter of hours and I lost my siblings. My sister running after the car screaming. Me feeling nothing but numbness. Everything, everything gone and me just a third wheel discarded.
Stability: something I want, but was it ever truly possible to ever have? Was it just an illusion I always had in the back of my mind that I could achieve? I wanted to get a house so I wouldn't have to put the kids through moving every six months. I wanted to have someone I could rely on in life and who could rely on me.
Perhaps it's not a matter of whether you can rely on someone who has multiple other partners or is simply monogamous. Perhaps it's a matter of not being able to rely on someone who simply isn't reliable whether they are with just you or multiple people? Perhaps this is where honesty comes into play: if you have someone in your life who is honest with you, maybe you can feel safer in knowing they aren't just going to screw you over and leave you to rot.
I must be one of the most messed up people hahaha. I know my thoughts ramble.