Wow. I realized when commenting on another post that I hadn't updated this blog in nearly a year! I'm really shit at keeping journals though and I just wasn't feeling like I needed to process "out loud" here though - I've read through past entries a few times and I really like having the record of things, so I might as well update.
It's been a hell of a long summer/fall. I mentioned here, I think, that Knight's mom was diagnosed with cancer back in fall of 2022. Pancreatic. At the time, she had surgery and chemo and actually did surprisingly well - so often that's a practically instant death sentence. But cancer being, well, cancer, it came back - she found out fall of 2023 that it was back, and chose not to do chemo again as it was miserable and frankly probably wouldn't have worked more than a few extra months. She stayed surprisingly healthy through Christmas/early spring, but then started declining pretty rapidly - we managed to take one last family vacation in July, to St. Thomas. (St. Thomas is lovely in some ways but not somewhere I'd choose to go; I did get to go snorkeling so that was great and honestly I spent most of the rest of the trip either slightly tipsy or slightly stoned as it was the easiest way to deal with her illness and my son's complete lack of wanting to be there.)
That was really the last good week she had, though - Knight ended up living at her house for the last month and doing most of the end-of-life care himself, as she really didn't want anyone else there (including me, really - our relationship never truly recovered from Covid, and I have a lot of anxiety-to-almost-the-point-of-phobia around illness so I wouldn't have been helpful.) Like, the last time I saw her was about 2 weeks before she passed because I spent five minutes by her bed, said "I love you and we'll be ok", then more or less RAN away, drove home and sobbed for the rest of the day. Yeah. Not proud of that, but not much I can do about it - the whole thing brought up way too many triggers for my mistakes around my own mother’s death (I was . I'm not the only one who failed at dealing with death - her brother and sister didn't come down at all. So anyway, she passed away September 12.
To some degree we're all dealing both better and worse than I expected. On... too many levels it's a relief, really. Hate to say it, but I've talked here before about how we've been in parent-caretaking mode since I started writing here, more or less, on top of actual parenting. Hell, I think parent-caretaking got in the WAY of actual parenting far FAR more than it should have. On the other hand, Knight's been doing the drown-his-feelings thing again and I'm so fucking tired of it.
We were in a good place last fall, but as his mom got sicker he got more and more distant, which I tried to give him space for but... he swears he’s ok after his mother’s death but he’s doing the absentmindedly get drunk thing. We ended up having a huge fight about it last weekend, after the third date-ish evening we spent together in a row (over a few weekends) ended up with him “going to sleep” (read: passing out) at, like, 9pm (when I was expecting to hang out until at least 11). I called him on it the next morning - it’s not even that I wanted sex, though it might have been nice, I just thought I actually got quality time and clearly that wasn’t important to him.
Cue the promises of being better. Probably will even happen for a while, given that this time I flat out told him that I’m barely romantically interested in him anymore because I can’t trust that he’s not going to do this again, hurt me the same way again. I think that shocked him, especially since I wasn’t even
angry anymore, just… exhausted. Like, I’ve lowered my expectations SO many times over the past five years or so… and each time I did it both made us more peaceful and yet also made us farther apart. If he’s going to be this unavailable, if he’s going to keep choosing alcohol over me, then… :
: I’m not going to try to take our lives apart but at some point the romance really will be forever dead. It’s not, yet..
The amazing thing was that he seemed almost surprised that I was this hurt? Like despite all of our zillion conversations about it, he somehow didn’t realize he was still doing it. Seriously, he almost has this idea that if he doesn’t get sick and he’s not hungover then he wasn’t drunk enough to affect anything. Didn’t notice he was passing out early, really (he just thought he was tired), didn’t realize he got pissy and/or verbose… mostly because he probably didn’t remember it. This time we happened to be watching a TV show we were both looking forward to and when I asked him the next morning about specific plot points he had no idea what I was talking about, so I had mostly emotionally neutral / factual evidence of exactly what he was doing to his memories and his interactions with people. (I think he believed me intellectually when I had told him this before but not, like, *deep* down.) I don’t blame him, his family
ran on denial so it’s an easy habit to pick up.
Hell, I’ve been in denial for years that he’s either a borderline alcoholic or really truly doesn’t give a damn about me anymore. I still believe him, that the latter isn’t true - which means the former must be and I don’t know what to do with that. Especially because after Joan moves out, and we sell the house we just inherited, we’re considering moving into a new place…on the one hand maybe I shouldn’t get even more entangled (for weird 2008 financial reasons, I’m actually not on the mortgage for this house, only the deed; this probably won’t be the case for the next one). On the other, if his drinking gets worse my life is going to get blown up anyway, so I might as well go with the hopeful option and believe that maybe he gets it this time.
At this point I’m more… curious where this will end up than hopeful or worried. That probably sounds weird, but I don’t want to hope anymore and I don’t want to give up, I *haven’t* given up. I wasn’t sure until I was in a group chat with two friends who have known me about as long as I have been here, so they’ve heard the ups and downs. One is having different but maybe even harder problems with her marriage and the third person in the chat asked her whether she still saw anything good between her and her spouse… but I thought he was talking to me and like, wrote paragraphs about why Knight was still worth it even if nothing changes. (I won’t do so now, feel free to read back in this blog for examples).
I saw the phrase “
the liminal space between Pandora’s and Schroedinger’s Boxes” the other day and I think that’s where I am. I think that’s where he is. But… at least he knows that there IS a problem? Ironically, the other thing that really, truly meant I hit the end of my tolerance was actually something else that happened that evening that started out with him being sweet/romantic. For reasons we needed to send a photo of us to someone for a website, and the one he picked was of me kissing him before a medieval fighting event - he’s in armor and holding his visor up, it’s adorable. And terribly romantic. And entirely wrong for the website (the person was looking for more of a formal portrait) so he had to send another. I wasn’t in the conversation, so he’s telling me about this early in the evening and is all cute about it, I think it’s wonderful because he’s so rarely schmoopy and I’m thinking “oh yay, maybe now that all this stress is over things will be better”… and then… yeah. I don’t know how he didn’t realize that he just wasn’t treating me like the guy in that picture anymore, that we weren’t the couple that we were then. Maybe he does now.
To be continued (splitting here to avoid character count limits). 
