Sometimes, It's Just a Cigar

I saw my counselor today for visit number two. Her thing is to get me to "experience my feelings," which on some level I find amusing, because I've worked hard to manage my feelings and not have them get in the way of what I mean to do or accomplish. I don't believe I deny them, in other words, I just refuse to give them "rent free" space in my mind to supercede my other priorities and obligations. After all, feelings are fleeting, and catering to something that changes capriciously doesn't make sense to me. Sure, it's fine to have feelings, but the way I see it, it's not so good to let them get the better of me.

The other level on which I find my counselor amusing is that she seems to want to provoke me, or at least to provoke feelings that I put to bed already. For example, she often expresses utter marvel at the idea of my ex-husband's flight of no return and what kind of terrible detrimental effect his choice must have had on me. That's just remarkable that he did that, she'll say, staring into my eyes as if willing me to break down and howl. Instead, I want to laugh at the soulful look on her face. Well, duh, it was remarkable, and it sucked. It was shocking and traitorous that the person who promised to love me forever decided he didn't love me after all and disappeared without backward glance. To have my all-important marriage come crashing down atop of me, crushing my hopes and illusions and leaving me to live amid its broken pieces hurt like hell. I was shattered, of course I was. Is that what she wants me to say? But saying it today doesn't make me cry. It happened three years ago. At the time, it hurt like hell, but that was then, and I'm not sorry if I no longer feel a need to cry about it now. In the end, my ex's seemingly spontaneous and complete departure from our life together was not really spontaneous, and really, in the end we didn't have much of a life together.

Today, I mourn far more for those lost hopes and illusions than I ever mourn for him. I can -- and do -- still hurt for them. For my lost ability to trust easily, to believe in real love, to imagine that someone out there really wants to know me fully, and for me to fully know him, and that in that complete knowledge we can accept each other in joy, not with reservation. I don't know that I believe in this ideal any more... and that, if I think about it enough, can make me cry.

I guess -- I'm used to it. What happened in my marriage is something bad that happened, and then it was done, and now it's over. Yes, understand that at the time he wounded me almost -- but not quite -- to the point of a mortal wound, and I realize I'm scarred now. It's those scars that are causing me some trouble, not the wounds that created them. But it's as if my counselor thinks that poking emotionally at the fact of the divorce will spawn some other reaction from me than disillusioned acceptance... that by rehydrating those feelings of abandonment and betrayal, I'll somehow see them differently or work through them differently. But nobody can reconstitute a mummy, and those feelings are verily mummified within me. They had their time in the sun, and they're reconciled. I can accept them. I can accept the history that unfolded since then. But then, I've had three years to do it.