New Roads

I have fallen in love. And it couldn’t have happened at a stranger time.

A beautiful woman has entered my life. She has swept me off my feet. She thinks the same way about me as I do about her.

We don’t live close to each other, so the last few weeks have seen a flurry of emails and texts, telling each other how much we love each other.

All this is in the context of me going away on a holiday with my wife and kids on one of the best vacations I have ever spent with my family. All this in a period of settling, where we are beginning to get asked over to friends, and to be thought of as a couple again. All this when our kids are simply thriving, with two doting parents looking over their shoulders.

I spoke about long term stuff on one occasion to my wife over the holidays, and I correctly assumed that her feelings for me had not changed that much and she had not put much thought into future plans. We both see ourselves as parents doing the best for our kids. In fact, we are more than just parents. We are good friends. The best of friends.

The touchy subject of our future together and me staying or moving came up. I admitted that I am not constructed to just sit back and admire menus for the rest of my life. “Well, you’d better move out then, hadn’t you?”, she said with a smile. 

She wants me to be upfront with her about future relationships, and to think about what the effect might be on the kids. (It turns out she heard from a third party that I was dating the last time before I had a chance to tell her myself, and was none too happy).

So, that’s the background. The next question is what to do next.

A persistent attraction

Things are still going well on the home front. I’m still in the family home, still central to my kids’ lives, enjoying my job, and getting on with life. I’m very happy. It’s amazing what a few short months can do.

However, I long for the intimacy of another woman.  I try my best to ignore it, but it comes back regularly – that feeling, that longing.

I have started having very strong feelings for another woman whom I met through acquaintances. She is beautiful, intelligent, sensitive and kind, and she’s interested in many of the things I love a lot. What’s more, I think she is attracted to me too.

She lives in a different city, she is single, she is younger than me and she (sort of) has a boyfriend. So getting involved would be dangerous, complicated and messy to say the least, not to say intensely stupid, given my current home-situation.

But I do feel for her. I think about her every day. I regularly wonder what might happen, should the chance arise and we were both alone together. Just the two of us. Alone.

Sleeping dogs..

Since I moved back into the family home, life has been good. The kids are happy, and their mother doesn’t seem to mind me pottering around the place. We seem to be getting on well together. There is very little tension between us. We are even considering going to the cinema together in a few days time. It’s almost as if all the separation never happened. 

But the separation did happen. I am sleeping in the sitting room and many of the issues between us are still there, somewhere in the background. They are never spoken about by either of us.  

I’m wondering if I should mention the subject of our future living arrangements? I am unwilling to do this because I am relatively happy with the way things are at the moment, and the downsides to me moving out again are very high: for the kids and for our finances.

I’m feeling that if it isn’t broken, why try to fix it?

From hero to zero..

It’s been a few weeks since I posted. I am doing well. I’ve started my new job and so far so good. I love it. My boss is good, the people I work with are nice and the whole atmosphere in the company is friendly. It’s a world away from my previous situation. My home life has improved too. I’m a different person. I’m feeling good. 

I wish I could keep on going about this, because so many of my posts have been negative in the past. However, something has come up that I want to blog about tonight. It’s weighing down on my mind. 

A good friend of mine – the woman I shared a house with – is accusing me of having broken her trust. She is extremely angry with me.

We both got into a dispute with our landlord over deposit monies and the situation quickly slid into acrimony. Veiled legal threats were made and I was concerned that the situation, bad enough though it was, was getting rapidly worse. I decided to contact the landlord myself, over email, one-to-one, and I managed to get the landlord to pull back. I really thought I had done the right thing until I reported this back to my friend. When she heard we had had an offline email conversation she accused me of going behind her back. This despite the fact that we had agreed that I speak to him. I spent an hour on the phone explaining to her what I was trying to do. I tried to explain that I did it to avoid the situation getting out of hand, but she wasn’t having any of it. She asked me to send her the email thread, so I did (what options did I have?). Since then I have been stonewalled and just now I have received an email saying that she is deeply upset that I have broken her trust. Even though I didn’t write anything in the email that could be construed as stabbing her in the back, she is reading all sorts of things into my motives. 

I don’t understand this volatility, this sense that everyone is out to get her, this belief that one must be fully in control of all events, this inability to take my side into account. She accused me of not doing enough, and then when I do something to ease the situation I’m roundly attacked, to the point that our friendship is on the line. I’m even questioning my motives now.

So did I do something wrong? What should I do to ease things? I’m really confused. I appear to have turned a friend into an enemy over a simple misunderstanding. 

So, now that she’s finished her exams ..

.. I mention that she might consider finding a job for herself. That she has her pension to think about.

She immediately launches into a tirade, calling me condescending and that she’s fed up me reminding her every single day (as if) that she needs to find a job. How will she cope with 4 kids in school, where a kid gets sick etc…That childcare will nullify any salary she gets, etc, etc, etc.

I felt like letting fly – that I’m personally the only wage earner in the family; that I’m a guest: sleeping on the sofa in my family home; that I’ve paid for her to complete her Masters; that I can’t afford to be spending money on two places to live, and that I deserve a bit more respect for what I have had to put up with in the past couple of years.

I bit my tongue.

As I always do.

I’ve learned that with her, it’s impossible to use argument as a means of getting through to her. The emotional reaction is far too strong and the memories are far too deep. She will have stashed this little incident away now to be used at a later time.

Am I the only person in this life who doubts himself? Or are most people so full of their own fucking self-righteousness that they can’t possibly ever consider that they might, possibly, have got it wrong, and that I, possibly, might have a valid suggestion to make?

Some good news

I passed my medical!

Houston, we’re breathing again.

The medical exam

I’m worried that the new job may not happen. It’s possible that I may fail my medical.

The doctor wanted further clarification with the cancer surgeon today – he was also interested in my use of anti-depressants, and wants to follow up with my GP.

Was I wise to mention the anti-depressants? Perhaps. I don’t know. My reasoning was the fact that I was obliged to take a urine test and I wanted to mitigate any likelihood of antidepressants appearing. I was also concerned that if my doctor was consulted about my cancer that she might reveal that I am on a course of anti-depressants. I decided to come clean and take the honest route. The advice I had been getting was that so many people are on anti-depressants these days, it’s hardly an issue. We’ll see. It certainly seemed to concern this doctor. Ach. It’s my first time taking them. It’s not as if I have some sort of history. I should be ok.

The cancer issue concerned the doctor because the surgeon wrote that my surgery last November should not be an issue. The surgery. Not the cancer… I didn’t pick up on this, so it’s likely that the doctors may have a full and frank discussion in my absence that may put this new job at risk.

I’m in limbo, but it’s out of my hands now.  I can only hope for the best.

My “Life Wheel”

Another exercise I performed this week was to look at my “Life Wheel” – a way of assessing my satisfaction with life from a number of different perspectives. Here’s what it looks like.

It makes for interesting reading.

Despite the fact that I was recently diagnosed with a skin cancer, I consider myself to be in rude health. I have lost weight, my blood pressure is fine and I suffer from no specific health problems. OK, I could do with a bit more exercise, but that’s about it. As far as the cancer is concerned, what can I do? I hope it was caught early enough and that it won’t reoccur. Other than that I’m going to get on with life.

Wealth is a concern, but for me, life has never been about wealth. It’s enough for me to get by and be happy. Obviously it may becoime a much bigger concern if I don’t secure this new job, but that’s a worry I’d rather not think about.

My relationship with my family has never been better. I’m back in the family home with my kids. My mother and my siblings are in regular contact with me. I am also lucky to have some very good friends who care about me.

Interestingly, the time I have had for play, leisure and just having fun has suffered in recent times. I lost my sense of fun while I was away working in a job I hated. I’m looking forward to getting back into my hobbies and new interests. Already I can sense a move in that direction.

Relationships. This is probably not as bad as it would seem, given that this blog was started to help me to get through the break up of my marriage. My relationship with my ex/wife is good these days. I don’t have anyone else in my life but I’m happy to let this be the case at the moment, at least until things settle down.

Satisfaction with my career is rock-bottom for obvious reasons, having just been left go from my previous employment. However there is light at the end of this tunnel. Everything is telling me that I should be moving into a career track that involves teaching and lecturing, and I’m making concrete moves in this direction.

Personal space – I guess I long for time away for myself: up the mountains:by the sea: anywhere that gives me time to think. It’s not a big priority though. It’s nice being with my family too.

Even though I am not a spiritual person, I understand what this is getting at – having that belief that I am doing something with my life: that life has meaning and that I am contributing to the world around me. I scored myself very low on this, because of my state of self given everything that has gone on.

What this tells me is that everything is not so bad: there are some big plusses to my life at the moment. Yes, my career is in bad shape and my self-esteem has taken a battering, but my family situation, the fact that I am back home and in good health is compensation enough.

What are my core values?

I’ve been asked to think about my values, but to answer such a question, I first need to establish what “values” mean. The best I can come up with are qualities or abstractions with a particular meaning to me, that inform how I look at things and how I decide things and without which I would in some way be diminished as a person.

That’s quite a mouthful, so lets look at some of the things that I value.

Time with my family. This is almost a “well-duh” type of value, but then again there seems to be a lot of people that put other things ahead of their families. I’m not like that. I love being a dad, I’m mad about my kids and I’m prepared to put my family first. Even though relations between my ex/wife and I will never be the same, I’m still there for her and I still care for her.

Friendship. I may not have a huge number of friends, but the group of friends I do have are hugely important to me. I value friendship highly because I feel we all need people we can talk to when things are not going well, and vice-versa. I feel I am a good friend to those who matter to me. We need people who relate to us as ourselves. No masks need apply.

Harmony. I have a strong desire for people to get on together and to work together for a common purpose. I have been told I am a good team worker and that I say and do a lot that add to feelings of shared belonging. The reverse side is that I dislike conflict, and I am much more likely to work towards patching things up than perpetuating hatred or bitterness.

Rational inquiry and knowledge. I am a science fan, and I have been for a long time. Science has greatly informed my outlook on life, which tends to be universalist, curious and diverse while remaining skeptical and grounded. I like rational argument and I am able to go off on intellectual tangents. I love gathering knowledge and reading books that enhance or modify my views of the world.

Creativity. Although I wouldn’t consider myself highly creative, I value opportunities to exercise creativity. I tend to be the type of person who comes up with new ideas, or builds on ideas already put forward. The idea that things should be done just because they have always been done that way is repulsive to me and cultures or organisations that limit people’s freedom to think for themselves are not places I enjoy working in.

Sexuality. I value sex, sexuality, and my own existence as a sexual being. I don’t feel ashamed of it. I desire female company and the passion, warmth and intimacy that comes with it. In this sense I am not put off by other people’s sexual desires (within reason, of course).

Freedom to be different. Call it liberalism or whatever, but I value a person’s right to do what they want to do and not to have others restricting things and limiting things because of their own self- interested reasons. Freedom to follow your interests leads to a fascinating amount of diversity in life and I would hate the idea that we all must follow the same stuff. (Interestingly, there is something of a conflict here: I dislike interests that promote intolerance or prejudice or that have a detrimental impact on people, animals or the environment).

Time by myself outdoors. I love getting outdoors on my own: getting down to the seaside and walking along the cliffs. It gives me time to think, a chance to relax, to get some exercise and to be myself in places that few others ever get to. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I value the freedom to be alone, or that one of my values is a certain degree of isolation. Certainly one of my nightmares would be to be constantly in crowds!

My health. I have only started to put real value on this recently. I feel very positive about the fact that I am no longer smoking or drinking, and that I have lost weight through better diet and more exercise.

Getting on with my life

Yesterday I started to taste freedom.

I had a meeting with my ex-boss and afterwards I took a trip to the museum to check out the country’s finest discoveries. I popped into a bookshop on the way home and then headed back to my house, where I cooked up a nice fillet steak dinner for my housemate and me. After a long chat I then went into the city centre to meet a good friend over a few drinks. It was late when I got back to the house, but I was very contented.

The meeting with my boss went well. I had decided to let all my thoughts and feelings out and I think the discussion was productive. He questioned me on some of my concerns and we even went for lunch together afterwards.

I smiled a lot last night. I laughed a lot. I felt good. A burden that has weighted me down over the past few months is now lifted somewhat and I can face the future.

I’m going home.