Needles & Hooks

Here’s what I had been so frantically working on before X-mas

A couple of different examples of this year’s ornaments:

A couple of baby sweaters:

Those are the Ruby pattern from Bee’s Knees Knits. Solid and self-striping sock yarn make washable sweaters with fun stripes. They were easy to make and the pattern was filled with thoughtful details.

The purple one:

Inset of color on the back:

Front pocket, knit into the body, only sewn on the slanted sides:

Close-up:

The blue one:

Hood piping detail:

Back detail:

It’s taken a while for me to post these, because they make me reflect on the last year and where I am. The sweaters are for my nieces, my ex-sister-in-law’s daughters. And I made the same number of ornaments this year, including my ex-SIL and my ex-MIL. And I wonder whether it’s healthy for me. And it makes me think about how I got to where I am now. I haven’t talked about it much here, I haven’t talked about it much anywhere really, just pulled away from things and hid, and it hasn’t been much good for me. Sure, I’ve been in therapy the whole time, but to some extent, that is all internal.

I was married for over 10 years. I spent 13 years of my life with my ex-husband, pretty much all of my adult life. And most of those years were really, really good. The last few were troubled. The external stresses of life started weighing on both of us, and we’d reached a point where we weren’t talking about it, because we hadn’t needed to learn how, so we never did. And we had a meltdown that we had a really hard time recovering from. It triggered a huge depression in me that I’m still trying to dig myself out of, and he was depressed too, and we didn’t see how that was affecting our ability to fix it. Neither of us had the strength to help each other out of it, and we didn’t know how to communicate about it, and that led to a lot of misunderstandings about how we were going to fix it, and so we ended it instead. Sometimes, I really regret that. In fact, I regretted it pretty much immediately, I thought I was coming home from a long work trip where I had been working on making myself more healthy to start anew and go to couples therapy finally, but he was done trying and wasn’t open to reconsider, and he had a new girlfriend waiting. And I didn’t know how to counter that, so I put on the brave face I always put on and tried to cope, to give him what he wanted, and I let him go.

Before anyone suggests the miracle of medication, don’t. When our big meltdown occurred, I started on meds. It helped me cope with the darkest moments, but ultimately, it probably wasn’t the right one. I stopped taking it a few months back, and since then, I’ve noticed that my affect is really different than it was on the meds. On meds, the lows were muted, but so were the highs. I was disconnected from myself and my life and I couldn’t see how to reconnect. He said a number of things along the way that suggested he noticed this, but neither of us made the connection to the meds, and it would have been a touchy subject anyway (and that’s a whole other issue, we started avoiding the touchy subjects, when really, that was the way to fix things, to dive into them and cope with them). Anyway, now that I’m off of them, I’m back to my old self again, and I’ve started mourning the loss of my marriage anew. I feel the pain that I wasn’t able to feel the way I needed to then in order to process where we were and to recover while it still made a difference. And I see all the things that I treasured that I’ve lost; things about him, things about the life we’d made, things about the future we’d dreamed of that we gave up on.

And that’s one of the things I struggled with the whole time. Because being married isn’t just you and him. It’s a much bigger thing you build around yourself, especially when you’ve been together so long. It’s a new life you create, even if you don’t have children. It becomes a huge part of who you are. I was never escaping from an abusive relationship, or something that was really unhealthy. We had lost our way and we were having trouble finding it.

We ended things amicably, and we’re still friendly toward each other, and sometimes that just makes it all worse. Because I can see how we could fix things now. I know what to say, and I know how to say it. I feel like I’m capable of it now. But it’s not my place to do so anymore. And all those things that hurt so much then, that made me wonder if all along we’d just been fooling ourselves about whether we were good together, those are gone. I remember the good stuff, I long for it. And when I think about the bad stuff, I just see things we could have fixed.

I miss him a lot. I find myself looking for him in ways I always have and he’s not there. The things I used to rely on him for support. The things I used to do for him. The holidays did this in a huge way. The traditions we had together that I missed this year (making the ornament each year was something I started early in our marriage, as a way to join our families together, because I made one for each of our mothers). The ways we relied on each other when we went home for the holidays, we were always a sort of shield for each other with our own families. Not that either of our families are terrible, but when you go home, you always find yourself in an old dynamic, and your spouse relates to them differently, softening it and supporting you all at the same time.

There isn’t a big ball of anger and hate between us, I’m just left with pain and longing. Things I wish I’d said. I guess this is sort of where a widow finds herself. But I’m not a widow. A widow doesn’t have to wonder if interacting with her late husband’s family is healthy. A widow isn’t waiting for him to get his things out of my storage space. A widow can’t drive over to his house and knock on his door. Most widows aren’t left thinking that if only they’d said or done something differently, they could have prevented the loss. There were so many things I wish I’d done or said differently in the last 2 years. In the last 5. Over the course of our whole marriage. I know that each little one probably didn’t matter that much. I can’t say there’s one definitive point where I could have made a big difference. I just wish I’d really had the chance to try.

I was always the optimist in our relationship, and I lost my optimism with the pain and later with the meds. And now that I’m more myself again, the optimism doesn’t matter. Because I can’t fix it anymore. He told me that he’s much happier now that he’s on his own. Sure, not being in the fog of pain and depression and distance would help that no matter what. But he’s also not the type to change his mind. He’s always been very stubborn. I understand that he’s getting settled in his new life and doesn’t want to take the risk.

I’m not sure which old saying applies here. “Hindsight is 20/20″. “The grass is always greener”. In some ways, I’m sure it felt like forever that we were trying to cope. But at the same time, it seems like I missed the last two years. I know they were painful, but I can barely remember them going by. They were a whirl. Just that in almost no time at all, I lost some of the things that were most important to me.

Sometimes it’s like I’ve woken up from a long sleep to the horror of what has happened. All my impulses are where they were two years ago, but they don’t apply to reality any longer.

Anyway, sorry this got so long and unknittingly, but at least I got it out of my head.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 10:37 am and is filed under Knitting, Almost Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.