Just a quick one to get that monstrosity off of the front page.

I’ve been shopping like crazy for the last few days. I hate to do it, because I just got the credit card down to a manageable level, but I need clothes for the cruise. So I bought a couple of nice dresses/skirt sets that I can wear for the holidays too.

And a new backpack purse that ought to hold up longer than the cheap one I bought for the last cruise did.

And I’ve been really lax on buying bras in the last few years, so of course, they all need replacing at once. It’s one thing to buy a nice one here and there, but it really adds up, buying a whole wardrobe full all at once. In fact, I actually dragged my ass to the mall this afternoon so I could get the correct sizes.

I forgot how much I hate the mall. I’ve been almost exclusively shopping online for years because I hate to shop in person. And I really hate crowds, but did I remember that this was a holiday? Of course not, so the traffic was really stupid and the lines at the registers were ridiculous. Not to mention having to stand in them and listen to four teenagers discuss whether or not some woman was too old to be dressing sexy. I wanted to turn around and tell them, “You know girls, we stop giving a rat’s ass what teenage girls think by the time we’re twenty.” But what good would that have done?

And then since I was feeling fat, I went into the Torrid store next door. They have their sizes in code, apparently because fat people like to pretend that they’re not actually fat. Who are they kidding there? We know we’re fat! But that store did make me feel thin when I tried some things on that weren’t at all flattering, mostly because they were too big and yet were still nominally my size. I may have to revise my concept of fat to, “larger than I’d like to be but still perhaps not appropriate for that store.”

See, yet another reason to shop on the internet. I’d rather deal with shipping returns than any of this.

I’ve had an entry rolling around in my head for a couple of days that I really don’t want to write. But in the interests of Truth and just plain dealing with it, I believe that I will try.

I have a bad attitude towards sex.

Well, maybe not bad so much as weird. Men generally think it’s cool, but I?m starting to think that maybe it’s just fucked up a little. I’m pretty damn good at disassociating sex from emotion, and they like that because they’re often that way themselves and it’s just less complicated.

But why I do that is a whole ‘nother kettle of worms, to mix a metaphor.

See, I used to be perfectly normal, if a little restrained. I had a normal sex life in college; some was casual, some was not.

But then I got married, and a couple of years after that, things really started to go down the toilet for me.

See, I don’t talk about it much (few people even know) but I was abused in my marriage. That’s why I left—once I was strong enough to pick myself up out of the depression and go.

He didn’t hit me. I always wished he had, because that would have been a clear signal to even my post-partum depression-fogged head that it was time to get out.

It started when I had my first son. I was terribly conflicted about being a mother, and just didn’t know what to make of having two roles in life all of a sudden. I went down into the bowels of hell really fast, and was never, ever diagnosed. I had no clue what was going on. Had I an Internet back then, I might have figured it out for myself, but even being forced to the doctor didn’t help. He blamed it on low thyroid, the moron, but I didn’t know any better.

And there was the small matter of an episiotomy scar that wouldn’t heal too. And having sex forced on you with scars splitting wide open is hardly fun. Combine that with the depression, and I developed a complete aversion to sex. Well, at least with that man, who, knowing about the pain and the scars (and how could he miss the depression?) kept forcing me to have sex at least weekly. For over a year. Never letting the scars heal, either physically or mentally.

He didn’t hold me down and rape me; that would have been too clear to me too and I wouldn’t have put up with it. At least, I think I wouldn’t have. No, he used whining and manipulation as his evil tools. It got so that I would just lay there and let him so I wouldn’t have to hear about it for a few days. He made my life a living hell. I was never so thrilled in my life to have my period as I was then, because then I had an excuse that shut him up and made him just leave me alone for a few days. I started lying about it a day or two on either side too, just for the peace.

This went on for at least a year. A year that I spent absolutely dreading nightfall, because that’s when he’d start to hammer me, one way or another. I do not know how many nights I spent in tears in a row. How could a man treat his wife that way? What was wrong with me? How much I hated him! No, I despised him, every glance, every sound, every thought of him.

Eventually, I moved out to another room in the house, nominally due to his snoring, which happened to be loud enough to wake the freaking neighbors, but was just my convenient excuse.

Why do I have a second son after all of that, you ask?

That was a conscious decision, and one that I also wouldn’t have made if I’d been diagnosed with depression in time, because I would have been long gone. I simply didn’t want my older son to be an only child.

So I let him near me three more times, and thank god I was as fertile as I am. I never let him touch me again after that, because by then, I was starting to come out of the fog and thinking for myself a little. I had my baby and that’s all I wanted from him.

It was also right about then that I started to work and lost a little of that isolation that kept me trapped for four long years. I met actual people who liked me, and I was good at something, and I could spend whole chunks of the day away from him and thinking about something other than dreading him coming home. And I started to get my mind back.

Oh, we went to marriage counseling, sure. After one or two joint visits, the counselor (a religious one, no less) started just talking to me. And he encouraged me to get out. He’s the first one who gave me a clue that what I’d been going through was rape. Before, I’d assumed that it was somehow my fault, that something was wrong with me for no longer loving my husband. But when the husband treats the wife so unforgivably for so long, it’s no wonder that things go to shit. The counselor told me that it would be better to put my kids through a divorce than to have them grow up thinking that’s how a marriage was, and that’s how a husband should treat his wife.

None of this really explains why I disassociate sex with emotion, does it? Well, I had to, as a sheer survival mechanism. If I hadn’t tried to, I think it would have actually killed me, because lord knows I was close enough that having a son to be there for was the only thing holding me here at times. So yeah. Rape, and lots of it. It’s an ugly word, isn’t it? It’s a wonder that I can even enjoy sex after that.

It’s not easy to admit. It’s too easy to blame myself for not being smart enough to figure out what was going on, and for not having enough self respect to leave a bad situation. But I was more afraid of the unknown, which is a huge demon when you’re dealing with depression.

You will never, ever hear me criticizing an abused woman for staying, not even when she has it worse than I did. Because I’ve been there, and the me I am today wouldn’t stay, but the me that was then had her reasons. And the reason was fear. It shapes you for the rest of your life, even if you don’t want to admit it.

Happy Birthday Bonnie!

OK, so maybe I was protesting a little too much.

Because I have to admit to myself that it does matter, that I do like this man, and that I don’t like that he left, never mind that it was for a good reason.

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to get myself in a situation that would expose all of that barely-healed scar tissue. I didn’t want to think more of him than just a nice guy to date. I wanted to be OK with casual dating, and I still think I could be, in concept.

But this guy, he seems to be more than someone I was attracted to on the surface. He’s really a hell of a man, and the more I talk to him, the more I find to like about him. And in a shocking twist to my cynical view of romance, he seems to be feeling the same way about me.

And I’m really not sure if I’m prepared to deal with that, but I know for sure that I’m not prepared to end it because of some nebulous fears on my end. Not if he’s willing to be patient with me, and all indications are that he is. He knows I’ve been hurt pretty badly, although I haven’t gone into details. It seems remarkable to me that I happened to run across someone willing to take the time to make me feel secure, but there you go, and here he is. We’ll see where it goes from here, but I do have to admit that I am getting attached to this man.

Am I in over my head? Well, I do have a history of doing that to myself in life, and I usually swim rather than sink.

And really, he totally needs an alias at this point. “New guy” won’t really cut it any more, and I like generic names. Soldier? Sarge? New guy, if you stumble across me (he hasn’t yet) and have an opinion on that, please share it with me. I kind of like Sarge.

I’m feeling rather blah, and only part of that can be attributed to the lingering bronchitis. I should be out cutting wood today, but I can’t quite catch enough breath or motivation to go do it. I’m not sick enough to want to do nothing but lay around on the couch all day, but I’m not well enough to do anything fun either.

It’s November, so all of my summer distractions are over. No more deer season, no upcoming trips to Pismo, no more dates with new guy. True, it’s still bear season, but between ripping off part of the trailer’s plumbing and not fixing it yet and the lack of breath, I decided to skip this weekend and I kind of wish I hadn’t.

And I’m not only bored, I’m lonely. I got a little spoiled over the last month; even if I had the kids, I still had a nice date to look forward to on the alternating weekends. It was nice to have someone to talk to, but he hasn’t been talking to me much lately. Not since he left for back East, actually, except for a few text messages. That’s OK; I don’t know that I really wanted a long-distance thing anyway, but he said he’d stay in touch and then hasn’t, and that has me a little down.

I’m still missing my usual activities with Cowboy as well. All summer I had things to do to take my mind off of what I was missing, but now it’s starting to haunt me a little, even though I know roping season is about over. I miss being able to just go out on a whim on a beautiful weekend and ride the horses in the arena. I miss having a partner to do mundane things like grocery shop and house clean with. I miss always being busy, one way or another. I miss the whole lifestyle, not just him. I’ve healed enough that he’s not on my mind every minute of every day, but I still feel the loss deeply, since it was the loss of a whole life, not just of one person.

None of these things are especially good writing topics either, so don’t expect a whole lot out of me until this mood shifts. It’s easier to keep my mind on the right track when I’m too busy to let it settle into the depths, but I’m running out of floaty distractions.

After I found out about my friend’s death, I tried to get in touch with one of my other friends that had also known him a long time. I hadn’t talked to him in a couple of years, but I had a pretty good idea where he worked and where his parents lived. I left messages at both places for him to call me back, and he did last night.

He was sad to hear about our friend too. It’s a little chilling to have people in your class dying—I only keep in touch with one other, and I don’t know if he’s gone over there or not, so obviously I don’t keep up that closely with him. I suspect there are more of them over there than just R@y, since our class was about thirty, and probably a third of them have stayed in the Army.

But it was nice to catch back up with my friend, who was one of my first few boyfriends in college. I would have recognized his voice instantly, even if I didn’t expect a call from him. He only lives about an hour and a half from me, but I don’t see us doing more than saying hello every couple of years. He doesn’t stay in touch with anyone else in our class any more.

I miss those guys—we were closer than the average bunch of college buddies due to the ROTC thing. I was the only woman in the class, although there were a couple above and below us. We had a core group of about five friends within it that really hung out together a lot. I still talk to two of them every couple of years, and I know about a third because one of the others’ wives works with him. I suspect the fourth one is raising hay and babies in very rural California, but I’d heard that he stayed in the Guard too. We’ve been out of college for fourteen years now, so some of them probably didn’t re-up, but I know at least one other did. I think he’s a Major now. If I hadn’t made some of the dumb choices that I did right out of school, I could have been one too, although I was always more NCO material at heart.

But here I am, in a civilian’s version of an NCO position, raising kids and living my life safely. I guess it worked out for me in the long run.

Although my annual round of bronchitis is back. The asthma would have eventually kicked me out of the Army anyway. So, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to send myself home to bed.