What have I done?
Yesterday I went back and poked around the boat that I had chosen for this fall and decided that I would, after all, despite my earlier misgivings, go sailing. Back at our hostel I skyped Delta and cancelled the second half of my ticket, the half that would have taken me home, a process I fear is reversible. And my path was committed.
Yesterday I went back and poked around the boat that I had chosen for this fall and decided that I would, after all, despite my earlier misgivings, go sailing. Back at our hostel I skyped Delta and cancelled the second half of my ticket, the half that would have taken me home, a process I fear is reversible. And my path was committed.
Now, at 4 am, I am terrified.
I want to call Delta back up right now, beg
and plead and cry, ask them to give me the other half of my
ticket back. By committing to go sailing for four months on this boat
(something relatively small – that I am not very sure about anyway) I have also
committed to giving up my home (something huge). I wasn’t thinking about that
yesterday afternoon when I was talking to Delta, I was only
thinking of the boat. How could I have forgotten such a huge part of the
equation? Do I really want to go? I don’t care, in the grand scheme of things,
about this four months sailing. I have been sailing before and will go again…
but giving up my house… deciding to not fight for it… to just hand it over to
my husband… that is something I do care about.
Before I left home last
week I boxed all my stuff up and while I am gone my husband will be moving back
into ‘my’ house (well, ‘his’ house actually, which is, of course, the point). I
have lived there for the past 15 years. My kids were, effectively, brought up
there. Their tree fort is in the back woods. My memories of their childhoods
are there; the room where Alexander suffered terrible migraines, the windows
that Fred broke playing hockey in the backyard, the basement Ben and his
friends hid out in watching endless sci-fi movies instead of going to dances...
The alternative to going sailing is to go home, work my permanent supply job, and
fight to keep the house for me. By committing to go sailing I am committing to
honour my agreement with my ex that he can have the house back. Which leaves me
homeless. And terrified.
My husband and I
did a one month trial reconciliation last spring that was an unmitigated
disaster. (Our marriage fell apart almost four years ago because he had ‘had
the brilliant idea to have a discrete affair’. It fell apart this spring, or,
rather, was irreconcilable, over another other woman he was seeing on a very
regular basis…) Just before I left to come here we had a huge blow up (over
her) and I felt for the first time in four years, in other words forever, that
our marriage was over. Done. Finished. Over. (Which had me in tears for
hours.) And at that point I considered staying home, fighting to keep our house
for me. (He did after all move out over three years ago and is currently living
in a different house he owns on the other side of town. It made a lot of sense,
to me, for me to buy our house off of him and for him to stay in the house he
is currently in. He didn’t want to do that however, he wanted our house back
for him. He wanted to sell his other house, move back into our house, and kick
me out (which, incidentally, to him, and somewhat more significantly, to me,
would leave me homeless). I went over to talk to him, to try and convince him
to let me keep our house. And he said the only thing that he could possibly
have said that would have made any difference. (I don’t know how he managed to
do that.) He talked about how, our marriage having failed and his parents
having died, he is feeling somewhat lost in life, about how that house is his
tether to reality. It blew me away. But it’s my tether to reality too, I said,
so how do we decide what’s fair? There was no clear answer. We both wanted it
for almost exactly the same nostalgic reasons. Which was weird. So I conceded,
I said he could have it, mostly because, for the first time in ages, I could understand
what he was saying, could sympathize with what he was saying, and it all seemed
too bizarre for words.
But now, at 4 am, literally
continents away, about to embark on a small adventure that I am not even sure I
want to go on, I am very unsure that I made the right decision then, that I am
making the right decision now, that I should be going sailing at all, that,
rather, I “ought” – whatever that means – be going home and fighting (a likely
expensive and acrimonious legal battle) to keep my house and the continuity it
would provide in my life. Here, now, at 4 am, I am very very unsure.
I could always, of
course, I tell myself, return to Deep River and just buy another house (if I
could find some way to afford it). I could do that. But it would not have a
tree fort built by my kids out back.
What have I done?
