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Opening My Daughter’s Sores
Today I return to prose, having told my story with some poems. Today I’ll expand a little more, on how I open my children’s sores.
Divorce and separation
My oldest daughter is once-again not talking to me. She is upset that I have decided to start dating. Perhaps I should not have told her, but I thought to myself honesty is the best policy. I thought that if she found out by accident, it would be even more damaging. It seems some hurt and conflict in life is just unavoidable.
The crux of the hurt is that while my wife and I have not slept together since the beginning of the year, we have only been separated since June, and the divorce was only filed in July. Therefore, my daughter cannot believe that I would start dating so soon, and has accused me of wanting to date for a while and just waiting for the right timing. My wife has accused me of dating as a manifestation of an ongoing mid-life crisis, never mind that I have been faithful to her, and mostly loyal to her, for 30 years, and she is the one who walked away from the marriage and filed for divorce.
Of course, there is no logic in such arguments. It is all emotion. It is whatever feels good at the time and brings some relief to the discomfort of heartache. My wife suffered emotional trauma, and her words are the words of a person still angry, judgmental and accusatory. Every conversation is a justification of what she does. Every justification an indictment of me.
The bigger issue though, and one I hope my daughter will one day understand, is that relationships do not end when someone files for divorce. That is simply ceremony, a civically condoned way of signaling the larger community that from this day forth, two people will be parted by government sanction. Relationships die much earlier, in small and large ways.
For my wife and I, we never communicated well. There was love, there was joint sacrifice, there was support, tender moments, carefree holiday experiences, and many other decorations you would expect in a loving and caring relationship. We never learned how to fight well, and we never learned how to heel hurt from not fighting well. After 30 years, accumulated unresolved hurt was too…
