One of Those Days

In "The Artists Way" it is recommended that every morning - first thing every morning - you should sit and write for 30 minutes or so. A way of decompressing before your day begins. Exploring your thoughts through a free flow of writing - physically writing word on a piece of paper with an actual pen or pencil. I tried this almost 18 months ago and found that it was too much paper, too much crap to hold on to for the duration and that my hand always cramped trying to write as fast as I was thinking. I'm changing it up a little. I'm going to type - this way I can keep up with my thoughts, not kill as many trees and not have to have a pile of evidence of my deepest secrets sitting around my house where anyone can find them and read about the deep dark holes in my psyche.

Some days you wake up and your significant other is in a shit-tastic mood and you know from the get go that today is going to be one of those days. Well, that is how my morning has started. My mom was visiting because she was photographing a wedding for a friend of hers and it happened to be close to where I live. Well, my significant other (s.o. from here on out) doesn't have the same amount of admiration and tolerance for my mother as I do. Which is completely understood - but I'm tired of making comments in a pseudo-apologetic way to cover the fact that he is really being rude, and that he is trying to ignore my mom and seems to not be able to wait for her to go. She has been through a lot lately (as has I and the rest of my immediate family - as much as my s.o. seems to want to ignore it). Being married for thirty years to a man that has just recently come out of the closet is not a very easy thing to cope with. It is difficult to be one of the people that gets to listen to her vent about my own father and his new husband but I do it because I know that she is not ever going to see a therapist and that I am the closest thing to that for now.

It is amazing to have something like this happen this far into my life - a true reality altering event - and that it is actually more of a relief than it is tragic. I'm not saying that I wasn't shocked. I'm just saying that now, I understand more things about my father and the relationship that my parents had. It is all a bit more clear. It is still difficult to look at my homosexual father and think that he was really like that the whole time. He concealed it pretty well. The hardest part is that I had thought my dad was the ideal husband, never looking at another woman or talking about other women or anything of the sort. And when I started dating, I found out that straight men actually do that sort of thing - and they do it all the time. It made me feel like my boyfriends were not being faithful - like my dad was to my mother - but really it was just because they liked women. Looking back on it now - the strange ways that my dad would look at other men - that was his way of ogling. Silly how no one noticed because it would have been impossible for my straight father to be looking at men in any kind of a sexual way. I guess that is also why he loved watching Martha Stewart, The Golden Girls, Sisters, and many other non-straight-guy shows. It is just too bad that the past is crystal clear and the future always looks so murky.