Intention for the day: just be cool.
Does it get easier? Bloody hope so.
Minding own business, cooking feast for kings and listening to something stupid, when her name pops up on his phone. No warning. Bold, bright and entirely terrible.
ARGH. Faaaak. Heart leaps out of mouth and splatters drastically and dramatically all over the kitchen floor. Consider joining it there, but instead stare at phone. Rocking, wringing, ringing, steps back, steps forward, and… it stops.
Realise that choices are – take phone to him, inform of unwelcome intrusion on peace, allow him to take off into the next room and physically watch the door close on evening together. OR, and this is preferable, hide phone in bread bin.
She NEVER calls anymore. Not since the Dark Days of what would have been most gloriously hopeful period of our adult lives. One woman’s first flutters was another’s relationship death knell – good god how we knew about it. The what’s-she-got-that-I-haven’t, you’re-abandoning-your-daughter hell of it all.
What could she possibly want now?
Feel PTSD-ish dread of it rising through now heartless chest. Remembering the dates coloured by tears pouring into half finished margaritas – like they needed more salt. The insecurity of feared decision that he’d made a mistake, that it was all too hard.
That denial of access to child wasn’t worth the rebuilding he was undertaking.
Does it get easier? Bloody hope so. Can’t take the stomach twist when am forced to say her name. Maybe should say it more, over and over, take out the meaning. What’s in a name? Quite a lot, it seems.
Turned out bread bin was full of mould, so forced to be good stepmother. Now sat on our bed, butterflies making legs restless and wondering whether glass-to-wall trick actually works.