Today I have so many thoughts in my head I feel like I can't process them all. This morning I lay in bed reading while the girls were getting ready for school. I did a Google search for ideas on turning a closet into a mudroom and I found the design and layout that I had run across previously, but when I went to visit the page it took me to another closet that I didn't like nearly as well. Last night I walked around the condo thinking about what I could do with what I had and how different areas of the place were going to be used. It's clear to me that I need a place where people can deposit their belongings as soon as they come in through any door. My idea is to take most of the closet doors off and replace them with fabric panels. That will be a lot cheaper and less time consuming than painting and rehanging doors and I'm hoping that it will give the place an airier and brighter look.

My youngest sister suggested taking some of the cabinet doors off in the kitchen to open that up as it's in the middle of the condo and not at all bright or cheerful. My middle sister doesn't think that this is a good idea since then the contents of your cabinets are on display, but my younger sister said that my cabinets were organized and picturesque enough to make it work. Today I woke up and thought about how many things I'm going to be taking to the condo. I would like to keep the number under five hundred. This is an arbitrary number, but I have to start somewhere and as I've been counting things and thinking about what I want over there, it adds up really fast. The last thing I can handle is more things to deal with, but I don't want to go too far which is a tendency I have. 

I'm going to go back over to the condo today. I need a broom and a dustpan over there, and fortunately we have some at home that I can take from an area. I'd like a different garbage system over there and a compost bin, but those refinements will have to wait. Lately I've noticed that I get ahead of myself so I'm working on figuring out in what order things could be done. I'm going to call the tile guy today to see when he can come over and install a wall between my bedroom and the bathroom. I'm really excited about and looking forward to that. Another thing I can do on my own is go over to see what my father-in-law has down in his basement that I could use. I know he has a long mirror that I could hang in the hall or elsewhere. Decorators recommend strategic use of mirrors so I'm going to play around with what I have and can find. 

Today I have so much nervous energy I feel like I can't sit still long enough to write this. I read more on PTSD last night and I decided to talk to my therapist more about that since that's one thing that I know I have and we can work on dealing with some of the fallout that accompanies that. At the last therapy appointment we talked about the role of friends in a marriage. When my therapist heard that my husband was talking to other women for several hours about emotions she held up her hand and said that if he wanted to break a marriage, that was exactly what he should be doing. I felt like his response was very defensive when he said that he has women as friends instead of men since men don't want to talk about these types of things. It was a joke when we started dating, I had male friends, he had females he liked to hang out with and talk to about whatever. I remember him bringing women along when we were going places and it always made me uncomfortable, but I put up with it because I didn't know any better.

My therapist explained that there is something called emotional cheating. It was something I had never heard of before, but had always suspected existed. I even have a term for it. I call them non-sexual affairs. Whatever the term, it's what happens when one partner shares things they should be sharing with their significant other with someone else. This erodes trust, invites comparisons, and builds walls between two people. I was stunned when she explained that he's been an emotional cheater for the entire time I've known him. He said that I have male friends, and there have been times when conversations and outings crossed lines. I've owned that in the past and I've taken new steps to make sure that those tendencies are in the past. For example, last night a male friend of mine asked if he could share something with me. Right away I wondered if it was something related to his girlfriend, but I didn't think that it was based on his opening.

I said he could tell me whatever was on his mind, but I also shared this conversation with my husband who was there at the time. It turned out not to be a relationship issue, a friend of his knows of a job opening and could possibly be in a position to pull some strings were my friend to apply. My friend has a disability that could be viewed as a reason not to hire him. Although I didn't hear the job particulars I think he could handle it based on what he told me and the fact that working from home quite a bit is an option. My therapist and I have talked about friends and Twitter which is really just a small snippet of life in general. Is it wrong of me to be talking to this guy at all if the conversation isn't being made public? 

My sister's husband works primarily with women so he eats lunch with them and my sister has heard how the women he works with just love him. I think it's a very slippery slope, much more so than I ever realized. For all the problems my parents had, I can't remember either of them having jealousy issues, my dad has a girlfriend. He doesn't call her that, and I don't know to what extent their relationship went, it grosses me out to think about it. My mom has remarried and I'm skeptical of a lot of the things she says since she's lied to me on several occasions and later tried to justify her actions without offering me any sort of an apology. By the time you're married and have kids of your own, you're old enough to understand that your mom can go out on dates. I don't care that she was dating, I care that she lied about it, and won't own it or apologize to us. 

I don't think that my husband thinks that going out with other women and talking to them is a marriage breaker. I don't think that he thinks that he did anything wrong. I know that there were things that I did that were wrong, but when I was sitting on the couch this tremendous crash of awakening coursed over and through me as I finally understood the reason that I was so often perplexed. He gave those other women things that belonged to me. I deserved those conversations, those outings, and that intimacy. I should have been privvy to his feelings and inner thoughts that he was sharing with them while they were shopping or at lunch together. He set one standard for himself and left the rest of us to get by on the meagerness that came home. I went from stunned shock to righteous wrath to scared confusion to wanting blood, my pound of flesh, and vengeance.

I was so grateful when my friend stopped by. She did her nails while I made supper. I went through this over and over in my head. I want an apology and I want some money. I don't love him because I can't trust him. I don't think that any therapist or marriage counselor will ever convince me that he deserves a second chance when I put up with this for as long as I did, not knowing that I was contributing to my own illnesses, delusions, and misconceptions. I worked so damn hard to get him to love me when we were first married. I made meals and kept the house clean and did laundry and dishes and planned special outings for him. I dressed for him, did my hair in ways that I thought he would like and encouraged him to go after jobs that he didn't think he could get on his own. I was always tight with money, he helped me loosen up, but without anyone in control, we spent ourselves into a hole that was so black and deep I can't believe we crawled out with a roof over our idiotic and immature heads. 

At the bank I primarily use is a woman with the same name as my husband. She helped us set up sub-accounts beneath our main checking account. It was one of the smartest things I did as far as money management goes. Today there is just over seven hundred dollars in the condo expenses account, and I've never spent below the emergency fund that he can use if he chooses. We no longer have any credit card debt, but we still owe on one of our vehicles. We have two mortgages, we owe the orthodontist, we're getting ready to put a second child in braces and planning to send our oldest to a school that I don't think that we can afford, but I've let that go. I'm willing to experiment with it for a year just to see how it goes. That way she will have the experience he wants her to have, and it may work out better than anyone thought that it would. I don't like how he spends money so I'm looking forward to not having to rely on him financially.

Long ago I realized that I couldn't count on him for emotional support. He hasn't done the things that make me feel loved and they have nothing to do with sex or romance. I can get sex anywhere, things that are easy to come by are less valuable than the things that are more difficult to obtain. If that sounds like I'm writing off sex you interpreted that in a way that I didn't mean. Sex is great, but at the end of the day I get more out of it when I don't have to worry about what's going to happen when we're retirement age. Peace of mind allows me to relax and enjoy myself in bed, and out of it. I'm going to be in charge of that from now on and regardless of how scary it is, it's kind of cool too. I don't think that my therapist wants us to get divorced, he has time to think about it before our next appointment, but I think I already know what his answer will be based on his actions. 

My sister said her husband doesn't want to discuss the minor annoyances and petty grievances, but if you can't compromise and communicate when it comes to the little things in life, you will be brutally unprepared for the larger things that will threaten a relationship. I should be more worried about the money situation than the kitchen cabinets and what I'm going to do with the closets. 

***

Just got into a fight with my sister who is my mom's favorite and can't understand why that's upsetting to me. Whatever.

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