Crying

I have been crying a lot this week and last.

Last Thursday, I got the hint that the Boy will likely stay in Montana for his senior year of high school. I cried for a few hours over this. It was a good hard, cathartic cry and I felt better afterwards.

Yesterday afternoon, I got an email from the Boy's school nurse that he might have torn his ACL and he needs an MRI. As readers of my blog may know, I tore my ACL at the end of 2015. 2016 was the year of surgery and recovery. The Boy is stronger, tougher and younger than I was in 2015, so his recovery will likely be faster. Still, this teeny-tiny ligament in the knee can surprisingly mess up someone's life for a year. Mobility is important. The Boy lives for skiing. His second sport is soccer. He had just joined the school's basketball team, too, which was awesome for someone who had rarely touched a basketball. This happens in a school of thirty-five kids when they need more players. All of these sports require an ACL.

How did he tear it? Attempting a 540 spin on what I am guessing was a janky homemade jump by the boys at his school on the snowy Montana campus.

I got the email around noon and I was able to hold it together for the rest of the day at work. After lunch, I was in an intense three hour team meeting in the afternoon where we hashed out details for a project plan. I had a few other tasks I needed to work on and then I fell apart crying.

The Boy is in another state under someone else's care with an injury that would deny him access to the sport he loves the most, a sport that under his own admission kept him alive last year. A sport that probably not so healthily gave his life meaning and gave him a sense of purpose and self-esteem.

That being said, I've watched the X Games and Olympic Freestyle skiing enough to remember the lists of broken bones and torn ligaments these skiers have had. Some have had multiple ACL tears. Could the Boy get a brace to make it through the season? I have a ski brace and it is awesome.

Still, I cried over his knee. Once I started crying, the tears kept coming. This morning I woke up a little blue, so I continued reading There the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owen. Kya is a girl who raised herself in the marshes of North Carolina. She lived alone for almost all of her life.

I realized I am alone.

Jack and I had an argument last week. He was reading a book that I told him I was reading, Codependent No More by Melody Beattie. He read it and said he understood how I felt--that he took care of his co-workers more than he took care of the family. He told me a story of Marcia, a physician who never remembered to renew her medical license. He would send her texts and remind her to do this paperwork.

This is from a guy who couldn't remember to put gas in either of our cars. He could take care of Laura, Erica and Marcia, but not me and the kids. A guy who was ticked off, annoyed and resentful when I ask him for his work schedule and when I asked him not to train for another marathon so he could spend more time with me and the kids. I didn't even care about myself at that point: I just wanted him to be a father.

I lost my shit when he told me the story of Marcia. Then in our usual dysfunctional marriage standard, he got mad at me for being upset. I was mad because he kept going on about Marcia and never got to the point of how it related to me. He says he never got to that end of the story because I lost my shit in the middle.

A few months ago, I attended a wedding of an Indian colleague. The bride--also Indian--came up to me and showed me the henna on her hands.

"If the henna is bright, it means your husband will love you," she said. She looked down at her hands, kind of sad, and "but it is always bright."

In arranged marriages, brides hope their husbands will love them. In American marriages, love is a given: that is why you are getting married.

My anniversary was last Monday, and Jack and I have been married for a long time. Here I am now, realizing that he doesn't love me the way I want to be loved. There was love at the start, but it got lost along the way. Somewhere in his heart, I am sure Jack has fondness and affection for me, but it is so buried behind his job and work and taking care of other people I don't often enough see it demonstrated to me. He gives more attention to Laura, Erica and Marcia and everyone else than he does to me and the kids. When I asked for his time and attention, he'd get annoyed, like I was a bother, that I was interrupting him.

And so I cry.

I cry because it has taken me so long to figure this out, even though he has basically telling me this all along. I just never figured out how to listen.