I took my son out for Vietnamese Pho for dinner tonight. It’s one of his favorite foods, usually the place he chooses if he has a choice. I am still so tired from this bug, and not sleeping this week, I couldn’t put together a dinner for him, and I didn’t get home til 6:30 anyway. I got him an ice cream cake, which is tradition. He’s never been a big fan of regular cake, even though all of mine are made from scratch.

It was really nice to go out with him. He’s going to a music festival in Las Vegas next month, and he’s so excited. Almost all his friends from here are going, and his friends from Colorado. I’m so happy to see him living his life.

On the way home though, I thought about how I won’t be with him on his next birthday most likely. I thought about how I’m going to miss him. It’s been just he and I for 8 years now. We are so close. I got all choked up in the car. He asked, “Are you ok Mom?” Yeah…I’m just going to miss you. We don’t hang out a lot, but we enjoy each other’s company. That’s gonna be a hard transition. Really hard.

I’ve been reading Marianne Williamson’s book The Gift of Change. It’s like she gently takes my heart, my soul, and my mind, and aligns them all with her words.

Today I put up a snarky post, with the song Silver Spring, telling how and why I got the song on my playlist, because of the first betrayal of me by S. The one he admitted to, the one I’ve always called the prison whore. Because I heard it playing, it reminded me of the first and all of the subsequent betrayals and I just wanted to put it down, on paper. Well, on the page. I did. In my inimitable way, hard, cold, edgy truth.

Then I read this sentence, in The Gift of Change, when I was at lunch.

“Our mission is to affirm the essential goodness in people even when they’ve made mistakes.”

And I thought about that post. Even though it was true, every word, it was designed to make one person uncomfortable with his behavior. To make him squirm. To make him look at himself. I could self-righteously say I hoped he’d change if he saw it in print, but I know better. I knew it would just piss him off, and maybe even shame him, to have me telling the world what he’d done. And I guess that’s what I wanted to do.

I deleted it. I rewrote it so it was more closely aligned with my pain, not his behavior. It was a mistake he made. He made a lot of them. But he’s living with the consequences, I’m not, not now. If I’m going to be who I want to be, I need to encourage what is good about him. Not broadcast any longer what is bad about him.

I’ve waivered. I go from encouraging open and honest communication to being triggered into furiousness. I have not been consistent, as I’ve tried to heal. And really, who is? It’s a roller coaster, one day it’s way in the past, the next day, something brings it front and center and it’s all you can do to not put your head down on your desk at work and cry.

It’s not my job to try to fix the behavior that caused the pain. But it’s also not my job to rub it in, through this blog, and remind him over and over of what he did. It’s my job to take care of me, and practice and find ways to encourage what makes me grow, and heal, and spread my light.

“Practice kindness,” Marianne says, “and you will become kind. Practice discipline, and you will become disciplined. Practice forgiveness, and you will start to become forgiving. Practice charity, and you start to become charitable. Practice gentleness, and you start to become gentle.” She goes on to say, “We become gracious when we decide to be gracious.”

I don’t know if this is just a phase for me. Or if I’m really sick of hitting him over the head with my words. Maybe I have enough distance that it seems old to me, at least right now. Maybe I’ve just gotten past it. Maybe, though, maybe I am afraid that my endless barbs at him are keeping him stuck where he doesn’t want to be.

Even though, he doesn’t have to read this blog. I don’t know why he does. He wrote one, on his own blog, after a year. It was one sentence, a barb, aimed at me, his only follower. I unfollowed him. Lol.  I didn’t want to get baited.  I already have an arsenal stored away if I feel like getting angry with him.  I don’t need anything else added to it.

But he still reads my blog, for whatever reason. Maybe, like he said once, it’s like the train wreck you can’t drive by. Maybe he hopes one day I’ll just stop…and go back to writing things like The Story in His Eyes, or The 7 Reasons I Love You. Or stop writing about him altogether. Maybe he just thinks he deserves my ire. Maybe he just wants to know what’s on my mind, hoping I’ve finally moved on.

Maybe he’s trying to find the unconditional love I always promised, in my words.

Maybe one day I will stop. I don’t think I’m quite done with it, I don’t think I’ve healed completely. I still think I’m picking up pieces of myself daily, and trying to meld them back into the whole. And as long as I’m doing that, I’ll probably continue to write about it. It’s just part of my process.

But, I think I will try to be kinder, lighter. I think I’ll try to shed some light, instead of pointing out the darkness. Even if my light doesn’t dispel his darkness, it might dispel someone’s.

He did cause me an inordinate amount of pain, and I did love him without limit. But he also caused me an inordinate amount of laughter, and that’s one of the reasons I loved  him so much.

Food for thought, that’s all.  Maybe it’s time for a change.

Love and light.