Curable

"Incurable"
by Dorothy Parker

And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned;
... The calmer, I, to see it true
That ways of love are never new-
The love that sets you daft and dazed
Is every love that ever blazed;
The happier, I, to fathom this:
A kiss is every other kiss.
The reckless vow, the lovely name,
When Helen walked, were spoke the same;
The weighted breast, the grinding woe,
When Phaon fled, were ever so.
Oh, it is sure as it is sad
That any lad is every lad,
And what's a girl, to dare implore
Her dear be hers forevermore?
Though he be tried and he be bold,
And swearing death should he be cold,
He'll run the path the others went....
But you, my sweet, are different.

As I alluded to in my last post my choices in men have been less than stellar. Even worse I could have written the above poem by Dorothy Parker, because as much as I hate to admit it, there was a period in the beginning of each relationship that I believed that this cad would be different.  I have not delved into the reasons that I choose the men that I do with a professional therapist, but there are a couple factors that I think may have played a role.  I was raised a Cub's fan and as such held a belief that it was okay for men to be losers.  If they were unemployed or abusive or slept with your friends you just kept on loving them and figured that surely things were going to get better.  When?  Maybe next year.  I've seen The Sound of Music dozens of times starting at the Palace Theater in downtown Peoria circa 1973 and at some point my mantra must have become, "If Maria VonTrapp can make play clothes out of curtains, then by god I can make healthy relationships out of red flags." 

And so it went.  I married my first husband, even though he hit me sometimes.  We were moving to Virginia and I assumed he wouldn't do it there.  WHAT?  The ocean is calming; it could happen.  I married my second husband because he didn't hit me.  Of course he would never stand up to me either.  Ever.  This got old fast.  A man without a backbone is even less attractive than  a man without a chin.  By the time I had had enough I wanted to have my first husband hit my second husband.  The next long term relationship was with an alcoholic, Hispanic musician.  I'm a crazy, red headed comedian and Lucy and Desi were hysterical so why not us?  We were a horrible combination and didn't last, but he has since quit drinking, we have a fabulous thirteen year old and he's one of my best friends. Do I want to be his woman now that he's living a good life?  Nope.  I wasted a couple of years on another man who was going to leave his wife and quit selling drugs as soon as he got his money right.  Neither of those things ever happened.  I finally got my head right and left.

I spent the day of my date with HUM (from the previous blog) running errands, taking my daughter to an art class and driving my son to his father's which is about a two hour round trip.  By the time I got home and got my other kids fed I had very little time to get ready before I was supposed to meet HUM at the show.  A funny side note: The first show at the club usually starts at eight.  I didn't realize that it started at seven that weekend so when I showed up at eight I must have appeared very "see you when I see you" casual when, if fact I was "can't freakin wait to see you".  After I got out of the tub and got dressed I was walking down the hall from the bathroom to the bedroom and had what I can only describe as a vision.  It consisted of receiving a letter from a man with whom I had had a three month relationship about a year before.  I could have made a circus tent out of the red flags that came with this guy.  I met him a day after he was released from prison.  None of his crimes had been violent, mostly a result of the stupidity brought on by drug addiction.  But he said he had learned his lesson and was all about making changes and a better life for himself.  I believed him and at the time I think he believed himself.  Things were fun for about two and half months and then he started using again.  You wouldn't think that someone with an ankle monitor that confined them to within 100 feet of their abode would be able to cheat even if they wanted to do so.  Not true.  When I found out he tried to deny it, but not with a lot of effort.  Over the next few months I found out she was a hooker.  He left me for a hooker.  Not long after that I saw her.  He left me for an ugly hooker.  In my mind they were happy and having a wonderful life together.  In reality they were in the grips of heroin addiction and their lives were falling apart.  She had her neck cut in the parking lot of her apartment building, allegedly by someone who wasn't amused by the fact that she wanted to pay for drugs with oral copulation instead of old fashioned cash.  He fell off a city bus, broke his foot which got infected and had to be partially amputated.  The swan song of their story is his being arrested for robbing two banks and escaping on foot.....literally.

This experience for me was the final nail in the coffin of me thinking that I deserved a decent man or that I would even recognize one if he bit me on the tit.  For a little over a year after it ended I busied myself with everything but a romantic relationship.  Then, out of the blue, I had this vision of hearing from him as I'm going out for my fairytale evening.  I didn't think anymore about it.  As you can imagine my thoughts that night were all on HUM and my thoughts the next day were all on......well, still HUM.  I was lying down for a nap the next afternoon and my twenty-one year old son came in my room with an envelope in his hand.  "You're not going to believe who this is from," he said.  I knew instantly who it was from (even before I saw the prison postmark) and the weirdest thing was that I wasn't surprised.

He basically was just apologizing and saying that I didn't deserve the way he ended up treating me.  Now logically I already knew that, but for some reason the combination of being pursued by a real gentleman who had lots of options when it came to women and having the man who chose drugs and a strumpet over me acknowledge that the choices he made were not a reflection of my worth sparked an epiphany in me.  Previously I thought that there was something that malfunctioned when I chose the men with whom I wanted to share my time and in some cases my life.  But it wasn't my judgment about the men that was off.  It was my judgment about myself.  About my worth, my zany uniqueness and the fabulous things that I bring to the table.  I am starting to look at perspective men through the eyes of my family and friends who love me, see the qualities that I have and can't always acknowledge and ask myself, "Is this a man they would pick for me?".  I believe and am determined to prove that this dog can be taught new tricks............first new trick ~ no more dogs.