And another month has gone by since I've written! I guess that tells you that I haven't been in a very reflective mood lately. This morning, I actually typed up a rather scathing post about my ex-husband, as I've been incredibly angry with him lately... then we had to go to a joint meeting to get assessment results from some psychological evaluations that I'd taken our oldest to, and he wasn't a complete tool, and managed to have an almost normal parental conversation with me about the kids on the way out of the appointment, and all of a sudden I hate him a little less.
Okay, truth be told, when I see him acting like he cares about his kids and not treating me like utter dirt, I don't hate him at all. I'm never going to want to be married to him again, but bitter pill of the nearly $80K it has cost me to divorce that man disappears. This gives me hope that I am, in fact, not just an unreasonably bitter woman.
However, I still have to do a better job of managing my expectations regarding Jason (my ex). I can't assume that because he wasn't a raging asshole today that this is any reflection on what I can expect for the future. In fact, it's more likely the opposite... whenever we have a moment in which we aren't being assholes to each other, I think those times make Jason more angry that we aren't together anymore, and he amps up the dick behavior as a defensive move. We had been getting along okay when someone (of course, I can't prove it was him, but honestly, the list of suspects is rather short, and I don't exactly live in the sort of neighborhood where people randomly vandalize stuff) turned on the outside water to my house in the middle of the night, presumably hoping it would back up the hose and flood the house. You have to crawl underneath my front steps to turn the water on, and while I may not be perfect, I also don't think I have attracted a random list of people that want to do bad things to me just because. Fortunately, my neighbor's son came home at 1AM and saw the water running and was willing to crawl under the porch to shut it off. I have since turned off the outside water, but if you knew my ex, you would know that this sort of activity has his name (or someone motivated to do it on his behalf) written all over it.
I have to do a better job of not letting that sort of stuff get to me, and just keep things focused on the kids. The juvenile nature of the water stunt is irritating, but not as big of a deal considering that there wasn't actual damage. The stuff that gets to me is the poor parenting stuff... and being unresponsive to outreach about simple things like homework assignments and the like.
It's funny that this very issue that I'm encountering right now is one of the biggest reasons why we got divorced. What I wanted from Jason was always so simple - I didn't have a big, long list of ways in which I wanted him to pay tribute to me, or super rigid expectations regarding how Jason was supposed to behave or what he was supposed to do with his life. Some times, it really felt like my expectations were so ridiculously low that any effort on his part could have met them. But, it is what it is, and part of my problem has always been that I've never been able to square my expectations of Jason with the reality of who he is. The sad thing about that is that I've always had a higher opinion of him than he's ever demonstrated himself to be deserving of.
So, I have to let go. I have to accept that for today, I'm not angrily hating his guts, and he wasn't a complete jerk. For today, he demonstrated that he cared about his son, and didn't treat me like I was garbage. And it is only for today. I can't hang on to it for anything more than what it was, and just be grateful that right now, I feel slightly less messed up than I'd been feeling before.
