Friday, March 03, 2006

Scar Tissue


It's been, oh, 18 months, since I last touched my wife, and it's been eight months since I last saw her, when she left for Panama along with my 1 year old son.

Those milestones are basically two of the last major steps marking the end of my 23 year marriage to her. To be clear, I'm still legally married to her, and we've got the children and some property which still link us.

We separated emotionally years ago but the usual considerations, children, job, money, etc., and the simple intertia of avoiding conflict, unhappiness, stress, scandal, etc., all contrived to keep the arrangement together for all of those same years.

All of this came to an end, in slow motion, over several months, in a classic denouement involving my secretary, clashes with my bosses in Ecuador and Washington, and a growing sense that I needed to change, change everything, and move on. In other posts, I'll get around to the secretary (K), and work, and the whole messy thing....

Today, though, I just woke up with with one of those recurring feelings (weaker, and less frequent, though, all the time) of sorrow and regret over all that happened in losing the marriage and the pain it caused my (soon to be) ex-wife. I don't know how many people have told me, in trying to comfort me, that both actors are equally responsible for a marriage staying together, or not. Whether it's true or not (and I hope it's true), I still wake up feeling bad, on occasion, and regretting the pain I caused the woman pictured in this post. The picture is small and faint, and my image/memory of her grows more like that every day. But still.....

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