Tick, Tock. Tick, Tock.

Today's head shrinking was really productive. We talked a lot about how I ended up "here". We talked about what brought me to this juncture, and what I thought was "the beginning of the end" with R. I did a lot of talking, thinking, and crying. Here's what I came up with:

• R was really and truly raised by a single momma. The parallels are uncanny, between the typical "single parent household" and the situation he was raised in. With the exception of the whole "totally broke" thing, of course. You see, his dad travelled all the time, much like T does, all week every week. When he was home, he was a fabulous dad. But sometimes, quantity time is really better than quality time. It sounds so terribly sexist, but I am a firm believer that a boy needs a strong, omnipresent father figure. Consequently, R has a bit of a warped view of what a regular marriage is like, because (through no fault of his own), his dad was never really around. Don't misunderstand me, R's dad is a wonderful man. And it really isn't a question, he loves his boys. And both R and his brother turned out to be upstanding men ... overachievers, but upstanding. I suppose that if the only emotional fallout from his youth is that, then he's doing OK.
  
  
• It is unfair to myself to NOT move on. Eventually. My therapist had a great point, in that I need to set a deadline for myself to abide by. That way, it puts the proverbial ball in R's court, and it assuages my guilt that I didn't wait for him to get his act together. So, I need to sleep on it, and decide when The Day will be. I will continue to wait for R, and hope that he decides what he wants by then. After that point, I will have no guilt about moving on, because he will have made the conscious decision to do nothing. Plain and simple.
  
  
• Our relationship denigrated because of what I have now termed "The Staircase Effect". Imagine you are going down a staircase. You stop at the landing, and then something causes you to step over the edge. You drop down, a step at a time, landing by landing, until you hit the bottom. It's like everything is fine while you're on each step, or on the landing, but every time there's a fight ... I would just smooth everything over until it hit a landing. From there, it was "smooth sailing" until the next time. We never worked on going back up the stairs ... just down ... until we had hit rock bottom and it was too late to fight our way back up again. Of course, I think there were other problems, but I think the staircase effect was the root cause of our separation.
  

You know, people that are depressed and confused can really benefit from someone to listen to them and help them sort out their problems. Even if all they do is sit across from you in a chair and let you cry, it still helps. Sometimes, the best talk therapy is what you get when someone just sits there, steers your obsessing and hysterical sobbing to really dig deep into your own soul, and gets to the heart of what really truly matters. And then, the tissue that they hand you is a true saving grace.

Trust me.