What I haven't been saying

Here's the post I've been dreading for weeks.  Months.
My marriage is faltering - and not in a cute get-to-the-end-of-the-post sort of way where you'll discover I'm talking metaphorically or analogically and all is well.

I'm fucking serious.

Rooster and I have separated.

After months of agonizing, we have decided that we need some physical and emotional space to try to determine if we can continue our relationship as married partners.  But truthfully, neither of us are all that hopeful.

Nothing I've ever written about Rooster and our marriage is negated by the current happenings.  I still esteem him, I still love him, he is still loving, thoughtful, articulate, an amazing communicator, trustworthy, loyal, and kind.  He is all of those things.  However, what he is not - what we are not - are proving to be a mightier beast.

And I am broken because of it.

I feel like the wind had been kicked out of me and I am writhing on the ground.  And yet, it's happening in a peaceful enough setting, maybe under a looming oak tree, with cotton-ball clouds passing above me, all oblivious to my suffering, but suffering I am, nonetheless.  It is the most bizarre, out of body experience wherein I am being gored by an angry bull and soothingly petted by a kind stranger.

At once fire and ice; pain and relief; anger and joy.

The antiseptic details are as follows: we have rented an apartment together.  We are taking turns staying there.  I go to "work" and come take care of Hawk on my weeks scheduled for the apartment.  Rooster stays away almost entirely when it's his turn.  Hawk knows about the "pawpotment" and thinks it's grand.  He knows Daddy's there now.  He knows Mommy will go there tomorrow night.  He digests it much as he does everything else: with aplomb and without too much significance.  It is 100% mutual.  We are both miserable.  No, it doesn't seem to have a solution other than separation and a reconfiguration of our very amiable, loving relationship with one another.  No, I don't take this lightly.

I am a shell of who I normally am.  I am under water most days; I can barely see through the haze of my own emotion.  I often forget where I'm going while driving.  I can do nothing other than nap when Hawk doesn't need me.  On my days at the apartment I schedule things with friends within an inch of my life in order to fall asleep exhausted only to get up before dawn to be back at the house before Hawk wakes up.

I am emotionless and raw, and yet overflowing with both emotion and pain.

I am sorry if you are reading this and you wish I had called you to tell you, or asked you to coffee to discuss it face to face.  I just can't do it anymore.  I've had half a dozen conversations like this and each one peels off another layer of my self and I need all the layers I can get right now.  I hope you can understand.

I feel like a colossal failure on a bad day, a sad mishap on a good one.  I can't tell you how I might have avoided this day because I honestly don't think I could have.  There were signs early on for the both of us that we chose to ignore and be hopeful about, but in the end are irreversible and unchallengeable.

It is one of the worst things that has ever happened to me.

I worry about Hawk so intensely that it overwhelms my entire being.  Will he understand relationships, love, commitment??  Will he get the nuance of his parents being fiercely attached to each other, yet wholly wrong for one another?  Will he believe in love?  Commitment??

Will I??

Anyway...

This is what has stifled me for all these weeks and months.  This is what has been stuck in my craw preventing me from my usual flow.

It's real.  It's happening.  I am brokenhearted and also at peace.

I wish with all my being that this wasn't happening.  And yet, it is.  Funny how that works.