Letting go...

I am so torn. I’m just ripped to shreds with confusion, anger and frustration. I want to stomp and yell and scream and cuss. I want to throw things and punch and kick.

Well, at least that’s how I felt the other day when I posted the status update about being good and mad and being angry that I was angry about what I was angry about.

Really, if you didn’t make any sense out of that, it’s OK. I didn’t either. There’s enough going through my mind at the moment that I have regressed in my communication skills. I’m distracted and my thought process is slightly disorganized.  So, bear with me and try to keep up because you’re really going to have to count on your reading comprehension skills to get through today’s post.

I was legally separated from my ex-husband at the time our son was born. When J was eight months old the divorce was final. As part of the divorce my ex-husband chose to terminate his rights to J and we never heard another word from him until J was seven years old.

Then, one day, I logged into facebook to find a message from him, along with a friend request.  Within just a week or two of that initial contact he managed to pull me back in to all of his nonsense. I let my feelings for him, that I’d kept reigned in all those years, overtake all of my good sense, my gut instincts and my ability to reason, and throw it out the window.  Then, I let him meet our son.

I wouldn’t put it all together until much later, but I’d been hoodwinked and conned. To this day I still don’t understand how such a stupid person can be so charismatic. A lot more happened, including us trying to rebuild our marriage.  But, for all my effort, it failed a second time. Nothing had changed from the first time around, he was still a pathological liar, still a chronic cheater and still a convincing con artist.

“If ya got yerself a gallon of spoiled milk and ya put it back in the fridge, it’s still gonna be spoiled when ya go back for it in two weeks.”  Imagine the best country “Bubba” accent you ever heard and then Insert spitting here à ____         followed by long gulp of beer here à____

That’s my good friend Brian talking. If he’s said it to me once, he’s said it to me a million times.

Brian is as hillbilly redneck as they come. He’s also a chemical engineer. So, he ain’t stupid, he’s just country.

Following the second failure, J’s father was MIA again. We go stretches of weeks, or sometimes even months, and don’t hear a word from him. He briefly had a girlfriend that made sure he didn’t miss birthdays or holidays. But that was pretty much it. She’s been dumped now too so, I see that ending.

In the meantime, his other two children have never missed a visit with him and have heard from him regularly. But not J – never J.  There’s always an excuse not to see J.

So, why did I get so darn mad? I got mad because last week I texted jerkface to ask if he would either buy J a couple pair of jeans or a pair of tennis shoes and he informed me that he was back in the state, living less than an hour away, and had been for almost a month. Almost a month and he hadn’t bothered to let us know – he hadn’t even tried to call J.

Again, I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he needed time to get settled, etc. So, Saturday morning I sent him another text. “If you’re back in town, why don’t you come pick J up and take him shopping yourself?”

Well, he couldn’t do that. You know why? He couldn’t do it because he was busy with his current selection from the Flavor of the Month Club and because he was busy with his other two children. He didn’t have time….

At this point you’re probably thinking, “Wow, I’d be mad at him too.”

That’s the funny thing about all of this. I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at me.

I’m mad because I allowed him to sucker me one more time; because one more time I opened the door for him to hurt my little angel of a boy.

One more time, I was completely and utterly stupid and trusted him to do right by J.

One more time, because I don’t want there to be anything in my little guy’s world that makes him feel unloved or unwanted, I let that idiot into my baby’s life. In all of my trying to protect him and offer him everything I thought he deserved, I ended up setting him up to be hurt and disappointed.

I had all the power and all the control and I didn’t use it.

I failed. Just me, because I made the wrong decision…

Now, here I am at this stupid crossroads again, wondering whether to tell the sperm donor to take a permanent hike into hell or, do I leave the door open for further contact?

Overall, when left to his own processes, J doesn’t ask about the sperm donor or mention him very often. He’s so filled up with the attention from Don, his “Every Day- All the Time- Real Dad” that he doesn’t seem to feel the need to worry much with Jerkface. Once in a great while he’ll mention that he hasn’t talked to Jerkface in a while and I’ll ask him if he wants to call him. Sometimes he says yes, and sometimes he says maybe later – other times he flat out says “No”.

It was at this point of processing everything, and after long talks with my husband, my mother and my BFF, that I realized – I have a beautiful, happy and well adjusted little boy who lives in a great two parent home and doesn’t feel his life is lacking anything. The only person who is angry, hurt and pushing for more is….well….me.

And, I don’t have to be mad at me -- because J isn’t hurt. J isn’t disappointed.

Overall, it would seem that J doesn’t give a rat’s behind about Jerkface.

So, what’s the solution? The solution is that I let it go. That if J expresses an interest, we go with it. If he doesn’t, we go with that too. I’m going to put my nine year old boy in the driver’s seat on this one and let him decide.  I’m just going to walk along beside him, just in case he needs me, and let him choose the path.

Because, honestly, anyone who can know this little angel faced boy and not want as much of him as they can get, doesn’t deserve him at all.