yobech505

Pitfalls

Learn from your mistakes!  Adages.  And this one is common.  Preachers, teachers, bosses, parents, authoritarians of all quirks love to tell you this.  We have all heard them, and we all listen, hoping to do just that, learn from our mistakes.

            So why don’t we apply that to our relationships?  Why do we continually connect with the same thing we just got away from?  Then,  when someone that we say we always wanted, comes by, we push it away.  Are we into an unconscious self abuse, martyrdom? 

            For me, it was my step father.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my step father.  He took my mother, brother and me and made us his own.  But his personality and mine clashed.  He was as close to anal retentive as he could be.  I was ADD.  Of course we didn’t know what it was back then.  I was lazy, forgetful, careless, thoughtless was the ‘diagnosis’.

            Anal retentive and ADD cannot be put in the same blender.  At all.  Not even the traits of each of those are compatible.  Guess what I married?  Twice.

My last relationship was not the same as that, however. She wasn’t anal retentive at all.  No trace of ACD either.  But damned if it didn’t collapse on itself.  She said it wasn’t me, which makes me want to analyze it and figure out what is in store for her.

            She would complain as any reminder came up, about her ex, and even the ex before that.  Neither one sounded like a winner.  Narcissistic, dominating, selfish, controlling, all the things I wasn’t.  Yet I threatened her serenity, the things that made her comfortable.  I wasn’t to be more than a memento in a bottom drawer of her future.

            At the time, the best part was that she was not what I had been married to.  I saw a new start, a good one, the possibility of a future without the control, without the dominating inchargeness, without the inability to accept my personality as it was.

It didn’t make it to the plate from the cast iron pan.  The horse we were riding would not make the finish line, instead ending up at the glue factory.

She went back to the way things were before I showed up, but hopefully not back to a third revival of the partners she over involved with.  Simply called out, it is no longer something I should have any connection with.  Nothing I should fret over. I made my play for change in my life and that is all I can push forward from in this era, hoping that when I do connect, it is more like her is some ways, less like her in others.

            I can’t tell what she’s learned.  I would guess one thing and hope it isn’t nothing.  I would say it isn’t my concern anymore, because it isn’t.   But when you cared for someone, it has to be buried in the psyche somewhere.  I’m there, but a small voice inside me, and I can only say this from past brain logs, not professional instruction, points to evidence that she still has a long way to go.