Unhappy mess.

I am an unhappy mess. 

Lately I hate hanging out at Missy and Red’s house when there are normal everyday family things going on, because it makes me feel even more like an outsider than usual (and I usually feel a LOT like an outsider).  I am the elephant in the corner that everyone is afraid to mention.  I imagine their kids are wondering what the heck I am doing there all the time.  It doesn’t help that I practically have to sit on my hands in order to not hug or kiss someone off-handedly, or say something that would blow our cover – which makes me want to be there even less.   Missy and Red are the step-mom and the dad…I am…the Chloe.  I have no role, and it makes me sad.  I don't belong.  No, I don’t want Red to tell them about us – even if he actually WANTED to, his ex-wife is a raging…meanie. She would figure out how to take the kids away or get more money or do something else to make his life a living Hell.

Also, I have been worrying lately about what they say about decision making (whoever "they" are).  You know…that thing about how we keep making the same mistakes over and over again without realizing it?  I have had two ten-year marriages that didn’t work out.  I must be making a mistake. Clearly I can’t be making the SAME mistake this time, but am I making some version of a mistake that I’ve made in the past?  How would I even know what that mistake was?   While Missy and Red are in the Trifecta, their marriage is continuing, their family is stable, their retirement accounts are growing...  Meanwhile, at least to the outside world (which is unbelievably difficult to ignore), it appears as though my life is at a standstill.  I am a middle-aged mother living with a college student in an apartment with paper-thin walls.  I drive a used car that requires constant maintenance, I have a job with no future (or insurance or retirement fund), and I don’t date.  It appears as though I hang out a lot with a married couple who can’t seem to get rid of me.  If the Trifecta doesn’t last, I will be in worse shape than before, because I will be all that...and older.  

Man, am I being a big baby about all of this?

Rumor of Demise Exaggerated

Well, of COURSE the honeymoon is over. Were any of us still honeymooning, this far into any other relationship?

(If anyone actually reads this blog more than once, which seems unlikely, maybe they figured the month-long silence after Chloe's last post actually meant the Trifecta was dissolved. It's not.)

Funny: when Chloe wrote that post, she seemed to think I'd be surprised by it. Nope. It's true that I was unhappy on her account that week, but not because she wanted to spend time alone. It was because she was pretending to be okay when she wasn't, and I knew it, and it hurt my feelings that she thought she needed to insulate me from that. All I wanted (ironically) was for her to up and say the stuff she ended up saying here in the blog. How's that for recursive girl-overprotection-of-someone-else's-feelings?!

Anyway. We got past that. It's still the case that real life is distasteful, much moreso than usual, and it's got the Trifecta in a holding pattern. We aren't spending as much time together as we'd like, it's been too long since our last road trip, the quantity of sex is a fraction of what it was. (Quality is still high.) I've had it up to here with ex-spouses, and I'm even exasperated with everyone else's children.

In fact, right now I'm tired of everybody in the world, except for Chloe and Red. Still like my work, at least the patient care part. Am exasperated by my extended family (they lay on the guilt for not spending more time together, but when we do, they lapse into timeworn criticisms and eye-rolls. Which I don't do in return.) Even some of my friends and colleagues are getting on my nerves lately. Common theme = unreasonable expectations.

What I really feel like doing is repeating what I did 25 years ago, when I picked up and moved across country with a boyfriend, scaling back my attachments to family and friends, visiting them rarely. Of course I made new friends, but for a while my life revolved mostly around my partner, and our warm sweet household. What I wouldn't give to run off to the desert and start a new life with my girlfriend and boyfriend. I'd work halfway normal hours, swim in our long narrow pool for an hour every day, cook all the time, fuck like a volcano.

That.

It wouldn't be a honeymoon. We'd know what we already know, that we're each going to want to have holidays from the other now and then. That there will be stretches of time where we're not all feeling wildly in love. But it wouldn't be a problem, because we wouldn't be trying to steal moments together here and there when other people aren't looking.

Maybe that's the ultimate unreasonable expectation: that a Trifecta can thrive in the middle of one's pre-existing condition.


Desert ... desert ... desert ...

I’ll be the bad guy and admit that the honeymoon seems to be over…

I am reminded that this blog isn’t about just the happy and good times, but the challenges as well. There’s no use hiding the not-so-pretty parts. And in hiding them, we’d only be doing everyone and each other an injustice by making it appear to be all rainbows and sunshine.

I can only speak for myself of course, but this is the longest stretch of nitty-gritty reality that I have felt to date in the Trifecta. There was a while not long ago that these times were fleeting, or at least predictably temporary. This stretch feels never-ending. Work has been challenging , tension and emotions have been in the red zone, money is tight, schedules are hectic, vehicles are breaking down right and left, and the weather and families have been less than cooperative. Isn’t that just the perfect storm.

Lately I have felt burned out on LIFE. All of it. Sleep, peace, and quiet are foremost in my thoughts. I feel like a day or two (or five?) of not speaking or listening or looking anyone in the eye would do me some good. The dishes and laundry can pile up and I won’t feel bad. The TV can stay off in lieu of a mindless novel that I probably won’t remember five minutes after I’m done reading it. I have hardly noticed the stereo being off in my car during my daily commute. THAT is how tired I am of sensory input. Maybe that’s it – I just need a break from my own senses.

Posting my concerns will bring them out in the open (although I think the funk I'm in is obvious to anyone who knows me) and will probably worry Red and Missy. I maintain, however, that times like these will force a relationship thrive or fail. We should not panic or waste too much energy over-analyzing. This time was destined to come, and I think our relationship could potentially crash (or at least fizzle out) without us knowing whether or not we are capable of surviving less-than-happy days. I am not afraid of what is happening, I don't feel like running away, I don't see it as the end of anything - just a time to sit back and live in it, and see what happens at the other end.

I have a selfish streak. I swear I am usually a kind, giving, caring human being. I love others and am perfectly able to maintain long-term relationships. For the most part, I think I get along well with people and enjoy their quirkiness and differences. Sometimes though, if I begin to feel crummy enough, I will not care what other people think. I will not care about anyone or anything other than myself and my problems, no matter how insignificant they seem to other people (hence the selfishness). Caring for ME becomes my top priority. Anything or anyone who tries to help will probably fray my nerves even further, and make me more irritable. Leaving me alone during these times is probably best for everyone.

Understanding this about myself (I feel) is an accomplishment. Explaining it to my partner in a relationship seems like my responsibility. Attempting to help not one, but TWO people understand this and be o.k. with it has been difficult. Needing to be alone sometimes is not me running away from the Trifecta. It's not me hiding from my emotions. In fact, I see it as retreating to my corner to deal with my issues in my own time and way, without inflicting my mood on anyone else.

Missy and Red will have either similar or different ways of dealing with the end of the honeymoon (or maybe they already have, and I handled it beautifully? haha). I will do my best to understand and respect their needs as we move forward into whatever new phase happens to present itself... Conquering the end of the honeymoon should be celebrated! It means we are all returning to our normal selves and getting back to baseline, and are still all doing just fine. This is normal. It is good.

p.s. - searching Google for a "Three-person honeymoon" picture - I found THIS...   If that ain't foreboding...haha

Fair warning.

I'm on a bit of a bender, because just tonight I told my nearly 20 year-old daughter about the Trifecta, and it was (in that way only a 20 year-old can make it) ridiculously anticlimactic.  I'm NOT a fan of drama, and I dreaded "the talk," but c'mon - it's a threesome!  Apparently she has suspected, and/or all-out known about it for a long time.  There will be no scandalous Facebook posts from HER on that topic tonight.  Well...I am glad she didn't run screaming, that's the most important thing.

Regarding Missy's post of earlier this evening though, I do appreciate (admire?) her confidence that she can show me she loves me SO MUCH every single day, that I should just get over our inability to make a formal committment.  Maybe I will be!  I have been so far.  And I mean that sincerely.  But I won't be ashamed of the fact that I'm jealous that THEY have the security of marriage, while I am left feeling a little disposable.  Last hired, first fired - isn't that the way it works?  I will be the one that can't go to Red's Corporate Christmas Party.  Or Missy's Physician Appreciation Dinner.  And I will be the one who everyone wonders about at the holiday dinner or Super Bowl Party "who is that again, and why is she here?"  They are a given...the norm...the always accepted.  People who knew them "pre-me" will always root for their relationship to prevail (since the Trifecta is doomed, right?), and people who knew me before will always wonder why I can't go find a man (or woman) of my own.  And bonus...(not)...I can be voted off the island by not one, but two people, in a way that neither of them will have to worry about.  I won't get the health benefits or life insurance or hospital-visitation-on-the-death-bed privileges they are afforded (ok, that's a little far reaching, I know, haha).  But you catch my drift, right?

Of course, on another day, when I'm in a different mood...I am unbelievably humbled by the knowledge that my existence has changed their relationship forever, whether I like it or not.  No matter how good or bad this all turns out, their marriage will never be the same.  That is a lot of responsibility.  Responsibility that I sometimes don't feel capable of handling.  I didn't expect that.  In it's simplest terms, if they kick me to the curb, they hurt one person.  If I leave, I damage two.

Therein lies the difference between a threesome and the Trifecta.  We love, we suffer, we communicate, we celebrate, we fear, we worry...in a sometimes blissful, sometimes painful, but in always a brutally honest way.

Life Without Promises

It has been established in this forum that We Are Doomed. (See the very most hit-upon post, "Impossible Things", for proof.) So it shouldn't be any surprise that the issue of our untenable future arises from time to time.

At the moment, the curious feature of the Trifecta, for me, is that we are (1) persisting longer than I would have thought, and (2) still under the specter of doom at all times. I guess I imagined that either the one fact or the other would have prevailed by now. Because:

Red is a planner.

Chloe is a romantic.

I am a rebel.

My long-term relationships are three, and they go like this: I've been married to Red for six years, with him for eleven. Before that I was married for five years. Before that, I lived with a man for six years, who never promised to marry me nor have kids nor nothing. (I have not had children of my own, can't remember if I've mentioned that, and never will -- I love my stepchildren and that's plenty.) That first marriage was a mistake. I try to make a practice of "No Regret", so I'll go on record as saying I learned from it. There were no kids, no financial entanglements, it was easy to extricate myself from. But, it was ... unfortunate.

The previous relationship, on the other hand, was very meaningful to me. Let's call him Andrew. From the start, Andrew and I deferred the notion of marriage as Something Other People Do, because they need to feel like they have some official constraint keeping them together when they don't want to be. We didn't rule it out, the getting married thing, but we never considered it crucial. We had ups and downs -- I was in grad school, he was working, we were poor -- and we were very different personalities. He was quiet and reserved, I was bubbly and social. But together we had lots of friends, had an active life, enjoyed each other's company, and learned a lot from each other. It broke apart when I saw he was not all that jazzed about coming with me when my job would require relocating. Many months ahead, I said "if you're not into it, just tell me". He said he would. He didn't. I got a job in another city, and he didn't want to move. I declared that we were done. He said OK. It came time for me to move, and then he decided he couldn't live without me and asked me to marry him. I said: too late.

That makes it sound sad. In fact, most of the six years were great. The thing that made me and Andrew different from Red and his previous wife, or Chloe and her previous husband, is that we did not expect or extract from one another any promises about the future. I wanted to know he would stay with me, but I was willing to live without a ring or a wedding. I did not need a roadmap or a five-year plan. Did not build fantasies of how we would meld our families. We imagined how we would grow old together, but every time we had a storm of conflict, we made an active choice whether to stay together or go our separate ways. There was no legal bond, no family pressure, no structure of shame to influence our decision. Since we were already broke, there was no financial advantage or penalty to either of us for staying or going. And we stayed together longer than either of my marriages (so far).

Why am I going on about an old boyfriend in a blog about the Trifecta? (Bad form, you know, to wax rhapsodic about a partner from the past.)

Because it is very painful right now for Chloe to have no sense of security. No goal of official sanction in the future. Yes, I too wish we three could have such a thing -- but as Chloe observes, Red and I already have the societally acceptable bond. There is no "normal" room for any expansion of that relationship, only the secret versus the open-but-unconventional.

Her quandary causes me pain. I can't un-marry myself from Red (I mean I could, but it would be pointless). I can't invent some alternate universe in which our arrangement becomes widely accepted and we announce ourselves as newlyweds.

What I can do, since I am over-the-cliff in love with her, is make a living promise, every day: I care about you. You matter. I will support you, even on a day when I'm tired and sad and grouchy. I will shower all my dizzy happiness on you when a day is good.

That's what I mean when I say "I love you" to Red, too: but there's a visible symbol on my finger that holds me to it, not to mention a bunch of family. I want for both Red and Chloe to know that I can make a life of love -- I know how to do it, I've done it before -- where you don't have words like "wife" and "husband" to fall back on. In my twenties, Andrew and I joked about whether "mate" might be the best term to use for what we meant to each other. Now in my forties, I just want to soak up the warmth of my two lovers and language be damned.

Exploding Head.

Ask anyone: I am chatty. She’s a talker, that Missy. Can’t shut her up. Robs a room of all its oxygen, she does, if you give her half a chance.

When Chloe started this blog, I was afraid I’d have to sit on my hands so as not to monopolize the thing. Turns out, although I do have a lot to say – a whole freakin hell of a lot to say – my work keeps me tied up (and talked out*) so much that I rarely write these days.

Enough of that.

My head is at risk of asploding, if I don’t get the contents out in the form of words. There is so much to say. About the Trifecta, about each of my lovers, about all of us – so much more than “Christ this is complicated” or “dude this is awesome!”, which I figure is what comes across as the chorus and verse.

The very fact of me jotting down a stream-of-consciousness list of things I wanted to write about, for heaven’s sake, became a point of trauma the other day. Chloe was worried that I was generating a catalog of “Things That Suck”, and I don’t blame her – it wasn’t true, but was not a ridiculous expectation. You see, when it comes to scorekeeping (which I abhor, loudly) … I am the biggest offender. Maybe because professionally, societally, familially, I have the most to lose if we are open about our ménage a trois? Could be, or maybe I’m more petty and vindictive than I like to think I am. Probably both.

A few weeks ago we were on our way to our Desert Getaway Town for the weekend: Red was driving, Chloe had shotgun, and I was in the back of the car (the automotive geography of a threesome is always an interesting factor in a road-trip conversation). The topic turned to All That Holiday Shit. Our weekend in DGT was the reward for getting through the season, and we were processing early so as to dispense with the yucky stuff and move on to the drinking and hot sex. I stopped Chloe cold when she was making some remark about hating how we have to be so guarded about our affection around other people. She, I pointed out, is just about never the instigator of the stuff that gets us in trouble. It’s Red. Maybe because he’s the boy, whatever, doesn’t matter, but I was tired of hearing about how “we” have to watch ourselves when really it’s HIM who needs to keep a lid on it.

And somehow she did this thing, in the most sensible way possible, I don’t even remember the words – Chloe succinctly observed that I keep reviewing the same miserable list of fuckups, in a way that shames Red, and is a buzzkill for all of us. Somehow she did this without me feeling attacked or getting defensive or anything. There was just this moment of clarity, and I said “you’re right”.

Okay. So that’s an example of the emotional machinery at work. I won’t always feel the way I oughtta, but I can gain insight sometimes, with a little help from my friends.

Now. The more tangible machinery.

There is a HEAP of rich material I could share here about the sex we have. Now that we’re going on two years together, it’s not the brand new shiny experience it was – but we do make new discoveries, even as we settle into comfortable patterns. If I really had the nerve, I could burn this site down with tales of our smokin’ hot lovemaking. But I am not accustomed to writing porn.

I’ll get to a point, sometime, when I feel I can strike the right note. For today just a glimpse: there was a moment a few nights ago, when I had a nearly religious vision. I was kneeling behind Red as he was on top of Chloe, thrusting in the dark, and I was stroking his back, her legs – hearing her breath deepen, feeling her push up against him. I slid my hands up along her hips, cupping them, elevating her pelvis just a little … and a fleeting image raced through my mind, of standing on the chancel steps, facing the altar, raising up the heavy silver offertory bowl as the priest consecrated the congregation’s offering on Sunday morning. Her warm, smooth skin is the very opposite of that bowl. But the vessel I was holding did feel as though it was being blessed – transformed – as her orgasm became inevitable.

(Some of you might not find a churchy image a turn-on. Me? I almost came myself, at that moment.)

Stay tuned.

*It’s time I just say it: my job involves talking and listening all day. I’m not just a doctor, I’m a psychiatrist. So, yeah, it’s pretty ironic that I get tongue-tied here. But I’m not dumb enough to think my training makes me a mind-reader, or exempts me from the need to share what’s in my head about the Trifecta.

Reflection.

I have been reflecting back on the holidays, and considering how different they were than last year.

The funniest thing is that I was wrong (of course) when I thought I knew what to expect, and that things would be easier this year than last.  It's funny to me because I always try to remember that things hardly ever turn out as planned and oftentimes turn out differently than I could've ever imagined. I still somehow get lazy and fall back into the same pattern of thinking "oh, we've got this."  I never learn.

Some things are a given...yes, we will still need to hide this from the kids, yes, we will still need to behave in public (even in places where we THINK we are among open-minded people), yes, we will still have to struggle daily with living separately and the lack of time we have alone together, etcetera.  But life always has new and surprising ways of complicating matters at the most unexpected times.

Missy took her mom to lunch one day recently, which somehow turned into her coming out about the Trifecta.  I sincerely felt like vomiting.  I had to sit down - my heart was racing and I felt physically ill.  When is the last time you felt like that?  My belly was better after the explanation and description of how it went down, and what her mom thought about it.  Still, I didn't fully recover until sometime that evening.

At some point before Christmas, when relatives were visiting and the kids were decorating the tree at Missy & Red's house, one of the kids (an in-law) apparently saw something intimate (yet tame) go down between Red and I, and she then talked to Red's kids about it and Missy's sister - complicated.  On one hand, I do realize that we sometimes get sloppy about keeping up appearances, and we shouldn't let things like that happen.  On the other hand, I was really ticked off that because of one kid (who we hardly ever see), the goodness of our evening was erased.  It took the good memories away and turned them ugly and shameful.  Incidents like these are always discussed and worked out as much as they can be, but they remain on an ever-growing list of blame - whose fault was it that this "thing" happened, and when will the nasty, hateful list be brought up again...

Thank goodness there are always (sometimes daily) funny, ridiculous, sweet, loving, happy, sensual things that make those other things so much less bad. 

So upon reflection, the holidays were really no easier or more comfortable for me than the first time we were together for them, but I suppose I'll still keep the memories.  And maybe next year I'll remember to expect the unexpected...or take more Valium.