DadJack.com Blog

I noticed, as the kids were here on their last visit, that they feel everything.  Every bump, every bang, every thud is felt with all it’s power.   Bing will run to me after any slip or blunder and request a kiss… and it breaks my heart every time.  Lucy goes through our band-aid supply like it’s water and yet rarely bleeds, the band-aid is just a tool to quite the very real, very temporary pain of that immediate  situation.

My kids feel every impact, they are effected by every bang and bruise…  I often find a cut or bruise I cannot explain.  blood stained shirt or raw wound that I realize in the shower or when clothing rubs against the point of earlier injury.

I was once a Bing or Lucy, feeling all that broke the skin.  I would cry to my Mom (my Dad no where to be found).  I would know how every drop of blood was shed.

Now, almost 40, I will find cuts and bruises days later.  Clothes stained and not revealed until I find them in the laundry.  physical pain almost ignored…. and yet mental pain, more real than ever.

When my parents got divorced I don’t remember how it felt… I know I gained weight and isolated myself (looking back), but I honestly don’t remember what I felt.  To this day, I can flash back on walking in on my wife embraced with her new husband (while she was still my wife!) and remember exactly how I felt.  I re-live it in dreams and face it on every exchange, and I have asked myself why?

As far as I can figure there are a few reasons.   When I was young I protected myself, realizing the hurt that was upon me, I blocked it.   I can honestly say for the first 30 years of my life there was only one person who could have hurt me, my sister, who had always been there for me through all the crap in my life.  And then I met my wife, I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t instant, but I grew to trust her more than anyone, and I thought we were bound forever… I trusted her more than anyone.

All that I told her, my deepest secrets shared, were used against me.   She betrayed me on so many levels it is almost unbelievable, and yet I still feel pain.  Why can’t I be like I was when I was young?  When I could shield the pain, not feel it?  I now live in a time when I can bleed without knowing and cry for someone I know longer know.

I don’t know my Ex, she is someone in her current state I would never even notice, who has morphed into what she needs to be now, no longer the woman I loved… And yet, I remember that woman, I long for her.  I will probably never see her again, exchanging my kids with a stranger, but I miss her, and I compare others to that memory.

I live a failing life, hope a thing that is easier spelled than realized, longing for a woman that no longer exists.  My heart broken, pieces swept, but unable to be re-assembled.   She building a new lie, me living the old.

I wish I could feel the pain of every cut and bruise… and forget the blows and kicks to my heart that no one can see, and only I miss.