Written with a friend. We wrote together for 20 minutes, and then shared. I have been reading about my relationship with my ex-husband Dana in my journal for the summer of 1996, and posted quite a bit about it. See post for August 7 for an example.
This is what I wrote:
Reading all the stuff about Dana & me struggling with our lack of sexual relationship is painful. Especially since I hadn’t been able to work on it in therapy. I thought I had been sexually abused when I was a baby, but nothing clear ever came up. It was only after the divorce that I realized that the problem had been due to early trauma, caused by being left alone too much as a baby. I knew I had been left alone, but I didn’t realize that just being left alone could traumatize a baby.
The other thing that came up really surprised me. I did line dancing this morning and we did a waltz that I’ve done to the Tennessee Waltz. That wasn’t the music he played, but the song was there in my head. “Introduced her to my loved one and while they were dancing, my friend stole my true love from me.” It brought back all of the pain from the summer I was 17. I heard that a young man who had met me at a party was interested in me. It turned out that he was visiting the family of a friend of mine whose summer home was in Biddeford Pool. So I was delighted. I thought that Pete wanted to be with me and we would have a romance. He took me out for a hamburger, and sitting in the car, started talking about this girl he met that he found very attractive. I thought he was talking about me, but in fact he was talking about my friend Diana. It was such a shock. I don’t know what I said. I came home and collapsed. There was no one I could tell. So I spent the rest of the summer watching their romance. I had no one I could tell about it, so that’s why I began writing a journal.
It’s so funny, I haven’t thought about it for ages. I thought I had left it behind. But I suppose, like other painful memories it’s not completely gone, but can be reawakened. It’s funny, in some ways it feels more painful than the breakup with Dana. That feels really over. I did have to forgive him, not for the divorce, but because he so completely rejected me after it was final. Later I read something in an Elizabeth Goudge novel that helped. She says “We hate those we have injured because they make us feel despicable.” That pretty much closed it for me, which may be why it feels old and dead, but the Pete & Diana story seems still very present.