Anita,

I will try to clear it up a little.

“okay at the beginning”-up to about 6 years of age I remember spending more time with baby sitters than with mom. I don’t remember any fighting to speak of. She remarried when I was eight.

“fighting is worth the love she saved”-The first year she was married again I watched her open up on my step dad leaving a trail of his blood on the wall behind him. I decided never to have kids that day. As time went by the fighting only intensified. Everyone in family stayed away from home as much as possible. The place we called home just had too many holes in the wall from the fights. Somehow it was more important to fight rather than try to work things out. To cope I just shut my feelings down. When I left home after school it was never to return. However, after about twenty years of not talking I wanted to try again. I thought maybe if time changed my mind, maybe she would have second thoughts too. We met initially and set agreed upon ground terms on conduct. It didn’t take long and things were back to the way they were before. The feeling of not being able to walk back in after the way we would fight set in again.

The thing I missed that never was- an atmosphere where people try to work things out, the hope that maybe there was another side to the story besides hers and that she might be able to see it, and the hope that she would be able to say she loved the person she married (at some level).

Perspectives changing and guarantees-Maybe I am different from most. But, by the time I reached 40, I remember doing a lot of reflective review of my life, changing my life by turning on feelings that I turned off years early just to save my sanity, and learning to trust again. I thought that if I was doing that for myself, maybe she might have done some reflective thinking on her own. Turned out it was just a hope that went up in smoke.

Maybe this makes more sense?

Phil