Dear Pete:

The Regret: “25 years ago, I made a decision to move to a new city for a woman giving up my home, my job/ career and ultimately my pension and chance of retirement, friends, family, everything you name it”.

Let’s name it, let’s name what you gave up:

1. the job you left behind: it was a job that you took because you felt pressured to take it, pressured by your father, your older brother, and your mother. You “didn’t like the work and wasn’t good at it. But it had job security/ pension”. Your heart was not in that job, but in “social work type stuff”, becoming a policeman and/ or a teacher.

2. the family you left behind:

-your father babied you on one hand and beat you up (with) the other hand, exposed you to the violence between himself and your older brothers and between the brothers (“fist fighting, yelling, screaming, breaking glass”), didn’t notice or protect you from the family member who sexually abused you for three years, talked you out of doing what you wanted to do (working in a summer campground with kids at 17 , and going for the police entrance exam at 19), and into what he wanted you to do (work in a job you didn’t want, and have a girlfriend you didn’t want). When he got your girlfriend/ first wife a job in the same company where you worked, which gave you no break from the woman you didn’t want a girlfriend or wife, he said: “I thought that’s what you wanted”- reads to me that what you wanted was never his concern.

-your mother babied you as well, but didn’t protect you from your father beating you up, neither did she protect her other sons from being beaten by your father, and from beating each other; neither did she notice or protect you from the family member who sexually abuse you. Along side with your father, she pressured you to take a job you didn’t want, and she talked you out of breaking up with a girlfriend you didn’t want (because the girlfriend was her best friend’s daughter). When you had a baby with this woman turned wife, and the baby died, your mother said: “it’s better he’s dead”. She loaned you money for the funeral of the baby, but two weeks later, she called you “out of the blue demanding her money back”.

3. the friends you left behind: you had “no support system”, and you were “not well liked at work”.

4. job security/ pension- yes, you lost these things on paper, meaning, staying in your original city, if you managed to remain physically healthy, and if you managed to heal emotionally from years of mistreatment and blatant inconsideration, and if you managed to live a life that made sense to you, then you would have enjoyed the job security and pension.

5. a really nice home – one that you  purchased and lived in unhappily.

In summary of what you gave up: the security of a job you didn’t like,  a family who mistreated you and kept you in chains (“the chains grew even tighter”), a purchased house that didn’t make you happy and a pension you were to receive decades later.

– Still younger than 35, before The Regret, and after your divorce from your first wife, you took a job transfer with your company “to a different city 5 hours away. It helped more than I realized”. Two years later, the company downsized and you “were forced to return” to your original city where your parents lived. Before the move back, you met a woman in the new city.

Back in original city, “I felt the weight of my past there.. with the hopes of putting the past behind me”- you needed to be far away from your original city/original home, but you returned to it and hoped to  put the past behind you (while living with the past close to  you).

Six months after you moved back to your original city, having kept in touch with the woman, you “had in the back of my mind.. Boy meets girl in a new city, leaves and returns for love”-

– I think that you didn’t want to live in your original city where you were mistreated for years, where you felt trapped, in chains, where the past was thick in the air, so you longed to.. get away.

“Deep down I was making the wrong decision”- I think you made the right decision to move far away from your original city, far away from your parents, far away from a life that didn’t make sense. The wrong decision was to move in with yet another woman you didn’t want.

“I had given/ thrown away my entire life”-

-it was not a good life that you gave up or thrown away. It only looks like it to you as you look back 25 years later. Certain things in your life now makes you look at your life before 35 in a positive light that didn’t exist then: back then you were young, now you are older; back then you had a stable job, now you have contracts that end before their time; back then you lived in a really nice house, now you live in an apartment perhaps.. but back then life was not good. You left that life because you wanted to get away from it.

Please post again with your thoughts and we can continue this conversation.

anita