Kiss Me It's My Birthday

If there were ever a day you thought hopes would be high for a thaw or a miracle or a seminal moment, it would be your birthday.

Marie's kids came over for my birthday tonight. We had shrimp and pasta and homemade chocolate cake. Everyone sat around telling funny stories from when they were little, long before I arrived on the scene. I was an outsider at my own party. I don't blame them for that, not at all. The love and deep affection they have for one another, the good humor, it is quite lovely to see. It's just bittersweet to be on the outside of it. This isn't the way things are meant to be, third and fourth marriages, broken bonds, shattered families. an occasion like this should bring whole families together that share the same stories, memories as sweet and satisfying as homemade chocolate frosting. I'm not a part of those memories and I can't be and shouldn't be--it's an ugly haphazard seam in a beautiful tapestry. Shared history and shared hopes are a sacred thing, the way things were meant to be in our living rooms and dining tables. These are lovely young people but people I scarcely know. They belong at the table of their father and mother, but that table was axed and burned long ago. It shouldn't be like that, but it is so all over the country. We try to blend and build new families but it isn't the same. Still it was kind of all of them to come and share dinner and have cake. Stephanie sent me a sweet text message and my brother did me the tremendous honor of embarassing himself singing a silly song in a voicemail. These are the fleeting embraces of the electronic age, better than despair, worse than a gathering at the fire. It's what we have.

I'm trying to find my heart and soul and person in all this turmoil. I live with a wife who no longer loves me or respects me, that in her angry hours scalds my soul telling me how pathetic and weak and unworthy and inadequate and contemptible I am, in the harshest and most awful words, with a sneering viciousness that tears me to the core. I'm trying to be calm and think what I should live for and how I should measure my days. I try to read a little and throw up an occasional prayer. We are so tentative with each other and so lost. I'm nostalgic for solitude and lonliness. It felt safer. I don't know if the rage and betrayal will ever end.

I could just walk out, but I'm afraid I'd miss some grand chance to make everything right. I'm afraid of the moral failure it would represent walking out on two women with no means of support. I feel as though I'm waiting for them to walk out on me or run into my arms, and either possibility seems painfully remote: it seems more likely we'll just suffer and exist until something awful or overwhelming happens to throw everything pitching forward. I don't know what to do or how to cope with all this. I don't at all. I pray for understanding that never comes.