Residual Anger

Way back before I even met Tom, I told some guy after the second date that I didn’t want to go out anymore because he lived 40 whole minutes away from where I was living at the time. This put him, oh, probably a 35 minutes’ drive from my work.

I rue the day I told that fib. Okay, it wasn’t exactly a fib. Because I wasn’t into him AT ALL, 40 minutes was too far to drive to see him. But then, five minutes would have been too far to travel to see this guy. But the distance was a nice, inoffensive excuse and it worked.

Alas, I went on to meet Tom, a guy I WAS into, who lived 65 miles away. Ohh, karma kicked my ass hard on that one.

When we first met, Tom told me he was willing to relocate. He realized that we lived pretty far away from each other.

Then…in the throes of new love and generosity and momentary stupidity, I saw how close he was to his older kids, two of whom were still in junior high/high school at the time he and I moved in together, and I told him I couldn’t take him away from his kids. I told him I’d commute.

I’d like to go back and slap the shit out of my younger, stupider self.

He held me to that. We bought a house that was about twenty minutes from where the kids lived with their mother. It was all of ten minutes from their school. It was an hour and ten minutes from my work.

We saw them, maybe, three times a year during the entire eight years we lived in that house.

When Alyssa was an infant, she and I commuted together, every single day. And oh, how she cried. She cried and cried and screamed and sobbed the last fifteen minutes of every single drive. And I seethed. I fumed. I cried hot, angry tears at having to put my baby through the torture of that drive on the mere chance that her older siblings would deign to remember that their father lived close enough to visit.

Alyssa was eight months old when I’d had enough and started staying at my mom’s at least one night a week. By the time Olivia arrived three years later, we were staying at my mom’s up to four nights a week (if winter weather looked iffy) and were just going home to Tom on the weekends.

It worked but it was stressful. And I was angry about it pretty much all the time.

We moved almost two years ago and I now drive 18 miles to work each day. And that’s nothing! It takes me all of twenty-five minutes to get to and from work. We’re very rural around here so a 25 minute drive to work isn’t anything at all.

When we moved, though, my anger didn’t just disappear. I still often found myself seething and fuming over minor issues, wondering where this fury was coming from.

A couple of weeks before school let out for summer, I told Tom how grateful I was to him for all the work he does with the girls each morning before school and work. He does the majority of the morning routine with them. I get them dressed and send them to him for breakfast, tooth brushing, shoes, jackets, etc.

He shrugged and said, “It’s the least I can do after all you’ve done over the years when I wasn’t around to help out more. After all the driving you did, I think breakfast is a pretty simple chore.”

And I felt something hard and mean unfurl in my chest. I felt lighter, more appreciated than I’d felt in years.

Just his acknowledgement that I’d worked hard, that the girls and I had sacrificed and he KNEW it meant so much.

I feel like that one comment on his part went further than a year’s worth of therapy could have done to undo the years of residual anger I’d felt over having to commute and be home part-time. It really is amazing how far a little appreciation can go to soften that knot of anger and resentment.