Revelation

I slept exactly 0.0 minutes last night. My blood pressure was too high, and I kept thinking about things like: I must clean the storage area! I need to stop drinking because I have to save money! I have no one to help me with Spencer! I have no one to sleep with! I have no one to have sex with! I am fat, ugly and stupid! I need to finish painting the kitchen! The whole house needs to be cleaned by Saturday! I have so much work to do - oh, that's right, must order furniture for the intern house, make an Office Depot order, enter that new project, research more data storage options! and on and on and on....every time I closed my eyes, I would see something, and they would shoot back open again. I even had songs running through my head and was reading mental blog posts with my eyes closed, my most recent post included.

SO, this morning at 8:00 I took Spencer to school and came home and slept for an hour. I had the weirdest dream. I woke up like, WOW...well, I hadn't thought about that before. But that short and simple dream made me recognize the point in my life when I started thinking that I wasn't good enough for anyone, and when I started accepting anything that was thrown at me, no matter how much it smashed my self-esteem. I realize that it's no one's fault but my own, for taking everything so personally and assuming that I deserve to be treated that way. I think, back then, I wanted the drama. Now it's a habit.

The dream: I was in my old bedroom. My parents were in another room of the house. Out of nowhere, my bedroom door shot open, and in fell (literally) my first and former boyfriend, Paul. He was naked. I laughed and said that he needed to put some damned clothes on because my parents were right there. He was smoking a cigarette, but for some reason that didn't bother me. Paul handed me a folder, and it was filled with things he wrote/painted for me. One of them was a purple piece of construction paper, with a bright yellow/red/orange sun painted in the middle and said, in silver marker, CYNDY IS #1!! #1 WOMAN!!, all over it. There were other things, like poems, in the folder, but that's what I recall most vividly. He sat there smoking and drunk, and asked me when we were going to get married. And, in my dream, I got very very sad because I realized that he didn't really mean any of it at all, just like in real life.

Here's some Paul history: we met when I was 17 and he was 21, and I thought he was SO CUTE. And I thought he thought that *I* was SO CUTE, but really he was on drugs and I could have been Phyllis Diller for all it mattered. I went to his friend's house with him and we made out all night. Nothing more, though he did do something that evening that I have never seen before or again (no, I'm not telling). I thought he was the shit. Too bad that he was married (briefly, he got her pregnant) and lived far away (25 miles is far when you have to ask to borrow the car from your mom and then pay for gas).
In the spring when I was 22, I ran into him again at a bar, and we hooked up that night. We continued seeing each other for a while, but I had to go back to college...he came with me. After about three weeks of witnessing his childish behavior and dealing with his obvious and scary addiction(s), and feeling uncomfortable in my own home, I kicked him out.

I should have known better when I think back on the fact that, at 26, he had no car, no job and his parents gave him money and bought him shirts for job interviews. He never once looked for a job when we lived together. All he did was sit around the house drinking cheap beer and watching talk shows. If he went out, he made inappropriate comments and hit on other women right in front of me. When I made him leave my house, I had to drive him to his mom's house in Michigan and drop him off with all his stuff. I felt such relief driving back home, but also guilt. It was as if I blamed myself for his situation because I couldn't make him "better." I started thinking about when I would see him again -- and I wasn't even home yet from dropping his worthless ass off!

A couple years after that, I sent him a birthday card. What I got in response was a nasty letter from his current girlfriend, saying that he didn't remember me, and that I should never attempt to contact him again. Of course, that was bullshit, but whatever. I went on my way, lived with another alcoholic, had Spencer, etc.

Some ten years later, I received an email from Paul. Ahhh, technology. We started talking on the phone and he would tell me about his kids and impending divorce and talk to me in a way that we had never communicated before. I even talked to his wife a few times; they were merely living together at that point and were more friends than anything. He began talking about how miserable he was in Michigan and how he would love to be in Boulder. He said that he had really cleaned up his act, and he sounded sincere. I told him that he could stay with me if he moved here, until he found his own place. I was so excited to have my cute boyfriend back -- yeah, the one who had previously shown no respect for me at all!

Well (even though it's too late now), to make a long story short, he came to Boulder that summer. He planned to arrive on a specific day but didn't show up. He called the next day, saying something about a delayed flight. When I picked him up at the airport, I could see immediately that I wasn't ready for this. His eyes were bright yellow from jaundice, all his wordly possessions were in two bags, and he reeked. I found out later that he had had an alcoholic seizure in the Dallas airport, and that's why he was late...they took him to the indigent hospital overnight for tests (I found the results in a closet one day - "severe alcoholism, cirrhosis, seizure disease due to alcoholism"...at 40 years old...scary). The second day he was in Boulder, I went to work and he got drunk. DRUNK drunk. Thank God that Spencer was with his dad. Paul was passed out on the couch when I got home, and I couldn't wake him up, so I called an ambulance. In the meantime, I located a garbage bag full of beer cans and an empty fifth of vodka in the kitchen. He drank a CASE of beer and a pint of vodka in ONE DAY. The cops came, the ambulance came, the fire truck came...and they took him out of my house. While an officer was asking me some questions, Paul spat on me. And, still, I packed up his stuff and drove it to the detox center they took him to because I didn't want him to feel lost. The officer wouldn't let me bring the stuff in the building, because he thought that Paul was a danger to me.

Two days later, he was sitting on my doorstep. He had gotten out of detox the day before and immediately got drunk. In the process, he lost his luggage and wallet. I let him in the house and helped make arrangements for him to leave on the bus for another ex's place in Florida (I told her the facts and she still wanted him back and I thought she was SO stupid). I have never seen him again, though his ex-wife sent Christmas cards for a while. I guess she felt bad about sending him my way, but I understand why she did. She wanted him gone and I wanted him back, same as the chick in Florida. Patterns, patterns...

My point in all this blather is that my dream helped me recognize that my pattern of unhealthy relationships started a long, long time ago with Paul. He was the most severe case, but it has always been basically the same. I will do almost anything to keep a partner around, mainly because I'm afraid I will not find anyone else. There has never been a case in my life when I have had a partner who would do anything for me, to make things work out and really TRY. Never. Every single one of them has been dysfunctional to the point that communication is basically a non-issue unless I instigate it, and when I do is when I get hurt, so I avoid doing it. That's saying something really harsh about me, and I see that. Until now, I have always thought that I was being a nice person, doing things for people who treat me like shit, but now I see it's just pathetic on my part. It's time for me to start over again, with a new attitude and respect for myself.