Working out the kinks

After an early morning ephipany, decided I'd go with my original blog for scrap happy crap and this one for the adventures of Miss Havisham kinda thing (aka my dark side). Yep, anybody that grew up loving Poe, Dickens and Zappa certainly has a dark side.

Had an enlightening 4 days with Jim, all kinda clicked in place for me. I know what an emotional toll the past 26 months have left on me, finally realized what it's done to him. He can't acknowledge the damage done to our lives by the storm because he couldn't "fix" it all. That first night afterwards, when Jerry got food poisoning and we ended up at the temp ER for evacuees, while I focused totally on Jerry, Jim was seeing the whole heartwrenching drama. That's when he just disappeared, he went to "help". I know that he felt like Jerry was fine and this was the "right" thing but I needed him and he wasn't there. When he finally showed up the next morning at the hotel, I was livid that he had abandoned us. He was destroyed by what he had seen over the course of the night. Maybe it's the difference between men and women, maybe just the difference between Jim and I. The whole women take care of the home and men take care of the world or the differences in what we each experienced that night, I have no clue. But I now believe that's the moment that our perspectives went in opposite directions. Every thought, action and reaction that both of us have had in the last 26 months, all based from that defining night. I don't believe either of us were wrong but that just seems to make it all the more difficult.

I've felt so incredably belittled by his attitude of "we were blessed and weren't affected by Katrina" and he views me as being "negative" and fighting imaginary demons. I've seen him as selfish for refusing to acknowledge the problems and insensitive for not respecting my feelings. It's made me so angry and resentful that he's just gone off to work in BR everyday, living his professional life and seemingly unaware of boarded up windows, mold spots, warped floors and rotten sheetrock. That's not even going into the first year, with desperate phone calls from my mother and angry ones from caregivers in MS or the stories of loss everyday from everyone I came in contact with. Ha, even last Friday, a trip to JoAnn's includes a sharing of loss from the woman cutting my fabric, the discussion of reintroducing color into our homes, blank slates of new sheetrock and changed landscape, how freakin' poetic can you get. Any wonder why I prefer to hide out at home? The internet, books and movies hold a bridge to normalcy, places where I don't have to be constantly hit over the head with reminders. Consider me chickencrap but I have to lay low and salvage what's left of me, my home, my family, my friends. I just don't have much stable ground yet, working on it, getting there but not yet enough to open my arms and share.

And Jim, the man is now killing himself on the house. Tells himself it's a remodel, LOL, can't even acknowledge that it's storm renovations. He's trying so hard to do everything himself, keeping the costs down so that our savings will go as far as possible. I worry about him, feel sorry for him but don't know what to do with him. Gotta figure it out, maybe with this new insight I can do better. He asked me last night what I needed, told him an iron skillet and a translator....think that might actually work.