psychoanalytic aspirations

i'm not sure if i wrote about this already .. i need to devise a system to check such questions .. (ehr, i think, there is such a system...it's called tagging). stop talking to yourself.

so - it occurred to me that i seem to be reliving part of my father's history. after my parents divorced,  my younger brother and i stayed with my dad. it was his condition to consent to my mother's request for separation. she wanted to move away and go back to college. shortly after they split up, my father got together with a woman who turned out to be mentally unstable. she was extreme but she loved him deeply and, i know, he loved her the same way ... he told me so. i was 11 years old when they started seeing each other. at first, he tried to hide the relationship from us - kinda like what i did with my children, only that i hid the fact that J and I were an item (and not just friends) for years. this was possible because my kids were so young when we got together. i don't know why my father hid his relationship from us. i suppose, he felt like it doesn't set a good example. unmarried coupling. there was a tiny bit of that reasoning in my decision to take it slow but, mainly, I recognized how unstable J, and thus our relationship, was and I didn't want my children to think they could count on him only to be disappointed later.

but, my father wasn't as skilled at deceiving his kids as i was and soon gave up his charade; it was just too difficult to keep it up in the small apartment we were living in. his girlfriend could be the nicest lady one day and an absolute demon then next. come to think of it, maybe she was bipolar. i remember sitting at the kitchen table with her, eating my lunch. she was all dressed up, her hair and make-up was done, and then, out of nowhere, as she lights her cigarette and deeply inhales her first toke, she casually tells me that my father announced he is breaking up with her and that she will be going down to the station at 6 o'clock to throw herself in front of a train. she then continued to smoke her cigarette as if nothing happened while i searched for appropriate things to say in response.

my father is one of the most reasonable, most stable people i know - maybe it is just that opposites attract. i take after my father in the way i walk through life - always searching for balance and peace. the only difference is that i don't think i would have ever left J (which sort of contradicts my yearning for peace, i guess). i couldn't have done what my father did -- sacrifice his love for the sake of everyone else, first and foremost his children. "if she and i could live on an island together alone, we would have a perfect life" he used to say, "unfortunately, we don't live on an island, and i have children, friends, and a career."
i have to add to this that she was definitely much more unstable than J ever was. or maybe that is a biased statement, .. i don't know. it probably is. people in love. they just don't see what other people see.