The Waiting Game

This mess is making a mess of all of us.

Shelby says she feels awful about her behavior and is thinking that it stems from resentment, for rescuing Aiden from a previous bad relationship, providing for him, and then having to live with his disregulated son's chaos. She completely nailed something that had been bugging me and allowed me to bring it up to Aiden, which is basically that I'm worried about heading down a similar path. He doesn't want our family to split, of course, and I understand that; he was happy with things the way they were and just wants them to go back to status quo. There's no reason he would vote for breaking us up and I'm not asking him to. But I'm taking that path and no one is going to talk me out of it.

He has a choice: stay or go. He's on the fence because he doesn't want either option, and while I understand why that is, his hesitation is causing me the previously mentioned worry...that he'll feel like he was dragged along with me, that he'll resent me for disassembling what we had, and that he's going to just sail along and try to be dependent on me like he has been on Shelby. It's not that I think he's inherently useless or wants to take advantage of other people, but that's most of what I've seen him do, and I know that it will destroy us if he does it to me, even accidentally.

Aiden is torn, pulled into a decision he doesn't want to make. Every time I talk to him about it we both end up crying; he because he's looking at loss, me because I feel so awful about putting him in this position. He told me he doesn't see it as my fault, and I hope to hell that's true, but frankly I'm struggling to hold onto that perspective myself. I made some awful choices and there's no way to get out of the resulting situation without doing damage to someone, and I just feel like I should have known better. Perhaps I couldn't have. Hindsight is 20/20, or so they say.

As for me...I'm cracking along all of my seams, just spending every day trying to hold myself together enough to not cry all the time or beat someone into a hospital. I handed the reins to Aiden, explaining that I need to know if he's in or out of my life; I can't look for an apartment if I don't know how many bedrooms it needs or how much income I can claim. Now it's just a waiting game. I'm sitting in my corner, wondering what he's going to do, stuck on pause until I find out whether we're going on with life together or I'm picking up the pieces on my own.

I have a lot of power here, and I'm really trying not to use it for evil. I possess the capability to be manipulative, but living under my emotionally manipulative ex for several years taught me both sides of that pattern: how to use it, and why I shouldn't. I'm pretty sure I could convince Aiden to come with me if I tried. The selfish side of me is begging me to say things with a certain flavor, to tell him all the tasty things I imagine in the future, to spin my perspective into the "right" one. It would be so easy.

But I'd hate myself. Even if I "won," I think in the end I'd actually lose, because I'd never really trust the foundations of our relationship.

He asked me yesterday, "How am I supposed to make this decision? What would you do?"

"I can't advise you on that," I said, face-punching the small voice in the back of my head that was yelling about all the things I could be saying to take control of the situation. "I'm a really biased party, and I've never been in your position."

It it so. Fucking. Hard. To step back and just hold my hands up and wait. Part of me wants to just tell him he can't come with me and let that be that, because then at least the next step is a known quantity and I can assuage the guilt over the fate of his relationship with Shelby (and I have a lot of it).

On the other hand, I said I wouldn't walk out and leave him in the current situation alone. And if he chooses to come with me of his own free will, I shouldn't take that choice away from him.

Or is that just me being a selfish excuse-maker? Maybe taking the choice away would actually be the better decision; to not put him on the spot, to rip off the band-aid and get it over with, to take the pain on myself as penance for my mistakes and let him rebuild if he can.

Are these my mistakes or Shelby's? They're both. They're Aiden's too, honestly. Shelby volunteered for something she wasn't prepared to handle, blamed him for it, and then melted into a screaming monster when it didn't go well. Aiden brought me into this relationship without ever checking whether it was really okay with me, allowing himself to be blinded to any sign of problems so that he could have what he wanted. I allowed myself to be led in without stopping to wave a flag and announce my boundaries, and passed up any opportunity I might have had to fix it because I didn't have the gonads to stand up for myself.

And now here we are. She wants to fix her mistakes and rebuild. Aiden wants it back the way it was before. And I want to burn it down.