Therapy Yesterday

I had therapy yesterday afternoon.  Which I always look forward to, but yesterday was in a whole different way.

She always starts off by saying, “so whats new?”  Then that usually sparks enough of something for us to keep going through out hour.  Whether because of the way I am speaking about it or the way my body language is, she can usually find something to dissect.

After the initial day to day recap of the time since we had last seen each other, I told her about Jess.  Now, she knows who Jess is, she has been brought up before.  Though, I have never had an entire therapy session about her.  Well, yesterday we spoke about her for nearly an hour.

I started off by saying, well remember that I blog.  She said yes, so then I said well last Monday I was reading…blah…blah and I came across this story that I just knew was Jess writing.  She smiled and said “ah, ok” just like Paul did when I said it out loud to him last week.  Like a “do you know how many people blog?  what are the chances that you found Jess?”

Then I just told her about a few certain things that the writer had said, that I felt like meant she was talking about me and my kids.  I told her that on Tuesday morning, I decided to address it in a blog.  And had come to find out that I was right, it was Jess.  That lead to a whole day of us talking back and forth, as well as a weeks worth of really good communication.

So, she basically was like “OK, well how does all of this make you feel?”  (That is what they are supposed to do right?)  Well, I looked at her and said “I’m going to start crying now” and I started bawling.  LOL!!  Actually, maybe not lol, as I’m tearing up right now too.

I just said to her, through tears (the gross kind where snot is starting to form and you don’t look beautiful at all) “I feel like a huge weight has been lifted.”  I told her some of the specifics of the text exchange between Jess and I and said “well I could read it to you, but that would take a lot more session, we spoke a lot.”

I told her the “highs”.  First and foremost the apologies for how we made each other feel, the hurt and pain we caused each other.  When you wait nearly 6 years to hear something, you just assume that it isn’t going to happen and you have kind of learned to deal with that.  Well before that apology, I was still holding all of the pain, the guilt and the failure on my shoulders.

Whether Jess meant to or not, she took some of that from me last Tuesday.  We were sharing the responsibility now, I didn’t have to carry the load on my own.  The next “high” for me was that she is in the category of “friend” now.  Instead of  being my ex husband’s wive, or my kids step mom, she now is my friend.  In a very real, raw, honest, yet respectful way.

The ONLY woman who understands where I have been, what I have been through and what that looked like for me and my family is her.  Sure she sees it from a different point of view, but she was the only one who saw the crazy, saw the tears and saw me work to deal with it.

My therapist said “I think maybe you cared more about being Jess’s friend, then you care about ever getting along with Matt again.”  That is true. “You being able to trust this woman, have an intimate relationship with this woman is important to you.”  Yes, I guess that it is.  I’m not sure that I will ever be able to “forgive” Matt.  Though I do believe the better the connection between Jess and I, the better the communication with get between Matt and I.

I told my therapist, “I just feel so good.”  Jess and I hugged on Sunday for the first time ever (I think) and the kids were just staring at us with huge grins (also kind of like WTF? is happening here), but in a really good way.  I said, “I don’t believe that this is normal.”  I believe that the average step-mom, mom relationship is that of necessity.  We are in the same space some of the time and that is that.  I think that Jess and I could have been like that forever.

In this totally crazy, yet totally organic way though, we found each other on WordPress. There are SO many people on here and we found each other!!  It happened exactly how it was meant to happen.  So that we could start caring for and respecting each other, based on our stories.  Making it easier to empathize and sympathize, instead of judge and critique.