20/20 hindsight

I’ll gladly foot the blame for my first major failure as an adult, my pending divorce.
Perhaps I was so consumed in doing my best to live to please him, thinking that was what a good wife should do. Perhaps I spent too much time in the kitchen, cooking his favorite things from scratch, decorating our home, or customizing the highlights of our life in a scrapbook when I should have been holding him and reassuring him that he was worth more than his self loathing personality allowed him to believe. “you deserve more from your family than table scraps” was a staple saying in our household, when I thought he was being mistreated or unappreciated by his family. Mind you, my stating this was not to demean his family, however for all intensive purposes I was merley attempting to add to his sense of self worth, as I could sense that the hostility between his family and I had been wearing him down.

My heartache is my own fault. When I met him, I knew that he was an unhappy person—but when I was around he smiled. A LOT. I adored his smile so much, that as a friend, and then girlfriend, fiancé, and wife, that i subconsciously made it my collateral duty to make him smile, laugh, giggle—anything to make those beautiful eyes of his sparkle. Hiding behind dark corners and jumping out to scare him soon became a favorite past time for me. Making him happy was all I knew how to do right, apparently. As much as he might like to think otherwise, I succeeded on a daily basis. I know this, as his eyes never lied to me.

I will always remember in great fervor, my cousin jack’s wedding. Their wedding favors included beta fish. I took one, stuck him in a dasani water bottle, took a greyhound all the way back to san diego with a fishbowl and a few rocks in my backpack. After he picked me up and we went back to his apartment, I ran into his bathroom and put the fish in his new bowl with the rocks, and presented (my new boyfriend) jon with his new housewarming gift. The surprised “well that was random, and I like it” look on his face burned my cheeks and I beamed with pride, as he further exclaimed that no one had ever gotten him a pet before, least of all a fish. And so began the exchanging of small gifts, or so I thought, until he one upped me with a snazzy pair of diamond earrings roughly a month later, a few weeks before Christmas. My first pair of diamond earnings!! I was taken aback.

As our relationship evolved and the months passed, I told him my reasons for not liking valentines day, as we had been proving my point from the beginning. We didn’t need to celebrate a day based on propaganda, we did sweet things for eachother all year round.

I suppose that our relationship was too good to be true from the beginning. I would cook, he would clean up the mess I left behind (very willingly, I might add). it was his way of thanks, I deduced.
I took so many good things from our (albeit, short-lived) relationship with him. He taught me patience, and enforced my self-esteem, telling me what an amazing person I was. Which, to this day I am not sure if he meant that. He taught me
At times, (especially these past six months being away from him, and now more than ever) I can still smell the morning I met him. That same familiar scent that continued as I sat in his truck writing him my “one letter everyday” while he was deployed to Afghanistan. I can still smell the morning dew as he would daily walk me to my vechile, and follow me all the way to work, acting as my bodyguard as so no one on the crazy san diego freeway could bully me.

Though we rarely lacked passion, We never actually “made love”. Perhaps we lacked the physical chemistry. Perhaps we just lacked the emotional connection. Since he was the second person I have ever “given myself” to, I now recognize that that I still do not know what “making love” is, except for it being Something I have always been looking forward to.

I suppose that the very few reasons for feeling the sense of relief that I am developing can be owed to two major disappointments in my relationship with him.
The first, being the fact that the little things I did to show I was trying my damndest to make him happy went unnoticed. From the clothes I wore, to the ways I did my hair. Second, that he was so continually distracted that he would forget things. Big things. Things that meant a lot. Still, I accepted him and forgave him without hesitation.

I know I am not the easiest person to deal with at times, my temper has a habit of getting the best of me. But there isn’t one goddamned person that cant attest to the fact that I did everything to please him because pleasing him made me the happiest person alive.

I honestly do wish for him to find happiness within himself, and eventually with another person. He is an amazing man with a talent for technology, and I honestly do believe that if he finds an outlet for which to channel his self-depreciating habits that he will go far in life. But it has to start with him. He can say we fought all of the time as often as he wants to, but in my heart I know it isn’t true.

The times we DID have fights, they were over silly things, or just disappointment.
He DID come home from deployment with PTSD, and it DID affect our relationship, plain and simple. I KNEW he was depressed, but for reasons clearly not up to me, he outright refused to at least follow through with getting it addressed and resolved. So I was left to deal with it, and we would fight, and because he never was treated for it, since I am the only one he fought with, he faults our marriage, and not the condition in which he returned to me. It does sadden me that I do not have him to come home to when I am through here. It breaks my heart, because that was yet another promise that he broke. In conclusion, i have divided that he has always had the best of intentions, he just seriously lacks the effort in which to follow through with them.

I remember how I felt the first time I got to wear his (last) name on my uniform. I was so proud, and excited. I was mrs. Jonathan scot pollard, plain and simple. I took the utmost pride in my engagement, and wedding bands, I was an official married woman. All throughout my training prior to coming here, I took pleasure in bragging about what an extraordinary sailor was, who had a shining service record, and piles of awards.
Even though his nametag burns a proverbial hole in my chest, and I thought broken heart was a metaphor, I still discern that I must push through this with a resolve like no other I have had.
Unfortunately, I am ill equipped when thinking of ways to fault him for the failure of our marriage. In my heart , I know I tried my best, but I suppose my best was not good enough. I did my best to show him what it was like to be put first, and I guess the idea was so foreign to him that it made him uncomfortable, and caused him to push me away. It did seem that the more I put him first, the more we would fight, and then the subject of his family would come up and the fight would turn into dragging each other through the carpet.
That’s about all I can think for now, so I’ll post.