There are days when years happen. (I wonder if at some point in my life it will all be too much to explain, too many details. Potential problems and anxieties, and glimmers of fantasies of the future. Maybe that's why geriatrics have to be especially good story tellers - otherwise their listeners wait for them to end their sentences or pass on prior to completion with indifference as to how your story ends.)

I wanted to say that I learned something, from meeting up with my abuser's current girlfriend, who has a son the same age range as my boys. She tells me that she has been single for so long. She asks me if he is a narcissist. I don't answer directly, but I do tell her about the intergenerational trauma that he has run away from by drinking. I told her that he can't journal. She tells me that he is such a good dad, at least in front of her. What a kind, intelligent man. I don't know who she is talking about.

I tell her that my mom was emotionally abusive and physically scary, so part of it may have been that I was used to taking abuse instead of calling it out. We were young, and there was much I hadn't dealt with at all. I guess I was trying to escape too, but at the same time, play the part that I thought would please my mother (because what would she do if she was truly displeased? I don't know, but surely it would be worse than her wrath for the minute inconsequential things, I didn't want to find out).  I told her that sometimes I am triggered even in my new relationship, and I have worked to change the script. And I tell her, this is what he has seen from his dad that he has not addressed. He has been very hurt, I say. She looks sad. I think she loves him, and I think he is lucky. And he sure knows how to pick them. He is intelligent, after all.

I am not sure what makes men change, and if you can ever tell if it's an especially good act. Does fake it till you make it work sometimes? Maybe, if you can hold fast to your rules, and work every day to change even if it's just one step in the right direction. One day the momentum may become muscle memory. Is the way to do this to make sharing a life a clear choice, by having an open channel of communication, setting expectations and enforcing boundaries?

It's never too late to change, but do you know the next step, and the next? And maybe the truth is that you cannot do this until you can see your choices laid out before you, and you can see the price in either turn, and know in your heart what is difficult but good for you. What would the loving choice for yourself be?