Moving On In

It took a month to complete the move. By the New Year she had a new place and I had a new living arrangement.

I would like to say that things went well for a while, but that is not quite the truth. The drama, heretofore non existent, started almost immediately. But it would also be untrue to say that things went bad. I think that it would be best to say that things started oscillating between very good interspersed with moments that were not so fun. We all have the same experience: drop us into a bad situation and we recognize it immediately, but if you feed it to us in dribs and drabs over a long enough period of time, we humans adapt. We adjust until the same bad situation feels normal.

The bad at first, seemed manageable.

Some of the new things were understandable. My son was ok with her, but he was also doing his level six year old best to push every adult button on her he could. The three of us were living in the suburbs, not a place that works well for a dramatic bombshell artist. She often felt like a fish out of water. That, and she now had a commute.

Some of it was unavoidable. She suffered from migranes, she also suffered from depression. Things could be cooking along just fine, and then I would come home and find her hiding up in our room, afraid to come out, sunk in a black hole that seemed to have no end.

Some of it was untenable, though I did not know it at the time. She drank, a lot more it turns out then I ever knew. She drank alone, and she drank when she felt bad. Now as a dating couple we partied a fair bit, and I am no teetotaler. But Marilyn would get depressed and bomb herself to the point where many times she could not remember what happened the next day. It seemed that this new life was depressing her more often than either of us had expected, though for no particular reason.

I learned a lot more that next year. She had been emotionally damaged as a child. She had been bulimeic. By nature she was easily irritated and annoyed. She was easily bored. She was acrophobic, sometimes hiding away from people for days. She was often depressed. Her sense of self was incredibly fragile. She could be vicious, cold and judgmental, starting fights, but then collapsing into tears in the face of resistance.

I learned that her family had rescued her not once, but multiple times from self destructive personal blowups. Each instance was different, but the patterns were similar. I learned that her family saw her as the black sheep, the troubled one, and that all of her siblings in some way saw her as still a teenager. Her family loved me and seemed to be happy that Marilyn and I were together. Maybe they were just relieved.

I repeat, don't want anyone to think that it was all bad. It was mostly good and we had a lot of fun. We went on a great rafting trip, did a lot of dates and a lot of family activities. She tried really hard with the boy, though the struggle was more with her own reactions. We spent time with her very large family, and they made room for the boy and I. We carved out a life that seemed to work. We talked about the future. What was right about us, to me, felt much greater than the challenges. Looking back, the signs were there, subtle forshadowing, as if I was in a story and the author was trying to warn me, or at least cluing in everyone else that something was not right.

But like I said in the beginning, if something happens to us slowly enough, we adapt. We rationalize.

One thing that stayed explosive was the sex. Use your imagination, it was all there. She loved to be worked over on her hands and knees, licked from behind, fucked from behind. I would pull my cock out, move over and stick it in her mouth while I continued to play with her. She loved it.

The mission never went away. She was patient for about three months, then started pressing. One time she tried moving out, thinking that it would force my hand. A week later she moved herself back in. She was twisting arms, hard, but I have to say, she never tried to cut me off physically. Just a lot of drama.

With the drama came fights, and we had some doosies. She was driven by hormones, more than anyone else I have ever known. PMS was a time of depression, frustration, and all around edginess. When she was close to ovulating, she was a hyper sex machine, happy and horny.

So mix one part PMS with one part biological clock, a dash of impatience and shake well. Serve it up anyway you choose, because it will get hot quickly. She fought nasty, and I fight like a panzer division, cannon and armor, shock and encircle. It was never physical, (though there was a time later when we were married when she cold cocked me), but it was intense.

Ugly.

We always made up, usually horizontal.

High Drama.

Yet in it all, and I believed this with all my heart, she loved me. And what she wanted was not unreasonable, it is what we all want, in the end, to love and be loved completely.

One day I realized that, warts and all, I loved her, I was bound to her, and I was determined to stand by her.

Yet I was still scared, still wary of walking that road again. Starting to be a bit concerned, it was hard to make that last commitment.

Then, one night, in a moment of mild depression she was bemoning the wait, telling me that she was coming to the end of her rope.

And at that moment I decided it was time.

I proposed.