WHOREMONES

Good grief, can being a girl suck. This monthly go ‘round, my whoremones have been screwing with me big time. It’s like I’ve been flayed and my every muscular morsel is bare. The merest breeze touches me and I do one of three things: cry, grind my teeth into powder, or hurl a blood-curdling scream at the sky. Simply nothing is right in the world. I’m up. I’m down. I’m upside down. I’m everything but right side up.

Imagine dating that kind of hell. Poor sweet, sweet Jim. He puts up with me during the swings and sways and storms of über sexy womanhood. Part of my post-affair/divorce damage is an amplified fear of abandonment. Jim is an honorable man. I have every reason to believe him when he says nice things to me and when he tells me that he wants to keep me around. But where I come from is a place of being pretty severely lied to. My books on extramarital affairs tell me that infidelity is inextricably linked to lies. And even though I have spent more time not being lied to than being lied to, it’s the being lied to that left a darker mark. Thus although Jim tells the truth, and I’ve never seen anything but honesty from him—no one has—my [rather reasonable] fears of abandonment, given where I’ve come from, and my effing whoremones of late mean that I think every single little thing I say will make him want to break up with me. It doesn’t matter that he’s never given any indication that he’s leaning that way; I don’t see the world through rational lenses right now.

But that’s where I come from. I spent the months after the affair came to light—the phase I refer to as the yes-no-yes-no-yes-no time in my life wherein my husband had his pick of two very desperate women, one desperate to keep her marriage and the other desperate to eff up every good thing in her life—terrified that any wrong step I made would send him into her arms for good. I tried to magnify my good parts. I tried to kill my bad parts. That’s usually my modus operandi, but I amplified the hell outta that shit. I was constantly trying to sell my spouse on not tossing our last ten years. I was all for forgiving him and moving on together.

For my own sake, I’m thrilled that that’s a battle I lost. I’m much better off. Most especially in the man realm. (I actually have one now.) But it’s a battle that left me with scars I hate. Some scars we get are pretty cool, maybe they carry a good memory or a funny story, but those inside scars I have from the way my marriage ended simply suck. At times, they make me really pathetic. But my strong, kind, and levelheaded boyfriend has an unfortunate understanding of how I got these particular wounds, and he puts up with my intermittent desperation—Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me. Please, please don’t leave me. Even if I haven’t done anything wrong, please don’t leave me!

I really loathe me at times like this, times when whoremones converge with wounds and make me into a pitiful being. The upside: at least I know the whoremonal part of all this ain’t permanent. I’ll probably be fine next week. Hopefully. And I’ve got a therapist for the internal wounds. So though I might be stuck in the mud for now, at least I’m facing the right direction.