Sleep Away Camp

The lights were out, everyone in the house was asleep and we talked long into the wee hours.

I laid in bed on Monday night with the knowledge that the coming week was going to be one of the more significant weeks of my entire life. When I woke up, I thought, I would be fifty-five years old, Julie would be bringing me to Siesta Key to celebrate and when we checked out of our vacation rental on Thursday, we’d be heading to the Town Hall right by the beach to get married.

Many guys wouldn’t be taking this lightly, but I felt like it was a bit more earth shaking for me because I had never been married before. I reminded myself, silently, why I asked Julie to do me the honor. Just like I said in the song I wrote her, I knew, the first time we hugged, that God put her in my life permanently. I could almost hear the angels singing that we were meant to be lifelong companions.

I was, however, feeling other things and many of them were not all light and airy. I was feeling very cheated by what was happening with my two daughters. Not only was I feeling cheated, I was feeling gaslit by their mother.

She wrote me an email about three weeks ago where she accused me of, not only giving up on my children, but also not taking accountability for anything.

This made me remember a phone call with their mother where I asked if it were possible for my older daughter and me to see a therapist or counselor together.

“I brought up counseling to G—--- and she started crying. She doesn’t want to.”

I’ll be up front with you: I didn’t trust any of it. Years earlier, when I began to feel like the relationship with their mother was a total mess, I also brought up going to see a counselor. There, too, I was met with every possible excuse why she couldn’t go. I couldn’t help feeling like the child’s dismissal of my proposed remedy was influenced by this same person, her mother. The response was too similar.

At that point, I sought out a mediator to discuss some remedy that we could both agree with. If I had the ability to see into the future, I think I would’ve brought up counseling in front of the mediator. I might’ve had better luck. Instead, I settled for writing them letters by hand, apologizing for how things were beginning to feel and asking if we could possibly start over. Both girls texted their responses: “We’ll get in touch when we feel better about things.”

Well, they never did.

They continued to receive 25% of my income and I received…nothing.

In the same email I mentioned from a few weeks ago, the one that accused me of not being accountable, the mother of the children claimed that we agreed I would text them regularly to keep our relationship from disappearing entirely. The longer I thought about this claim, the clearer it became that this could not possibly be true. When we were at the mediator, I never imagined they’d receive my letters and reject my idea to reconcile. So obviously, if that wasn’t even thought of as a possibility, why would I have agreed to a contingency plan? It wasn’t even a good lie.

Of course, none of this matters when faced with the complete estrangement of my children, but it made me angrier and angrier as I laid there thinking about everything she said in that email.

I have a tendency to believe every bad thing anyone has ever said about me and treat every compliment suspiciously. I credit my balanced and healthy childhood for that. As many women out there can attest, an upbringing like that makes a person a prime target for this sort of treatment. When a person grows up being made to feel guilty about even breathing too loud during allergy season, it isn’t too difficult to revise history and make them feel responsible for everything. They’ve been thoroughly conditioned to blame themselves for everything anyway.

As I said, it took weeks for me to remember my request to seek family counseling, how their mother rejected that idea and how similar it was to how she rejected couple’s counseling years before. This all led to my venting in a very direct way on social media on the morning of my birthday.

Once I thoroughly got that out of my system and I received the support of all my friends, everything got a lot better. I stopped allowing people to hang a fictitious narrative on me, I was able to be “in the moment” with Julie and I refused to let anything obscure the first true happiness I had ever experienced in my life.

Julie and I laid together in bed on our wedding night and Julie mentioned something about what made our relationship so magical. The lights were out, everyone in the house was asleep and we talked long into the wee hours. We talked about love and what we were both thinking about each other before we met, and me sending her my book when it first came out and how she wrote the first Amazon review and–well, just about everything.

That’s when Julie said that the nights we spend together like that one, reminded her of being with a best friend at sleep away camp, talking and talking until we both would fall asleep.

We fell asleep, in each other’s arms, as I silently though that sleep away camp is a great analogy for what makes a strong marriage. Two team mates who never run out of things to talk about…long into the night, year after year and long into old age.