A man I love with a daughter graduating high school. J.'s daughter and Scott's daughter even share the same name. Yikes. Talk about skin crawling potential for creepiness.
But this is completely different in a number of ways. A number of dramatic ways.
First, J. was a loser. "Loser" being a way of summarizing all of the lying, unreliability, unemployment (resulting in more lying), closet alcoholism, swindling, manipulation, and creepy tattoo of my Facebook profile picture on his scrawny thigh after I dumped him shortly after he put the candles on the relationship cake by showing up at the sacred Girls' Weekend.
Scott by contrast, is a self-assured, delightfully silly, proud, ethical, well-mannered, gainfully employed and hard-working, unselfish, devastatingly handsome, sexy, fun-loving, respectful, principled, self-respecting, chivalrous DARLING of a man who is full of surprises and loads of fun, who is serious when he should be and ready to help or help you forget what is on your mind, and intuitive enough to know which is the right thing to do.
So, perhaps it is fair to distinguish the two situations by stating that the situation with J. was one I was in at the time because I felt obligated, because I had loved him at one time. And in that time, had come to love (and to pity, just a bit) his girls. Scott is someone I am sure I am in love with, whose girls I have grown to love as well, and whom I don't pity, because they are strong, vibrant girls who don't require my pity or need me in any way to survive their lives.
And while I completely understood where I fit into the lives of J.'s girls, I am not at all clear where I stand with Scott's. I get along with them beautifully. My insecurities come from me and me alone.
I am not the first serious relationship Scott has had since divorcing their mother. I am not novel.
Their mother is not the warm and fuzzy type. She is is a military trained night trauma nurse. There is a predictability about her personality type even before you get to know her and learn the history, which I have.
I say this not as a criticism but as an enlightenment. What the girls are accustomed to from a mother is what they understand a mother to be. How I am different is probably interesting, but not something they need or expect. I could go to the ends of the Earth to show them kindness. I could cater to their needs, emotionally and financially and in all the ways girls need a mother, and they would no doubt appreciate it all. But truly, if I turned a blind eye to their needs, if I failed to show up at something important to them, if I chose to remain uninvolved in something going on in their lives, or kept my distance from their troubles, they may not even notice. They would not even need to forgive the slight. They would have expected nothing in the first place.
So while I feel that my graduation card, and accompanying sentiment are very important, and have the potential to be of significant meaning and import, whether I write from the heart or write "My dog has fleas" I am not sure it will matter.
Or maybe it will, and I will never know.
Quite a quandary for the Hallmark store.
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