There is exquisite pain in leaving you.  Of course I am not even leaving anything real. It is all play acting and you allow me the play. You are like a wall…a mildly interactive, grunting, stuffed animal that allows me to leave and come back. How many times have I told you that I wanted to stop this? I would guess that the number is thirty. We have probably had thirty breakups in a year and a half. You are always there to take me back but you give nothing. You tell me that I am in control of the “spigot”.

The first time I asked Amy to cut the cord that karmically bound us, Amy and I sat in her little tarot card reading room. The cards were in front of us. I brought a picture of you. She helped me to mentally cut the cord that held us together. That night I dreamed of you. You emailed me and pleaded me to put the cord back in. The second time, I went to Amy to cut the cord, you called me in my dreams and said that you would meet with me sometime soon just put the cord back. The last time I really cut off from you in my mind, I did not need Amy. For three nights you came to me in my dreams pleading with me to resume contact.

The pull is simple but it took me so long to understand it. My father was emotionally abusive to my mother but she was helpless to leave. When we lived in Evanston, Chicago, I was five. My father was having an affair with a woman who later became his third wife. She was a Chicago socialite. I remember her teased blond hair. She gave me perfumed talcum powder one night when she can over to our house to have dinner. She was beautiful and looked like Catherine Deneuve and I thought she was a princess. My father told my mother that she said that my mother was fat. Of course my mother was not. My mother was very beautiful but that was part of the abuse my father gave her.

He left us every weekend to be with his mistress and he took the car. This was the one car that my parents owned. We were stuck in the Chicago suburbs without any transportation. In the summer, he said he was going sailing on his friend’s boat. In the winter, He was snowmobiling on the friend’s estate. He really did have the friend with the boat. My mother and I went on occasion. I remember the estate. The friend was an heir to a printing fortune. When I went to his house and the grownups were snow sledding, I was afraid to ask his housekeeper for the bathroom. I peed in the back hall way waiting for my parents to comeback from snowmobiling.

Every weekend, my mother was stranded. She was alone and helpless. She never had the courage to leave him. He was nasty and twisted his words to find fault with her. I have told you that the technique is used by abusers and is particularly used by lawyers. It is call “gas lighting”. I believe that he heaped abuse on her with the hope that my mother would run home to her mother but she did not. She was not free of him until he told us to come to New York because he had found a new job with a bank.

I later found out from his second wife that he told her that he was separated from my mother at the time and could not understand why she was following him to New York. So you see he was able to have his only child closer to him and pull my mother away from any support system that she might have to help her- especially the support to negotiate a better alimony settlement. I never understood why she did not leave him but instead waited until he left her. I think she felt as if something catastrophic would happen if she made the bold step for separation.

So you see our play breakups are just my attempts to understand what happens when I willingly leave a man. Through you, I have learned that nothing does. Of course, we have nothing to begin with. Buildings do not fall down and you are still here for me in your very limited way.