Dear Jon Stories, part 9

For part 8, click here.

Aren't you people sick of listening to me whine, yet? Yeah, that's rhetorical. You'll either read on, or you won't. The thing is, I'm getting sick of listening to myself whine. Although I'd like to try to speed this up, I can't.

April through August of that year were pretty much more of the same, with the following exceptions. Jon spent an exceptionally large amount of time at his wife's house, and I spent an exceptionally large amount of time drinking. Both issues started causing us to constantly bicker.

The first week of July, one of my sisters and I rented a cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. I invited Jon to go (free of charge), but he said he couldn't be away the whole week. Instead, he would spend the first part of the week with me, and the second part with his family at Lily's parent's beach cottage on the Jersey Shore.

When we got to Winnipesaukee, Jon confided in me that he had been laid-off from his new job. It turned out that he basically had gotten fired because he had not sold one thing since he took the job over six months previously. He was feeling really low the whole time he was with me, but just really focused in on berating me for everything he thought I was doing wrong, especially my drinking.

After a couple of days, I was like, WTF - I'm on vacation! He was transferring all his negative feelings on to me, so I basically didn't take his calls to my cell phone for the rest of the time I was away unless he was willing to talk to me civilly. By this point, I was starting to rebel a little bit at his authoritarian attitude. I don't answer to anybody!

I came home from vacation to a shit storm from not just him, but also Lily. Apparently, I was the one to blame for him losing his job and their whole family not having an income. I was the one to blame for him leaving his job at our company to begin with. She even tried to blame Jon's father's cancer scare on me. If he hadn't been so stressed out about the state of his son's marriage, he would never have been unhealthy enough to possibly get the cancer that it turned out he didn't have.

I tried to get Jon to talk some sense into the woman. For fuck's sake, if I had a magic wand that I could wave around making people get cancer, did she not think I would have used it on more important things, like making her shut the fuck up? He just told me the same thing he probably told her, "I have no control over the things she says or does". Yeah, if I had a magic wand, I would have made him grow some balls, at the very least.

By the middle of August, Jon had begged for and received a job back at the company we worked for. But he received an older position, the one previous to the position that he had left - at a seriously reduced rate of income than he had been receiving when he left. At least he was bringing some money home.

When my pussy boss found out Jon was back with the company, he decided to try to regulate Jon and I communicating on company time. He drew up a document with a bunch of ridiculous stipulations about how and when Jon and I were allowed to talk on the phone or see each other in the office. He called me in to his office with a co-worker who wasn't even my supervisor and asked me to sign it. When I asked, "Do I have to?", he answered, "Yes". Which made me believe that my job was on the line if I did not sign the document. Jon was never asked to sign anything.

I eventually had to go over pussy boss's head to the corporate HR department to deem that the document he made me sign under duress was null and void, actually it was illegal. From that point on, pussy boss did everything he could to find any reason under the sun to fire me. He also moved me from my pod that covered New York and New Jersey to a pod that covered Northern New England. That way, at least, Jon didn't have a valid reason to have any communication with me at work.

Fast forward to the end of summer. For some reason, I was still completely in love with Jon. I don't know why I thought things were beginning to settle down, and we were going to make things work out between us. I felt like we had gotten through the work thing together, Lily was quieting down a little bit, I felt that the end of summer was going to be a happy time for us. Jon attended my family reunion, and was a big hit. I remember encouraging him to show off the beautiful pictures of his kids, and him being so reluctant to do so. Again, that didn't strike me as odd at the time.

The next weekend was Labor Day weekend. Jon stayed with me from late Friday to early Sunday. He had agreed to go down to the Jersey Shore to spend time with his kids for the last weekend of the season, and also to watch them while Lily went out Sunday night with her girlfriends.

Here is where it gets really weird for me. I thought Jon and I had reached a point in our relationship where we could be extremely honest with each other with no recriminations. It turned out that when I bared my soul to him, he couldn't handle it.

On Sunday morning, I admitted to him with all the honesty that I had in my heart that I thought I had a problem. It was 10:30am on a Sunday and I wanted to start drinking already, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't beg him for any answers, it wasn't a Hollywood chick flick moment where everything gets resolved at the end of 90 minutes. I was extremely open and honest with him, in a way that I had never ever been with any other person up until that point. I felt like I was sharing my raw soul with him. This is just what it is, and where I was, and I didn't know what to do.

Jon didn't have any answers for me, he didn't even have time to call me later that night. Down at the shore, he didn't have any email access. He left a message on my answering machine long after I had gone to sleep to let me know that Lily and her friends were going to be out really late and he would have to stay the night at the beach house. When I woke up on Labor Day I knew something was not right. First of all, he was already supposed to be at my house. Second of all, my calls to him were going straight to voice mail.

I had made a promise to my parents that I would go over to trim their front hedges, which is what I did on Monday. Everyone asked me where Jon was. The only honest response was, "I don't know".

Around Noon on Monday, Jon finally started responding to my phone calls to tell me he was on his way. I asked him why he had not responded to my phone calls and he told me it was because he had been having breakfast with his son. This just didn't make any sense. When he actually showed up at my house, I asked what the hell was going on. I was pretty pissed, and was being a total bitch to him. He basically refused to give me a straight answer. He finished installing my dishwasher, which he had been working on, and then went upstairs "to get ready". While he was upstairs, I bitchilly told him that he had about 5 minutes until I was ready to go to my parent's house without him.

He missed the deadline, so I left without him.

Turns out he was only finishing the dishwasher so he didn't feel badly about leaving me in the lurch. He only came back to my house to get his stuff.

The night before when he had told me was with his children, he had actually crawled into Lily's bed and asked her if she could ever forgive him for the things he had done, and she did. That explains him not responding to any morning phone calls, they were enjoying the morning together as a family. He spent that morning holding his wife in his arms asking her to take him back. And she did.

By the time I called him from my parents front porch to find out where he was, he was already on his way back to New Jersey. To say I didn't take it well would be an understatement. I had a complete breakdown. A complete and total mental breakdown.