Peeling the onion: When what you always knew is confirmed.

So this has had me twisted up for two days now.

If you know me personally, you know that I was once married and togwther my ex-wife and I have a teenage son with special needs.

After five years together my wife decided to leave me while she was pregnant with our son cutting my inability to manage money and the ever overused reason of "irreconcilable differences".

The shorthand being her family did not like me and basically told her that I needed to go. 

It was primarily one parent in particular who upon or first meeting asked my then- fiancé if my portly dimensions at the time were the result of a beer belly.

For 15 years, I believed that money management killed us.  It made sense and isn't particularly uncommon. 

Myself, I attribute it to being young, dumb and in love which I was, head over heels. 

But hold onto your hats, ladies abd gentlemen, another reason...one I always knew was part our marital implosion...has finally come to light and it has me twisted up even after all this time.

Apparently, I'm not religious enough to be married to the mother of my son.  Yes...after 15 years, 18 if you count the separation time and related court actions this character flaw she accepted by marital vow was enough to put our marriage on waivers. 

She is correct in that I am not a religious person.  I have a distaste for organized religion as a whole and socially, living in Oklahoma, it puts you somewhere between atheism and outright devil worship in the social construct here.

It's not that I don't believe.  I do, but how I believe and the way I profess my belief is personal and not under the thumb of an oppressive group of people gathered socially.

Going in, I accepted my fiancé and her church as part of the family I was about to marry into and, though the other party will doubtlessly dispute it, tried to assimilate as best I could.

Apparently it wasn't enough.

As I have written here previously, the bitterness and contempt associated with this life event is all but gone. 

I live and breathe for the child I created and it would do him zero good to see me at loggerheads with his mother.  She agrees and our disagreements in front of him have been few and far between.

What gets me though is that it reveals a lot of what I didn't realize about the woman I married.  Mainly, it disappoints me to know that this could have been worked through.

Had she not have given up...or decided to give up under pressure from her parent(s), we might still be married and raising our son as it should be. 

But it isn't going to happen. The more I think about this old/new revelation the less confident I am in the idea that I will likely die alone.

John Lennon wrote, "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans", and with that in mind I will somehow get past this like I always have.

I could have gone without knowing it even still.

I should have stayed single...

It's three o' clock in the morning and my mind is still active.

This is another subject I have been thinking about for a while but haven't quote figured out how to put it into words. 

Before you get any untoward notions that the regret that I'm about to express here is an indication of impending self harm or anything of that nature.  

Quite the contrary...I am happy with the way my life has turned out to this point.  What you're about to read is my hindsight positing the question of what I could have possibly done to make life simpler, especially in the area of relationships.

I do not regret any relationship I've been in.  Not one.

After all, a relationship resulted in the creation of the life I value much more than my own, my son Sean.  

I couldn't imagine life without him. 

There are times where I wish things could have worked out with his mother and I. 

Not to the point where I long for what we had though because it's end was way too painful and I feel it nearly 20 years later.

I have forgiven her enough to make sure that no ill will from anything would reflect poorly on him.  But there is a limit to that forgiveness.  It will never ever be total and complete because of the pain she inflicted on me and by default, my family.

That's all I'll allow on that subject.

To connect this with the title I'd have saved myself all that if I hadn't decided to take the chance and get over my shyness that had prevented me from starting a relationship when I was younger.

It raises the question of if I had started at an earlier age...say my teenage years which are supposedly traditional, would I have had better success later on?  

That's a rhetorical question but with the benefit of hindsight maybe it might have.

It was a calculated risk I don't regret and I can only hope I've learned from it.