You know...

...for someone who can be so smart about some things, I can be quite the savant when it comes to other things. I don't want to rag on Rick...I'm not even angry at him anymore. We get along just fine and that's the way it should be. Is he telling me the truth 100% of the time? Hell no. He's lucky if he's honest 50% of the time. He has a habit of telling you exactly what he thinks you want to hear and he puts forth such a decent front that you would NEVER expect him to be lying so you doubt yourself when things don't make sense.

I'm writing about how a lie affects a person...I'm not whining about Rick himself. That's just where I took my lessons so he is in the story.

To this day...either I find something or I remember something. This past February I found those 2 pair of panties, one red and one black. I thought they were my sister's and if Rick had been here, that's what he would have told me. There was the KY Lube "foreplay in a bottle" that I found cleaning out a kitchen drawer. Then there was a time when I was doing stand up and this dude who wanted me to be in his act paid me in a tiny bit of weed. I brought it home, showed it to Rick, hid it and went to sleep. I never saw that little bit of weed again. I didn't figure out that he took it until last year when I painted my room. I took EVERYTHING out of the closet, drawers and out from under the bed. If that tiny bag was still there, I would have found it. So, I finally got it through my thick head...Rick took it and shared it with his girlfriend. I didn't even figure that out one morning when he told me that he had NOT taken any pot to work. Then, as he kissed me good bye, I put my hand on his chest (innocently...not searching...I believed him TOTALLY) and when I did, I felt two fat joints in his chest pocket. I can't believe it took me so long to figure out that he was cheating...what a MORON I am!

The other day, during a very pleasant conversation, I asked him if he took that weed. He found a GREAT answer to that question..."If I did, I don't remember doing it. But, I'm not going to say that I did or did NOT do it...I just don't know.

Isn't that perfect? A confession without an actual admission of guilt. Good one, 'ey? That'll shut a person up and most of what Rick said to me was for the express purpose of shutting me up. (That is, of course, if I were asking questions at the time and his bullshit wasn't working.)

Spending so much time with my father showed me something...I doubt that I could have learned as much in 20 years of psychoanalysis. I spent my entire childhood wondering what I had done to make him mad at me. And then, I married Rick who took over and assured that most of my adult life was spent the same way. For some reason, I had put Rick on some sort of pedestal and when he lied, he was so good at it that I wondered what was wrong with ME...just like I did when I was growing up. Both my father and Rick made me feel as though I was the one who was bad...and I had BOTH of them on pedestals. I respected them both so much that I couldn't believe that either one could be wrong or lie...so it HAD to be me...right?

Hearing Rick say that sentence, "If I did, I don't remember...", took me back to how I felt when I suspected that he had lied to me. It always went like this:

1. I asked him a question.
2. He denied anything and everything.
3. I ended up believing him, feeling guilty for ever questioning the man and I even felt sorry for him because he was so damned good at coming across as the victim.
4. Two weeks later it would start over again.

He never, ever admits the truth unless you have him on tape. And then, the "truth" he admits to is never as bad as is the real truth. If backed into a corner, he would admit to something...but never the truth. A hickey came from a 16 year old hitch-hiker who he would never see again. He didn't mention the 40 year old skank that he was screwing at the time...Louisa May Wilson.

I graduated from college when I was the single mother of 3 small children. I had to wake up early enough to take the baby to a private sitter, the pre-schooler to pre-school and the school aged kid to the church where they had a program for kids who had to wait for the school bus in the morning or the parents in the afternoon. I did that for years to get my degree. People always asked me, "How did you ever do all of that by yourself?"

I know now that it was exactly BECAUSE I was by myself. I didn't have anyone to worry about except myself. There's no one around to preoccupy my time and make me wonder what I'm doing to deserve any guilt feelings. There's no one around to make me feel so badly about myself that I'm afraid to try anything new for fear of failing. That's what happens to a person who spends decades questioning themselves. So...I didn't have anything special that helped me to accomplish so much as a single mother, I just didn't have anyone around to make me constantly question myself.

I don't think that these guys ever think these things through so much as to do this specifically to cause such harm. They just don't think about that at all. The only thing they're thinking about is getting away with something.. Of course, the comments meant to shut you up are manipulative...they're there to make you feel so badly that you DO shut up...but most of the time I doubt that these guys (or girls) are working that hard on other people.

I remember exactly where I was the moment it occurred to me that Rick didn't belong on the pedestal that I put him on. I was turning a corner on Franklin Road in Roanoke Virginia. Halfway through the turn, about the time I began accelerating...I had an epiphany...Rick wasn't a very nice guy. He certainly wasn't as decent as I thought he was. At that time I had known Rick for 10 years. It took me that long to figure him out. He was good at what he did and I was good at wondering what I had done wrong.

You can't accomplish much when you're constantly trying to fix relationships with people who don't care as much as you do.