Turning Point

Well, I guess we all knew it was bound to happen. It took The Trucker a little by surprise tho. Last night he came over for dinner and I asked if he'd thought about things yet and if we had a future or not.

He hadn't. The problem is that I can think about nothing else. I feel like I'm suffocating. This whole limbo thing isn't working for me. I need to know we have a plan and we're heading in the same direction. Unfortunately, it turns out that we're probably not. He's going to think about it again. I gave him a lot more specifics this time.

The truth is that I am at that terrible age. The age I feel like a failure in spite of all I have done with my life so far. No one wants to marry me or have kids with me and like it or not these are not just things you can think positively about and make happen. They very definitely require the participation of a willing partner. And I don't have one. Yes he may end up having kids one day, but he can't say for sure. And he is quite unlikely to be able to agree to having them in the small window I feel like I still have open (the next 3 years, pretty much).

This is going to be hard, it's going to hurt. And I feel like my life is pretty much already over. I don't have any faith that breaking up with him will mean that I do get to have a child. All I know, and how The Peeb put it is, if you stay with him you pretty much know you won't. So the choice is really between deciding I could live with never having kids vs. deciding to open my life up to the possibility of it.

It is an awful place to be in. We are fine, we love and adore each other. But his life experience has moulded him into a very different person from me and he doesn't have the need or want for family life or see the up-side of having kids. The two example parents he could give me, he reckons all would not have their kids again, given the choice. While yes the parents in question do love their children and I have no doubt there are good times, all he sees is the impact on their lives and their ability to make choices. He sees it has having to decide, voluntarily, to allow some annoying, needy, noisy creature to take over your life and priorities for the next 18 or more years.

Yes, girls and boys are wired differently. I know there will be days where no doubt you just want to throw in the towel and give up and will wonder why on earth you chose to end up in this situation. But I still believe that if you're doing it together with someone, a team, then you can overcome it. And there will be good and amazing times. Joy and happiness at watching a little person grow and being able to show them the world and teach them about life.

I was willing to make many compromises for us to get there. Get married? Who cares (while yes, I would like to, I am not dead set on it needing to happen first). Live together? We can work around that. Have 2 kids? Maybe not. Have your own vs. adopt? I'd love to have my own, but if I can't I'm open to suggestion.

If you'd asked me 6 years ago, a lot of these would be not negotiable. Life has changed. My faith in life just working out for me the way I expected it to has long gone out the window. Now I'm just praying I haven't left it entirely too late. I realise I probably haven't made the best relationship choices so far: a guy who turned out to be gay, a guy who turned out to be more interested in someone else (cheater sounds a little cheap) and who I couldn't trust to be responsible for me or my child and now someone who just simply doesn't want one. I may have messed up irrecoverably and I'm not really sure how or where my life will end up once that ends up being the truth rather than just the likely. I will be broken.

It's very hard needing to rely on someone else. But I want to. I want to live a shared life where you both do things for the betterment of each other and your life together. And for the most part, I don't need to rely on someone else ... except for this one thing and I just can't seem to get it right. The right balance and kind of mutual need.

Anyway, we haven't broken up yet. I think it's kinda difficult for him to be going thru this all over again, actually. It's the same reason his last relationship ended. (I know, I know, I should have known I'd end up here. But I wanted to believe I'd be different and he'd be older and and and ...). He's going to think about the compromise. I agree, if you don't want to have kids it is the most impossible compromise ... but see, if you do want to have kids, at our age does a year or two earlier make that big a difference to him? Unfortunately I don't think the compromise he'd have to make is the one I was hoping for.

On the flip side I am very grateful I am dating someone who doesn't just tell me what I want to hear. Who isn't just agreeing in the hopes that somehow he'll want the same things I do in the next few years. Someone who isn't going to string me along. I do think he'd be fine given an Oopsie. But I just don't have that in me, I'd worry he'd end up resenting me for the rest of our lives. And let's face it, it wouldn't be an honest Oopsie, it'd have to be an active Oopsie on my part.

He says I think too much. I think in some ways he is exactly the same as me ... hoping that if you just love someone enough everything else will fall into place. Seems that's not how life works. I feel a little like if we break up now, I'm giving up. But this issue isn't going away, in fact it's causing me massive internal emotional turmoil, and the strain it's likely to put on our relationship would probably end it anyway.

I don't think we're going to be riding off into the sunset to live happily ever after. Other people make this look so easy. Sigh. I think I'll just go get myself some cats :P

*sad*

Now I can't figure out what I should do ... do my kitchen renovations, stay in Joburg where all my friends and my home which I love are or move back to Cape Town and start over ... at least if I'm there I could consider having a kid on my own with my folks help.