What's Next?

How I Feel...

A little over a week ago, my first father asked me about my expectations going into reunion.  He told me his and asked about mine.  I had a really hard time coming up with the answer.  It was hard for me to think about my expectations because I wanted to be honest, but not mean.  There are ways of phrasing negative things to make them seem better.  This works well in some cases and not so well with others.

It took me a few tries, but I finally got something together that I was OK with sending him.  In that email, I asked him about his expectations for the future.  This was hard for me to ask.  It shouldn't be because we've become pretty close lately (we've been texting a lot and talking twice a week instead of just once) but it was still hard for me to ask.  I wasn't sure about what to expect back from him.  I didn't know what he'd say.  And he has the potential to really hurt me at this point.

I was pleasantly surprised with his answer.  To paraphrase, he told me that he hopes him and NeverTooLate come to an agreement soon about when to tell my sisters about me.  I get the sense that he's opting for sooner and she's opting for later.  He said he wants to keep getting to know me and meet the important people in my life.  So sigh of relief from me.  He had the ability to totally gut me there and he didn't.  So ten points for SinginInTheRain.

So I had to answer the question back.  Usually if I ask a question, I answer it first.  It's a good way to make sure that he understands what I mean because he can take cues from my answer.  On the flip side, he sort of already knows how I feel about things so he can tailor his answer to better match mine.  Good or bad, it's our way of doing things.  Unfortunately because I was so caught up in answering his expectations question, I completely forgot to ask mine in my response (the way we usually do it).  So I had to send it to him as a PS email of sorts from a rest stop on my way to see Rudy.  Not a good place to type out an email, so I had to put off the answer.

In my original email, I told him that I don't have many "expectations".  I find that when I have them, I either get really disappointed, or I am completely off in what ends up happening.  I prefer to call them "hopes" instead.  I think that's sort of how he answered anyway.  I told him that I hoped to meet NeverTooLate someday, I hoped that things worked out well when they do eventually tell my sisters (which I phrased in a way to hopefully not pressure), and that I hoped I could show him where I live and introduce him to the important people in my life.

Then I took a huge step.  A few months back when I started my job he mentioned that I should scout out lunch spots and maybe he'd come up and have lunch with me this fall.  It's now October and he never brought it up again.  Is he waiting for me to bring it up?  Does he not want to?  I don't know.  I'm going to take an educated guess that he's waiting for me to make the next move.  I did, and it wasn't very pretty.

"If at some point you get bored during your days off, I have an extra day off I can take whenever and we could hang out in the morning or something. If you wanted to come up to [insert town name here] I could show you around.  There's plenty of other stuff to do/see. Just thought I'd throw that out there. If you're too busy or it's too much don't worry about it. :-)"

I warned you, it wasn't pretty.  But I took that step.  It shouldn't be a huge step, but considering that the last two times he's met me there have been issues from NeverTooLate, it was still sort of a big deal.  He might say no.  I could see him saying no, because I need to focus on my mom.  He pulled that before.  He doesn't get that I can't do anything for her, so I might as well be happy and seeing him makes me happy.  And I really want to show him around my hometown.

He won't be able to meet my parents, which I think he wants to do.  My mom isn't up for it and my dad hasn't gotten over his little hissy fit.  But I think that would be a lot anyway, to show SinginInTheRain around my hometown, show him where I grew up, AND meet my parents... it would all be too much.  But if he says yes, I would like to show him where I went to school, where I played soccer, maybe go to the local hangout which has a TON of stuff to do, and just have fun, no stress of meeting my parents.  Then once my mom starts to do a little bit better and my dad puts his big boy panties on, we'll figure something out.

That's my current plan.  It could very well backfire.  We'll see.  If nothing else, it will make for some interesting blog posts!