Journal Jar #71..here comes the Bride (2)

I think what crushed me the most about Jim and I splitting after 4.5 years was that in the very beginning we knew, we knew this was bigger then anything we had anticipated. Just like from the first time I saw him in 1981....I knew someday I would be his wife, even though we did not even speak to one another. Like I knew by our 3rd date in 1986 I was in love, we both were.....don't question....somethings go beyond answers. So when we had that talk, back in 1986..Yes! on our third date I asked him, do you see yourself ever marrying again, because that is what I am looking for and I don't see continuing down this path together if we do not have the same intentions, he said yes to my question, I then said but please understand I have no intentions on having anymore children Amanda is enough for me, will she be enough for you? again he answered yes. He said the perfect thing........He said that he loved being married, but that he had married the wrong person the first time around, so yes he saw himself married again. When love happens......it happens that fast, some just take awhile to see it or act on it.......I love intensely, always have.

(back to where I left off)

So here I sit across the table from a man that has all of Jim's looks, all of Jim's charm....he says the right things, he takes my mind of my heartbreak if only for a few hours but he is not Jim. Jim was somebody that I loved but somebody that I had to walk away from.......it had been 2+ weeks with no contact.......never went that long before this really must be happening.

Because Jim was the only man that I allowed to get close to my daughter who by now was 4 years old,  and I did not want a revolving door of other men in my life knowing her, because I had a girlfriend who went through a nasty divorce only to have her children witness a new man every two weeks walking out of their mother's bedroom on Saturday mornings while they watched Saturday morning cartoons..........that is not me, that is not what I wanted for me or my daughter.....so when I did date other men in between Jim and after Jim none of them met my daughter, I didn't want to expose her to any of that kind of thing........She knew Jim wasn't her real Dad, but he had given her permission long before she could talk to call him Daddy.......I was beginning to regret that now. At 4 years of age you have no true concept of time.......it's either a lil bit ago or along time ago....after a few days of asking about him she stopped.....her life consisted of Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears.....She never stopped asking about Melissa......Jim's daughter from his first marriage.

I talked to this new man almost everyday and saw him a couple of times over the next 2 weeks, I never lead him on, I never pretended to be over Jim........I just simply was myself and it was an interesting new friendship. After a late night of dinner with this man one night, (his name is John by the way) he walked me to my door and I invited him in, I felt it was all right to do since Amanda had already been asleep for the night.....he stayed about half an hour then I let him kiss me goodnight for the first time and I walked him to the door.......it was probably around 11:00 p.m.

I washed my face, put my hair up for the night and crawled into bed still missing Jim lying beside me ( we did not live together before the break up but we had spent the night with each other many occasions) and I was wondering where John and I might be headed to. About 10 minutes had passed from the time John left to the time I crawled into bed and I heard a knock on my door........I throw on an oversized T-shirt and open the door expecting John to be standing there and my whole world stops..........it's Jim and it's been almost a month since I've seen him last, it's now the middle of July 1990.