Some of the best laid plans....

So as promised, I'll continue to dribble out details of our "understanding" as I get the energy and enthusiasm up to post. But as you might recall from my Life is what Happens When You're Making Plans post, on that day back in January of this year we came to the agreement that never would we spend another miserable holiday season like we endured in 2009. And to quote "The Plan" from that post, that meant I would have to "resolve my current situation by then and leave Jen no doubt in her mind whatsoever that our lives together will soon begin, if not having done so already. And along the way -- between now and the end of 2010 - I have to give Jen hard evidence that the wheels are indeed in motion".

Now looking back, this was quite a heady plan to make after having known each other for less than 6 months. But we knew then -- as we do now -- that we had both found that special someone we wanted to spend the rest of our days with ... and The Plan seemed realistic.

So we forged on .....

But then June came, and that fateful Father's Day weekend, and The Plan was in jeopardy. Jen's confidence was severely shaken and for a brief period at the end of that month we broke up. And things kind of changed after that. Jen lost all confidence that I would ever leave, and the stresses of a relationship such as ours was starting to take it's toll on me. To complicate things, June and July were the last month's of life for my Mom, and I was dealing with that almost non-stop as well. Summer 2010 will go down as the most stressful period of my 51 young years, not only because of our breakup and my Mom's passing, but also because of the standard stuff an over-involved Dad commits to during the summer for his three kids aged 11, 12 and 15.

But we survived. Well, sort of. Talk of The Plan dwindled significantly -- to the point where it was almost never mentioned. And my excuse was -- and yes, I'll call it an "excuse" -- is that my time with Jen was my oasis from reality. You see, those couple of hours I would spend with her every day, or that extra daily time I would spend on the phone with her or Instant Messaging -- that was my escape from the daily grind that had become my life. If we wrote it once on this blog, we wrote it a million times -- during those moments, all was right with our world. And from my perspective, why complicate it all with talk about forever when I was craving a respite from the here and now?

Like I said -- an excuse for not dealing with reality.

But then heat of the summer faded into autumn. Which brought us to the here and now I was avoiding.....

More on that in the next post......