If You Don’t Know Me By Now

If you don’t know me by now, you will never, never know me….

That used to be our song, mine and Pap’s. He picked it, way back in the beginning when our marriage was young. We could be across the room from each other, but when this song came on we snapped together like magnets, to slow dance and nuzzle under a disco ball, a harvest moon or around the toys cluttering our living room floor. When little incongruities popped up in our marriage over the years, the words to this song would play through my head and I’d accept his explanations clapping the intelligent woman who shares space in my noggin in gags and chains.

All the things that we’ve been throughYou should understand me like I understand you Now girl I know the difference between right and wrong I ain’t gonna do nothing to break up our happy home

Independence in more than one way this weekend. The details are unimportant, enough to say he was caught red handed and when confronted, still chose to lie. There wasn’t even a fight, the entire confrontation took less than half an hour, because there is no hope of resolution when one person refuses to tell the truth. He has lovely eyes, Pap, large, guileless, deep blue pools. When he looked directly at me and lied, it was as if the intelligent woman burst out of her bonds and cranked on a movie of our twenty five years together, the film stuttering and stalling on all those incidents I’d chosen to ignore, despite the fact they’d made no sense at the time.

We’ve all got our own funny moods,
I’ve got mine, woman you’ve got yours too

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not easy to live with. I’m an off and on housekeeper, as a writer I need a good bit of alone time, I don’t like to cook. I have an exhaustive list of interests, a circle of friends that are only mine and I accept people just the way they are, without conscience thought to color, creed or sexual orientation. I love a good debate as long as everyone plays by the rules. I don’t mind confrontation, as long as everyone is honest. I am a devoted mother. As a wife, I am loyal, available and faithful. If that wasn’t enough for him, he should have said so.

Just trust in me like I trust in you
As long as we’ve been together it should be so easy to do

Empty words at this point. If he were to say them to me, I’d slap him. I can’t trust a liar. When I talk to my girls about relationships, I tell them to take marriage seriously. Everyone has their quirks and annoyances. But there also must be a line you draw, and clearly enunciate to your mate about what is the deal breaker. Whether its infidelity, home labor or number of children… if there is something that you know you are absolutely unwilling to accept in your marriage, I tell them to talk about it. For me its honesty. If you can’t tell me the truth, we have no foundation to build anything else upon. So to Pap, who has been banished from home tonight, I’ve saved the last two lines of what was once “Our Song”:

Just get yourself together or we might as well say goodbye
What good is a love affair when you can’t see eye to eye