Chapter 45 - Maximum Inefficiency Mode - from my book Changes

Chapter 45

Maximum Inefficiency Mode

When I got to the airport, before flying to Oregon, I called my husband and told him I didn’t want to be with him anymore.  Scary but freeing, and I flew away to Oregon.

When I got to Oregon, my sister and I picked up a yurt kit from Pacific Yurts in Oregon.  She was living about 45 minutes from my property at the time, in a tiny little house in the woods.  She and I would go back and forth from her house to the property, daily, to set up the yurt and get her moved into it.

One day, during the yurt set up days, we got all the way to the property, talking and laughing, as we drove the winding forested roads to the property.  When we got there we realized we had forgotten the tools we needed!  All we could do was laugh and declare we were working in maximum inefficiency mode!

We turned around and drove the 45 minutes back to her house, got the important tools we needed, than drove back to the property, enjoying ourselves all the way.

Once the foundation for the yurt was ready, it only took a couple days for us to get the yurt put up.  She and I are actually very good at following directions and putting things together.

Then we moved her in and we both set up living there.

My sister at the time was a college graduate with two degrees, one in business and one in fine art.  She was working at an art gallery director in Springfield at the time.  She drove to her work and back as needed on the days she worked, and on the off days, we stayed warm in the yurt with the rocket stove she built.

My sister has always seemed very brave to me.  When she tires of a bad situation, she says, she launches herself off the cliff into the unknown, all the while constructing her landing gear as she flys through the air.  I’ve always admired her, for her self confidence.

I tend to cling to security.  That is why I stayed in a doomed marriage the first time around until my first husband left me.  And I had been clinging to this present marriage too, afraid to leave, until this monumental choice to leave.

After I had been living in Oregon with my sister for about a month, my older children called me to tell me that I needed to talk to their dad / my husband.  He had not been going to work.  He had not been eating.  He had been staying outside the house, crying all the time, not wanting the kids to see him so sad.

When I called my husband, he could not talk to me for the crying.  He could not get any understandable words out of his mouth.  Finally I said we ought to email each other instead of trying to talk on the phone.

We started emailing and that worked better.

His reaction to my leaving was a surprise.  Based on how he acted when he got angry, I expected him to be awful to me and spiteful.  I expected him to be angry and ugly toward me.  He was the opposite.  He begged me to be able to live somewhere on the property just so he could be near me, even if we weren’t together.  He started doing grand gestures.  He paid the person who gravelled our dirt road to bring up a huge banner he and the kids made, to hang on the gate to the property, saying “We miss you Mommy”.  He had flowers delivered for me to the hardware store I frequented.  He had candy and perfume delivered to my daughters house for me.  He was love bombing me.  It was nice but I was skeptical.

Finally I told him I would come home and we could pack and move me and the kids to the property.  He could come too and create a separate space for himself there.  He agreed.

I also told him that he would have to read the books that opened my eyes to his abuse:  The Verbally Abusive Relationship, and Controlling People, both by Patricia Evans, a communications expert.

He agreed.