Is it life imitating art or art imitating life?

You know how you can watch that one certain movie and say "That’s my life"? I had one of those moments a couple of nights ago.

The movie Hope Floats came on TV and, since I was an extra in that movie through a friend of mine, and because I happen to really like that movie, even though parts of it made me want to scream b/c of the husband's selfishness and cheating, I watched it. I’ve seen that movie lots of times before, but this time...this time, it was different. It’s like I was watching the story of me. Ok, so some parts of it were completely different. I wasn’t the Queen of Corn in high school, nor did I move over 1,000 miles away when I got married, and my husband didn’t leave me for my best friend. He just moved in with a former co-worker over two years ago, left for a few months to "work" on our marriage and then "unofficially" moved back in with her at the end of this past November. It is my daddy who is dead instead of my mother and my mother does not make scary-a$$ stuffed dolls out of deceased animals. Other than that, pretty much what Birdee is going through is me. Oh, and I have no male friend turning into a romantic prospect for me either. I would have to have a male friend for that part to happen. LOL!

There is this one part that really speaks to me where Birdee is in the bathroom of her mother’s house, where she moved back to from Chicago, and she is drunk, throwing up (well, not that part of it) and crying about how her life turned out and she says something about how she used to look into her husband’s eyes and see herself there and then one day she looked and she was gone:

"I know it's so easy to blame him. But you know what? I think it's me. I do. Because he used to look at me and I would see myself in his eyes. And it was like he saw me. And I was audacious, Mama. I was. And then, I don't know... things just started to change. The harder I tried to be what he wanted me to be... the less I saw myself in his eyes. And one day I looked, and I was gone."

Kind of like the day before you were that same vibrant, shining person and you wake up and *POOF* that person has disappeared and you don’t know how you failed to notice that the person you were one time was disappearing. That is how I’ve felt, how I still feel to some extent, well except that Matt bears at least half of the responsibility for what happened in the marriage to bring it to this point. Though when a serious relationship ends and it’s not you that’s doing the ending, per say, it’s hard not to try and figure out what went wrong and it’s easy to say that "It must have been me" when you can’t see why they didn’t want you anymore. That quote is how I’ve felt in the only two relationships that really mattered to me, the only two men I ever really, truly loved.

One was when I was barely out of my teens. First love and all that, and to some extent part of that still lingers with me, haunting me from time to time. GAH! Do you ever really get over your first love, especially when it breaks your heart in millions of pieces? You can read about part of that here.

Last one was Matt. Talk about audacious. He was audacious, bold, daring, a little overconfident, slightly full of himself at times and I loved it. We were a great match until it was time to grow up and stop the partying and the drinking. After the glimmer and shine wore off, after the illusions disappeared it seemed that neither one of us was what we had been at one time. It seemed like there were parts of him that weren’t ready to grow up yet and at times I feel like I forced him into a situation he didn’t want, but I was not going to have a baby and not be married, especially if he was going to stay in my life and we were going to have a relationship other than just the parents of a precious child. He admitted after we were married that he hadn’t wanted to get married until maybe after Emily had been born. That really cut me to the quick, but now, I think sometimes he may have had a point. We wouldn’t have found ourselves going through this crap that we’re going through and we would probably have parted ways a long time ago.

Part of my fault was that I started to have my life be consumed by him, but yet kept myself apart from him b/c I didn’t want to get hurt so bad that I could almost literally feel my heart breaking again. Well, joke was on me b/c the same thing happened and now I’m looking at the end of a marriage that, according to him, had been over for a long time. I still love him, I will always love him, but I don’t want what we became anymore, and it hurts deeply. One doesn’t go into a marriage thinking that it may end in a few years. Or at least they shouldn’t b/c right there is a recipe for disaster. I expected to live the rest of my life with Matt. Only reality and a certain conniving hussy had other plans. Matt still denies that she has or had any ulterior motives for letting him move in with her. I call bulls#!t on that one.

In Hope Floats, Harry Connick, Jr. says:

"You know, Birdee you used to be so... I don't know...audacious... bold. People would stop and stare as you walked down the street. Their eyes would light up. 'There goes that Birdee Calvert' they’d say... You think you've lost that. I can still see it..."

I want someone who still sees it in me, only I need to figure out or at least re-discover exactly who I am first.