Is This What Happiness Feels Like?

Alex has been staying with me for two and a half weeks now. When he's around, I have a partner who helps me out with all the work around the house, with the kids, and who also throws me to the ground for sex several times a day. He likes shopping with me. We have similar interests and whenever we have a disagreement, nobody screams. We discuss issues like calm adults until it's resolved. Usually I can sense happiness as a fleeting moment or a sensation that I can enjoy for an hour or so before it disappears. I realized a few days ago that this settled feeling in my heart seems to stay and only go away when there's a reason to go away, but then quickly returns. Is this what happiness really feels like? It's been so long. I can't remember. I remember the tension in my neck, the anxiety, the tears. I remember struggling after I moved out to keep my act together while teaching full time and juggling my children. If I try, I can vaguely remember a time when I laughed just as often but it came from the bottom recesses of my soul rather than from my lips. It just seems like...so long ago.

So now the fears whimper at the back of my mind. When does he leave? When does he hurt you? When does he show his "real" self? You'd think that after knowing a man for three and a half years that I'd know this IS his real self, but I just can't hope. I just can't believe. If I believe, then what happens when it falls apart?

The kids love him. My family loves him, even my sister who is impossible to please. Sometimes I turn around to look at him only to see him staring at me as if I were the most beautiful of angels come to earth just to delight him. I can see in his eyes every time he looks at me a sort of adoration and love that I've never had a man give me before now. Do I deserve this? Can I stand to ever let him go? Why does it feel so strange and wrong to be happy and to have a man be good and kind to me on a regular, consistent basis? Have I broken the woman's curse? The woman's curse is to be attracted strongly and passionately only to men who are assholes, who are taken, or who are gay. Sometimes I stare at him sleep, his chest gently rising and falling, his lips barely parted, his black lashes fluttering from time to time...creamy shoulders protruding barely over the sheets...and I just freeze. Why is it so unusual to feel happy?