Ouchie! I Need a Band-Aid, Please!

When AC was very young, she loved the "Itsy Bitsy Spider". It was virtually the only song I knew with hand gestures that didn't include the middle finger or Satan's horns, so we sang Itsy a lot. She became so well-versed in Itsy that she could do the hand motions by seven months old. Perhaps the cutest pic I have of her is sitting in a laundry basket, hands stretched above her head, imitating the climbing up the waterspout portion of the song.

At the height of AC's Itsy phase, I found an adorable board book based on the rhyme of Itsy, with a new rhyme on each page. My favorite was the rhyme where Itsy fell down and shrieked, "Ouchie! I need a Band-Aid, please!". Of course, based on the fact that Itsy has eight legs, she requested eight Band-Aids, but her mother only had six.

I, too, am having an eight Band-Aid sorta day. The day started out smashingly, with me packing up a bunch of my ex-husband's stuff, a task I refer to as "taking out the trash". However, after I picked up my daughter, my sadness started setting in. Holidays are never good for the newly-single girl. Your usual support system is gone, caught up in their own families and new boys.

As the icing on my heartbreak cake, I said goodbye to an online flirtation, who is deploying to Iraq in a couple of days. Sure, deep down, I knew that it was unlikely that anything would come of it, apart from the occassional sexting exchange. But what a fool believes is that what seems to be is always better than nothing, and he was always reliable for some occassional drunk texting.

The other victim of my weekly drunk texts is a married guy I like to refer to as my "one night stand that got away". Coulda, shoulda, woulda...but even 10 years after the fact, he still likes to play my game. I consider his receipt of my infrequent drunk texts to be a true honor on his part; I doubt his wife would agree, because I have typically found that while I don't care, most wives don't wanna share.

In thinking of this--why would someone as intelligent and beautiful as me continually throw myself at Someone Else's Husband?--the answer dawned on me: I can't trust the guy. If I know I can't trust him from the start, there is no reason for me to ever build trust in him. No trust equals no heartbreak for me, because I already fully expect him to break my heart. To expect it means that essentially, your heart cannot be broken. I have equated my broken trust issues to Santa Claus: I feel like I carry it in a huge sack tossed across my shoulder. The good thing, is that just like Santa delivering his gifts, I toss out a little bit of that mistrust each and every day.

But yet, the truth always remains...after saying farewell to my brief--but steamy--online military boy, my automatic defense mechanism was to text Someone Else's Husband, even though I know he is really no different from Itsy, though far more dangerous: a poisonous spider just waiting in the corner, fulling willing to silently and slyly break his wife's heart while playing with mine.

Ouchie...I need a Band-Aid--or six, or eight--for my scraped and scuffed heart.