In Which I Am Done Working With My Ex

My ex and his mom and his gf are officially done working with me. I found out the reason he’s leaving is because he wants to go back to school and keep his other job, which offers more hours to make a living of off. One of the parents I work with said he’d mentioned “popping in” every now and then, which the parent thought implied he might be coming back. I was just thinking, “For crying out loud! If you’re going to leave, then just leave already! Go! And stay away!” But I doubt he’ll be able to get a job here again because he really left my boss in a bind when he left and I think my boss is too unimpressed with him to want to hire him back.

And I guess Ex’s mom and gf are leaving… because he’s leaving? His mom I can understand, since she already has her own business, but his gf is apparently just doing school and I know she’s had trouble keeping up with it all, but hey, if she’d taken the perfectly good advice that I’d given her on university course loads when she’d asked me way back when we were still getting along, she wouldn’t be struggling so much with school. Fine, girl. Your funeral.

Honestly, I feel like if he hadn’t quit, she’d still be working here, and that if he quit and she was keeping up with everything else fine, she would’ve quit alongside him anyway. I think my boss has come to the same conclusion and has kinda lost respect for her.

My mom thinks another reason she left is me. Anyone I’ve talked to about this girl’s behaviour has said she’s really jealous and insecure and feels very threatened by me and last year, it got to the point where she seemed to be deliberately making me uncomfortable to try and get me to quit my job so she wouldn’t have me around to worry about (File under “Why I Can’t Stand My Ex’s GF”). And now it’s been over a year and instead of quitting my job, I’ve gotten more involved and taken on more responsibilities and am clearly not going anywhere so now that she’s got the opportunity to get herself and her boyfriend away from me, she’s taking it.

I haven’t seen her since before they gave their notice, which is fine by me and probably by her too. Good riddance.

The last day I had to work with his mom things ended on a really good note, which makes me feel good. He never introduced me to his mom while we were dating– she didn’t find out about our months together until I came clean and told her about it months after we broke up (unfortunately after he already made his relationship public with this other girl, since I was trying to honour their wishes by letting them make their relationship public on their own terms and felt that if I brought anything up beforehand, I’d risk exposing them), since I felt really wrong about her not knowing what was going on–so it feels good to have that rapport with her and know that she still likes me as a person, even if I am his ex and even though she also likes his current girlfriend, and that she would’ve liked me as her son’s girlfriend had she known at the time and that if we ever were to get back together, she’d probably still like me a lot.

I wasn’t sure how it’d be with me and him, though.

So, I have to commute to another campus for one of my classes and that campus is in the same city as my work’s other location, which, obviously, was now three staff members short, so I’d offered to come to work out there after my lecture was finished and help keep things running out there once a week until we could get someone else hired to take over. When I’d offered out of the goodness of my heart and sincere desire to be of service, I did so under the assumption that my ex would be finished working at that location. Not so. After already offering and my boss accepting my offer, I found out my ex would be staying on an extra two weeks to help transition things over.

So I was super nervous about heading over to work there after my lecture and was really regretting volunteering for this. Firstly, I hadn’t worked a full shift with him in over a year and though I saw him weekly at work, that was only for the hour-long staff meeting. Second, the summer before last, his girlfriend would come in on her days off, bring her knitting, and just hang about to watch him work the whole shift and flirt with him on his breaks, occasionally giving him a shoulder rub if my boss wasn’t there. Her doing that really made me dread work so much and caused such anxiety and discomfort that I was constantly ill (this is how I lost thirty pounds), and even though my boss spoke to her about this on my behalf, she’d continued to do this (file under “Why I Can’t Stand My Ex’s GF” and “Why People Think She Was Trying to Put Me Out of a Job”). I was worried she would start doing this again, since she wasn’t working now plus they share her car.

Thankfully, she didn’t do that this time ’round. I know school’s kept her pretty busy and she gets almost as anxious about her grades as I do, so she might just want to stay home and study. My mom thinks she also doesn’t want to be anywhere near me, which is like, well, I don’t want her near me either, so win-win.

Anyway, full of trepidation, I walked in there, ignored my ex, and just breezily greeted my boss and asked what he wanted done and sat at my desk and worked with him. There was a lot of organizing that needed to be done, old (read: ancient) papers that needed to be filed, and a lot of data that needed to be transferred from one database to the other, so I was in my element. Organization is strangely relaxing and my boss is always thrilled when I organize things because “everything just makes so much more sense now”.

I had to walk right past my ex this one time, couldn’t avoid it as much as I’d wanted to, and from the corner of my eye, I see his facial expression just open up with curiousity (and maybe a bit of anxiety, since he did this freeze) with this kind of, “Oh, is she going to talk to me?” kind of look on his face. I didn’t talk to him, but it’s stuff like this that makes me think he’s still a little attracted to me.

And after all the students had left, it was just me, my boss, and my ex left and it was time to set everything down. During the evening, when he was teaching one of the smaller classes, him and my boss were kind of joking with each other and I was kinda grinning and chuckling at them both, and I could see my ex curiously glancing at me and watching my reactions and getting more comfortable around me. I wasn’t exactly comfortable around him, though, and I’d forgotten where everything went for set-down since it’d been over a year since I’d worked at that location, so I awkwardly asked him where I should put things because, I baldly stated, “I forgot”.

And he was super nice. He was all “Here let me help you with that” and “You could take a picture once we’re done so that way you’ll remember where everything goes in the cabinet” and “Don’t worry, I can do that part”. We wound up sitting on the floor side by side with me passing him stuff and him putting them away and explaining things to me.

It kind of reminds me of this one time before we started dating and we were still just getting to know each other and I was sitting on the floor, folding and sorting through things and he just sits down a couple feet away from me and asks if it’s okay if he watches me work because he doesn’t know what else to do with himself because he’s already done all the work he can think of. It was cute, him just sitting cross-legged there, a little shy and uncertain, talking to me.

And it reminds me of my first full shift with him, where I was really anxious because I’d just taken a few days off but now I had to explain program info to the new students by myself for the first time and I’d only worked there for a couple weeks and have a bit of social anxiety, and he just stepped in, on his first shift, and helped me with it until he had to leave to help with classes.

Anyway, he locked the cabinet before I could snap a picture of it so I was like, “Oh, am I not taking a picture of it then?” and he was joking, “No, never, absolutely not” then handed me his keys to unlock the thing and get my picture for future reference.

Then I put my phone in my back pocket, since my jeans didn’t have real pockets in the front, and I commented how stupid women’s jeans are, like, why are there fake pockets? If you’re going to go to all that trouble to sew those on, might as well go the full nine yards and put in actual pockets. He’s like, “Well, those are women’s jeans for ya.” and I’m like, “Well, women clearly didn’t design them” so we bantered a bit about jeans.

And I cried pretty much the whole way home because though I’d ignored him most the night, I still had to hear his voice (he has a really pleasant speaking voice, by the way) as he was teaching for six whole hours and he was being so nice and thoughtful towards the end of the evening, like, there he is, there’s the man I fell in love with, and ugh, I miss him so much.

The final shift with him was actually less emotional. It was similar to the shift before in that I mostly kept to myself and my desk and talked mostly with my boss, and then towards the end my ex seemed to get comfortable with me again. I was setting down and my ex just comes up beside me and asks, “Do you remember where everything goes?” I told him I had a picture for reference and apparently his episodic memory sucks because he didn’t seem to think I was stating the obvious or anything even though he’s the one who suggested I take the bloody picture in the first place.

Once again, I was reminded of back when he had a crush on me before we started dating and in the early days of our relationship, how he would often come up to me between teaching classes and strike up a quick conversation with me before returning to his work area. It’s almost like turning back the clock, things coming full circle.

I’d hoped that I would get a chance for a final farewell before he left, but I wasn’t sure of what I would say if I did. There’s all this stuff I want to say– “I’ll miss you”, “I wish things were different with us”, “Do you ever wonder what it would’ve been like if we’d never broken up?”, “I’m sorry”–and I really wanted to hug him too and kiss him on the cheek (definitely not actually do that kiss on the cheek, though, that would really be crossing a boundary), but feel like if I were that emotional, I’d screw up all the work I’ve put into maintaining that distance. And I can’t exactly wish him good luck because when it comes to his relationship with his girlfriend, I don’t want him to have good luck. I want their relationship to fail spectacularly, let’s be honest. Or maybe not spectacularly, but I do want them to break up– it’d sooth my ego.

So I settled on something very simple but heartfelt and honest.

Me, my ex, and my boss all walked out together, and each of us headed straight to our respective cars. As we parted ways, I called to my ex, “Take care, [Ex’s name]!” and he said “See you later, Irene.” in this low, serious voice.

So I feel things ended on as good a note with him as they could. And I think he wanted things to end on a good note too, which makes me feel like he still cares on some level, a far cry from the moodiness and resentment I’d gotten from him during the first year of their relationship. I feel like if I were ever to meet him again a couple years down the road, we would be able to start almost fresh from where we’re leaving off, without all the bad feelings. Of course, it’s a small world and the universities are thin on the ground here so we’re likely to run into each other on campus sooner than a few years into the future and I really hope we don’t because if he’s still with her I don’t want to see him, but for the time being I’m going to enjoy the time away from him and all the feelings because I’m just so done with bad feelings right now and now I finally have the time and space to work on getting rid of them.

Annoying Things People Say After a Break-Up: “He’s not a good person.”

“He’s not a good person.”

I’ve heard this one too many times.

Firstly, I wish people would stop acting like everyone fits into these neat little categories of “Good” and “Not Good”. Everyone has good and not good things about them. The percentages of good and not good might vary, but everyone is a blend on a spectrum. This dichotomy of good-not good doesn’t capture the complexity of human thought and behaviour.

So when you tell me “He’s not a good person”, my instinctive response is that what you’re saying isn’t true. I am fully aware of the bad things my ex has done. You really think that I’ve forgotten? And if he’s not a good person and not not a good person, then what exactly is he? It just prompts more analysis than what I should be doing right now.

Secondly, there are things you don’t see. Yes, he left me. Yes, he moved onto someone else quickly and shamelessly. But I still have the memories of when we were together. I remember all the times he’s comforted me, the times he’s picked me up in the middle of the night when I was upset. I remember him grabbing all these blankets for me because I was cold and him bundling me up in them and holding me close and teasing me about how I’m always cold. I remember waking up with his arms around me and him waiting for me to wake up before getting out of bed even though he wasn’t very comfortable (it was a small bed and his collarbone was broken), all because he didn’t want me to wake up alone. I remember him giving me shoulder massages when he noticed I was stiff or sore (I didn’t even have to ask). I remember him slipping gas money into my bag and texting after I dropped him off “Take a look in your bag” when I was stressing about my tank being empty. I remember that on the rare occasion that there was conflict, that he was always the first to say ‘I love you’, even if the conflict wasn’t resolved yet. I remember the dates before we said ‘I love you’ for the first time and the way he would stop what he was doing and just look into my eyes, open his mouth like he was going to say it, and then close it again, still looking right at me like he wanted me to read his mind and see the words he didn’t say yet. I remember date number four, when he noticed that something was bothering me and asked me to tell him; I told him, “That would take a while.” He said, “I’ve got lots of time.” And he listened to me complain about being poor and how I hated living where I did and school and how stressed out I was and he genuinely listened. He didn’t tell me to stop crying or offer pat answers. He just listened and held me. And he’d only known me about a month at the time. He was seventeen years old and shouldering an emotional burden that people much older still don’t even know how to handle.

So there’s these two versions of him in my head. There’s the one that cares about me and the one that doesn’t anymore. And they’re so different I can’t reconcile them. I’m confused. It’s like I’m dealing with two separate people.

So, “He’s not a good person” only winds up confusing me and making me miss him more. (General rule: if it confuses me, you shouldn’t say it. Confusion is intolerable to someone with anxiety.)