It’s a lovely wheel. It really is. I remember when I bought it. At the urging of my incredibly-talented late friend, Maiysha, I acquired a second wheel. My first was the CS2 I sold last week. It was a good wheel, and perfect for the art-yarn styles of spinning I was interested in, but I wanted something I could do more with, and the CS2 isn’t a good wheel for thin spinning. So… this creature. It’s a Majacraft Aura. It’s lovely, truly. It’s just… Well, it has baggage.

The wheel was kinda sort of a gift from my almost-ex. I say “almost” because we’re not technically divorced yet. It’s complicated, just like my relationship to this wheel. It wasn’t really a gift. Not in the traditional sense. It was timed to arrive around our “wool anniversary”. I told a pretty story about how he’d gotten it for me, and how darling that was. But that’s what it was: a story. The reality was that the wheel was acquired, like so many things, in an attempt to soothe a hurt, and patch a wound, and fill a hole that was only getting deeper by the year. By year seven, our marriage was basically dead in the water. But I continued to prop it, and him, up, and puppet the dead stories around as if there were life in them still. And to prop myself up, to fortify myself against the crushing weight of the sadness and loneliness and deadness in my own being, I bought things. Like the things could make me happy somehow…

Now he’s gone (again). And so are a lot of the things, habits, people and patches for old holes I now have to actually mend. I want to be able to just freely enjoy the dang thing, but I never have. It’s why I fought with the CS2 to spin thinner than it was designed for. The CS2 was something I bought for myself without pretense or a story or a need to convince myself I had an actual happy life and decent partner… a role he possibly never wanted to play anyway. The CS2 didn’t have feelings. This thing definitely does, if not in and of itself, then certainly by virtue of all I’ve projected onto it. And so, like so much of the unraveling and reclaiming I’ve had to do since my husband abandoned the children and I again, I have to confront the reality of this object, as it actually is, and decide what I’m going to do about it.

When my not-yet-ex abandoned us the first time, I found ChumpLady and her brilliant post Untangling the Skein of Fuckedupedness, and I felt seen. I have spent well over a decade of my life trying to decode and unravel and understand the manipulative, abusive, neglectful, hurtful, damaging behaviors that existed in my marriage. I wanted to solve the problem. I think that’s fair, and my intentions were good. I wanted to create the life I wanted for myself and my children and my “happy family”. I wanted it so badly I was willing to lie to myself about what it actually was, and go to great lengths to spin fantastic tales about how things could appear to be, but actually weren’t. The end result, of course, was that I was chronically exhausted in ways I didn’t even realize until he left again and I finally decided to STOP.

So, what to do with that now? Where does the story go from here, and how will it end? And that’s where this tired Yarnie finds herself today: what new yarn to spin from this mess? The only thing I know is that I’ve finally given up hope of untangling that messy skein. It’s not my work to do, and I’d never succeed, no matter how much effort I sank into that work. The owner of that skein of fuckedupedness may like it just the way it is. It’s not for me, and so I move forward, ready to spin my own yarn. Hopefully in a healthier, less codependent way this time.