All Mexico Roller Derby Championships

Mexican Nationals

11/18/16

Leon, Mex to Juarez, Mex

Zero Miles ridden

As I begin this I am seated on a VivaAerobus flight from Guadalajara to Juarez Mexico.  To say that the spacing is a bit tight would be an understatement.  I feel like this is the only time having T-Rex arms might be of some help.

Overall the day has been good, despite small seat spacing. We had to rush out of the house this morning as Montserrat was not ready to go as fast as she had planned. It meant a bit of a rush to make the two and a half hour drive to Guadalajara to catch our flight.  The drive was smooth enough but we were too late to get to the house where we had planned to store the car.  Instead we were forced to pay 75 pesos a day to store the car at a pay lot outside the airport and then grab a shuttle.

The airport was packed with familiar faces from San Luis Potasi and from Guadalajara.  It was a smooth check in process for us but several skaters from Bastardos and Los Furiosas (San Luis Potasi) were not allowed to bring their skates in their carry-ons and it was already too late to go and check them so they missed the flight.

I tried to use the flight for writing but my lack of sleep caught up fast and I was out like a light for the majority of the ride.

Once in town we were picked up and taken to grab some food before going to the venue for part one of the tryouts for Team Mexico Women's Roller Derby.  Montserrat was set to skate so I took the time to do a full clean on my bearings. Without normal maintenance supplies I was reduced to fully dissembling the bearings all the way down to separated components and cleaning them with a rag.
Not all of the refs fared so well with the schedule

After tryouts we went to the house we would be staying at.  It was a great gesture but turned out to be a bit of a party house.  We ended up going for pizza and by the time we got back the marijuana smoke was heavy in the room.  I excused myself to the stair well and ate my food their.  Our host saw how uncomfortable I was with the situation and offered us the use of her room.  Montserrat and I graciously accepted the offer and decided then that we would find something different for the rest of the weekend,

The actual tournament was a unique and wonderful experience. I ended up as one of the alternating crew head refs with Sir Veza as my counter part on the crew.  I ended up working 11 games over the weekend, including the men's and women's finals. While it was certainly my first time getting a death threat from a coach, I didn't let that damper my view of an otherwise amazing weekend.

Montserrat and I had ups and downs over the weekend as she and I were both independently stressed, but we came out of it all still very happy.  For a rather new relationship it was a really nice first fly away together.

Cat and I also talked over the weekend but I kept managing to get her messages as I was running out of time between games or as I was working the Mota booth to help out Corina, I felt bad and I know that it can't have been easy to have been just starting make sense of opening our relationship and then to seem as if I was unreachable.    

From Cat

After making the decision to open our relationship, I spent the next week or so trying to process and make sense of what I was feeling. My brain kept trying to understand what was going on by comparing. I wondered what their interactions were like if they were anything like ours? What happened if he fell in love with her? How did she compare to me? Was she “better” than me? Was there something that she was giving I couldn’t? While I never for a moment doubted Zack’s love for me, I remember also very much wanting the reassurance. I wanted to make sure nothing had changed between us. And I was needing that support bit more than I cared to admit. I really wanted to be that person that just instantly understood everything and was “okay” with it right away. But I kept going back and forth between logical understanding and having my raw emotions take over.


The bridge between knowing something and your feelings about that thing is often hard to cross, and this was going to take some time. I felt all of those old fears and insecurities from my past come rushing back again. Before Zack, I had only been in two prior relationships. The first was in my freshman year of high school and it ended very abruptly. We had been very close friends for many years and I really cared for him. Losing that relationship and more importantly, that friendship, without any warning, was very hard for me. For whatever reason, it left such an impression that every relationship after, I have been afraid that something would change. That it would end immediately like that again and that I would be left alone, hurting, in pain, and wondering what I did wrong. The second relationship was my ex-husband and we were together for 9 years. That is a lot of time and effort put into a relationship, even if it wasn’t the healthiest. When I found out he was cheating on me it also left quite the mark. He intentionally and purposefully hid his inappropriate actions with other woman from me and went to great lengths to do so. He then lied to me and made me feel as if it was my fault when I found out. This once again left me feeling very self-conscious, hurt and with a lot of questions. My head was reeling and I was trying so hard to keep it all separate.

Were my feelings about what was happening right now legitimate or was I projecting? I knew that this was a completely different relationship, and more importantly, a partnership. This was being done with complete openness. Yes, it was incredibly hard to hear about at times, but life isn’t always easy is it? No, I wasn’t upset at him and was not holding his feelings against him; how could I? He was completely upfront and honest with me from the very beginning. He wasn’t cheating because there is complete consent and knowledge by all parties. So why was I having such a hard time with this?
After quite a bit of self-analysis, I realized that one of the things I was having a really tough time with was him not physically being here to reassure me. While I was getting the verbal and emotional reassurance, I really wanted that physical too. I missed Zack. I not only wanted a hug and a kiss, but I also wanted those little moments that we share together that had come to mean so much to me. I wanted to feel that everything was alright and that nothing had changed. And right now, I just couldn’t have it. I was also having to come to terms with the fact that Montserrat was getting that time with him. And that was proving to be tough for me to cope with. But I also knew that this was something I was going to need to work through if this was going to work. At least now that I was aware of it, I could stop it from having power over me and my thoughts. I soon came to realize that while this wasn’t going to be easy and I wasn’t processing it all nearly as quickly as I would have liked, this was just something that I was going to have to work through and, like him, just continue to move forward.

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