Being all too familiar with avoidant attachment and also the dance of make-up and breakup, I’ve been friendly and careful with my ex-GF.

She recently said basically that I’m a liar via text.

She does this birthday party concept thing–well, her kid is 3, so she’s done it three times–wherein mostly adults paint a piece of art with acrylics in which there is a printed model that you can use and she has sketched the outline of the figure on canvases.

I’d only worked with watercolors, but did ok for a first time with acrylics for “La Petit Fleurs” this past spring.

I don’t know what the first year was. For her daughter’s second birthday all the pieces were “Plant of Life” by Georgia O’Keefe.

Originally, I thought that she’d painted it for me. She hadn’t. It was one of the ones that she had done during her daughter’s second birthday party. She didn’t bother to write anything on the back about me either. It wasn’t really a birthday present to me, but she wrapped it in Christmas paper and gave it to me for my birthday last year when we had a date a month after my birthday.

At the beginning of the month, after I had called her and she flipped her shit on the phone, and then I went over to her place the following night, she basically asked for it back.

She said that she’d take the O’Keefe back.

Me: “My birthday present?”

And then we had a conversation about it and I guess that she was just glad that I wasn’t throwing it away.

In the meantime for my birthday I had my basement steam cleaned and the entirety of my house cleaned professionally. There are some things that I want to go back over in every room but there is literally no hair anywhere. It’s never been like this since my ex-wife filled up my house with animals. I am going to run a 5k on Saturday and then come home and work in my house. I still need to throw things away and go back over the hood of my stove for example.

I was going through everything weekend before last and had a new present that my buddy from the Co-Ed Poly group had done for me–and wrote on the back for my birthday–and the color scheme fits my house so I put it on the wine cabinet where the O’Keefe had been. It looked like it belonged there. He’s done a commission of my son’s cat and also gave me a tile that I had my former sister-in-law’s partner lay into a table with sample tiles that a company gave me.

I wanted to get her back the “birthday present” so it would complete the wall in her group practice room. That’s where the paintings from her daughter’s 2nd and 3rd birthday party are hung. Recall that it wasn’t painted for me anyway. Also, that she said she’d take it back. She called me dishonest in text when I told her that I’d be returning it on Thursday.

I left her an audio saying that I think that we can build a good path to a friendship and not if we’re doing stuff via text. I told her it was weird.

I’m a lot of things. I’m not a liar.

In fact, my default setting is so direct that folks wish I’d do white lies.

There was a bunch of stuff that my son needed from her yesterday and I was meeting with a planner regarding my long term care stuff after work, so I had to dip yesterday. It was a good thing because my son and his GF spent 2-hours with her and needed that time. I’d have been a third wheel.

When I went into the foyer of her practice and got my Blu-Ray player and all my DVDs and such there was a bag with one Hail Mary in it. She’d held onto that thing for 4-months. And they have to be refrigerated so I just composted it.

What a passive aggressive and bizarre thing to do.

I’ve made my decision.

I’m not seeing her at all this fall and winter.

It was a good thing that my son and his GF needed her yesterday, they moved the time, and I simply dropped off her daughter’s sand toys, the painting, and a joke chap stick from some of our exchanges this month.

I grabbed my Blu-Ray player and the videos. That Hail Mary made me laugh and then feel like shit.

I had given her a ring for her birthday this summer. She had been putting pressure on me that now I understand resulted in a change to her having infrequent sexual types of contact with me. That ring means that I will always make February, which is a hideous grief stricken month for her, and her birthday special as long as she lives here. I’m a great friend.

I don’t want to see her otherwise until some time has passed.

I’m not a fan of her behavior currently and don’t want to be around her energy.

I want to keep things simple, minimal and work on myself as I brave the world of dating true to me.