Spoke to NM earlier today!

Was typing an email to my friend and Yahoo messenger popped up with a "Hey!" from NM. I sat staring at it blinking on my screen for several minutes before typing back, "Hi." We chatted a bit back and forth, mostly neutral stuff. I'll post the whole convo later. Right now, I'm just trying to process what exactly I'm feeling. I know I'm not upset and I felt pretty calm while talking to her. I had zero problem standing my ground on the few things she said that I didn't agree with and wasn't about to let her slide with. I was respectful but calm. At one point she started talking like, "See. We can get along with one another! If you'll just be honest with me and tell me when I do something that upsets you, blah blah" and I nipped it right there and said, "Before you run away with yourself, I want to make it clear that just because I'm talking with you right now does NOT mean I'm ready to jump back into a relationship with you. I am in no way ready to see you at this time, nor do I wish to speak with you on the phone. I think I would be okay with sending emails back and forth a few times a year but, for right now, that's as much as I am willing to give and there are no promises." I made it clear that while I did love her and missed her in some ways, that I would NOT under any circumstances, go back to the way things were before.

She said she loved me and never meant to hurt me and I responded that while I'd love nothing more than to believe that were true, that it was hard given all the seriously negative comments that have gotten back to me over the last couple years from her, NHS and NSJ. She said that she had told everyone she didn't want to hear any badmouthing of me - not so sure I buy that at all - and then added, "I mean, at first, yeah, but not anymore".

There were a couple more comments about how she's not blameless but neither am I and how she's been hurt in this whole thing but, overall, we stuck to general topics and things went okay. Dh read it and then we talked about it and he said he's really proud of me. He said I managed a good balance of standing my ground on things but not allowing myself to get sucked back in to defending myself and becoming overly invested.

Overall, I guess I'm glad I talked with her. There is a measure of relief that that first reconnect is over with and I feel confident that I can handle further contact should I desire to do so. I don't know where I'll go from here. If I ever do resume some measure of contact, it will likely be an email relationship where we chat a couple times a month and any face-to-face contact will likely be restricted to only once a month at the most. For now, I'm just going to give it a few days. If I still feel like emailing her, then I will and if I don't, I won't.  :o)