Days 0751, 0752, 0753 & 0754

i am loving the past tense today as in this sentence:

Yesterday would have been my wedding 16th anniversary.

But, thank Dog, it wasn’t.

🙂

Day 0721

You know what?

Just because you think ‘all men get angry’ doesn’t mean I needed to stay with a man who was always angry.

Just because you make excuses that that’s ‘just him’ when he yells at you and humiliates you in public, doesn’t mean I needed to keep doing that.

And just because you think ‘you can always work harder and give a bit more’ to a relationship doesn’t mean I ‘gave up’ by escaping when I did.

I don’t judge you for staying.

Don’t judge me for breaking free.

Days 0677, 0678 & 0679

When I raised the fact that I had no friends with He Who Shall Not Be Named I got this response:

Aren’t I your friend?

When I volunteered at a women’s shelter for a short period – much to his disinterest – I was confronted by a pamphlet that said:

Does he isolate you from others and prevent you from forming friendships?

That coincided pretty much with my moving to a job where I finally found My People. So I stuck my toe in the water and started sharing some ‘ I can’t believe my spouse did x and y’ stories.

And much to my emerging horror the reactions I got weren’t shakes of the head and laughing ‘oh my’s but genuine horror quickly disguised as changes in subject.

Apparently not everyone gets SCREAMED at for cutting the capsicum in the ‘wrong’ direction.

Not everyone has to be the parents who gets up in the kiddie of the night every single time without end.

And when other people have

Minor eye surgery their partners actually don’t tell them they’re lazy, milking it and ‘GET THE FUCK UP AND HELP’ when the baby needs to be resettled in the night.

Having friends removed the scales from my eyes.

Day 0599

One of the best things about having spawn is the view of the world through their eyes.
It was those big blue eyes that made me realise how abusive my marriage was: ‘I like helping you, mummy. Dad never helps you, he just yells at you.’ ‘I’m going to teach you to run like a superhero so you get away from dad when he’s mad’
Hearing those things and seeing what my boy was seeing made it clear how wrong it was, how much I would have failed if I hadn’t shown him that it’s not ok to treat women (or anyone) that way.
We just went on a four-day road trip, the boy and I. We had lots of fun, played together, lazed about together, explored together. At the end of the trip I asked him what was the best bit. He had a few but he told me his favorite was when we were eating lunch near some holiday program kids. There were about 20 of them – all primary school age. They swarmed in and onto the various picnic tables. One boy, bigger than the rest and a bit tubby sat all alone at a table. No one joined him or said anything to him.
My son was clearly disturbed. I could tell because he’d stopped slamming back his pancakes.
‘He’s all alone, mum. I don’t want him to be alone; it doesn’t feel good.’
We talked about why the boy might be alone for a bit and both agreed we wished we could fix it. About 10 minutes later a huge smile lit up my boy’s face.
‘He’s not alone anymore, mum. I’m so happy.’
Writing this down, it feels like a bit of a cliche but it was devastatingly sincere.
If I’ve brought a compassionate man into the world, leaving that marriage was totally worth it for even more reasons.

Days 0553 & 0554

I know The Pill is meant to be this hugely liberating thing for women and I know it was back in the late 60s/early 70s but I hate the bloody thing.

I was hesitant to use it: I like the way my body tells me stuff as it waddles and bloats along its 28-32-day journey.

As much as it hurts sometimes, it’s terribly comforting to feel the *pop* of an egg making its way out those tubes like clockwork.

So, like I say, I avoided it. Besides, why should it be MY responsibility alone to make sure his tadpole didn’t cause trouble??

I resisted until I was 30 — pissing one or two people off along the way (which equals 50%-100% of males who were pissed off with me for that).

And then I tried it. It was hideous. I had a month of morning sickness followed by weight gain. Of course I didn’t gain weight in the places I would have liked and watched it glom onto the places I didn’t want it.

And my PMS was much worse. And it never worked — my bodily rhythms kept busting through until I had my period constantly apart from a one day break every once in a random while.

So I chucked them all out — those stupid foil packets — and thought: Fuck this.

I was long-married by then so it wasn’t like I was having sexual relations anyway really (I’m sounding bitter here, aren’t I)?

Then I had a kid.

And they added birth control pills to the veritable bonanza of drugs I was ingesting for the first two years of kid’s life until I finally chucked those out too. I hated taking them even more than the anti-psychotics that made me keep losing my car when I parked it in town (thank goodness for remote locking and flashing headlights).

Then I got rid of the blight on my life that was He Who Shall Not Be Named and entered a world I had never actually been part of: boyfriends and dating.

And the men were all (the two of them) like: ‘Oh, oops, I thought you would have taken care of that’ and ‘I just assumed you had — oh, jeez, sorry’ and ‘Is it safe?’ (that one made me laugh: like there was meant to be some coded word answer to that one — at least Halfman made me laugh albeit AT him that time) or the inelegant ‘Can I finish in there?’ (Halfman again, but that one didn’t make me laugh — it was more like finding a long and salubrious nose hair wafting from a loved one’s nostril at the apex of desire).

I do take responsibility for myself of course, I’ve found the ways that work for me. And I will not compromise them for someone else’s pleasure. At least I’ve stayed true to that one through all my other mistakes.

Day 0491

I was thinking back – not fondly but with a sense of having escaped – at that crushing feeling that used to be my regular companion in my personal life.
That one where I’d be feeling pleased that I’d ‘managed’ some new parent hurdle I related at the success or actions of a friend or family, only to be crushed into the dark, cold earth when I got told how selfish and thoughtless and stupid I was for – well – for not filling my thoughts with Him and His Needs all the time.
It was most definitely a falling sensation: like the one in our early dream sleep where you fall off a cliff and wake with a start. Except this was the falling sensation accompanied by darkness and disappointment. A mire-ing into the mud rather than a bottomlessness.
In fact an image came to mind of the aluminum pop cans the (in)cool dudes in junior high used to flatter under one foot. They would put the weight of one leg on the top of the can and a friend would flick the can’s middle just right … and PHWUMP! The can would be top and bottom with everything crushed I between. It was a satisfying sideshow: the sound, the small disc the can turned into.
That is what that emotional crush felt like – almost exactly.
It even had that sound effect as it pushed my heart outward and emptied me of ego.
PHWUMP.
There’s my wife. In her proper place: crushed into a flat disc and tossed into the recycling bin. They don’t make ’em like they used to.

Days 0455 & 0456

When I was a little girl, I dreamed of getting married. I even got up at some ungodly hour on my birthday in 1981 to watch cream-puff-wearing Di make her stumbling vows. It was all so pompous and opulent. Sigh. Romance.
I didn’t ever dream of actually being married of course.
Does anyone?
In fact, I never thought beyond the decoration and romance of the getting married to realise there was life afterwards: one in which you had to get on with the same person for ever.
I listened to my dad, who I admire and love very much, make slightly catty comments about couples who didn’t get married. ‘Why bother moving across the country together if you can’t be bothered getting married?’ He said once when I was about 16.
So when my boyf of five years and I headed halfway around the world for four years of chasing marine mammals, I thought getting married was what I was meant to do. The right thing. The correct thing. The loving thing.
But it wasn’t. It felt wrong in my gut when we walked into the city hall office on a minus-20 degree day in February. The friend who had helped with my hair had parted it on the wrong side, but what did I know? So I didn’t correct it.
My future father-in-law, grumpy at not being told the date of our elopement employed a grad student to pretend to be taking a survey and get the date out of me. I thought that was beyond mean when I found out. My groom thought it was funny and told me I was stupid for not realising it was a trick. I still just thought it was mean.
The judge who married us commented on how he’d known someone with my maiden name. ‘Died in a plane crash,’ he sloshed out with his mainly drunken tongue.
Good memories. Just like that wedding I dreamed of in St Paul’s Cathedral as I sat with my nightie pulled over my feet to keep me warm and watched Chuck and Di co-opt my 10th birthday celebrations 12 years earlier.

Day 0447

Is it possible that long term relationships are just continual wishful thinking that never gets shattered? That two wishful thinkers get together and spend their time thinking in an unreal way?
I’ve been thinking about what is the hardest part of a relationship to get over.
Stay with me; it’s on the same continuum.
The hardest part of saying goodbye to a relationship is letting go of dreams – they may not even have been fully formed; just some romantic story that you vaguely thought you were heading towards. But letting go of that part; the dream of a happy, life long marriage; the dream of trusting someone implicitly to give themselves to you body and soul; the dream of having someone to care for you in a foreign land far from home …
I’m quite sure that sort of dreaming is what left me working at my dreadful marriage for two years of relationship counselling. The reality and the wishful thinking were not even parallel lines – they diverged too greatly.
And I remember saying to Halfman when he asked what expectations I had for our relationship: No expectations; lots of dreams.
I was honest, at least.
Could I live in a bubble of wishful thinking for decades?
I suspect so; and I suspect I’d be happy enough as long as the bubble never got popped by reality.
I certainly couldn’t rebuild the bubble, once it had collapsed all over my face.

Day 0353

Louis C. K. has this line he uses that goes something like:
No good marriages end in divorce.

And that is so true.
But thousands (millions) of bad marriages never end at all.
And although people always greet news of a divorce with sadness and ‘that’s such a shame’ statements, it’s not the divorce so much as the end of a dream, the end of love and the having to go through such a hard thing that they’re bemoaning.
Because, in the end, the only thing more painful than a divorce, the only thing uglier, is the perpetuation of a marriage that should have been put down and taken to the glue factory long ago.
When marriages go wrong, the people in them think: But we were sooooo in love. It was so beautiful.
As if those are reasons to keep it going.
I now believe those are the exact reasons it needs to end.
Is there anything more disrespectful to a beautiful memory than claiming a life the opposite of it is what keeps that beauty alive?
By letting a marriage become a living hell that you avoid at the end of the work day rather than sigh and lean into, aren’t you actually demeaning the beauty and respect that did once exist?
That’s not to say I condone giving up.
Marriage (to quote the movie ‘The kids are all right’) is just so fucking hard.
It is hard and you do have to always work at it. That’s why when it works, it is such a truly beautiful thing.
But when it isn’t working, when the beauty, respect, symbiosis, are all gone and reversing in on themselves, when you wake up hating the person next to you and yourself for hating them, it’s time to let go of the ‘but we were so in love’ and ‘it was so beautiful’ and allow that beauty and love to be preserved by ending the downward spiral.
Ending it before it gets so ugly you no longer remember the beauty.

Day 0340

The reason one says yes to getting married is far too complex to boil down to a single thing, but it’s interesting to try to do it, just to distil that layered and emotional time a bit.

For me, I got married the first time because we were about to travel to the other side of the world for four or five years and it was scary. Also, I was in love. And my dad always said of other people that he couldn’t understand why you’d commit to travel together but not to be married.

The second time it was because I was determined not to stuff it up and disappoint myself, my parents and everyone else. I wasn’t head over heels in love so I figured that was the optimum setting for it: I could be rational and make it work. No matter what.

A friend told me he got married because: She said if we didn’t then she was going to take the house and the dogs and I liked the way my life was.

Another friend told me: She’d been bugging about doing it. It was summer in [a European country], we’d spent the day picking grapes and as we were driving away it occured to me that if I got married I wouldn’t have to worry about women and relationships ever again.

Now, I look back at my reasons as pretty damn silly and thin and honest. But that last one – the one from a friend – breaks my heart with its naive hopefulness and gentle giving in. Its romance and its total practicality – albeit in a magical universe of some sort.

I really feel for the poor bugger.