The Things I Avoid, As A Single Parent

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Having a husband meant there were certain domestic tasks I never had to face. That’s changed now that I’m the only adult in charge. Here are the things I sheepishly avoid…

Garbage disposal needs to be replaced: sounds like chainsaw massacre when I flip the switch. My solution: put a cute, plastic drain-catch over the drain so no more food slips past my lame attempts to grab it out of the sink. No more sticking my hand down “there” and risking a phantom turning on the disposal and leaving me five-digits-less. Now I just watch all the crap puddle in the cute plastic drain-catch and then I procrastinate cleaning it out.

Ceiling light in kids’ bedroom faulty: excessive temps and electrical burn. After having 4 fighters in the house at 10pm to help me figure out where my house was about burst into flame, I removed the ceiling fixture and moved in a table lamp. First, it’s summer and it doesn’t get dark until, like, midnight so I even thought about not putting a light of any kind in the room. Second, all of the table lamps we have are low-wattage, so the 40-watt bulb’s benefit is questionable. It’s almost 3 months later now, and getting dark much earlier. The good news is that I bought a new ceiling light.  The other news is that it’s sitting in the corner of the room. Getting it out of the box and mounted on the ceiling – with all of the wires connected – might take another 3 months. This is a lesson in avant-garde fashion: patterns and colors don’t have to match when choosing what to wear. Be free and take a chance on what comes out of the dresser drawer!!

Rain gutters need to be cleaned: I’m not looking. If I don’t see it, it’s not there. We’re in a drought anyway. No rain running off of the roof to be directed away from the house and my head as I walk out the door. Occasionally I contemplate getting up on the ladder and checking and then I think, “Why?”.

TV remote stopped working: fancy Logitech device that consolidates three remotes into one. Have seriously contemplated just getting rid of the television instead of fixing it.  After 3 days of horrid TV watching because I can’t really navigate the channels, I finally wrote “Call ATT” on my list…it might actually be a technical problem someone else has to fix! Looked at “Call ATT” on the list for another 3 days. Last night I sat and held the remote firmly in my two hands. I pleaded with the God of Electronics to invisibly intervene and straighten out whatever radio wave or internet signal or mind-control device was being emitted between the remote and the TV. Guess what? It worked. My 20 minutes of clutching and silent begging fixed the remote. I don’t have to throw away my TV!!! Imagine how happy that made me. Sigh.

What I DID do!!! I bought the wasp-yellow-jacket-hornet spray and got rid of a nest in the rafters off the living room deck. We were sitting out reading one afternoon when I noticed a cluster of yellow-jackets under the gutters and in the rafters (damn gutters again!).  My first mistake was pointing this out to my kids. They ran away screaming and haven’t ventured to that side of the house since. I didn’t really make a second mistake, except that I did decide to get rid of them myself.

Found the spray at the local hardware store easily (and had a 15% off coupon, which made me feel thrifty and in charge). My initial plan was to wear as many layers of clothes as possible, including covering my head and face, to avoid being stung by the crazed yellow-jackets. My oldest LOVED this plan and asked if she could video it. I said yes, and then I reminded her that she would have to stop taping and call 911 if things went wrong. She said, with a completely straight face, that she would only video long enough to catch all the action and then she would call 911. Definitely no more 2 or 3 minutes between me being eaten alive by yellow-jackets and dialing for help. Hmmm.  Not what I wanted to hear.

After reading the instructions on the spray bottle, which by the way, the very first point that is made is to spray the bottle AWAY from oneself, I decided that I didn’t need all of the layers of protection. It sounded like the spray immobilized the pests immediately, assuming I actually hit the target.  I was relieved to not have to suit-up because it’s been warm and I was starting worry about passing out from heat exposure, compounded by my nervousness around possibly being swarmed by yellow-jackets. By the way, my oldest told me I didn’t need to feel bad about killing the yellow-jackets. She said they’re only consumers and don’t provide a benefit to the environment. Sounds like another species we all know and love…

The instructions on the spray can left me feeling confident so I decided to take down the nest when the kids weren’t home. I did, however, attempt to video it myself. Meh. Not all that interesting, but we’ll save it for posterity. Anyway, it worked! I hit the nest with my first attempt and about six little critters fell to the deck. I felt a little bad about taking their lives, but I really couldn’t have a nest on my deck at my living room door. If they had been bees, I would have hired someone to remove them. I swear.

The lesson I did store away is that I should have waited until evening when all of the yellow-jackets were back home. For the past hour, I’ve been watching about 10 circle the destroyed nest. Are they plotting against me as a type??

The Scalded Nipple Incident

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It was a good day and I was happy…happier than I had been in many weeks. The kids were with NH, but I didn’t feel the stress of their absence. Instead, I was content to be in the moment and leave the worries and fears on shelf. I gave myself permission to be free for a few hours. Troubles would be there when I returned.

I had hiked and I had showered. I picked up a latte for TA, a fellow mother who was incapacitated by major reconstructive ankle surgery. As my life was falling apart, I appreciated that I was a healthy, clean smelling, thoughtful friend. I even had a piping hot cup of tea for myself. I approached my friend’s front door, balanced the tea on top of the latte and used my chin to hold the two cups in place. Leaning forward with my free hand I reached for the doorbell and SWISH, the cups buckled inward towards me and scalding hot tea-water poured down my shirt. My involuntary reaction was to throw both drinks against my friend’s front door. I held in a scream. I pulled at my shirt to get the molting hot fluid as far away from my skin as possible, yet the intense burning persisted. I clutched my breast and realized that my bra had absorbed the scalding water and was holding it against my nipple and the surrounding area. The pain!

I marveled at how the hot water seemed to have hit nothing except my bra. I was thrown between fascination and excruciating pain of a burning breast. My white shorts were clean; I couldn’t feel water anywhere else on my top except in my damn bra. How did I manage that? And then I was wincing from the pain again. Breasts should never be burned. Not by the sun, cigarettes, ropes or hot tea. Never. By anything.

Thankfully, my hobbled friend did not hear the commotion, and thankfully she had a bench in her entryway where I could sit and gather myself. I seriously considered beating a hasty retreat and hiding at home, but she was expecting me. Besides, the mess I had created wasn’t going to clean up itself. She would know I had been there, and she would see that I had cracked. “Wow. She’s worse than I thought…throwing coffee cups at my front door”. I peaked at my breast – ouch – the blazing red skin around my nipple made me cringe. Would it blister? Would it scar? Great. I was going to have a deformed breast.  Would it be a badge of honor that always reminded me of how I held my cool during this insane time of life or would it be the first of many battle scars that evoked the torment and suffering of the summer of 2009?

The contents of my cup were dripping down the wall and door and pooling near the welcome mat. The latte had survived relatively unharmed, but knowing what I did about its little journey from the coffee shop to this front door, it seemed pathetic.  I sat and contemplated: sit and cry silently, slip away, knock louder on the door and ask for help or run home to get cleaning supplies and pretend this never happened. I decided to pick myself up, go back out in the world and get more hot beverages. I left the cups, the dripping, pooling mess, and texted TA about the situation:

Me: Do u want/need food? I just dumped my drink in your entry. Going to get another. Yours is safe!

TA: I’m good on food. R u coming back to join me?

Me: If you want company i can stay for a bit.

TA: Yes!!

TA: Oh, now I see the mess 😉

Me: On my way. Dont touch it!

TA: Well it’s like torture eyeing the coffee and I can’t get it!!

TA was using crutches and there was no way for her to bend down and pick up her intact drink. She had to stare at it, and the liquid disaster, through the screen door and hope I was coming back soon.

I returned, hosed down her entryway, and we settled into chairs outside in the backyard. We each had a load to share. Hers: the frustration of recovering from a serious surgery where her ankle was completely rebuilt; the agony of having her husband diagnosed with an advanced case of prostate cancer, and his surgery. Me: a husband who decided that on the eve of our eleventh wedding anniversary that the marriage was in major crisis and that he was abandoning ship. Three children, his own health scare/breakdown, a successful/failed business that came within inches of breaking the two of us, and four years of waiting…waiting for him to figure out what he wanted to do with his life; waiting for him to make a serious effort towards something; waiting for him to tell me how I could help and support him…had not deterred me from holding onto our marriage and the idea we could pick up the pieces and make a good show of it. Man, I was determined to a fault. Naïve. Afraid.

Depending on where you like to find your statistics, 50-65% of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce. One truly has a 50/50 chance of having a “successful” marriage (I put successful in quotes because I don’t believe that a life-long marriage equals a good, happy or healthy marriage, but that’s a topic for another time). So the fact that I was in a whirlpool of turmoil in my marriage wasn’t remotely unique…and not all that interesting from the outside. We had no stories of infidelity…that I’m aware of. Neither of us is an addict. Out of control spending hadn’t driven us to financial ruin. The horror of domestic violence wasn’t our reality. We were simply faced with sorting through some very mundane, adult themes: How did our families color and shape our intimate relationships? How, as adults, do we put to rest the demons from childhood (and believe me, we each had our fair share)? Where did our connection short-out? Could we mend the damage that’s been done? Did we even want to wake up next to one another every day? In my relationship/marriage to NH, there were 18 years of inconsistent communication, the build-up of little resentments that affect intimacy, and after enough hurt I’ve had to wonder if he can be trusted with my heart. I believe, looking back, that he never trusted me with his and that he wasn’t capable. TA points out that most couples are literally one bad argument away from where NH and I find ourselves in the summer of 2009. Boy, for their sake I hope not, I think to myself.

Looking back, I now believe that we started with everything going against us. My therapist  – God bless this women, she was my life preserver on very rough waters – would say, repeatedly, that if we had been put in a room with a thousand eligible people, we still would have gravitated to one another. This is because NH’s unique set of issues coupled perfectly with mine. We were like moths drawn to what kills them, the bright light; we were destined to orbit closely and burnout. Of course, she had a more hopeful message. One filled with the possibility of healing the wounds and building a story where the gravitational pull doesn’t make the planets collide, but instead they’re able to hold a symbiotic path and actually enhance one another’s existence. And for a while she believed this.

NH is not a horrible person – although he does continue to baffle me. I like to think that I’m pretty ok, too. Yet we were unable to meet one another with complete trust and acceptance. I understand better, knowing what I do about our lives, and that’s where the heartbreak lives for me. Repairs may have – for a brief time – been possible, but we missed the opening.

The scalded nipple incident ended well. I cleaned the wall, wiped the door and watered down the tea so it wouldn’t stain the stone entry. TA and I sat on her deck, enjoyed a beautiful afternoon, and talked about the pitfalls of marriage, the frustration and joy of kids, and that (sometimes) elusive search for purpose and meaning to one’s life. We enjoyed the hot drinks, round two, without episode. And, thankfully, there was no blistering or scarring of my dear left breast.

 

Nesting Like Sweet Birds…Only We’re Not Sweet and None of Us Can Fly

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Without knowing the term, NH and I decided to create a nesting situation for the kids: they stay put in their family house and he and I take turns living there and caring for them. This was an easy move for NH because he had crashed at a divorced friends’ house. I, on the other hand, had to stitch together a crappy living situation. That’s not just me feeling sorry for myself…although I had plenty of those moments. I was a stay-at-home-mom, close friends with other (mostly) stay-at-home-moms, and all intact families. Finding a place to stay wasn’t easy me for because most people didn’t have the room, a few hadn’t told their kids what was happening and didn’t want to answer the inevitable questions, and I had no money to rent a small space or even stay at a hotel. One fearless, dear friend stepped up, though, and offered a place for me, which I did accept. But I didn’t want to impose so I made an effort to break-up where I slept on my “off days”. Because it was summer I was able to stay at several homes while friends were away on vacation.

I know everyone was giving support and love and kindness, and I believe they wanted to help. It was demoralizing, though. I was displaced, in shock over the possibility that my marriage might end, and so deeply hurt about not being with my children. Packing a bag, being told I couldn’t go into my HOME – the place I had literally crafted as our safe haven – was inconceivable. But the “nesting” was my idea and it made sense: keep the kids stationary while we figure out what the hell just happened. I did what all girls do: I sucked it up and put on good public face.

The man  – the other human being – I thought would always be my best friend had completely retreated from me. I couldn’t go in and check on my sleeping children before I turned in for the night. I wasn’t allowed to make their favorite breakfast or plan a fun summer outing on a whim. My heart was in absolute distress and my soul felt like it had been set adrift in unknown territory.

Some background: NH had been home for 4 years, and by that I mean he hadn’t worked. He closed a business after suffering some serious mental/physical health issues (and yes, there was a direct connection between the two), but he did not participate in our day-to-day life. He was a ghost of sorts who walked on the periphery of our world. We did eat dinner together every night, which is something, but he locked himself away and retreated into his own world every other waking minute.

At first, given the foundering of his mental/physical being, I was relieved he had stopped working. The chasm that had opened in his mind and heart was big and I wanted him to tend to it, to find some peace. I ran the house and cared for the kids in all ways imaginable, which was my job, but I had no support from my partner who was literally 20 feet from us at all times of day. He simply didn’t participate.  I had to ask his permission to leave one of the younger kids home if it was raining and I didn’t want to drag them to school pick-up for an older sibling. He usually said yes, but he acted like it was a burden and I had to give very specific information about how long I would be gone…and I better not get delayed because then he would be overtly annoyed. I had to get a dentist who took Saturday appointments because he wouldn’t come out of his home-office Monday-Friday and play with the kids for an hour. He would act put upon to attend school functions like class plays or holiday parties and he often wouldn’t go. The number one reason? It conflicted with his yoga schedule. Dude went to yoga instead of participating a classroom party for one of his kids. Years later, I get it…NOW we’ve been to 500 class parties and taken pictures of a gazillion craft stations that included glitter and glue…but back THEN this was all new and every fucking popsicle stick creation was a masterpiece not to be missed.

One year into his “recovery” I did become resentful. I was afraid and I wasn’t quite sure why. There was the obvious: running the household and raising the kids was becoming more stressful for me. I started realizing that the boundaries we – I have to take some responsibility for what was happening – had established worked against the long-term health of our family unit. NH became less and less available for normal tasks.

About two years into his self-exploration-recovery efforts, I was offered a part-time job. It would have required NH taking care of the kids one to two afternoons a week, maybe 4 hours each time. I would have earned enough to cover the groceries, which is a nice bill to have taken care of given that we all like to eat…as in, we need to eat. Call me crazy for wanting to give my kids food!! NH’s response, “If you’re unhappy being a stay at home mom, go ahead and take the job. I mean, I understand if you just need to get away from your kids. Also, I’m not your babysitter and I won’t watch them when you’re in the office. I have things to do.“ Wow. I was shamed and crushed all once. How’s that for effectively shutting down your partner?? Guess what? I didn’t accept the job.

The reality of shuffling myself in and out of my home and in out of my kids’ lives was torture. I cannot emphasize this enough. I didn’t see it as an opportunity to take an art class or catch up on pleasure reading. I saw it as a big fucking danger sign and my body was in survival mode.

At All Cost

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Today is 7/23/13. I wrote this passage 4 years ago. It hurts to read it again. Not because I feel the same despair and anger, but because I remember feeling it and I grieve for us and for the difficult journey we were on. I want to go back and deeply embrace us all. I want to give an invisible shoulder to lean on.

I’m a little embarrassed reading this now…and I cringe a weensy bit when I think about posting it. I was so raw and vulnerable and the pain is shocking to look back on. But that’s part of our beauty as human beings; we are such complex and intricately stitched together creatures. Our rough edges and flaws are as legitimate as our gentle, intact and sound parts. And now, here’s what it was like to tell my three children that NH and I were separating.  Ugh.

My children. My dreams and fears. They are all so beautiful. It’s more than the color of their eyes, the way their noses are set or the gentle curve of their chins. They possess that infinite love, hope, and innocence that only a child can. They speak from the heart. They feel intensely and often. They’re bursts of laughter, runaway silliness, and the sweetest of joys. They’re selfish and needy, anxiety ridden at moments and seriously unaware. And I love them immensely, immeasurably and intensely. Their pain is my pain; their bliss is my bliss. And one day we will have to separate, and I will release them fully to the world and to themselves. Today, though, they are mine and I cherish the moment.

I believe fiercely – some could argue foolishly – that there is nothing in this world that compares to a mother’s love. Nothing stronger, more virtuous, more right, more deep than the love a mother has for her children. Yes, fathers love their children and would sacrifice themselves to preserve their offspring. But that’s just it. It’s about preserving an offspring and not cherishing the child. That’s power shaded by love. When you hold a living being inside your flesh and nourish it with your blood, a commitment is forged from the strongest of steels. The need to protect the life is simply pure love.  Life as they know it is threatened now, and I’m in protection mode.  But what am I protecting them from? From NH? From all the uncertainty? From the landslide that our life is in? I don’t want them to know divorce. I don’t want them to question the stability of our life together – not yet, not because of me.

Shortly after NH told me he was leaving, he commented that he would take the girls with him a few days every week. Take them? Why? No, I wasn’t going to have any of that and quickly suggested that he and I take turns being in the house and caring for them. I didn’t really think through how displacing myself would play out; I only knew that my children needed stability. They needed to lay their heads on their pillows, in their beds every night, and they needed to open their eyes every morning and see the only four bedroom walls they had ever known. NH suggested it would be fun and camp-like for them to stay with him at his friend’s house. I could not believe he was serious. Fun? Camp-like? Sleeping on the living room floor of a strangers’ house? This was the beginning of their world being spilt in two, not a fucking trip to Yellowstone. Thankfully, he agreed with me, though, and we set about creating this ridiculous “on-off” parenting arrangement.

It was a Wednesday night at dinner when we explained to the kids that we were having a serious argument and that sometimes when this happens adults need some space from one another (yeah right, real adults wouldn’t run away. Real adults stand and face the onslaught of anger and disappointment. Real adults look one another in the eye and speak from their heart about their experiences, their fears and their needs. Real adults take ownership of the shit they created and real adults do right by their partner. But, hey, I’m not angry or bitter about this separation.) So we were going to create some space and take turns being in the house and caring for them. All of the standard catch phrases were spoken: this isn’t anyone’s fault, we love you more than anything, your world is intact and will stay on course, we will work hard to resolve this and put the pieces back together.

NH did most of the talking. I was truly and utterly broken-hearted. Devastated: verb, destroy or ruin something • cause (someone) severe and overwhelming shock or grief. I was the definition of devastated. I’m not sure if the pain of losing my mother when I was 24 even compares to the pain of knowing I had to leave my children, even if it was only for a few days every week. And after we put them to bed and he prepared to leave the house, I sat at the kitchen table and I asked him what he was going to do to take care of himself. I had witnessed him have, what can only be described as a major emotional breakdown that afternoon during therapy, and I believed he needed serious outside support. He had the nerve, the insensitivity, the pure gall to ask me what I thought he should do. I didn’t have a mirror so I can’t be sure what the look was that I gave him, but I know what the feeling was.  Simple hatred. He tears our children’s life apart because he is incapable of processing his own emotions and being a present, engaged adult, and then he asks me what he should do. Jump off of the bridge, fucker. Crawl in a hole and die. I won’t dance on your grave, but I won’t shed a tear either.

Words do not adequately describe the pain of involuntarily leaving my children, of packing a bag and walking out of my house and leaving my children behind. There is a small piece of hate in my heart reserved just for NH because of this. Now, I know that I need to be very careful to not nurture this hate, and that I will need to process and release it one day soon. But as I write now, it’s there. It has a tiny pulse and although it spends most of the day and night silent, it does breath.

p.s I just remembered that part of NH’s breakdown at therapy included him admitting that he hoped for my plane to crash when I went to visit family. Without the kids. Just me being torn to pieces in a plane crash. Thanks, darling. I hope the UPS truck runs you over, too.

Movies Are for Escaping Harsh Realities, Right?

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My children are worriers. They come by it honest. Do you remember the shooting at the movie theater in Aurora, CO? Hopefully no one has forgotten. One of my children hasn’t, and every time we go to the movies she gets worried. She tells me, in her sweet, soft voice, that she likes going to the movies but that she worries someone will come in and shoot her.  Parenting is humbling in so many ways, and this is one of those “bring me to my knees” conversations.

I’ve been able to give one part validation: of course that was horrible and scary and I understand your fear; and one part reassurance: no one is going to hurt you and that won’t happen to us. It’s a lie, right? People will hurt her in life and crazy shit does happen to innocent people.  I look her in the eyes and I tell her everything is going to be OK. And then I give her a long hug, as if it might create a force field of sorts around her that can deflect a mad-man’s bullets.

Yesterday, the kids took a big step towards independence – the kind of independence that no one thought twice about when I was growing up. They walked from our house to the local movie theater with two other friends, about 1 mile. It was a beautiful summer day, they had money in their pocket for a stop at the ice cream store and they were happy. And then my one who worries about being shot in a movie theater says, “I want to go, but I’m worried. You know. About someone coming in with a gun.” I look her in the eyes, hands on her shoulders, digging deep inside myself for confidence and authority but adding a little light-heartedness, and I say, “We know all the crazy people in this town and none of them own guns. No one is going to hurt you in the movie theater.” She smiles a bit and asks, “Who are the crazy people in our town?” and I tell her that we might be on the list of crazies and that some of our dear friends might be on the list, too. She relaxes and they’re out door.

Two weighty issues here: the soft lies we tell our children to comfort them and to maintain their sense of security, and crazy people with guns! Our society fails the mentally ill. Not many seem to care  and yet we all pay dearly for this state of denial.

I might be an atheist of sorts. It’s not that I’m a nonbeliever, it’s that I believe we don’t truly understand the inner workings of our universe, both physical and non-physical. We seem to have a small grasp of the physical arena, but the spiritual eludes us. For the record, I don’t believe in a God that sits in heaven and manipulates our existence. I do believe we – humans and other animals, the earth and all that it contains, space and all that it contains – are part of an intricately woven web. This “we” is deeply linked, bound and influenced by the different components. I think the answers to who and what we are, are beyond our imagination. The only element that I have confidence in is the concept of love. Love is mighty powerful and part of the answer, part of the reason, part of the basis for this web. (I’m going to go eat some granola and dance in a fairy circle now…ha! I can hear my Midwestern family thinking those thoughts about me.)

I believe that the idea of afterlife was created when a small child turned to his or her mother hundreds of thousands of years ago and asked, “What happens to me when my body breaks and I leave you?” And that mother, because let’s be honest it realistically was the mother, looked into her child’s eyes and said, “There’s a place where we will all be together again”.   And you know what? Hundreds of thousands of years later, I said the same thing to each one of my children when they asked. I think there is an afterlife; I’m just not convinced it looks anything like what we have here on Earth. I omitted that last thought, though, because there’s not a lot of comfort in the idea that something happens to our being after we leave the physical body, but I can’t give any details or provide a thread of familiarity for my child to hold onto. That’s like saying, “Go ahead. Jump in the ocean by yourself. A lifeboat  – or something that might resemble a lifeboat – will find you eventually. You’ll be fine”. I wouldn’t jump.

And then there are our mentally ill. I say “our” with purpose. (It doesn’t have anything to do with being a socialist, although some might accuse me of that. Fine, I don’t think it’s a dirty word.) The “our” goes back to the intricately woven web where we exist together…and the love. We need to take better care of one another. There’s no honor in allowing our young, ill or old to fend for themselves. What we do – or don’t do – for these marginalized or vulnerable groups is a reflection of how we value life and humanity. And apparently we’re suffering.  I don’t have answers for this one, yet. I’m thinking about it. We need something better to catch our most vulnerable when they fall.

This Will Only Hurt A Bit: Part II

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The hostility became so pervasive that a few weeks later when we had plans to visit friends out of town, I suggested that NH stay home.  A friend had stayed with us the week before and she commented on how he was treating me – when he spoke he was hostile, disdainful and mean. She felt uncomfortable being in the house. I didn’t think it was right to bring our fucked-up dog and pony show to someone else’s home. “Hi, thanks for having us. Now we’re going to berate one another and make really awkward comments about our personal life. Yes, I’d love more salad”.

I would take the kids and he could use the time alone to figure out what was going on with this flood of emotions. I told him that it wasn’t acceptable to be so angry and loathsome towards me and we really needed find a better way to deal with the problem. To his credit, he broke down..shaking..sobbing…about how horrible he felt, how full of shame he was. He kept repeating how shameful he felt. I remember being in shock, or maybe it was disconnect. As difficult and frustrating as our relationship was, I couldn’t understand how he pulled shame from the marriage. Shame is about humiliation, guilt, or disgrace. Where was the shame coming from? That was the very first time I thought there might be something else going one here – something more than just poor communication.  Incredibly naive of me, but I began to get that we were having two very separate and distinct experiences that occasionally managed to overlap in small places.

I left with the kids and made lame excuses for NH’s absence. No one really questioned me because we were in the beginning stages of buying a business.  The process was time consuming and stressful. The trip wasn’t great, though. These weren’t people I knew well enough to confide in, and even if did, what was I going to say? “We’ve been having communication issues for years, and now my husband thinks he raped me, and I’m getting creeped out…read any good books lately?” I had no clue how quickly our marriage was unraveling and I wasn’t even sure what the cause of our unhappiness was anymore.

I returned home with the kids late Sunday afternoon and I didn’t feel well. By dinner, I had a fever of 102, and was in bed. I don’t even remember the last time I had a fever before that day. NH took care of the kids and I slept. Deep sleep. On Monday, a friend helped with the kids while I stayed in bed. No interest in food and unable to do much for the family. NH again made dinner for the kids and I sat at the table with everyone, but my fever hadn’t broken and I was quickly back in bed. I could hear him cleaning up the kitchen and getting the kids ready for bed. Around 9pm, after the children were asleep, NH came in and stood by the side of the bed. The lights were out but the sun hadn’t completely set and the room was full of that twilight glow.

NH told me he was leaving. My head was foggy from the fever and I didn’t comprehend what was going down. NH was leaving and he we would need to make a plans for the kids to spend time with him. I think I asked, “What? Why? Really? You’re doing this right now?”. He said he thought about what I had said, that he was angry and it wasn’t right for him to treat me badly, so he was leaving and he would make arrangements for the kids to be with him part of the time. (Uh, I didn’t mean walk out on us, I meant dig deeper and try to make some sense of the spiral…talk to me about what’s going on in your head…fight for us.)

What? Where are you going? To a recently divorced friend’s house. NH was staying on a blow up mattress in this friend’s home-office. And you’re going to take the kids to stay there? Are you divorcing me? No. Then the kids aren’t leaving this house. Every night, their heads will hit the pillows in the bed they’ve always known. We will have to make some other plan for the kids to see you. OK.

And he walked out. I heard the garage open, close, and his car pull away. The man walked out with little explanation as I was lying in bed with a fever of 102. Who does that? Apparently the man I married does that. As silly as it sounds, I never imagined NH and I would separate. I knew we had problems…that there was a two-ton elephant in the room regarding our intimacy and communication, funny how those two items are so tightly bound for most of us – men and women. But I always assumed we would just muster through it…til death do us part.  I believed there was something better on the other side and we just had to push ourselves over the hill.

This Will Only Hurt A Bit: Part I

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I knew my marriage wasn’t where I wanted it to be, and had been in this fragmented state for some time. Honestly, years. Now I can semi-cohesively narrate what happened, where we aggravated one another’s raw spots and pushed one another deeper down our personal holes instead of lifting one another out of the pit. But in June of 2009, I only understood and felt that the connection was off, not the why’s and how’s. Ok, so I did have a few ideas about the why’s and how’s, and most of the blame was laid at NH’s feet. Not fair, not realistic, but it’s what I believed. That was one of the loops my mind was stuck in, and I didn’t have a lot of long-term, healthy relationships that I knew intimately to hold my marriage up against, so taking this position seemed reasonable to me. The other loop my mind was stuck in was, “Of course we will figure out the problem. Until then, soldier on”.

I have no simple sound-bite for the misery we created in one another. Our final therapist would use words like, “the dance”, “demon dialog” and “lack of attachment”. I connected to many of these ideas, but it was too late for the marriage. The marriage was not “revivable”. Now, several years later, I tend to believe NH gave up or lost interest or hit an impenetrable wall early on. Heartbreaking…for both of us.

We had been in couple’s therapy for some time – over two years. I was unsatisfied with our counseling, but believed that something – some kind of effort to sort through the pains and fears – was better than no effort at all. I often scolded NH with, “You get out of therapy what you put into it!”. Meaning, if he would just open up and share something from the heart, then we could move forward. Certainly I wasn’t the problem! If anything, I was too emotive and too quick to tell anyone who would listen exactly how I felt about every detail of my life. And I was willing to accept my mistakes. I grew up in a family where people didn’t take responsibility for their own hang-ups and foibles and it drove me nuts. I made the decision at a young age that I would acknowledge when I was wrong and then do my best to remedy the problem. Of course, I’m very human and I am not always happy to own my personal shortcomings, but own them I do. In fact, I wrestle with these flaws regularly, some might say to the point of neurosis. The negative critics in my head are well fed and live a comfortable life. One might say they have celebrity status in the movie of my life. Taking personal responsibility is essential, though, in my world. So I was moderately satisfied to limp along with our mediocre therapist, because, hey! It was better than limping along without one. It was like having a cup of room temperature coffee…drinkable but not gratifying.

We were bumbling along in our dysfunction, when NH comes up for air. It started with jury duty, which seems like a strange place for the end of a marriage to begin, but it’s where I’ve earmarked our formal demise…and so the luge run began. He was the juror on a local rape case. He took the duties seriously and I didn’t know any details, but when the cases ended (with a guilty verdict, I believe) he came home and shared the story. I vaguely remembered the incident being in the paper a year or two earlier: woman hiking/camping alone on the coast, meets a man camping alone, perhaps he was a drifter. The two hang out together for a while, it’s amicable and ok; in the middle of the night he crawls into her tent and rapes her. There may have been a knife involved and I remember that she felt very threatened. He also may have raped her multiple times. The detail that sticks in my mind because NH was so affected by it is that during the act of rape, the woman laid as still as possible and just endured the violation.

(I want to proceed carefully from this point forward about how I share NH’s story. I’m a bit conflicted about to how to tell my story and deliver my perspective of NH’s story without misstating what he went through. I acknowledge that he likely would recount many of these pages differently. I happen to think I’ve been fair and accurate…I certainly have been painfully honest with my own feelings, thoughts and experiences. But how does one fairly relate another person’s story? I’ve decided that I can only do my best to retell what I saw and experienced. I may make guesses at what NH was feeling and experiencing, but he is the only person who knows those details for certain.)

NH is quite distraught over the case. Something about being on that jury and hearing the testimony and seeing the faces of real people – on both sides of the offense – hit NH hard. A point worth noting is that I had been raped as a young teenager, and he was well aware of the horror.
We had friends coming over for dinner the night the trail ended and he started sharing details of the case…in the kitchen, with friends standing around as I prepared dinner. I was quite shaken by his recount of what happened. It wasn’t my story, but it did make room for the memories of my rape to surface. I remember thinking, “Can’t he see that this is upsetting and that this might not be the place to process his experience?”. I also remember feeling like he was watching me closely as he recounted the trial. Was he trying to upset me? I was confused about why he was going into such great detail and carefully monitoring my reactions. I was having a visceral response. Everyone was fairly engrossed in the conversation because it really was a griping story. I finally asked him to stop talking about it, though. I made some joke about more party-appropriate topics, and he obliged. The night progressed without further discussion about the rape trial, but I didn’t forget anything. As a side note, the dish I was preparing while NH occupying us with the story turned out horribly. It was all I could do to get the ingredients in the bowl, mixed and in the oven. I was unnerved.

Standing in the kitchen one evening, sun still out because it’s June, kids playing in the other room and I can hear their talking and laughing, he leans over the kitchen counter and tells me what hit his core during the rape trial. He tells me that what he realized when listening to the details of how this woman was raped is that he raped me.

I couldn’t have been more surprised or puzzled by this statement. However, the last time we had sex it wasn’t good. (I don’t have genteelism for the act, people. “Made love” sounds like something from a soap opera, “sex” sounds clinical, and “got busy” sounds like a drunk teenager. After some unscientific polling, I found many friends refer to it as “sex”, too, so I’m going with clinical for now). It was while NH was on the jury. The night started off normal – me not so interested, but willing to put in the time to get to the good place, and NH happy to have a semi-interested partner. Quickly, though, the energy morphed into something I had never experienced with him. There was hostility. Anger. It was coming from him and it was directed at me and I didn’t know what to do. I chose to be silent. I pretended the whole experience wasn’t happening. Looking back, I probably did shut down. Let’s be clear, this was not offensive or threatening. In fact, I remember thinking that it was sad and that it would take a little while to shake off the experience, but I did not take it personally or feel debased. We had bad sex. It was a first and I thought a last (boy, I didn’t know how literal the latter sentiment was!).

NH did not rape me. And in fact, I found his presumption offensive. Like, you think I would allow you to rape me?? Get real. Never again, motherfucker. I have been in that paralyzing, frightening, dehumanizing, appalling place and, frankly, I thought he was absurd for even suggesting it. I did interrupt briefly to tell him that he didn’t rape him, but I’m not sure the words even registered in his ears. So NH continued to reveal his pain and an incredible shame. He was ashamed for doing this to me. He cried, which, as is typical for many, many men, he rarely-to-never did. I could see that this was very real for him and I thought it was important to give him the space to express the thoughts and feelings. It was odd, though, because he was distraught about an incident that intimately involved me, and yet I didn’t share the same experience.

And now NH was saying he raped me. It was a bit confusing for me, but I was committed to going down this path with him and resolving the matter together. It never occurred to me that we wouldn’t sort out the pain and frustration, but that’s not what happened. Over the next several weeks he grew more distant and incredibly angry with me. It wasn’t just a generalized anger, the feeling was consciously directed at me.

 

Introductions

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IMG_1050We each have a story to tell. As I see this life, we are all ancient trees standing in the forest of humanity, and if a cross-section of our self was gently taken one would see the rings that mark the passing of time and our legacy. In between each of these delicate rings lies our story. And it’s these stories that bind the forest and remind us that our roots penetrate the same rich soil and take life from the same mysterious force. We share our stories with one another for validation, acceptance, amusement, to set ourselves apart, to find where we belong, to test our sanity, to warn or encourage others, and to fortify our place in the forest. Here are some of my stories. Look through them and in return share one of yours…with me or someone else. Your choice.