Four

He didn’t come home most nights which, I didn’t see at the time, really was a blessing. He never did anything to me when he was drunk, but his instability always kept me on edge. I never knew what to expect. I guess that’s one way an abuser controls you, by keeping you confused. Confused in that you never know how to respond because you never know how they’re going to respond. You always have to be on the defensive - prepared for anything. After a while, you start to feel like you’re standing in the middle of a six lane highway with cars coming at you from all directions. You begin to hate to see weekends come because you know that’s usually when the instability flares up. Weekends and holidays.

Normal families have fond memories of holidays past. Food, love, and being around family is what it’s all about. Families like us, however, just use holidays as reference points. How bad was this Christmas fucked up compared to last Christmas, to gauge progression or digression of the instability. It always progresses.

My most vivid holiday memory is of Thanksgiving 1998. The evil jackass had concluded a day of drinking by visiting my sister’s house. I’m not sure why he did this, other than to embarrass me, but at any rate, that’s where he ended up the night of that Thanksgiving Day. After picking a fight with my brother-in-law, he tore off into the night, headed for who knows where. My sister called to tell me that he had ‘gone wild’ and she thought he was headed home. She was warning me, just in case. So I tried to be proactive in the situation. I locked the doors so he couldn’t get in the sardine can. My oldest daughter was 5 at the time and she was already in bed. Our two month old daughter was laying on the couch beneath a window. I heard him drive up and he proceeded to bang on the door for me to let him in. I picked up the phone to call the police and was talking to them while I walked over to pick up my infant daughter off the couch. The dispatcher was hearing all of the cursing he was doing and the threats he was making. Just as I got across the room from picking up my daughter, he broke the window she had been laying beneath and shards of glass pierced the couch where she laid not thirty seconds before. He would have killed my daughter if instinct had not told me to pick her up.

The police did come that night, but what happened after that is all a blur now. I’m not sure what became of it, but I know that wasn’t the last incident in that sardine can. He threw me to the floor some months later, but that time he was sober. I left him there with both kids to drive to the police department because I knew I’d never get a phone call to them while he was there. I pressed charges against him and they followed me home to arrest him. His boss bailed him out that night and the police called me to tell me when he was released. I spent that night (I didn’t know it wouldn’t be my last) in fear of retaliation. He didn’t do anything, but the instability…the threat that looms over you when you know someone is capable of causing you harm…still controlled me even though he wasn’t there to do it physically.

We separated for a couple of months after that. I didn’t know how good I had it at the time. I was living off of a credit card and he was giving me money, too. He was under the impression that there was a restraining order preventing him from coming around. But I, like a dumb ass, met him at different places to pick up money, let him see the baby, or whatever. I don’t know what in the hell convinced me to let him come back, but I did. That is the only thing in my life that I regret more than ever laying eyes on the son of a bitch.

You’d think something like that would be a wake up call for both of us, but no. No, we’re a hard headed lot and we don’t pick up on things like that too quickly. He did tone down his drinking and after a while, he did tone down his all nighters. He’s never laid a hand on me since then, but he’s thrown stuff at me. I’m not sure if he meant to hit me or meant to scare me. Maybe it was just a fear tactic because he felt he was losing control since I was becoming more assertive in my old age. Assertive. That’s one word for it. A few more would be that I had finally realized that I genuinely didn’t give a fuck if he lived or died. So much in fact, that when I would hear sirens in the night, I would pray that it was that mother fucker laying dead in a gutter somewhere. I still think like that occasionally, when he pisses me off more than he should. I still genuinely don’t give a fuck if he lives or dies, but at very least he’s more tolerable now.

Tolerable. Actually, there are still times that my stomach turns just by looking at him and I need a Dramamine to even stay in the same room with the miserable bastard. Other times, I just feel sorry for him. I shouldn’t because of all the holy hell and beyond that he’s put me through, but he’s getting older now. Not wiser, but losing his fight. He’s becoming almost complacent and this is new territory for me. Sure, he still gets the occasional wild hair, but we’ve gone from being gasoline and a match to plain old oil and water. I don’t know if he’s listening more or I’m talking louder, but he seems to finally be “getting it”. Whether it’s age, senility, or just plain growing up - he’s almost a new man. But I don’t like this one any better. I know that I, too, harbor resentment toward him for all the shit he’s done to me, but it’s something more than resentment. I don’t know what to call it. Even though he’s come a long way at a snail’s pace, we still don’t have anything resembling a marriage. Most of the time when I think of my life and how it was wasted, I’m madder at myself than I am at him. For the past eleven years, I’ve been stuck. Stuck without the boot straps to pull myself up by. Never mind that he let me down. I let myself down and that’s what sucks the most.

Married couples make memories. Happy ones, sad ones, all kinds of memories. I don’t have any good memories of my married life. It started off bad and got progressively worse. There’s an unspoken code of conduct in marriages that both parties should just follow without having to be told, coached, or persuaded. I did that or at least I thought I did that. I was everything I thought a wife should be and that’s why I couldn’t understand why in the hell he treated me so badly. No, I never got any of the niceties in return, but I kept giving them. I kept overlooking how badly my feelings were being hurt and how badly I needed more than I was getting. Just to keep the peace, just to keep from rocking the boat. You know, the whole being on the defensive against instability thing - it makes you act that way. After a while, you give up. Anybody would. Who could blame them? You’re putting all this effort into something and getting repeatedly criticized for it. What the fuck is the point?

I used to get all dolled up every day - perfume and the whole bit. Then I started to ask myself why. Why did it matter what I looked like? I felt like shit. Why not look the part? And how could I not feel like shit when I’d ask the evil jackass if he liked my new whatever or if he noticed my different whatever and he’d say that there was no point in complimenting me because I’d just get the big head and think more of myself. Think more of myself. Isn’t that what married people are supposed to do? Build each other up instead of tearing each other down? After repeatedly hearing that, it made me believe that I was less than and didn’t deserve to be noticed. That no matter what in the hell I ever did, I was never going to be good enough or pretty enough. See a pattern here? Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Sticks and stones, man. He had me wishing for sticks and stones again.

Then there are the requisite times in your spouse’s life than you have to be in attendance for. For support…moral support. To provide comfort and love and compassion. This goes back to that unspoken marital code. I didn’t get any of those things from the evil jackass, either. When I had gone to the hospital - alone - for an induction of labor with our daughter, he was working. The induction failed and I called to tell him that the doctor was going to do a C section delivery and he should have been with me hours ago, he told me he still wasn’t sure if he could “make it” because he was working. Working. In the same town. Up the road from where his wife was about to be sliced open and his firstborn brought into the world. I’m not sure if he ever showed up. He wasn’t there when they put me to sleep and he wasn’t there when I woke up in recovery. He did get a picture with our newborn daughter in the nursery with him wearing scrubs that I hadn’t been there for. Even if he did show up later, it was too little too late. As always.

Fast forward two years. September 2000. My daddy had been in the hospital for two months and was getting markedly worse. We got ‘the call’ that the family should come in and say their goodbyes. The evil jackass did accompany me to the hospital that night that my daddy was dying and he stayed there with me, too. We came home after a few hours, but my mama and sisters stayed. I got another call at midnight telling me that my daddy had died. I took a while to absorb the news. Not that it was a shock. He was very ill for a very long time, but you’re never prepared to hear that your daddy died. So I went to bed where the evil jackass lay sleeping and told him the news. He said, “Oh”, rolled over, and went back to snoring. Unfazed. Unconcerned. Unmoved. Unbelievable? No. Quite par for the course, actually.