Three

People still think that money is the root of all evil. That’s just the desire to be rich talking. If you ask someone who has experienced evil firsthand, they will tell you the root of it is love. I’ve seen a lot of evil directed at me over the years and love or lack thereof was always the root of it. The love of themselves is what made the kids in school treat me so badly. Longing to be loved is what led me to the evil jackass. Love for my daughter let me to endure all the evil I have over the years.

Thirty.

Typical of fat, lonely white trash, I lived in sin for a year before I became Mrs. Jackass. We started out with nothing, just like people used to do before the world - or the people in it that matter - got so well off. We never worked our way up like the happy ending folks claimed to. We just swam around in different levels of squalor at the bottom. Our first home, sweet home was a sardine can of a two bedroom trailer complete with doors that slid into the walls and a black and white TV. I didn’t realize this would be pretty much indicative of my years to come. If none of these things raised any red flags, my ten minute wedding ceremony at the courthouse in dirty work clothes should have. We married on a Friday, but I didn’t get a ring until Sunday. Even then, it didn’t fit. I had to wait two more weeks for the ring to be sized to fit my fat, lonely white trash finger. Looking back, I think that was a sign. A sign to get the hell out of there before anything as final as a ring made an appearance. I wasn’t paying attention because I was too focused on my mission, accomplished. My daughter has a house and a yard. A room and a bike. A daddy. All she lacked was the dog.

We stayed in the marital manse less than a year. On my daughter’s third birthday we were evicted. So we moved across town to the other side of the tracks - literally, not figuratively. We rented another sardine can of a two bedroom trailer and took the black and white TV with us is our five hundred dollar Plymouth that didn’t have a headliner or air conditioning. When we reached the second sardine can, my daughter got a dog. Not a big deal for most, but for me that dog completed my quest. She now, by all accounts, had all the things people guilted me into believing she needed. I had fulfilled their expectations of our lives. That’s what matters, right? That the people around you be pacified - regardless of the cost to you? So long as you suck it up and keep the peace, all is well. I didn’t know that, by being complacent that first time, I was setting myself up for a lifetime of the same.

I don’t remember when it dawned on me what I had gotten myself into by marrying the evil jackass. I was too absorbed in doing the right thing instead of the best thing that I let all my defenses down for the sake of my daughter. I sacrificed a lot of myself without knowing it - way more than any person should ever have to sacrifice. The old saying about jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire just doesn’t seem strong enough to describe what I did. It was more like jumping out of the fire and into the crematorium - except I wasn’t reduced to ashes as quickly as it’s usually done. It was a slow process, killing me and cremating me and the person I used to be one small piece at a time. That process went on for years. Feeling yourself wither away with each passing day is a sobering experience, but feeling yourself withering away at the hands of someone who promised to love you is a harder pill to swallow.

They say all is fair in love and war and I knew what I was in wasn’t love. During one of our daily blowouts, I finally confessed the truth to the evil jackass one day. I told him I never loved him, would never love him, and only married him to get out of my parents’ house. I think that’s the day he began to harbor resentment toward me that he began to act upon later. Maybe I did bring all his ill treatment of me on myself. I guess I knew those words were going to have some kind of effect or else I wouldn’t have spoken them in anger. It took anger for me to have the balls to say them. I was feeling it all along. I said it because I wanted to hurt him. They say the truth hurts and I guess he felt mortally wounded. He began to try and hurt me, too. Not with his words, like I was accustomed to - but with the physical stuff I had wished for years ago in lieu of the words. Maybe I should have left the first time he acted out on his resentment when he slapped me in the first sardine can. The fact that he cut the phone lines and sped off into the night after he did that should have been my warning, too, but I was hard headed. I didn’t even grasp the magnitude of it when he shoved me to the floor while living in the second sardine can or when he, again, cut the phone lines and sped off into the night. However, my wake up call wasn’t too far off in the distance.

A raging drunk is bad, but an unstable raging drunk is a force to be reckoned with. That’s what the evil jackass had evolved into by the time we got settled in the third sardine can of a two bedroom trailer. I was pregnant with our first child at the time and that compounded my grief.