Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Nineteen
After that, my feelings toward his excursions changed. Instead of wishing he'd come home, I started wishing he'd come home in a body bag. I hoped and sometimes even prayed that the miserable son of a bitch would crash his truck in a drunken rage and kill himself. Sometimes I even fantasized about it. About how I would wait by the phone for The Call and then tell them to bury the motherfucker wherever they found him because I wanted no part of it. Nobody would miss his sorry ass anyway. Just throw some dirt over him. Who would give a shit? Good riddance.
But in my heart, I knew that wasn't me. As bad as he'd treated me over the years and as much as he'd done to me, I wanted nothing bad for him. I'm a firm believer in Karma, see. For 'good people'. I don't think Karma ever comes back on 'bad people', but I damn sure believe it comes back on the 'good ones' and I didn't want his blood on mine by wishing such thoughts. So I just started removing myself from him. I just started seeing him as a roommate. Us being just two people living in the same house, not a married couple. That wasn't a stretch. That's all we really were. It was another one of those subconscious self defense mechanisms. If he was 'just a guy', what he did or didn't do couldn't hurt me. Since I wasn't seeing him as a husband, his blatant disregard for me could be overlooked more easily.
You know what - I was wrong.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Eighteen
I don't remember how I paid the bills, where he lived during the time, why I didn't get the hell out of Dodge while I had the chance, or what the circumstances were that brought us back together. All I do know, looking back now, is that was a mistake of epic proportions on my behalf. I guess I had a reason, though. Perhaps it was out of wanting to make sure my kids had a financially stable life and some resemblance to a family life. Just appearance-wise of course because we in no way resembled a family within the four walls of that sardine can of a two bedroom trailer.
We didn't in the years that followed, either. He never really was a part of normal family activities, holidays, or the mundane tasks of maintaining a home. He didn't see the importance of birthday parties or Christmas presents or The Easter Bunny or anything else related to childhood. Had it not been for me, my kids would have lived an even more grim existence than they already had. I was the one that made sure they had Christmas and holidays and birthday parties. I went to all the school functions and played Mom and Dad when the situation arose. I did all of the child rearing. The only time he had anything to offer was to come down on them for something. If it wasn't negative, you can bet he didn't say it.
For holidays, he'd try to find a way to fucking up the day for the rest of us. He'd get pissed off over something ...anything...and set the somber tone for the day. Christmas Eve, he'd go out drinking and be still passed out on the couch come Christmas morning. Birthdays, he'd have to work late, thinking the celebrations were going to wait on him or what he would be missed. That he was somehow going to control our happiness and dictate how our days were going to pan out. That nothing could occur without his input, his blessing, or his ridicule. That he was not only Lord and Master - but also running the show.
It took us both a long time to realize that the only thing he was running was his mouth.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Seventeen
So our daughter was born and he was thrust into fatherhood for the first time. Parenthood has a way of making people grow up, but not him. Nah, he couldn't be bothered with midnight feedings, burping, bathing, doctor visits, or diaper changes. He still had too many wild oats to sow. I guess since, by this time, I had already been a mother for six years, it was expected of me, if not just my duty, to take up his slack.
So I did - just like he knew that I would. He still didn't think anything of staying out on his all night benders, drinking and running the roads - while I, like the good wife (idiot?), stayed home and minded the babies. I didn't have a choice, see. It wasn't like he came home from work and then left again. No, sir. He went right on from work to his benders, never coming home at all until the wee hours of the morning when he was done. So what if I needed something from the store or one of the kids got sick. That was too bad because, even though he had a cell phone, he wouldn't answer it no matter how many times I called. I'm not sure where he went and at that point, I no longer cared. Actually, I never cared. My whole issue with the situation was that he was trying to make an ass out of me and I had no way to retaliate.
My family didn't know how we lived or what all I had endured at the hands of the man who promised to 'love and cherish' me. I just kept it all to myself because my sisters had been in similar situations and it was common knowledge. I swore I would never, ever be in a situation like that and always said they were crazy for allowing that kind of abusive behavior to go on. That was when I was single and still green in the ways of the world. Before I was ear deep in dirty diapers without a friend in the world. Before my self esteem had been shattered and before my head realized how quickly the odds can stack up against you.
His family knew how he was. He had been this way all of his life, but I didn't know it until it was too late. When somebody's trying to woo you, see, they put on their best face. They don't show you the dark side until you're too far away from the light to find your way back. That's what happened to me. I'd call and tell his sisters all of the things he had done and they would just sigh and make comments to the effect of they 'guessed he wasn't ever going to change'. I don't know why I called them. I guess to try and shame him in some way, not because I wanted their help. His mama was no different. They had always turned a blind eye to the things he did because they were scared to confront him.
My family did get to witness some of his alcoholic antics. It was Thanksgiving 1998 - two months after our daughter was born. I'm not quite sure how he ended up at my sisters house because he's never been to my sisters house before or since - not even with me. But he did and he was drunk and he got drunker. I, of course, was at home with the babies like the good wife (idiot?). I remember that night my sister called to tell me he had just left her house and that he was 'crazy'. He was drunk and violent and tried to beat up her husband. She told me to lock the doors and to not let him in because, frankly, she was scared for me. So I laid out daughter on the couch to sleep. My daughter was asleep in her bedroom and I went to lock the doors. He came flying home and went into a fit of rage when he wasn't able to open the doors. Yes, he tried to bust through them. He tried to kick them open. All the while, he was cussing me and threatening me. In the meantime, I had called the police and they were listening to every thing he was saying because it was that loud. Still holding the phone to my ear, I walked over to the couch to pick up my daughter. Just as I got her nestled safely to my chest, the window shattered and shards of glass pierced the couch where she laid not three seconds before.
Friday, March 02, 2007
Sixteen
That was the middle of July. The baby was due the second week of September. You'd think that an expectant father would want to be at his wife's side helping her tend to things and anxiously awaiting the arrival of his firstborn. And I guess in a 'normal' or 'typical' family, he would be. However, my family was never normal or typical. Sometimes things become such a pattern in your life that your mind tries to make you believe that the things you're enduring are normal and typical and that you just need to find a way to cope. That everybody has the same troubles and you should just suck it up. It's a self defense mechanism that kicks in, in an effort to spare yourself some amount of grief - a subconscious survival tactic.
It works for a little while until you realize that your life pales miserably in comparison to interactions you see between couples around you. You realize that people really are kind to each other and that not everybody screams obscenities to each other. That not every husband calls his wife names and sometimes daddies really do take their families on outings together. You learn that people are loving toward one another, they tell each other how much they love them, and that couples still hold hands and give kisses goodbye before leaving their homes. That their house doesn't feel like a pressure cooker from all the stress and that they really are enjoying life.
When you come to those realizations, you go through the gamut of emotions. First you feel jealous of them so you immediately have to hate the loving couples, so the jealousy turns to anger because people you hate make you angry. Those are more self defense mechanisms, courtesy of your subconscious. If you hate them, they won't matter. Then you remember that everything you hate in someone else is a reflection of yourself - of something you don't have or wish you did. That's when the sadness and longing set in - when you realize what you don't have and everything you're missing out on. Then you get angry again because of how your life turned out and how dare you be suffering when everybody else seems to have it all. Finally, when you're done of feeling all these things because you've spent so much energy and have nothing left to feel - the final self defense mechanism kicks in and that's numbness. You shut down completely. You grow cold. Numb. Desensitized. Not because you want to be, but because the only thing left to feel is nothing. Your mind is out of survival tactics so your senses shut down and you go back on Auto Pilot, pretending you don't need the basic human needs of love, kindness, compassion, sympathy, company, and closeness. Defiance. Your final stand. You don't need it. Fuck 'em. You're tough. That shit's for lame people anyway. Who does that stuff? Who needs it?
You do.
But the defiance survival tactic won't let you show it because it knows that showing it would make you vulernable to feeling again and that's what hurt you to begin with.
Living a life of solitude is hard, but living a life of solitude in the physical company of someone would be unbearable to a feeling person. I've spent more nights alone since getting married than I ever did as a single person. I don't know why he drank. I don't know why he didn't come home from work most nights or come home at all on most nights, for that matter. I don't know if he hated me that much or loved the alcohol more.I never asked. It wouldn't have done any good to ask. Our communication consisted of tirades of curses, insults, threats, and the occasional physical contact punishable by law. Living like this forces you into a life of solitude. You learn to keep the peace by keeping quiet. Not because you're scared, but because you're just so.....tired. You're mentally and emotionally drained all the time and you end up not having anything left in you to care or fight with. So you let it go. You let it build up. You let it slide. You forget it. It might seem that you're giving in, but you're trying to keep your sanity - what little of it you have left.
The day of my last prenatal visit, the doctor sent me to the hospital for some tests. They decided to keep me there and induce my labor. The induction wasn't going well so the doctor called for an emergency Cesarean section because the baby was in distress. I called The Expectant Father at work that afternoon about 5:oo PM when I got the news. He told me he was 'working' and that he 'wasn't sure he could get off'. Some how, I wasn't surprised. Par for the course, it was. He did show up, though. While they were wheeling me down the hallway to surgery. He says he was there for the whole procedure. He wasn't with me when I went to sleep. He wasn't with me when I woke up. So who really knows? Or cares, for that matter? I mean he had been drunk and/or gone my entire pregnancy. It's not like I depended on him for any kind of moral support. I learned a long time ago not to do that and I wouldn't be disappointed.