End.

Where my marriage ended - 2020.

Just in the name of being complete, of saying it all, of describing reality as I see it, this is how one Friday night was for me..

He had moved out...

In the name of being civilized (which I am not) he had invited me into his dead parent's house.

---

30th august 2020.

On Friday I was meant to be nice and normal and possibly grateful as I took the invite to eat fish and chips with him. I managed OK (not normal) and I was grateful enough until I found the courage to ask him a question to which I truly needed answers.

His attitude of belligerent animosity, because I was too scared to speak, caused me to have to take up some paper and a pen and write the words out in shaky handwriting, this was the only way to express my thoughts.

I was too scared to speak.

His reply to my question was "No".

Then "I can see why it was hard for you to ask"

Silence!

At which point I should have left. But this hostility, this sense of disgust, the implication that such a question should be hard to ask, left me shaking. I didn't feel able to drive; I needed eye contact and a hug, something to get me back to the land of the living.

Nothing...

A buzzing undercurrent of heavy resentment and hostility crushed the air from my lungs and froze the blood in my veins. I was paralyzed by it.  But then at some point in the depths of this loss of contact, grief and the reality of this unkindness, my anger clicked in. I felt as if I was holding the last remaining photos portraying the good man and really it was time to consign all the snapshots and recordings of happy and loving times to the funeral pyre.

I asked myself: Is this a good man?

And my answer is, no, a good man works to mend, to heal, to help...This man makes it all about punishment, about right and wrong and judgment.

So be it.

He hears the genuine fear and loss I'm experiencing, and he is aware that his decisions have real consequences for our family. It is time for me to judge. So let the present eclipse our past, I will recast and re-frame as it appears to really be...

There are many stories that could describe us, but there is one core narrative which is beginning to feel true. A new core narrative to dismember and rip apart the one I preferred. Here it is: when he asked me to marry him - there was was something too fast, and not fair about it. And I didn't believe it was about me...So at the time I asked him questions, he sounded sincere, and I decided to trust. But let's face it, I knew that I'd been shoehorned into a script. So I took our marriage as if it was arranged; arranged by fate, let myself be taken by the undertow, by forces that felt bigger than me. I was both grateful and torn by it.

And love is easy.

So what do I think really had happened?

He needed a family that would be a full 180 degrees different to his birth family.

Why?

To have a life in which he could be 'the good man' forever rescuing his mom from the bad man (the 'bad man's is his Child's view of his dad) . But that dad is a part of him, hidden inside himself.  For years he was able to convince himself that he is 'better' than his dad.  To do this he pretended to be the man who listened and willingly did what we agreed. He bottled up the resentment, his dad's misogyny festering in the compost heap of his un-named dreams. But he couldn't hide that resentment, made worse because I kept on seeking out the real person, the person under the bolted on metal exoskeleton that prevented him from feeling, knowing true love, pain and joy, and real anger.

But children can't be children forever...family stopped.

I hadn't known how important it had been to him to be the good dad...

And without the children, it was time for us.

Except, he had no plans about any future, it was nothing...I wasn't in it, and there wasn't anywhere for us. And of course I'm not his mom...so I wouldn't keep quiet and accept and so I got to understand exactly why his mom had found it impossible to describe what was actually happening to her. 

Clearly my husband expected me - as his dad had expected of his wife - to 'suck it up' and keep smiling, saying 'nothing to be done, oh isn't it awful'.

I was expected to smile through tears that fall only when my husband is out of the room; as his mom had done, trapped in her bed, confined by her inability to name and shame, living under a regime that gave no easy way to access the anger she  needed, to end her abuse. And she would say '...oh but he is a good man, I shouldn't be like this'. Clearly, anything other than placid null wave was 'out of order' not hard to get the picture! 

By 2017 I could feel the weight of lies and deception being placed over me, as suffocating as a plastic bag. But it wasn't easy to deal with at all. I tried naming it. I accessed anger. But the thing was on automatic, beyond my husband's awareness, after all for him it was home - the stink of lying and manipulation didn't offend him, it was a stench that he had grown up with.

Partially because of this I chose to head out to college, vaguely and uncomfortably aware that I didn't feel safe or secure about my future at all. When I bought new clothes I always had the sense that I was packing my bags for a long journey beyond shops and civilization.

Soon, my youngest son (in his early 20s, away at university)  began to un-ravel and I was trying hard not to focus on my husband sounding increasingly like his dad; superficially polite and loving but really someone who is absent, un-hearing, un-feeling...

Where was he?

Where was the good man?

I didn't really believe that he was playing happy families elsewhere.

But it sure felt like it.

I knew that at work they sat together at dinner times. And as Josh smashed our home and traumatized me, my husband and she bonded over how they are 'both victims of other people's madness'. Josh was drowning in psychosis, so my husband completely transferred his sense of home to work and I was replaced.

She was good.

I was not.

She appreciated it when he protected her. She wasn't filled with agony and despair...For me it was hearing Josh hit the concrete of the kitchen floor, after 'the good man' hit him. That sound echoes through me, still. 

You know, it took me too long to judge that. I had to hear him say "I'm glad I hit him, I should have hit him more"...before I could judge and see underneath my husband's veneer of good. Within a framework that justifies violence and lies she could be his good wife, becoming my husband's ' mother-to-be-saved. He had to rescue her! She provided the essential key component to his script; she lies some more, describing her husband as a violent man.

She tells my husband 'he will kill you if he finds out about us'. 

My husband's battle with the 'bad man' inside himself is externalized, projected onto and carried by her husband. Now all the things my husband thought and did, can shrink away into the shadows cast by the light of how dangerous and bad her husband must be believed to be. 

But as this story about her husband isn't actually true, to make it true my husband actually had to go into their home and force the issue! At the time my husband said that he thought that he was saving her. This is impossible to understand - who is he lying to as he says this? Just me, or to himself as well? It was important that he saw it this way, needing to see himself as the hero, accessing his inner  'Manly man'. But I know what the text her husband had sent said that brought him there. 

"He's out, come round, use the front door".

No peril, no emergency...

Just 'he's out!'

And the fantasy continued...fantasies that her husband was looking for him. This is unlikely, her husband told me that he feels sick at the idea of seeing my husband ever again. It truly seems to me that my husband  could only see himself as good if he believes that her husband is worse - and so my husband can feel better than him!

To get to that place he had to make changes, to relax into a stereotype and get into sync with her. I watched his personality change as he bought the same sort of car as her husband ( the car that her husband had been proud of as theirs). He got manly tattoos from the manly man tattoo shop. His language changed! Whilst he tried to look like her husband....

Sorry, this is so mad! If I hadn't lived through it I'd find this too weird to beleive.

Whilst she got her husband to buy her beautiful underwear...to wear to work for my husband. 

My husband started to make snap decisions in a decisive way, without paying any regard to anyone, just as his dad had done. And all the time he lied and lied and lied, and told me to 'shut up' because he just wanted everything to be 'normal'...and I was the reason things weren't OK.

became he...

whose natural enemy is she...

who says,

 "and how does that make you feel"?

After the fish and chips, after asking the question, after he refused to show any compassion for the price I was being asked to pay for his decisions, after I took a gulp of air and returned from the land of the dead,  it was time to drop the narrative of: 'You made me feel safe, you were my love, you were good enough (true) you are a good man (I believed that)'.

So I told him.

"You were just playing happy families you never actually wanted me, just a different family to save you from yours, and that certainly makes sense in the light of what I've seen happen here! And I don't know if I'm right. I can't know. But I want to know. Now you are in your dead parents house. You are a child whose heart was broken with love, needing to save your mom, the child who wanted and never got his dad's respect...Now you are the one unable to take any responsibility for the harm you have done to your true wife, and true family."

He said "take that back...you are 'turning my past to shit!"

"Then tell me I'm wrong and tell me how it really is."

Silence

Null wave.

I described the present.

"You are living in the house your grew up in. You have abandoned your real wife and your real family. We didn't tell you to go! That was not our family's decision, we didn't accuse you or blame you! And we need to have this conversation with a counsellor present, but you wont go to counselling".

He exploded in rage and said "you wouldn't say all this stuff to a counsellor!"

And I fell for this 'look over there' manipulation...by replying.

"Of course I would! But if you don't like the way I describe what's happened tell me my view is wrong. Tell me how it really is!"

And I wanted to know. I so much wanted not to be right. To be able to leave with a sense that all the love he had once said he had felt hadn't been one more lie, on top of another lie, on top of one more...

No answer.

Null wave.

My re-frame stands.