Two years ago, I shut this blog down. I removed my book from Amazon, and shut myself away to try to survive the horrific storm that I am just now barely emerging from. Part of why I took down my book was due to the disturbing amount of cover up I had been doing and done in that book. A cover up of what, one might ask? The reality of my relationship with my ex, the reality of what my marriage had been, the reality of what I had been fighting against, losing my mind to, and trying to survive under for close to 13 years of marriage.
As I pull these words out of me, I am sitting here one semester away from graduating with a bachelors in Sociology. I have spent, and will have spent, just over 3 years intensely studying how our environments, culture, societal customs, directly impact the individual, and how those individuals impact our environments, culture, and society. My speciality is not one I want to divulge quite yet, but perhaps when my honors thesis is completed, I will share the publication. However, the importance of mentioning my scholarly path is because of the impact facing a divorce in the middle of my undergrad studies had on me as a person, my involvement at school, and my social interactions. Shame, guilt, fear of retaliation kept me silent, pulling away from people I used to connect with frequently, turning inwards and shrinking into myself. Shame, because of the choices I was forced to make for the survival of myself and my children. Guilt because I couldn’t be there for my kids in the way that they would have preferred, and guilt that I was trying to get myself to a place of surviving instead of becoming just a memory to them. Fear of retaliation keeping my mouth shut when what was being done to me and to my kids was abhorrent, despicable, and completely devoid of basic human decency.
It’s been over two years since I last spoke to my siblings and to some of the people I once thought were my forever people. It’s been over two years since I watched my best friend choose the side of my ex, tell me my behavior was full of red flags, and that she couldn’t believe I was choosing to do what I was. All without being willing to hear me, hear my perspective, and use her brain to recognize that there was more going on than what things first appeared. Walking away from her was easy – easy because no way on this forsaken earth am I going to keep in contact with someone who willingly listens to his manipulative and coercive narratives.
Let’s start in August of 2023, because that’s when all hell broke loose, and I made the decision to leave. Although, it would probably make more sense to back up further to 2020, as that is when things really began to go sideways.
In 2020, my ex and I started couple’s therapy. It was an ultimatum I had given him as I was done with being the only one working in themselves, and he needed to do work – serious work – on his behaviors, patterns, and existence in my/the kids lives. Little did I know, or even fully understand, there was also the part about him being an alcoholic that was playing into things as well. Therapy was like pulling teeth, shoving toothpicks down nail beds, and it became uncomfortably apparent that he was not willing to listen, work on communicating, and continued holding power and manipulative patterns over me. Given my status of only stay at home parent, having only ever [barely] completed high school, I had no way to support myself, no way to get out. I vividly remember calling that best friend, sitting in my car in a parking lot, sobbing, and telling her that I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t handle the gaslighting, the vicious manipulating the narrative to always be my fault, making me always second guess my reality, my memory, and the very valid issues I had had that were somehow now no longer relevant or valid enough for me to speak up about.
The moment I said it might be time to consider separating, his behavior magically transformed. Suddenly the issues in therapy were no long issues, but merely a misunderstanding of the definition of a word. Look, he was growing, learning, changing! …right? I felt significantly whiplash, especially when I had shared with a very close friend that I had wanted a wedding ring set of my own, not one that had been given to us because we had been too broke to buy rings in the beginning. I had shared with her that his response to me wanting my own unique ring was to brush me off, stating he didn’t understand the logic or desire for having a ring, and apparently seemed to consider the matter closed. Things often went like this, if he didn’t or couldn’t understand why a thing was wanted or needed, he would dismiss it and/or flat out deny the purchase, need, or want for something. Ah, but as I’m sure you can imagine, if it was something HE wanted, needed, or desired, of course it would be ordered, purchased, obtained. He would spend thousands of dollars on himself, but if I overspent the grocery budget by $100, then I got a talking to, and my own personal [tiny] allowance from him would be subtracted from.
Again, the alcoholism played into all that too. Therapy never happened without him having a glass of whiskey. Conversations or discussions never happened without the second or third glass of whiskey or mixed drink of the evening. And let’s not forget, during that couple’s therapy year, he decided to try to reconcile me and him with his parents. I felt apathetic at best about that proposed reconciliation, particularly due to his stark and immediate betrayal shortly after we got married, where he constantly sided with his parents/siblings, and denied, dismissed, and belittled my feelings about how his family’s terrible treatment of me made me feel. I had tried to bend over backwards to appease his family, and yet his mother hated me, his father tolerated me at best, and they often blamed me for my own pain and grief of not being good enough for them to be included in their family. The ex’s handling of that? “That’s just my mom…” or “that’s just how she is, can’t you let it go?” When I had sacrificed my own family by choosing him, he acted like he had gotten everything he had wanted, hadn’t lost anything, and expected everything to go back to ‘normal’ which meant ignoring the lack of integration of me into his immediate family. So yes, 9 years later, almost a decade of facing ridicule, backhanded compliments, or point blank mean and critical statements to my face, I had no desire to restore any kind of connection with his family. They certainly were never my family, and I never wanted them to be.
Oh yeah, the pain of spending over a decade being forcefully excluded from the people who were supposed to be family is still having an impact on how I interact and how I hold myself apart from my partner’s family, who, by the way, fully accepts and has folded me into their entire family structure. If anything, my partner’s family’s acceptance of me has shown the problem was never me with my ex’s family, it was them. They chose not to include me, they chose to make sure I was always on the outside. My current familial situation is painful in a different way now. It’s hard for me to not feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, or like I’m waiting to be told ‘actually, we don’t like you, and we don’t want to have you around.’ It’s been long enough and they have shown me more than enough that their acceptance of me is unconditional. For the first time in my 35 years of life, I am accepted into a family without conditions, without expectations that I’m only worth what I can offer and do for said family. And that’s hard to believe, it’s difficult to trust this isn’t another trick of fate, just waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under my feet.
Anyway, returning to the issue of the wanted wedding ring. When I talked with my friend about it, her response was instantaneous anger, demanding she talk with him because how dare he deny me something that was important and precious to me. Unbeknownst to me, she personally texted him to call him out. Which, I then received a massive talking down to about how I was sharing private relationship things with friends, and how dare I betray him like that, and now I needed to promise I would never, ever, ever do that again. I refused. I asked multiple times for him to clarify how it had been a betrayal of his private information and situations, or how my friend defending me, even without me asking her to, was something that I had to promise would never happen again. He couldn’t explain, refused to back down, and this became something that ultimately destroyed any remaining trust or care I had for him, especially when he got our therapist to side with him, and sic’d her on to me. I continued to refuse to make any such promise, and by holding my ground, I got punished through him giving me the cold shoulder, refusing affection, ignoring me for quite a while.
This was merely one example is multiple situations where he blew up at me, demanding I promise something or commit to acknowledging that *I* was the one to mess up. Every single situation was started by me bringing something to his attention that I was confused, hurt, or struggling with, and him twisting the narrative around so that now I was the issue, my tone of voice, the words I used, the way I brought something up was the problem. Common misdirects from what was actual causing harm, and him denying any responsibility for his own actions, words, patterns, and/or behavior. Fast forward to the end of 2022, and I accidentally told him I didn’t find him attractive. This coming on the tails of multiple conversations, discussions, and arguments over intimacy and the lack thereof. Although, to be fair to myself, after he had forced himself on me multiple times in 2017, and the several following years, when memories of childhood sexual abuse were coming back and breaking my mind and body, I don’t know why I would have found him attractive whatsoever. Also, unaware of how queer and genderless I was at the time, many factors were playing into my accidentally spoken comment.
His response though to my essentially confession was to threaten divorce and say that if there was no sexual intimacy in our relationship, we were done. Me, terrified of being on my own, not having enough of a supplemental income to be able to survive outside of his income, acquiesced to his threat, and forced my body into having intimacy with him, even though it made me sick, feel gross in my own skin, and was forcing continued dissociation between my mind and body. His needs too priority, always had been the case, and it certainly was continuing to be the case.
Which this now brings us to 2023 – the year everything imploded. By the middle of 2023, we were no longer being physically intimate, and he had come down with a seemingly very severe illness. He told me it was mono, but there was a lot of questions about whether or not he was lying. I once mentioned the mono diagnosis to a friend of his who was a nurse, and the look on her face was disbelief and shock. But she didn’t correct me, and he kept insisting he had mono. The curious part was how on earth did he get it? My belief is that he was facing some serious alcohol detoxing, covering it up by saying he had mono, and making other people lie for him. Biggest reason I think that? He had started a new medication that prohibits the drinking of alcohol which on said medication and he had suddenly had to stop drinking which, given how much he was buying and drinking daily, the detoxing situation makes a helluva lot of sense. Having now grown up around alcohol at all, and not being able to drink myself, I didn’t have the ability to put the alcoholism pieces together until unfortunately much later.
The next events, which are what ultimately led to my decision to walk away, will have to be in the next post.
Profligate Truth 
Want to share some thoughts?