9/13 TFTD ~ More on Living Well

When the night has been too lonely
and the road has been too long
And you think that love is only
for the lucky and the strong
Just remember
in the winter
far beneath the bitter snows,
Lies the seed,
that with the sun’s love,
in the spring becomes the rose.

~ Amanda McBloom (from “The Rose” by Bette Midler)

He was angry when I got pregnant for the third time as if I had managed to do that all by myself and somehow, was something I was doing TO him…to make him miserable.

He was SO angry about it.

By the time I was six months pregnant I was spot bleeding and had to leave work earlier than I had expected. I had promised to work up until my 9th month but now I was going to leave 3 months early. There was no disability. There was no FMLA. It meant we were going to hurt financially. It was a financial hardship and because it was all my fault, he stopped speaking to me.

He invited an 18 year old co-worker to our house to play video games while ignoring me the entire time. He insisted nothing was going on but what was going on was that he spent all his time with her and not with me.

She was at our house constantly. Even if it was just a friendship, it was not okay. But again, it was my fault. Every time he did something I didn’t like, it was my fault. I deserved it. I had it coming. And he would weave the logic just so that I would feel nuts and lose my train of thought when we argued about it.

After a while he just stopped speaking to me and there was nothing I could do to make him speak to me again. I would cook dinners and he would eat them and not say a word. We would have something to discuss about our other 2 children and he would barely nod or grunt.

When I was 8 months pregnant, I came home one night and for some reason, had just had it. I saw her there with him, joysticks in their hands and I was feeling no joy. So I went crazy and threw her out of the house. She flew down the stairs and he went running after her. He came back later to scream at me and then he went over her house every night after that. I guess I showed them.

My due date was November 29th which was the Monday after Thanksgiving. I had hoped we would all spend a nice holiday together. Instead he took the two boys to his mother’s house for the weekend. I went to my mothers for Thanksgiving and out to shop the next day. I spent the rest of the weekend at home cleaning. Feeling the “nesting” instinct, I cleaned and cleaned and could not stop cleaning. I had not had that with the other two but I was cleaning machine for this one.

He came home on Sunday night, looked at the house and said sarcastically, “Did you make your mother come over and clean?” I told him that I had cleaned but he didn’t believe me. He dropped the boys off and left.

I was crushed.
I gave the boys baths and got them ready for bed. About an hour later, I started cramping and bleeding.

I had not bled with either of my other pregnancies and I didn’t know what was going on.

It was Thanksgiving weekend. Both my downstairs neighbors were gone for the weekend. My mother had gone to her Sunday night Bingo game.

No one was available to help me. I was alone in the house with two little kids, it was cold and rainy outside, I was in labor and bleeding.

I knew that sooner or later I would need to call my doctor and they would probably send an ambulance. But I didn’t want to frighten the boys so I tried to hold off that scene as long as possible.

My mind was racing.

I didn’t want to harm the baby, I didn’t want to look like a drama queen, I didn’t want to be criticized by my husband or family for how I handled this but I was so confused and distraught. All I could think of was that I had to do the RIGHT thing, but I had no idea what that was.

Every time I thought of what to do, I found some possible way to be criticized for that. He always criticized me for not cleaning the house and didn’t believe that I had cleaned but if that activity had somehow harmed the baby, it would be all my fault.

If I waited too long to go to the hospital, I was putting the baby in jeopardy. If I called too early, I was traumatizing the boys. Who would look after the boys when I got to the hospital? How does this work? I didn’t KNOW. I didn’t want the boys to be upset. I had no idea what to do. And my inability to decide, my inability to just KNOW what to do brought my husband’s and my family’s criticisms of me to the forefront. See how I was? Maybe they were right. I was a MESS.

I didn’t know then that their criticism of me was WHY I couldn’t decide, because everything I had ever done was wrong. I was muddled and thought it was MY fault…this is what they were talking about. I was clueless and helpless and hopeless.

It never, and I mean NEVER dawned on me that he should have been home and not out with some 18 year old twit playing video games. I never thought to figure out that what HE was doing was wrong. It only occured to me that I was not capable of a decision.

Because that is how I was raised…no matter how crazy my family was, it was all about how I screwed up AGAIN. So I gravitated to someone who was comfortable and who would keep me off my pins and second guessing my every thought and deed all the time. I had NO time to think that maybe it was someone else’s fault. Like, DAMN, why weren’t you HOME with your 9 month pregnant wife. No, that never occured to me to question that.

The boys had not seen me in a few days and would not settle down. So I brought them into bed with me, piled blankets on us and turned on the television hoping they would go to sleep and that by remaining still, I would slow the labor down.

As hard as I tried to be calm, sometimes the panic would well up in me and I would grab the phone to try to call someone. I cried every now and again but didn’t want my sons see me cry. My little one was only 16 months old and my oldest was 5. Neither of them deserved to see me freaking out.

Eventually I caved in and called around to find out where he was. I called a mutual friend and said “if you know where he is please ask him to come home.” Everyone claimed they did not know. The hours crawled by. The contractions got worse. Eventually he came in and saw the blood on the floor and asked what happened. I was almost hysterical and told him I was in labor. The downstairs neighbors came home about the same time and sat with the kids. He drove me to the hospital in angry silence.

Once we got there, they hooked me up to the monitor. The baby’s heartbeat kept decreasing with every labor pain and they were doing various tests on me. I could tell that the doctors were worried about the baby and I was so scared.

My darling husband was standing against the wall like he was waiting for a train. I asked him to come over next to me while the doctors poked and prodded and hooked me up to various machines but he sneered at me and said he was tired.

I never hated anyone so much in my life as I hated him at that moment. They told him to put on scrubs as they thought the baby’s birth was imminent. As soon as he left the room, the baby was born in the labor bed. Part of me was happy that he missed the birth.

My son was born with the cord wrapped around his neck, but overall he was fine.

But something in me was gone forever. I woke up the next morning and knew I would never feel the same way about him again. I knew it was over but I was too afraid to leave and I would stay and it would not get better. At least not for long.

Four years later I was still holding that night against him, but inexplicably I was still with him. We reconciled a couple of months after the baby was born. We bought our first house and fixed it up. We had some nice moments and good times once again.

But we had also had a couple of more bad stretches. One time he took off his wedding ring and wore it on a key chain for months. Another time he just stopped speaking to me again for months.

There continued to be female coworkers with whom he had “a close relationship” (cough, cough) with and we still continued to have physical altercations.

For some reason when I lost my job in January of 1987 I couldn’t take any of it anymore. I had no idea why my tolerance just ran out that particular day. Why did it take me so long to get out? What was I holding onto?

Later I would begin to understand. One of the reasons for staying had to do with my fear of intimacy. By choosing people who could not or would not get close, or allow me to get close, I never had to deal with the fear that true intimacy would entail.

Another thing is that I didn’t know what a healthy relationship looked like. I didn’t even know if I was capable of one since I was so sick inside.
But the biggest reason for staying in a chaotic relationship was that it kept me from having to deal with the pain deep inside and the sense of abandonment and the feeling of being unwanted early in life.

Foster care.

Alcoholic families.

Lies.

Delusions.

Blame.

At the time I didn’t know how to surmount all that scarring and how to be okay with just me. It was something, I knew, that I just had to learn. Learn it or die. I saw those as my only choices.

I finally had to just leave.

I remembered that night in that hospital room.

I remembered the fear I had being in labor and alone with two little kids. I knew I would never forgive him.

I had to go for it.

But I had no clue how to walk through the pain it was going to bring……

FAST FORWARD TO 2007:

After the marriage broke up, it wasn’t easy. As I’ve written on here and in “About”, it was a long, hard journey. I raised the boys and tried hard to break the cycle of abuse so that they would not be abusers nor be abused. I think I was successful with that.

The child who was born on Thanksgiving weekend of 1982 is getting married this weekend. His fiance is a wonderful person who loves him deeply and completely and they treat each other like gold. He has chosen well (as has she :) ). His next oldest brother is his best man and my oldest son a groomsman and my oldest grandchild is the ring bearer.

My son said to me last night, “Mom, you are such an important part of my wedding.”

His biological father will not be there. They have not spoken in years and my son will never speak to him again. There is too much water that has gone under that bridge. My husband will be there. The man he considers his father and the one who taught him how to treat women well. Choosing a good role model for my sons was so important to me and I think I have done well. We’ve shown the boys that love is as love does and that is how they are. I’m very proud of that.

When my first marriage broke up, I wondered what would become of me. How would I survive? A person who could not make the seemingly most instinctual decisions. A person who had her family’s and her husband’s perpetual criticisms in her head to the point where it FROZE me before I could do anything.

I had to leave him and detach from them. Find good and healthy people and go where recovery is. I had to learn how to be healthy and how to put together a wonderful life. And I did.

In that night, in that hospital room, I had no idea what would become of me. It was scary and it was hard.

The night had been too lonely.

The road had been too long.

I thought that love was only for the lucky and the strong.

I didn’t even know what love was.

The families will be lighting a Unity Candle at the wedding. The bride’s mother and I will light the small candles and hand them off to the bride and the groom to light the large candle. For me, it will be a stunning and shining moment in my life when all of my work over the past twenty years will come to fruition. It will be the rose.

Without the pain of leaving, without the pain of not knowing and of working hard to build a new life and set off on an uncharted and difficult course, this moment would not only not be sweet but would not even be possible. Everything I’ve done since leaving that marriage has made this upcoming weekend possible.

For years I was working hard and at times beset with loneliness and sadness and anger. And the experience of not knowing if anything I was doing was going to result in anything.

Today I know.

I have healed.

I am whole.

Believe it or not, the broken down crazy person that I was is fabulously successful and happy.

And today I’ve managed to pass the good stuff onto my kids and that good stuff will be front and center this weekend.

Life is short. Do not FOR A MINUTE think you have to stay in a relationship where you are being treated badly or not appreciated or criticized or blamed. Yes, it’s scary to leave and forge your own way, but the rewards are SO worth it.

I’ll be gone for a few days from the blog.

Celebrating life.

Celebrating love.

Celebrating getting past my past.

I wish the same for you.

Peace, Susan