Yesterday a newer old friend who never met my wife saw a blog article and forwarded it to me. The friend was afraid I’d get angry about it or be hurt. The article began: Last month should have been the 18th birthday of my oldest daughter…
Twenty-four years ago, my very short marriage ended abruptly and against my heart’s desire and wishes. Our child would have been 23 in December or January. I wanted children for as long as I can remember. But a miscarriage ended that hope and in four more weeks my wife had left me to grieve a double loss, and without any clear explanation.
During our marriage, three separate marriage counselors encouraged her to share her feelings and issues with me and she flatly refused. All three fired us for that issue. The last one gave her the permission to leave she’d needed someone else to give. In California, no-fault divorce meant that I had no real input into the process.
I was young and my wife was eight years younger, and only four hours after the ceremony I realized we had made a devastating mistake. Neither of us was who the other thought. But my faith and my disposition made it impossible for me to admit failure so I soldiered on. An event happened that day that was shaming and demeaning to me, and that left me so broken I didn’t see how I would cope. It was not the sort of thing one might guess. I felt like I was suffocating and began to grieve the relationship and the career that would never be possible when things played out.
Against this backdrop we agreed not to have a child until we were financially better established. When finances went from bad to worse, I brought her to my parents home, because I couldn’t make her homeless. It was horrible.
Parenting Matters
In retrospect, my wife was obviously and morbidly depressed. But she refused help. Her retreat left me with the burden of decision making for the both of us, something I wasn’t able or willing to do. My wife was very young and had been abused by a mother who refused to recognize that her children were separate individuals.
My mother-in-law was a self-pitying, malignant narcissist who used her home library, 20 shelves of self-help books and medical journals, to lend her self-pity an aire of legitimacy. She began on my wife at a young age by indoctrinating her with the idea that they both were suffering whatever illness or syndrome was flavor of the month. After all they were the same person.
My wife’s Daddy issues, that had been relatively silent, opened wide and swallowed me, the first week of our marriage. This included a session where she began speaking like a three-year-old for several hours. Over the following weeks she was fired from her job for sexually abusing an elderly, female patient, demanded that I quit school one semester shy of completion, and pushed me to work full-time at a local factory to support an oversize apartment we could not afford. She then crawled into bed and only crawled out again to eat the meals I cooked for her after long hours rebuilding automotive parts.
Physician health thyself.
We immediately got into couples counseling. She demanded we quit about the time the counselor got tired and demanded that she start honestly communicating her needs and issues with me. Over the following years we saw two other counselors. They both bottom-lined it for her in the same terms. She refused.
The irony is that her undergrad and practicum was in dealing with battered spouses. But in her world battered spouse was a gender biased term. Only women could be victims of spousal abuse, or at least only someone married to a man. From the time we were engaged, we had a list of unrelenting House Rules. Among them were:
No hitting: (men may not hit women but women are only being expressive with their fists.)
No name calling: (When I was fuzz-ball, Dick, Ass-hole, or worse. that wasn’t name-calling. Women aren’t capable of name-calling.)
No money hiding: (Men hide money so they can leave their wives or cheat, women are only providing a means of escaping abuse when they do the same.)
No castle secrets: (A woman’s privacy is sacred, a man is only using secrecy to do bad things or talking about his feelings with a third party to shame his wife.)
My upbringing had made me constitutionally incapable of hitting a woman. But that hadn’t really been the point of the rule. When I began amending her rules to be gender neutral that was considered abusive. Also, announcing that she was Klingon (aside from the lecture on Trekker vs Trekkie that should have sent me running) was not a mixed message, even when she was asking me to engage in the mating practices of next-gen Klingons. Something I was not into in the least. It made me sick.
After she left, I went just a little bit mad. To provide context four women have stalked me in my life. No stuffed bunnies involved, but ‘C’ still drives by my house then speeds away just to see if I’m around. ‘B’ contacted my mother, two years after we lost contact, while I was in residential college, and tricked Mom into giving her my contact information so she could make menacing calls. ‘S’ looked me up when my wife left and kept showing up wherever I went in the local county. A fourth left a poem in my locked car in college:
Roses are red
Andorans are blue
Always remember
Someone’s watching you.
My wife confessed that one was her. We were engaged at the time.
In the counsel of many, there is dissonance.
Old friends and peers, church family, even strangers began to have very definite opinions about my marriage and character and feeling the need to share them. I couldn’t even go to Starbucks for a coffee and a chance to write, without a stranger walking up and engaging me in a conversation about marriage and how women can never leave a man unless he’s abusive.
It made me reclusive, something at odds with my natural disposition. A college friend refused a facebook friend-request with the message: I prefer to remember you as the friend I knew in college, and blocked me. The worst of it was no one who knew the both of us would share what her real motives might have been or why she chose to disappear from my life rather than leave a line of communication for the future. I grieved long and hard and the wounds kept reopening because of the third party abuse.
Knowledge is Freedom
When my friend sent me the link to my wife’s article, I took a moment to brace myself then read it with trepidation. It was shocking, in a very objective and physical way. Psychogenesis is not a game for children. But, on the heels of the lightheadedness was an overpowering sense of joy, peace, and freedom.
As I read, I realized the real cause of the divorce and finally got the closure I needed. I saw just how deeply ill and delusional my wife has been and I began to realize how the narrative she’d been perpetuating kept her trapped and unable to break the walls of grief and rage she’d built for herself.
It would be pointless to play the he vs she game at this point. In spite of the delusional nature of her recall, which has moved events around and even changed the year of her miscarriage and forgets the DNC she had before we were married (I was not the father of that one)–my wife believes the narrative. She remembers these fictitious or even dream events and the trauma to her is just as real as if they had actually happened. I grieve for her. I don’t however have any responsibility for those events, and it is freeing to know that the majority of those things she suffers over are not my doing.
I have to admit in retrospect there were strong indicators. More than once, she woke up from a dream convinced that the events in her dreams were real, I should know what they were, and I should be duly repentant for what I’d done in her dreams. IT was not her resonsibility to tell me what she had dreamed. Bear in mind that she was fully aware and admitted that they were dreams. But this was a castle secret.
My life and hers could have been much happier if at some point she’d been willing to admit what things she believed I’d done and what had happened. It would have helped me if I’d been able to overcome the machismo that made it shameful to admit I was a battered, emotionally abused, verbally abused, financially abused, and erstwhile grieving father. But I was the man so I had to be the strong one, the stoic, the invincible, the punching bag.
The bottom line is communication is critical, and privacy is a basic human need–but secrecy is toxic to every form of human interaction. In secrecy, sickness and insanity go without care. In secrecy, abuse, both real and imagined, goes unhealed. In secrecy, hope dies. In secrecy, delusion is omnipotent. But secrecy is at times the only defense against cultural bias and misandry.
The mediation will be socialized.
This is the point where most blogs would give a short, saccarine offer of hope and a hotline. I have yet to find a hotline that really deals with men abused by women except to blame the victim.
If you are an abused man, know there is hope. I have no respect for modern psychology or it’s religious technology alternatives. In place of a hotline, I recommend you get away, get safe, and get a Bible. When you have the perspective, find a friend that believes you, that you can trust, someone patient who doesn’t practice tough love. And get busy with low stress work and helping others.
Remember, when someone hurts you, it’s probably not about you.