A Series of S Curves

Divorce - PART I (the narrative)

Warning: Some cliches here. And if you ended up here, but are in a rush to get quick info on options for divorce then click here — and don’t forget to come back. This may help you too. 

I was his student and he was my college professor. But if you are looking for raunch, I will disappoint. I didn’t want to tear his clothes off and he didn’t see me as a way into the social circles he desired. We didn’t fit. Then again, I don’t remember us fitting in with anyone else. We became friends that pushed each other: pushed buttons, nerves, and occasionally we made each other grow up a little. If you interviewed us separately, the story of us would be completely different. If you interviewed us together he would be the only one talking. This is a one-sided account of what happened before he died. This is what happened as we split.

I couldn’t tell you why we ended up staying together so long. We were almost 10 years difference in age, but as the younger one, I was always trying to keep up with his schemes to get one over on the world. On our worst days, I was embarrassed by him. His playfulness crossed into unethical in my world. We didn’t seem to share a world. He was a beautiful mess, and women literally would stop and stare as he walked. I was less than affectionate; I was indifferent to his charm and good looks. I gave him nothing to make him feel good about himself. He gave me little to make me feel safe and successful. It was doomed but entertaining– to most everyone around us.

The timeline was jumpy. We met in 1995 or 96. I was a single mother going to college and he was a restless married graduate student. I was the only person in the class that could understand anything he said. His mid-western ideas and mannerism– the differences in dialects– made it impossible for the Cajun students to understand his passion for Paulo Freire and Stanley Fish. He looked insane when he’d throw himself across his desk and contemplate his role as a teacher. I could hear the girls in the room breath in deeply. Charee the loudest of them all– she wanted him on the desk. They were like sheewolves, Chareewolves, panting at his beautiful insanity. The most attractive thing about insanity is that you don’t have to waste your energy trying to understand it.  

Backing It Up

I took him seriously though. A mop of curls over my eyes– I sat second row center. The same semester, my mom had called in a favor and gotten me enrolled at the local rape crisis center. She was forcing me to get help after my world blew up my senior year in high school. That’s when I told her I had been sexually abused by her husband for the 11 years he lived with us. His own kids had accused him of the same, so this was not a new idea, but this time I was saying it. My sister at college, he caught me one early morning around 2AM when I was coming in from a night out. He was dressed to go hunting and creeped up. I couldn’t slip past him to my room, so I stared into the refrigerator hoping he would leave without stopping. Coming around the kitchen counter he moved his arms around me and pushed his body against mine.

I had enough. And when it all came out, it really all came out. I felt like the whole town saw him touch me when I walked down the aisle of my Catholic church or when I walked into class. I felt raw and invisible. When it feels like everyone can see you naked but no one can see you at all– there starts a psychological split between you and the world. The cells inside me multiplied when I was in my car alone. I couldn’t even be in my bedroom without feeling like I was being watched. At one point, I undressed and stood naked in my window. A car stopped and watched me. I wanted to punish the world, become how they were looking at me.

In the next year, I became pregnant, contemplated abortion, had a baby girl instead and married a boy a year older than me who was still in high school. That marriage lasted until one pot-throwing fight (I threw it) and a frustrated steroid push on the bed (him, I was pregnant). He stayed out most the time and I became deeply attached to my very alive baby girl. The Christmas fund at the mill got me enough money to move she and I out into an apartment in the college town. But it took me two years to actually show up for classes.

The first day, the first class, he was there: my second husband. It would take three years for him to ask me out, seven for us to marry and 20 or so years to divorce. That divorce, like this story, was a series of human mistakes. The emotions and lack of emotions involved produced a nice income for the lawyers. Money we did not have to give.

Divorces are a collection of everything you have ever experienced. You bring into the relationship what you know.

I wish he was here to write his side of the story. He was a writer. I would probably laugh at his fabrications, but I know that he would get a little more real if we were writing together. He was a good writer and could sell anything. He knew others were looking at him so it seems he was selling himself every moment of the day.

I can only tell you what I knew for certain. He was adopted and when we were together, he was struggling with his adopted parents. I, on the other hand, didn’t believe in marriage and believed it was impossible to feel the romantic love others were so often talking about. We were a collective mess. He was a walking romance novel book cover, and I was a caricature of myself. I could of easily had a text bubble looming over my head like a black cloud. He needed me to love him, and I saw his need as an inability to love others. I wanted to fix him. I wanted him to know he could love himself. I wanted him to know he could tell the truth and that would be safe thing to do.

He cheated; I was randomly depressed. My immune systems attacked itself. Therapist literally kicked us out of their office. Sounds painful? It kept us together. We were relating. Sometimes your brain wants to see broken pieces as a larger puzzle.

The next years were a blur. Defending his thesis, my writing scholarship, him fighting for adjunct work, my grad school work. We were more concerned with building ourselves outwardly than the months of inward tension.

Then, I would break up with him; he’d tell me no. He’d sleep with an ex, and I would agree to commitment because it was important to him. His jealousy confused me. And my lack of jealousy confused me. We had poems to write.

At one point, my daughter told me he pushed her– too hard. They had been playing, and when I asked him, he said he didn’t. But he was guilty. He wore it like his infidelity. I tried to leave him then, but questioned everything about my thoughts. Men overreacted all the time. Men were inappropriate all the time. I saw it in every scenario of every dynamic I have ever been in. This was just what men are. I wanted to understand. I was weird too.

In truth, we married because he wanted to. It was important to him, and his logic was that if I didn’t believe in it, what did it matter?

In the end, it mattered. I did it because it mattered for him, but once we decided to split, the distrust between us grew. It had grown with each lie I ignored. But when we split, I was willing to let all of that go. We had a son together (a happy anomaly since my ex-husband was told he could not have kids by his doctor) and we agreed to always do what was right for our son. We agreed to be friends. We had been friends through much worse than a break up: the time he thought he was possessed by a ghost, my custody fight for my daughter, his father’s Parkinsons, my step father dying. But when we stood in the kitchen and agreed, a conversation he initiated, to be right to each other, I believed him. I would never had said it because I just expect that from myself. We were different in moral standards though, and for him to make it a point to make an agreement for us to do the best for all involved was a big deal.

But he met a woman from work. And like many presents, they prefer to not see the past. How else are you to start anew. Our son didn’t like her, she didn’t like me, and our divorce threatened their income. We split with more debt than I could have even imagined.

He and the Present ganged up to make the future go their way. For him, these were little things. For me, they were continued gaslighting. My life became a lie I was participating in. But I will tell you about this more in detail. Because with this narrative comes a list of divorce S curves we can all stand to look at.

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