1 January, 2008
This is my journal. It is sometimes ugly and brutal, sometimes beautiful and tender, but it is always honest.
In a lot of ways, I am like everyone else. In other ways I am like no one else.
Today is New Year’s Day. While others eat sauerkraut and clean their homes, or watch football on TV, or just relax, recovering from a night too drunken to remember, I sit here, Stevie Nicks in my ear, shaking, terrified, feeling sick, as though what happened was too much for my body to comprehend, much less my mind.
In 2008, I will be divorced. This is a decision I made today.
It started last night with something that probably shouldn’t have happened.
A friend of mine had screamed at me in e-mail, because I had asked her roommate if it would be okay for them to keep a rescued cat until I could find him a home or get him into a no-kill shelter.
To my astonishment and anger, she screeched that not only would she never bring a rescue cat to me, but that it was something just short of sick that the neighbors consider me the neighborhood “crazy cat lady”. She pulled out the hatchet, then, and told me I couldn’t even take care of my own cats.
I had much the same reaction to what happened last night as I read that. Utter astonishment. Utter incomprehension. Anger. Wounded pride. Bitterness. Pain. Fear. And ultimately, a wash of emotions, ocean-like in their fullness but fire-like in their intensity.
I adore my cats. They are my children. For those who believe animals are expendable things, I say you are scum. And stupid. And have no idea of the beauty and unconditional love you are missing.
T. helped us move, and all I can imagine is that she made the erroneous conclusion that, because a couple of them had (temporary) problems with mats, I therefore cannot take care of my cats.
If it wasn’t so painful to me, it would be laughable.
So I sent my husband over to her New Year’s Eve party. He called, raving about how nice T. was to him, and oh, yes, it was just a little mistake that we weren’t invited this year, and T. would so LOVE to see me.
I should have known better, and later proved why.
She barely looked at me, much less give me that happy hug and quick kiss she apparently had given R.. She then spent most of the time I was there talking about animals, in a way that was so negative as to leave me aghast that she would say these things in front of me, knowing how I feel.
So I could take no more. I said “T., you said some absolutely horrible things to me in your e-mails. You really wounded me, deeply. I think you owe me an apology.”
Asserting that this was probably not the right time, she agreed with my suggestion that further discussion would be beneficial. But not now.
Of course not now. It was minutes until midnight on New Year’s Eve. I spent the time the clock chimed midnight walking in the sleet down a dark alley, dodging the enormous amount of fireworks being set off all over the neighbohood.
Not an auspicious beginning to the year, is it?
Now, I had suggested that my husband, R., might actually want to have some beer. He drinks very rarely, and when he does, he is what is known as a “happy drunk”. Until this night, that is.
He had been very tense, and I had thought it would relax him. And when we had been separated, we had talked several times while he was a bit in the way of tipsy, and he had been loving and insightful, and able to discuss difficult emotional things with some measure of reason.
After we arrived home, we talked about a number of things, cheerfully, until he began to shift the conversations to my lover, D.. I kept trying to shift him off that track that leads nowhere, but he refused, returning over and over again to the subject.
Until we somehow managed to drift onto the topic of our move last summer. The move was a nightmare; we had very little outside help (although the help we got, I was intensely grateful for), and I spent every day for a month, hauling what I could up and down the alley – this because we had moved a single block away.
I managed this with a shattered pelvis and broken tailbone. I should not have been doing this, period. But I had no choice, as R. did as little as he possibly could. And it had to be done. I went from healing well and properly to becoming much worse. I have always blamed this on the move, and I am sure it is the only reason my healing was completely interrupted. Each night, as I stopped moving for that day, I took off my shoes to feet and ankles that were swollen the size of small balloons.
R., in the meanwhile, had made sure to request time off to attend a sci-fi convention for five days. And he refused to do anything else during those five days. If I so much as sounded like I was about to ask him to do a bit of moving in that timeframe, he clenched his jaw and did that quiet scream that comes out in that position, a posture I have seen more times in the past three years than I care to count. It is like a mental and emotional firehose that leaves me crouching, folding into myself, and drained of all energy and feeling.
Last night, he sat on the couch, and, with a very ugly smirk on his face, claimed that it was all my fault. He had plenty of FMLA time (Family Leave Act), and all I had had to do was get a doctor’s written okay, and he could have taken plenty of time off to help me move. But, he continued, I refused to do so, because I wanted to be able to go around telling all my friends what a horrible person he was.
My initial reaction, after trying over and over again to tell him he was wrong; he had never told me about that, and in fact, he had claimed he had NO FMLA time left at the time, was to stare at him, utterly aghast.
I didn’t know this person. This was some horrendous creature you read about or see in a movie, not a person I would ever marry. This person sat in front of me, smirking without stop, telling me I had not done what I had done, or vice versa. This person blamed me for my pain. This person blatantly lied, and would not back down an inch. This person was crazy, and playing terrible mind games.
As it slowly began to sink in what he was doing, what he was saying, and worse, what he had done, I began to feel sick. “Oh my God,” I said, over and over, unbelieving.
What he had done was tell me had had no FMLA. He never gave me a chance to go get a doctor’s excuse that would allow him to help. He did not want to help, and decided he would make sure he did not have to. Worse, he purposely, with hate in his heart, had forced me into the position of walking all those days, on my broken pelvis and tailbone, to do the moving he could have been helping me with, but had refused to do. He purposely caused me physical pain and very likely caused my bones to never grow together again right. He may as well have hit me for all the difference the violence of his actions caused to the pain and problems in my body.
I could not believe it. And worse, the more horrified and terrified I became when I saw the truth of him, the more emotional I became, the colder he became, making it appear that I was crazy, not him.
What do you do in that situation? I wish I knew. All I knew is that I had to get out.
What I will do is unclear. I have no job, no money of my own; I have 10 cats. I have rent, and bills, and credit card debt. I am injured and unable to work most jobs. I have not worked a job in the “real world” in over a decade. The main job I used to do – typing – has become obsolete with the growth of computers.
How can I survive? I do not not know that I can. But I must try.
Tomorrow, I will make some phone calls and ride a bus downtown the the Social Security office to see about SSI. I will try to start this process that will lead to the end of this marriage that began (I thought) with a kind, compassionate young man, and is ending with a manipulative, lying, emotionally and mentally abusive monster.
For today, I will not speak to him, save to tell him I want him to do one thing: call a doctor tomorrow, and make an appointment, so that he may get back on his medications. He needs antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. He has refused for over a year to do this. His response to my demand today was to smirk in the same way he was last night and claim that he was already going to do that tomorrow anyway.
I am truly afraid.
