It was difficult to hear your voice today. To know that you
were sitting right there as your attorney spoke to me. I was grateful to have
the anonymity that the telephone provides because seeing your face sends
conflicting shockwaves through the very core of me. Emotion flooded my body and
I choked back the tears, not wanting to give you the satisfaction of knowing
that I hurt over all that has transpired though I know only a fool could think
me cold enough to not be broken. There is so much hurt in my heart. I feel
cynical and jaded to the point that I wonder if I will ever be able to trust
again some times. No one fights for my best interest. I find myself in a
position where I just want to be removed from the situation as expeditiously
and painlessly as possible. Outwardly, I appear collected and together but
inside I feel very defeated and broken in the wake of indifference. I loved you
from the first moment that I knew you with an indescribable tether to you that
I could never comprehend and yet from the very first moment that our souls
intertwined I knew somehow that you didn’t have my best interests at heart and still
I trudged on thinking that I could be the balm that mended your broken spirit
and that would be enough to hold us together.
You told me once that you knew that you would never find
someone to love you the way that I would and that was the reason that you held
to me with such a tight grasp. It wasn’t enough for you to be loved. You
chalked it up to immaturity and inexperience and came back to my life nearly
two decades later claiming that you had evolved and all you wanted to do was
love me and only me with your whole heart and make mine and my children’s lives
better. You openly spoke of how you blamed yourself for many on the iniquities
that had transpired in my life since our parting and with the deepest sincerity
I absolved you from any guilt that you might feel. The past had a place in the
past and the future was what I was looking to. It’s difficult however to ignore
the signs when they are right before you and sadly it felt too late for me,
having already married you, when I seen the rage monster within you re-emerge.
I hated you briefly. I hated that you wouldn’t let me grieve
the death of my Mother. I hated that you expected me to act as if losing the
one person in my life that loved me and accepted me just the way that I was at
any one point in time was of no consequence because you were to be some sort of
replacement. Only a week or so prior with stars in your eyes you had agreed to
love me until the ends of the Earth with your whole heart no matter what the
circumstance… and then here you were, angry at me for being withdrawn and sad
and emotional over losing the very being that gave me life. Marriage was
instantly something that you didn’t want or comprehend. You had all these
ideals of how it would be and in many ways I feel that losing my Mother caused
me to free you of all of them. I’m sorry for that. I truly wanted to be able to
make you the happiest man on the planet and fill your day with my smiles and
adoration much like you had dreamed, yet I simply wasn’t capable in the wake of
my grief. Much the way that you had expectations, I had them as well. I needed
you to comfort me and understand how I was feeling and set aside the desires
and wants that you had to take a more compassionate, understanding role; and
yet in many ways you simply just abandoned me. Your need to control me confused
me so much. I changed so much in an attempt to please you that I barely even
recognized myself over time. I wondered how you even fell in love with me when
I was so very different to begin with than this person that you were making me
into. It was as if you wanted to wipe away the 19 years of life that I had
lived and get that naïve nineteen year old girl that you met in Pittsburgh back
for a do over and I just didn’t know how to be her anymore. Life had changed
me.
I believed you when you said that life had changed you too.
I hung on your every word much the way I always have and took everything that
you said to me in the most literal term. I would happily forsake anyone who
opposed our union and cautioned me to think to the past which I had seemingly
placed large unsavory portions of from my mind so easily. I learned recently
that behavior of forgetting is a coping mechanism and have taken many steps to
journal my feelings from this forward point in an attempt to never forget
again. In many ways you have been such a poison to my life. Loving you has brought
such a brokenness to my soul. I have never really had regrets in life, I had
always chalked them up to learning experiences. I thought that I had learned so
much over the years but couldn't understand why I kept making the same
mistakes. It must be something wrong with me that makes people treat me this
way. I give too much, I give too little… I trust too much or not enough. I am
38 years old and I am just finding out through therapy that it isn’t me at all.
I simply lack the ability to choose someone that is good for me.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I can agree with that. I had
nodded in agreement when the therapist spoke to me and told her that I could
easily see that, as the death of my Mother was something that altered me in a
way that I couldn't describe and that I felt I was unable to move forward from.
She then corrected me and said that she felt that my first traumatic experience
was at age 1 when I witnessed my Father sitting on top of my Mother and beating
her about the face and that I had subsequently re-traumatized myself dozens of
times over since that very moment. She went on to explain that this forgetful
coping mechanism that I have so seemingly perfected is something that I have
been carting around since childhood, passing it off as this greatened ability
to forgive those that had wronged me. I have formed in many ways this altered
perception of events to push the events that are unbearable to me out of my
head and life completely. I trick myself, almost into forgetting the events that
broke me from you to begin with. (Unless you remind me) I guess that is why it
came as such a shocking revelation to me when you were on top of me screaming
in my face with your fist clenched above my face. Until that blinding moment I
had forgotten that you even possessed the ability to cause me physical pain… I
instantly remembered.
I sat there on the kitchen floor sobbing for hours, holding
my children close and somehow realizing that the trauma that I experienced as a
child was now officially passed on to them. It wasn’t the first time and it
wouldn’t be the last. It’s no surprise to me that my children have no desire
for me to be in a relationship with anyone. They speak to their therapist with
fear that I will welcome someone to hurt me again and how they want to have
weapons so that they can protect me from anyone that would want to harm me from
this point on. I cry a lot to my therapist about what a failure I feel like for
bringing this hurt into their lives. I can only hope that therapy will fix that
for them and that the cycle will end here and not be something that follows
them into adulthood.
I have spent countless hours evaluating the relationships
that I was holding onto in my life. We are raised with a certain moral
obligation to allow people into our lives that otherwise would hold no place
there and simply do not belong. My Mother came from a large family that
outwardly seems so tight knit and connected. Growing up, I was at no loss for
frequent family gatherings and all the dramatics that follow.
