My Verbally Abusive Marriage

The dream hurt. I was at Will’s house and my son’s room was beautifully decorated and he had all the “things” I ever wanted to give him. Professionally painted wallsand trim, decorator-type bedspread and pillows, matching bedset, plush carpet – it was an oasis of his personality, soft inviting comfortable. And Will provided it for him, not me.

I stood there with a notebook in my hand, ready to write the emotions, willing to write the story, but lost for the words required to express the sense of utter failure I felt deep within my gut.

I pulled a book off his shelf, overladen with reading material, and opened it. On every page was a map showing where “Iodine” lived. I knew it should say “Iroquois”, but it didn’t. It said Iodine. In the margins were pictures of military vehicles, land and air, labeled neatly with a blurb about each one in tiny print. I felt like my tears should be wetting the pages, but the tears didn’t come until I woke.

Helplessness. Defeat. Failure. Doubt. Fear.

Fortunately, I was able to share the dream and as I listened to myself talk, I realized that “things” and “appearances” lie.

I know that one of my greatest faults is in thinking that I can buy my boys something to make up for the pain I think they feel. I was able to do it all the time when I was married to Will. Most of the time I was married, I didn’t know what pain I was trying to make up for by purchasing the latest game console or pair of shoes.

Now, in hindsight, I realize I tried to make up for the deficit I perceived in myself. Yes, I knew my boys were in pain, but they maybe didn’t know it. They knew one thing all their lives…the way things were…they were young and didn’t consider that other people may live differently. They didn’t know they were being deprived.

I subconsciously knew it before the word “abuse” entered my mind, but I consciously came to terms with it after discovering the truth. I knew their lives were lacking a mother who could give her all to them. I felt deprived of love and acceptance and projected those feelings onto them. I thought that I couldn’t fully love them because the one man in the world who I wanted to love me could not. There was something wrong with me, and if purchasing them the latest toy could delay them finding out that I was a fraud, then that was a game I was willing to play.

Now I cannot play anymore…I must be real. I must be myself because I have no green paper-bill bandaid to fill any void. I am literally stripped of my coping mechanism, laid bare for better or worse to those boys. I am what I am, and I fear that who I am isn’t enough.

In the dream, faced with the room Will decorated and the toys he bought for them, I came face to face with the realization that it is time to put up or shut up. No longer can I compare what I do as a mother to what he does as a father. No longer can I make up for any perceived deficits in either Will’s or my character by changing who I am or what I do to mend their possibly aching heart. I cannot be the malleable wood-filler that magically fills the gaps in my boys’ broken hearts.

My perception of what may go on behind their dad’s closed doors haunts me. I truly hope he is the father he projects himself to be to the outside world, and the outside world now includes me. I see him nagging about homework and chores, keeping tabs on the boys’ friends, taking them to doctor appointments, and sharing horseplay and jokes with them. I see him being the father I knew he could be, and I hope I am right because I really want that for Marc and Eddie. But I fear that my perception is limited.

I fear that they are now experiencing what I experienced with their father, and honestly, I am torn about it. On the one hand, I don’t want them to go through the painful voyage of realization I experienced. I want to coccoon them, protect them from finding out the truth I discovered. I pray that I am truly the only person in the world whom Will desires to be “just like him”, that I am the only person in the world expected to live on a pedastal and to be punished when I fall off of it.

On the other hand, I want them to see the games Will plays and the subconscious lies I feel Will tells himself. I feel that if the boys could see the manipulation and control, then they could learn to detach themselves from it. Never in a million years would I want them to NOT LOVE their father, and I know they COULD NEVER stop loving him. I don’t want them to hate him or to not want to be with him. But I want them to be able to protect themselves.

I want them to be able to say to themselves and believe in their heart that there is nothing “wrong” with them, despite the tornado tearing through their heart and mind most likely created by Will’s inability to allow individualism on any count. In hindsight, when I wasn’t mirroring Will, then I was wrong. And I have a strong suspicion that the boys are experiencing that same tornado without the inadequate storm shelter I tried to provide.

I want them to love both Will and me without limitation. I want them to be able to see each of us for all of our goodness and all of our flaws, and then choose what they want to carry with them into their own lives. I don’t want them to make subconscious choices, I want them to make conscious choices.

And yet I have no control over their choices. My hands and words are tied. I cannot tell them what I know, I cannot share with them the strategies they can use to protect themselves, I cannot say or do anything to help them without sounding like I hate their father or want them to hate Will. Or at least, I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

I’ll search my dream for an answer. But I already think I know it. I must continue to detach from Will. I must continue to accept the love and protection of the angels (living and ethereal) in my life. I must continue to shed my fears, to discover who I am, and to love my boys unconditionally even when it hurts so deep inside that I think I will literally explode into pieces.

I must rip off the bandaids, even when the sticky parts pull my flesh from bone.

Linda recently wrote to tell us about her abusive marriage. Although it appears her husband is changing, she suffers from PTSD and cannot trust that what happened before truly will not happen again. She remains in the marriage, prays for guidance, and trusts that God will guide her steps.

Read Linda’s testimonial.

There must be something in the air. My mood is so serious, like a rain-filled cloud threatening to rain on my parade.

Although I feel in my gut that I’m moving in the right direction, I’m getting stronger, finding out who I am and what I like (and don’t), … there’s something heavily sad about this weekend.

Will and I have talked several times, amicably enough, in the past weeks. But Saturday, I found myself embroiled in a disagreement with Will, told to quit popping off at the mouth and scolded about my soap opera drama. I didn’t see it that way. Said to stop telling me what I was doing and what my intentions were. He got madder. We hung up the phone. It didn’t last long.

Somewhere in there, in response to him telling me he didn’t trust me and that he thought I was up to no good and being dishonest, I said, “You’ve always thought that of me.” He replied that no, he hadn’t always thought it, that its a recent thing. He got angry that I had said it, told me that he was sorry he’d tried to talk to me. I thought to myself that he wasn’t talking to me, but at me.

When we hung up, I tried to shrug it off as if his words didn’t bother me. They did. But I think what is really bothering me now is what I said: “You’ve always thought that of me.” Shrinks will tell you to not use words like “always” in conversations because they’re accusing words. But I used one, he felt defensive, and the rest is history.

Now, writing this, I’m torn between two paths I could write about. The first one is that it would be nice if he had only said, “I don’t think it’s fair to say ‘always’” to which I could have corrected myself. Or at least apologized for inflammatory language.

But (and here’s the second path), I think I was right. I don’t think I said it to be accusing or to pop off or to start some drama. I think I said it because it was what I was thinking, and the more I think about it, I think I was right.

Although I do wish I hadn’t used the word because I want to learn better ways of expressing myself that don’t ignite someone’s defenses, there are several reasons why I think “always” was the right word to describe what I felt:

• In the beginning, I was called “whore” often. He didn’t trust me to be faithful to him.
• When I did tell him about the kiss one of his friends dished out, he told me that I was mistaken, that his friends would never betray him. Sometimes he would come home and “investigate” the house. He’d look for something out of place, or maybe something to give away what I was doing with my time when he was at work. Sometimes he’d get lucky and feel like he hit the jackpot, caught me in some imagined lie and confront me. This wasn’t usually about “other men” it was about how I spent my time. There were times when no explanation would satisfy him. He didn’t trust me to tell him the truth.
• Although eventually all the finances fell to me to handle, he constantly insinuated of my mishandling them and became angry over what I’d spent without bothering to find out what our expenses actually were. He didn’t trust me with “his” money.
• When our children would act out and misbehave, or behave in a way he considered wrong for “men”, he claimed that it was my influence causing their dysfunction. If I’d only spanked them more, if I weren’t so soft on them, if only I’d act more like him when he was away on deployment, they’d know better. He didn’t trust me with his children.

Integrity, sex, money, children… what else was there to our marriage? I feel that there was nothing at all I could have done to gain his trust in any of those areas. Everyone has weaknesses, everyone makes mistakes, and I am no saint. But for crying out loud, how could I really have fought this issue? If he doesn’t have trust inside of him, then how could I earn his trust? I wonder if he had any to give (to me, at least).

When I would bring these things up to him, he would answer with, “I married you, didn’t I?” or “I must trust you, I have to leave you with the boys when I deploy,” or “You’re the one who handles the money, aren’t you? You could really screw me if you wanted to!” All true statements, but never truly honest.

Sigh.

But there is a silver lining to the storm cloud. It happened today. Will told me that he thinks our relationship should be “only business.” He wants to pull away from me. He said that he can tell I’m moving on, but he’s still stuck in the anger and hurt. He wants to detach, and he set clear boundaries. I listened to him without saying much at all.

A big piece of me is so freaking proud of him! A big piece of me wanted to tell him that he was on the right track, that detaching from me was the right thing to do in order to find peace and health and happiness.

And a small piece of me is sad. The little wife inside of me wanted to hug him and tell him that it would all be all right. That I appreciated his vulnerability and that his decision is a wise one. And I cried (after he left) because he is detaching from me.

You see, when I started this blog, I thought Will and I would be married forever. I thought we’d have our ups and downs and solve the downs and be happy. I thought when he saw what effect his words and actions had on me that he would change them because he loved me. I thought we would heal together, never to be torn apart.

But now he and I are healing on our own. We won’t be together when we’re happy next. We won’t be married forever having overcome the trials of our own humanity. We’ll never sit on the porch together, rocking, gray hair blowing in the breeze.

I must detach from that dream, and saying goodbye to it hurts more than any dream I’ve ever held and released before.

Diana is, I think, the youngest person to contact me in hope of breaking the silent pattern of abuse. She’s 18, and her abuser is 23.

Although I hesitate to use the word “fortunately”, I find myself thinking it because at the time of her writing, she was not with her abuser due to his physically violent rampage. He went for her throat, pushed her into a window.

Read Diana’s Abuse Testimonial.

Ali’s testimonial gets right to the root of the problem for abuse victims. It’s beautifully written, like sad, dark poetry.

She wrote me in February, and I am greatly sorry that I didn’t post her testimonial sooner.

Read Ali’s Testimonial - you won’t be disappointed, although it will make you think, wonder, and maybe recognize yourself and the abuse you’ve suffered.

Carolyn wrote an abuse testimonial a couple of months ago. I hadn’t posted it yet because I didn’t really want to think about my own abuse. That wasn’t fair, and I’m sorry Carolyn, that you waited so long.

As you read through it, think about the years Carolyn has lived with this verbal, emotional and mental abuse. The time it takes you to read the testimonial is nothing compared to the years she’s spent living the abuse. I got a knot in my stomach realizing that many of the abuses she reports were happening in real time even though she was listing past abuse.

Carolyn’s Abuse Testimonial

Lately I’ve not preached the gospel of what verbal abuse IS or how it is affecting me because I’m in a new phase. The phase that exists after the prime abuser is removed from the majority of life. However, just because I’m revelling in the freedom, that doesn’t mean that all of YOU are revelling with me! So I’d like to share some links about abuse and where you can find help and relief from it.

The Narcissism Daily Mirror, author Kim Cooper, is writing a series on verbal abuse. The latest one is When verbal abuse is covert or may not sound like verbal abuse … Check to the right of the article to view the others pertaining to verbal abuse.

My friend recently found a site called Women Exhale. It’s an inexpensive alternative to traditional therapy for abuse victims, and it is not insurance based, meaning that your abuser will not receive notice of your choice to seek therapy from any insurance approval letters that may come to your house.

Patricia Evans, author of books such as “The Verbally Abusive Man: Can He Change?”, is online at VerbalAbuse.com. I highly recommend becoming a member of her message boards. Yes, you must call the toll free number to join the board, but this is done to ensure only abuse victims have access to this resource. No abuse perpetrators allowed. When I called, I spoke to Patricia directly, and had access to the boards within minutes.

For information on verbal abuse, try Dr. Irene.Please call or virtually visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 even if you don’t know what you’re going to say, and even if you haven’t experienced the physically violent side of domestic violence (yet). Domestic violence includes mental, emotional, verbal, financial, and all other sorts of abuse. Just because you’ve never had a bloody lip or blackened eye does NOT mean you are not experiencing domestic violence.

To read my story from the beginning (1992), start at Less Than I Am and click “Next” at the upper right to continue. Or to read testimonials from other abuse survivors, visit Your Journal Entries.

Also, check out the Blogroll and Links section to the right, near my facebook badge. The more you know, the more powerful you become. The more power you have within yourself, the sooner you can make changes to stop the cycle of abuse.

You do not have to leave your abuser right now or ever, you can stay. That is a valid choice.

For me, I chose to stay until I’d reached a point of power within myself that did not allow me to stay any longer. But before that point, I had begun reacting differently to the abuse. Back then, there was no way to know if my husband would change or not, but I hoped he would.

Hope is not a solution, it’s a distraction. Stop hoping and start educating yourself.

Back in March, I spent a couple of days writing a story for a Memoirs, Ink short-story contest. I didn’t win, but now I can share the story with you.

This story did not factually happen the way it is presented. I drew from my last night with Will and all the other times that were (and are) so vivid in my memory to create a snapshot. Again, this story is a mash-up of times and places, a reorganization of reality, with a knife thrown in because I had only 1500 words to tell this story.

DayBreak

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “You’re calm. You’re calculating your next move … I can see it in your eyes.”

“What?” I asked. I felt my eyes scrunch at their lids, felt my brow knit together into the one wrinkle on my face, off-center between my eyebrows by a fraction of an inch.

He used to smile at me when he saw that wrinkle appear, run his finger along it gently. Now, years later, looking into his whiskey reddened face, I understood why he loved that wrinkle. The subtle line showed my first signs of anger. It was his clue that he was getting to me.

“I can’t trust you when you’re calm,” he continued. I felt my wrinkle deepen. “Why won’ cha you call me an asshole, a bastard? Why won’ cha yell at me no more?” he said, “I’d respect that more than this calm, manipulative thing you’ve been doin’ to me lately.”

He grabbed his drink from my desk. I smelled the sourness of the whiskey as he pulled the glass toward his pinched mouth. He took a sip, looked into his half-empty glass with narrowed eyes, and then finally relaxed his face enough to gulp the rest.

I felt the wrinkle disappear, my face relaxed as if I were his mirror image. Calm for an instant. But then his knuckles whitened on the glass and he brought it down fast, stopping it an inch above the surface of my desk. My hand gripped the computer mouse tighter than a second before. He concentrated on his hand and banged the glass to the desk three times, seeming to need the punctuation of sound. I squeezed the mouse three times harder and felt my ribs clench together in my chest.

My eyes were wide as he slowly defocused from the offending glass and settled his greener-than-sober eyes on me. “What’s that look for? What’s wrong with you?” he whispered, emphasizing the “wrong”.

We looked at each other for a long silent second, me wide open and scared and him white-knuckled and angry. Was he angry because I was frightened? Was he mad because I wasn’t angry?

It would be wise to choose anger. Smart to give him what he wanted. My mind shot five minutes into the future and I saw myself yelling and crying, shouting horrible things I didn’t mean to placate him. I foresaw his muscles relax, envisioned him turning away toward the kitchen. He would be saying, “You’re fucking irrational. I can’t talk to you,” with a sneer on his lips.

I would hear the ice banging into his glass, then hear the Coke fizz briefly before the Jim Beam silenced the fuss.

What he wanted was an excuse to keep drinking.

Spinning out of the vision, looking into his eyes, I realized I was stuck in a tight corner, my only exit through him. If I stood from my seat, I would have to lean into his space. Would he allow me to stand? I decided he wouldn’t.

I blinked my eyes, then pinched my lids together tightly for a moment. Opening them, I saw that he was leaning in closer to me, bending at his waist and eyeing me curiously. I felt like an unknown type of animal the hunter must study before killing. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Tryin’ to figger out what you’re gonna do,” he said, tilting his head a little and slowly pushing his chin toward my face until he managed to look down at me even though our noses were aligned. I felt his breath on my cheek.Smelled the residual stench of alcohol mixed with sweat as if it were my own. Familiar. Threatening. Vile.

I didn’t move. I thought of how a deer froze in the road as if its stillness guaranteed immunity from the car barreling down on it. The car always won. I saw my carcass in a ditch.

I snapped back in my chair. He startled. I rose up from under him and escaped the corner. I didn’t go far, turning to face him as quickly as I could from a new position near the freedom of the kitchen and its exterior door. Six feet of air stood between him and me, and my purse was three feet beyond him on the table by the front door. Could I exit the kitchen and then round to the front door, re-enter the house to grab my purse and get to the car before he could stop me? I considered his slowed and drunken state, but I doubted my ability to execute the plan. I imagined that once I was out of the house he would lock the doors, and I would be outside in my socks and the cold dark rain.

Or worse, he would chase me outside to subdue me. I would run, but he would tackle me. I would fight, but he would win. What did it mean to win? What did he want from me?

“What do you want from me?” I yelled, knowing he wanted me to yell. “You are scaring the hell out of me!”

He slowly stood erect, a delayed reaction that bought time for his voice to switch to a croon. “You’re scared? Come on, Woman. Have I ever hurt you before?” he said, corners of his lips lifting upward while the centers stayed straight. He slightly lowered his head like you do when you peer at your naughty child over the top of your glasses. I expected him to tsk and shake his head in disappointment.

He may have forgotten holding my face over the lit stove burner and using my neck to swing my head into the wall, but I hadn’t. Five years had passed between that night and this, but I remembered it clearly.

I put my hand to my mouth partly remembering the heat and partly in shame. Why hadn’t I left him then? Why was I still here?

He took a slushy step toward me and I heard the sole of his Ridge Desert Storm boot slide barely over the surface of the wooden floor. At 1 a.m. he was still wearing his uniform and boots. That meant his knife was still attached to his belt, in its case, positioned horizontally not vertically.

I took a step backward, purposefully staring into his eyes so I wouldn’t glance at the knife.

He wore the knife horizontally so he could pull the 5-inch blade from his side with a smooth backward motion before giving a powerful forward thrust. He’d shown me the move, proudly, not long ago. The knife was too long to be regulation, but he’d said “Some of us get to carry what we want,” and I hadn’t doubted him. He was a stellar soldier.

“Why do ya gotta be so different from me, Woman? Why d’ya havta challenge me all the time?” He took another but steadier step my way. My thighs tightened into coiled springs. He subtly rounded his back. My torso twisted slightly facilitating my right arm’s creeping motion toward my own imaginary weapon. I was gonna take my knife and twist it into something raw.

“I only want you to respect me,” he said. His glassy eyes filled with tears. “Why can’t ya respect yur husband, Woman? Why?” He moved toward me, the toe of his boot rubbing the floor somehow wrong. He stumbled and then fell to his knees, putting his hands to his face, shamed. He sobbed. I felt the tension drain from my body. I couldn’t run.

I dropped to my knees and pulled his head to my breast. My eyes welled up with tears and we cried together for a while. He cried until he passed out on my lap and I let him sleep there while my legs grew numb.

I sobbed my goodbyes to the sleeping soldier. He seemed innocent like this, on my lap, in my arms. I smoothed his thick dark hair. I wondered if he would wake to mimic my broken heart, to express grief in the same way I now mourned, realizing we would never grow old together, never see our children, and never once touch one another, ever again.

It was a comforting thought, thinking he may weep for me.

I gently placed his head on the golden wood floor then straightened my legs to get the blood flowing.  I uncased the knife at his side, and carried it with me to our bedroom. Packing, I would stare at the knife at times, reminding myself why I was leaving. It would be easier to pretend he hadn’t wanted to stab me, that I had imagined the whole thing. I wanted to crawl into the bed and sleep away the pain. Instead, I packed.

On this side of daybreak, I stepped over the soldier on the floor. I laid his knife on the table by the front door, took up my purse, and drove away.

Kunjii’s comment got me to thinking about my dependency on Will.

Surely there is more to it than financial dependency (fear of making money on my own is a factor because I haven’t done it in so long).

The one area in which I did have independence most of the time was with our finances. I know how to invest and have picked solid stocks/mutual funds in the days before returning to the military. I upped our retirement savings amount every year and when he would get promoted. I bought my first car alone last year and an investment home a few years ago which we sold for a huge profit. I’ve chosen services, balanced bank accounts, and set aside money to use in the businesses I owned and for hobbies he enjoyed. I’ve budgeted for groceries, gas, the kid’s expenses and pleasures, et cetera based on one income – his.

There was always money for what we wanted, not always exactly when we wanted it, but for what we wanted, in part due to my money management skills but also due to his mechanical and other “handy” talents. (I swear, that man can do everything from repairing a carburetor to building a garage. The only thing he doesn’t like to touch is electricity, but he knows how to work with it.) No one is perfect. My spending habits are sometimes flawed. But how many families with the parents pushing 40 do you know who have survived and thrived for almost two decades on one person’s income? I think we did a pretty good job. I know how to handle money (not implying that he doesn’t, just that I know I do).

Many of our fights, toward the end, were due to money. He thought we should have more. He thought I wasted it all. He disagreed with my choice of our cellular phone company. He told me to stop paying them; I wouldn’t because it was my credit that would take the hit if I defaulted. Soon after we split, he told me, “You know, I make damn good money,” and I said, “I’m glad you finally see that.” How did he not know how much money he made?

I know there has got to be something else, something besides financial dependency. Some good reason for hoping we’ll get this family back together.

There are the obvious, although increasingly idealistic reasons such as

• I love him, I love the idea of “our family” in the traditional sense
• I don’t want our children to suffer from a broken home (despite the fact that it was “broken” when we lived together)
• I think our boys would be better off if Will and I could make peace instead of war; fall back in love, show them what a good relationship looks like…
• I promised him “until death do we part”

There are things I know are NOT reasons such as

• Fear of being alone (I’ve done that many times with his deployments and training)
• Fear of never loving again, fear of not being loved by another man (There were men before, there could be men again – I know I am not “unlovable”)

So what is the basis of my dependency on Will? My latest correspondence with the voices said, “We are dragging you forward and you want to stay in dysfunctional familiarity.”

I can’t argue with that. I do want to cling to SOMETHING familiar, no matter how dysfunctional my rational mind knows it to be.

Most things, the things I held dearest, are different now. My kids are spending half of their time away from me. My husband is not my husband. Nothing is “ours” – its divided into “mine” and “his” – and that change alone implies vast changes in thinking.

Many thoughts that used to revolve around Will and my family are pointless now. I must cut off thoughts of Will because, technically, he is no longer my concern. Thoughts of my family are vastly different; now family is my children and me. Period. Well, outside of the fact that Will is and always will be their father, he is no longer in my definition of “my family.”

I try not to care or concern myself with Will’s moods or possible feelings; it is difficult because my every behavior has depended on deciphering how he feels (mostly in an attempt to avoid his anger). Trying not to care about his feelings takes up more time than caring about them; in time, this will change.

I am learning how to feel what I feel, decipher what I want, after years and years of depending on Will’s opinion to tell me what to do, what I should be feeling, and what to think. He would tell me when I had a “right” to be angry, when I should feel ashamed, when I should respect his actions and how I should show that respect.

He would let me know when it was okay to be loving or to be silly (well, grown women aren’t supposed to be silly, but he would tolerate it from time to time). He would tell me when my behavior embarrassed him and what I needed to think or do differently to keep him happy. By comparing me to other wives (or maybe his mom or some imaginary feminine goddess), he determined what I should be doing, feeling, saying…and it seemed that if I wasn’t behaving as he thought I should, he would explode. He told me he put me on a pedestal, and right or wrong it was my duty as his wife to stay there.

Now, I am at a loss as to how to feel, what to think and, at times, what to do.

The voices also tell me that we must be separate in order to learn that we’re individuals. That’s what I’m trying to do. It is hard. Sometimes I long for the “dysfunctional familiarity” and am willing to temporarily erase my memory and substitute the dream.

When I’m with Will, I am told what is required of me. I suppose I miss that aspect very much. In some ways, being told who I am is superior to determining who I am on my own. It’s definitely easier in many regards, especially during the “bad” times when soothing his temper was merely a matter of putting on a mask. I’d put on the mask not so much to deceive him as to deceive myself into believing I should be what he said to be.

At the court house last Wednesday, he commented that I wasn’t the woman he married. I agreed.

But I don’t yet know who I am. I’ve been dependent on him to tell me.

On October 18, 1992, after six months of marriage, I wrote

“He married me to fight me, it seems. Beat me down and make me less than I am. That infuriates me. THAT is what scares me. What if he does win? Where will “I” go? Just disappear into the mold he has laid out for me? I don’t think it will come down to that. I think he’ll come around before that happens. I don’t want him to change, I want him to understand. Understand ME. I hope when he does understand he still loves me.”

It’s been 18 years since I wrote that statement. It’s time to accept that he doesn’t and cannot love me.

There’s got to be something else I want to say. My belly is still churning. The anxiety is lessening, but it isn’t gone.

During my conversation with them, they told me “He is being honest with you.” They said this to me before last night’s horrible phone call, after Will and I had talked at the court house and at the house I’m staying in on Saturday.

At the court house and here, I felt that he was being very sincere in his desire to ease my emotional burden. I feel that he means it when he says the boys will stay with me three nights a week. I believe he intends to continue to “do his duty” as a strong financial provider for me during our transition. I even partially believe that he has considered “dating” me again after we get this hard crap sorted through, I think he doesn’t want to have wasted the past 18 years we’ve spent together.

And yet, I don’t completely trust him. I wish I did, but I don’t. I understand that the day the sheriff arrested him and removed him from this stupid house, he stopped trusting me completely, too.

I know that we didn’t trust each other before then, either. We were working on our marriage, but it wasn’t his priority. His priority was the boys (for which I was happy), our marriage, and his career (although I think his career was second, and our marriage a far behind third despite his proclamations to the contrary).

I know neither one of us really KNEW what would become of our marriage. In my mind, I was willing to work through almost anything. And then he put his hands on me again, and I had to do what I said I would do. I had to press charges. I had to get an attorney in case we did permanently separate because I knew nothing of the legal system. And things seemed to fall into place like heavy bricks from that point forward.

I know that in the past week, he has expressed genuine concern for me and to me. Not only at the court house, but also when I told him I was going in for my first mammogram (What? Are you okay? Isn’t it early for you to have mammograms? Does the doctor think something is wrong?) And again when he called on Sunday and I was out of breath. I could tell he was curious, I thought maybe he was concerned.

Friday morning, his father had a medical episode. Will called me and told me and I went running out to his father. Will had already called 911. Everything for his father has worked out all right, so it seems for now anyway, but I know things like this bother Will emotionally. He’s vulnerable when someone he loves is sick or hurt; he was vulnerable last year when his grandfather passed away too, and there was a period of peace between us in the house as he dealt with his grandfather’s passing.

I know that deep down Will must care at least a little for me. I found some peace during the past few days (before last night) in thinking that he and I may actually be able to work through this situation and come out better for it in the end (friends or spouses? don’t really know).

Saturday, when he was out here mowing and fixing my car’s tire, I took him aside and asked him to try to stop talking to me as if we were a couple. We’d had a conversation with his father in which he referred to the land in Texas as “ours” and that “we” … anyway, it was like he used to talk when we were together. And we’re NOT together. We’re separate.

Staying bound to him mentally, emotionally, psychically…it is too hard. When he is vulnerable, my heart wants to hug him, to love him, to soothe him, to make it all better. I feel drawn to him in love and hope when he speaks to me in soft words, when he speaks as if we’re a “we”. When he says, maybe we’ll get back together later, I want to believe him.

And at the court house, we talked about a lot more than the custody, more than the finances. We talked about “us” and what it had been like to be together. We both agree that we hurt each other. He wants me to take responsibility for doing exactly what he did, for being exactly like him. He wants me to stop writing online, wants me to erase all of this from my consciousness.

He’s asking me to erase myself.

Now my gut isn’t churning so much, but the tears are flowing. It’s as if me telling him that I am exactly like him somehow makes the sickness go away. If I am just like him, then I am also abusive. I get the sense that he hopes that I will say I am just exactly like him, and when I do that I won’t want to face my past actions. But that is HIM. If I am just like him, I will change me. If I am just like him, then I don’t want to be this way anymore.