The Return Trip

The Return Trip

After an angry outburst over some silverware that had not been put away, he picked up a handful of knives and forks and beat me over the head with them shouting reprimands about my lazy housekeeping. My neighbors and other friends had told me that they could eat off of my floors they were so clean. So I called him on it by asking a friend to drive me to the airport. I had decided to go visit his mother and check her housekeeping for myself.  I didn't tell him anything, I just left after he went to work. I needed some answers.

I travelled two states away with a baby in tow to see if she really was so perfect. Well, not so perfect after all. The woman I had seen sitting on a barstool in a seedy part of town four years ago was his "perfect mother". What an eye opener. She got drunk every day after work and then flew into rages when she got home, yelling at whoever was available, mostly her children. Immediately following her rage outburst she broke down into tears hanging onto to her children and sobbing uncontrollably before she passed out. Lord knows what it was all about but I had a pretty clear picture of someone who was an alcoholic and who was prone to rages. It was a pitiful sight and I didn't have to look far to see who my husband took after? The more I saw, the worse it got and the more alike they appeared. I remember wondering if there was some genetic component to this bizarre rampaging craziness.

While I was there, I watched her swindle he drunk patrons out of their money, she could lie her way out of any situation and she had built a life around immoral values. This was a type of situational morality where she behaved one way at the bar another at home and another with regular society. She ran the bar, she ran a prostitution parlor upstairs at the bar and she took food stamps in trade for beer. It was nothing I wanted any part of. Other than that, she was very nice to me and told me to stay as long as I wanted to. That was a thanks but no thanks however, my better judgement told me to turn and go home. Her lifestyle was a stark representation of a faulty moral compass. Why? I don't know. Was it something she had learned to do that worked for her? If other people stole or took advantage of unsuspecting victims why shouldn't she do the same to feed her family and improve her living conditions? She couldn't possibly raise 4 children on her paltry wage as a barmaid with no child support, could she? "Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall". I hung onto my belief in erring on the virtuous side as the better choice regardless of perhaps having less. The question is how much of "less" would it take before I too considered going to the dark side? I picked up my baby and left. Did I get the answers I came for?

The conclusions I came away with were confusing and worrisome. I really didn't know how to handle the frightening tortures of life deep into the dark side. I truly thought that I had visited hell. I couldn't get far enough away from there fast enough. I had seen the hapless souls of an earthly Inferno. They were lying in the streets, slobbering on themselves, sleeping in the laundromat dryers and throwing up in public bathrooms eventually selling their souls for another drink until they just died. I will never forget them, all of them: Those who were cursed into shame and those who took advantage of them. It will forever haunt me. If that was my husband's haunting reality then why behave similarly with me? Like I said it was confusing. I had decided to go home, get some rest for myself and the baby and then figure out how to leave my husband without  evoking too much hostility. This marriage was simply not working for me.
We boarded the plane for home and after my little boy fell asleep in my arms I reviewed what I had just witnessed. What happened to his mother that she fell into drunkenness? There was a moment between she and I that I will remember to this day. She looked me straight in the eye and told me not to march to his demands, to let him wait it out. I saw in her deep pain and concern. She knew what I was going through didn't she.  I discovered that I had compassion for her and the people in those streets and bars who had fallen into complete despair. I wondered too about what has caused her to seek that lifestyle. What made her wander into such a complete shallowness of life? Maybe she was a good mother once, maybe she did do all the good things my husband said about her as a wife and mother but what had preceded her brokenness's? Pops had told me that their four year old daughter was killed in a farm accident. She must have been devastated beyond belief. Two months later she would become pregnant. There would be 4 more pregnancies after that. Was she ready to have and love another child when she gave birth to a son, my husband? It was only eleven months after her little baby girl had been killed that he arrived and required her motherly instincts to bond with another life. How deep was her agony? Nobody said. Had anybody noticed? Eventually her marriage to his dad ended in divorce and a complete destruction of life as she knew it. She crawled into the bottle and she raged and she manipulated and she stole and she prostituted. She raised her kids on a barroom floor and devalued herself and them. She had married at age 16 and she had no work experience to speak of. She fell into the only life she knew .Who could blame her? Oh, but we must. Do we have compassion for her experiences? Yes we do. Do we tell her that she has a right to live as an alcoholic, a thief and a neglectful mother because of the tragedies she has endured? No we do not. This would be a crippling compassion, one that gives her permission to kill herself slowly. Feeling sorry for someone and doing nothing about it is a useless higher self. Allowing another to wallow in their misery by feeling sorry for them without requiring them to look beyond their devastation is not compassion rather it is abuse of a different kind.  I felt a sadness about it all. There was nothing I could have done to prevent her continued downhill slide. She was addicted to the bottle and the lifestyle and nobody could change that no matter how much they tried. But for one moment I wanted to pick her up and take her away from this plight. She would later die of alcoholism because that's where addiction ends. She lost herself to it.