Wednesday, February 19, 2020

THE FALTERING

Depression set in. I felt weak and dejected. I had nothing but myself to sustain me. I was starving to death emotionally. In spite of counseling his disregard for me was leaving me completely deficient and wanting. I was wasting away here and nobody noticed. I felt my spirit withering away. I was         longing for attention, nurturing and hungering for that joie de vivre that makes life worth living.  He had absolutely sucked the life out of me and he took pleasure in doing it. If it were up to him I would become an empty vessel while he took my life for himself. I didn't matter. He was a nothing wrapped in the human persona. He had bones, skin hair, teeth and he looked like a person but he lacked the emotional morality of an inner life. Without that inner life there is no person: only a shell with the appearance of a person. "Looks can be deceiving" and they were. It took years for me to discover that he had no inner life and he sought to take mine in an attempt to make up for it. No wonder I was so miserable.
Every time he did something crazy I lost more ground. One evening after everyone was asleep I finally took my bath and decided to read for a while before bed. I propped myself up against the arm of the couch, put my feet up, and started to read in a reclining position. It was calm and quiet and I was enjoying the relaxation. My eyes wandered off the page of the book and I could see my husband's reflection in the dining room window. He was spying on me from the kitchen doorway. My heart jumped and a feeling of terror crawled into my space. It was so creepy. I was living with a voyeur. I nonchalantly got up as if I was going to get something from the kitchen and he immediately sneaked away back into the bedroom. I sat there in disgust. How could I live like this? As I sat, shaken by being peeped on, I tried to contemplate some alternatives. I didn't feel safe in my own home. His sneaky behavior made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
 I would do the previously unthinkable. I would call an old friend. Not just any old friend but an old high school love and male friend. I needed to feel alive and I was hoping he could bring something back that I had lost 15 years ago when I married.  I wrestled with this decision for days because I had standards and I had never crossed that line for any reason. It is funny what you will do if you think you are dying and you need a way to save your life. My intention was not to start an affair but to get some insight from a man that I knew. He fed me from a distance. We talked and wrote letters. I refused to see him; that was where I drew the line. We both understood that we really didn't know each other after being apart for this long. You know, it did wonders for my soul. I felt alive again and although I knew others might pass judgement on me for it, I would do it again. Nobody had the right to attack my reputation without considering that this decision was based on survival. It was a necessary step in fulfilling the psychological and emotional needs of my life. They hadn't lived what I had lived and until they walked in my shoes they couldn't form a just opinion. This friendship saved me from despair. It brought me back enough to find healing. Honoring the rules of commitment to my own detriment would have been a type of suicide. This was never an act made without deep evaluation and discernment. A moral choice in favor of yourself also contains within it a moral dilemma and it is never easy. If it is easy, you haven't weighed the consequences either for or against it.
  I began to find my latent courage. This instilled in me the willingness to have a backbone. I began to know my value. I saw hope for a different future, one without constant denigration. I was making plans for a divorce and way out. His threats were no longer so harmful to me. Anything he said to threaten me or disarm me was all the more reason for me to persist. When he was trying to threaten me into submission he would forecast my lack of options without cause. He would say that I would never get the house if I divorced him but I didn't care anymore. When he said I would leave with nothing just the way I came into this marriage, I told him he had a short memory because I was the one who brought everything into the household. When he said I was a college educated idiot, I told him that this was his opinion. Nothing he threw at me could alter my course. Material goods could not make me live a life of "soul poverty" with him any longer. The good part of this was finding that there were men out there who did have depth and empathy (in varying degrees of course) and that I could certainly do better for myself and my children if I chose to. Maybe I would choose to simply be alone. Anything would be better than what I had.
I decided that the part- time job I had would not support a family so I began a search for full time employment. I was now laying the ground work for a better tomorrow, one step at a time. While I was making plans I had to wait for the right opportunity to leave. It had to be a safe move. I had to protect our lives by being patient. Just a little bit longer now.



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