The Long Night

I entered the long night in 2009, three years ago.  I had seen the night coming long before that and the twilight of that night was as obvious as twilights always are.  As the long night fell and the last of the light of day faded over a faraway horizon, I did as I had always felt was right, I tried to light a candle against the encroaching dark.  My wife chose to ignore the dark.  She used my candle to fool herself into thinking that the night was so very far away.  In the end, as the flame guttered and faltered, she began to curse the darkness as she allowed herself to see, for the first time, the cold night we were in.

I started seeing just how deeply in trouble we really were.  The economy was crashed, jobs were incredibly scarce and I was just off an injury leave.  The situation was somewhat dire and I was having a lot of trouble getting any kind of traction in the job market.  My wife had gone through three jobs in as many months; she’d get hired for some low-level counter position then start showing some form of competence (well, more than the “fresh from high school” regular hires they had so it wasn’t hard), they’d give her some real responsibility or fast track her towards a management position and she’d have a low-level nervous breakdown and either quit or lose the job.  She’d lather, rinse and repeat until, finally, the offers stopped coming.

For my part, I was hammering away at “the breadwinner” job.  She’d decided that I had to be the breadwinner.  That way, she could become a little hausfrau after I’d built up some seniority and stability and she’d not have to work.  Therefore, most of my efforts were concentrated in upper management and eventual high-dollar positions.  That was fine, really, since lower-level opening wouldn’t touch me with a ten foot pole.  I had too much experience and they knew for a fact that I’d dump their minimum wage position the second something better came along.  I was having little luck and what few nibbles at the hook I was having would invariably get screwed up by the wife nagging me to do things a different way until I did.

New Life, New Philosophy of Life

Let him that would move the world first move himself.

-Socrates

A word of warning: This post is stream of consciousness. It will meander and it will sometimes double back on itself. It is intended to. I wanted it to be a raw accounting of my personal philosophy of life without any overthinking.  As such, it will not follow most of the usual rules of writing.  I’ve only lightly proofed it to keep form overthinking it or adding to it.  If I spot any other errors I’ll correct them in time but I won’t be adding to or removing actual content. 

With my wife gone I’ve had had to make some severe adjustments to how I live my life.  I don’t just mean the changes caused by her not being here physically, such as the fact that I can watch TV when I want to or when I eat dinner at the house I do so alone.  I don’t mean that I’m the only one cooking or cleaning or that I’m the only one who cares for the cat.  I don’t mean any of the changes brought about by the loss of my physical companion.

At the same time I don’t really mean the emotional loss either.  It is true that it is sometimes difficult to handle the loss on that level and there are times when, completely unbidden, some aspect of her being gone will strike me especially hard.  It’s also true to say that there are some activities I simply cannot do and objects that I simple cannot be around because of their effect on my emotions.  However, as important as those are, I’m not talking about those changes either.

What I am referring to is a change in the philosophy of life that I’ve lived by for so long.  As a couple, the philosophy of life is about the couple.  It’s all focused on keeping the couple together.  It is about “us” and not “I.”  It is about taking care of each other first and yourself later.  It’s about suppressing the ego in the interests of your mate and your relationship.

Thank You For Being Hateful

She doesn’t know it, but my ex-wife gave me a tremendous gift after we were divorced.  She sent me a letter.

I’ve spoken about this particular letter before.  The first time was in “Offering an Olive Branch To a Woman With a Flamethrower” – a title I still love – and a second time in “Three Months Divorced.”  Both times I mention the angry and nasty tone of the letter.  I’ve written about the hate she filled it with and the foul delusions she reveals inside that letter.  I’ve never spoke of it in detail though, the content of it is too personal for that at this stage.  Her attempt to hurt me with her words is still too fresh for me to completely share in a public forum like this.  Her attempt to hurt me that way may have fallen very short and the attempt ultimately futile, but it was still a very personal moment for me.

I have also, to my knowledge never said how much I should thank her for writing it.  I should thank her for the hatred and animosity she poured into it.  I should be grateful her for the bile and vitriol she tried to vomit all over the page.  I should be appreciative of the delusional ranting and the insanity fueled ravings.  I should be immeasurably and incalculably appreciative to her for showing me what she really was and what she’d allowed herself to finally become.

When I get upset that she’s gone; that letter is there to remind me that she is not here for a reason.  It is there with the bitterness in it to say, “you were glad she was gone for a reason.”

When I feel lonely here rattling around this house by myself and begin to want her to be here; that letter is there with its pages of venom to remind me what a poisonous person she was when she was around.

When I start wondering if we had a chance together if we’d just tried to work it out; that letter is there with its pages of rancor to remind me that she’d become an energy sucking monster in the guise of my former wife.

When I start to think we made a mistake in getting divorced; that letter is there with its pages of maliciousness to remind me that in the end, she was too far gone into a hell of her own making to be saved.

That letter was the greatest gift she could have given me.  In one move she handed me the ultimate shield against the sorrow I felt for her being gone.  In one gesture she’d given me a powerful shield to defend myself against doubt and uncertainty.  In what she thought was a powerful blow for herself against me she handed me a list of reasons not to want her back.  In her attempt to hurt me she gave me the tools to build a wall between her and my emotions.

Because of all that, I owe her a tremendous debt.  She did me the greatest favor she ever could have.  She showed me that she was long gone.  She showed me that she was too far gone into the pits of insanity to recover.  She showed me that she wasn’t ever going to be a safe and sane person again.  She showed me that she was a lost cause and that the woman I loved was long gone.

That letter is one of the best things she ever did for me since with it, I can almost instantly nip any feelings of remorse or guilt or loss before it has a chance to bloom into a deeper depression.  With it, the moment I start feeling those pangs that tell me about is coming on where I’ll have trouble with her being gone, I can take that letter out of the plastic sleeves that keeps it safe and read through it.  Inside of two pages I’m feeling like her being gone makes me a safer person.  Inside of four pages, I feel better about her being gone.  Inside of six I am happy to have such horrible hate and remorseless insanity out of my life.  By the end, I can put the letter away again and sit back with a glow of satisfaction that not only is her being gone a good and healthy thing for me but that in the end, I was very lucky.  She could have dragged me down into the gutter with her.

So, for my ex-wife: Thank you from the bottom of my heart.  You might not have intended it, but your letter, the one you thought you crafted into a weapon, has been the greatest present you ever gave me.  You gave me freedom and the knowledge that you being gone is an immeasurable improvement in me and in my life.

The Detritus of a Former Life

When my wife left me, she went back to stay with her mother.  I’m told such arrangements aren’t unusual.  What was kind of unusual was that “going back to her mother” required her to move over 1,100 miles away.  What was more unusual was that move meant that she left a giant stack of boxes and loose stuff in my living room for around six months while she arranged for movers – movers who were so inept they didn’t get to the task at hand for a month because they couldn’t answer a phone – she could afford to move it the same 1,100 plus miles to her mom’s house.

Over that six months, I made sure to find as much “missing’ stuff as I could to send up there and made sure, via her mother since she’d decided she needed to “not talk” for a while (“a while” lasted pretty much until this very day except some “emergency’ communication about her stuff getting moved).  Of course that attention to detail was not appreciated and a month after the stuff left she began to complain I didn’t send things she’d said via her mother or via letters in the mail she didn’t want me to send.  To make it worse, she sent a list of things that “weren’t sent” that we’d never found or worse, the “friends’ she had help her pack some of it up very likely “liberated” from her the day they helped.

After months of looking for any sign, and slowly finding some of the extra stuff she wanted sent, I told her mom what I’d found, we discussed what to send and then I boxed it up and had UPS send it along.  At that point, with the exception of anything really important or of great sentimental value that turns up, I considered the “shipping her the stuff” issue closed and the court agreed about two months later.

However that means there is a lot of “wreckage in the ruins.”  There is a lot of her stuff that is just sort of left behind.  She didn’t want it, but it was hers.  It’s stuff she thought she could do without or thought was too expensive to ship or thought would upset her because I gave it to her.  Some of it is just refuse she left behind with no value at all.

It’s the flotsam and jetsam of a wrecked marriage, floating along behind me.  I can’t bring myself to dispose of it all at once even though I know it would be fine to do so, maybe even cathartic.  Instead it sits here in the house awaiting its fate.  Will I keep it or throw it away?  Will it end up in the trash?  The recycling bin?  A yard sale, maybe?  Perhaps some little local shop?

I DO Love My Computer

The last communication I had with my ex-wife was a rather nasty and hate filled letter from her.  In it she put her anger and insanity on full display.  She ranted and raved in her delusional state of mind and basically created a reality in which she was a powerful liberated woman rather than having regressed to a “middle school child” as several people who read the letter have noted.  Even people unconnected with the divorce looked at her letter as the ravings of a madwoman who needed serious psychological assistance, a person whose life had been destroyed and whose mind had been unable to handle that fact and snapped in response.

However, just as the blind squirrel sometimes finds and acorn, even the mad occasionally find a truth.  She was no different.  She did manage to brush up against some reality in her letter.  Not a great deal of it, that’s the nature of anger like that, it doesn’t deal in reality but in lies that feed itself.  She did, find some kernels of truth.

She said, more than once in a few different ways, that I “loved” my computer.  True, I do.  But where she got it wrong was why.  I don’t love this machine because it’s an escape or because it plays games or because it isn’t a human being.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

In a previous post, I talked briefly about my college friends and why I missed them so much.  I highly suggest reading that post or else the rest of this might not make as much sense.  In the previous post, I talked about missing the access to friends, intelligent (and unintelligent) discussions, philosophical debates, talks about television and movies, discussions of classes or things we’d learned and general fun with them from games to watching TV to going to shows.

I Just Can’t Seem to Delete Her

I said it again today.  I seem to say it a lot.  I said, “I just can’t seem to delete her.”

“Her” is my ex-wife, of course.  And when I say “delete” I mean delete, not some euphemism.  I can’t bring myself to remove her and her stuff from my electronics.  I don’t know why but I just can’t.

When she left and it became apparent we weren’t working it out, I considered removing her from the computer, the cellphone and the cable box.  I didn’t, naturally, since that was just one of those stupid, petty “I’m doing great and don’t need you” moves that people make in a separation or a divorce.  It was just a way to convince myself I didn’t need her at all in my life and that her “stuff,” even digital “stuff,” wasn’t important to me at all.

It was then.  It was important to me because it was hers.  None of it would be irrecoverably gone and could be returned with a little effort, but it was hers and therefore important.  Deep down, I wanted it to be there when she came back.  Not “if” she came back but when.  I kept everything exactly as it had been.

Then the divorce happened.  By then, I had calmed down and released a lot of the anger I felt.  I wasn’t exactly “Zen centered” but I wasn’t mad anymore.  I was just accepting of all that had happened and trying to make sure I was a better person for searching for and learning the lessons.  I didn’t feel this need to remove her presence from the devices left in the house.  By that point it was more of a “we still might work it out” feeling and even if we didn’t she may ask for some of it eventually.

Now, it’s months after the divorce and this digital clutter is still there, refuse from a previous life.  There’s still a dozen phone numbers in the cell phone for her friends and her medical services.  Her account on the computer still exists untouched with photos and music and resumes and seeds of ideas.  The favorites on the cable box are still set to the channels she watched the most.  Her digital life is still present, a binary ghost in the house.

I don’t know why I can’t bring myself to do it.  She isn’t coming back.  In a lot of ways, I’ve accepted that the woman I first met and loved was murdered and replaced by the one I divorced like something from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Even if she wanted to come back I’d need to see her changed into a woman so unlike what she’s become that I doubt she could recognize herself before I’d let it happen.  So why can’t I just hit the delete key?

It would make things easier.  I’d have a dozen less numbers in the telephone to scan past to find the ones I want.  I’d clear up a few gigs of memory on the computer.  I’d be able to push one button on the cable remote and scan all my favorite channels.  I could get rid of constant reminders of her.  I could streamline a small part of my life into a “post wife” world.

I guess, for now at least, I find some sort of bittersweet comfort in seeing some part of her is still with me.  I can see her name on the login screen or a phone number to her mental health clinic or a little “favorite channel heart” icon next to a channel she watched constantly and for a moment think the woman I loved is still around and that all I have to do is call her name and she’ll answer from another room a little perturbed I called her for nothing.

I know she’s gone.  I know that in the end what she became wasn’t healthy for me and she was an incredibly unsafe person to be with.  I know that she’ll never be back and that I’ll never have a relationship quite like it was with her in the beginning.  I know that phase of my life is long gone now and it’s silly to dwell in such a painful past.  But there her name is, waiting for her to click it on the screen.

It’s waiting for her to come back.  It’s waiting for the impossible.  It’s waiting… but I am the one who is disappointed it will never happen.

Quick Note on Part Four of “Why Do Men Go For ‘Crazy’ Women”

On July 13^th I posted part three of my “Why Do Men Go For ‘Crazy’ Women” series with a promise that in part four I was going to delve into the final years of my marriage.  I am still writing that post and have been for nine days.  It has proven to be more difficult to write than I had initially thought it would

I knew I was tinkering around in dangerous psychological waters by dredging all this up in a raw state without any defensive delusions about it in place to protect myself.  I felt it was important to do it that way, to analyze the “original text” so to speak without any blinders or biased interpretation.  I wanted to give an honest account of those last few years without blinking or resorting to protective deceptions or white-washing.

Admitted, I’ve gotten or improved some good posts from false starts on it.  I’ve managed to dredge up some good thoughts, some more upsetting than others on the subject, but so far I’ve not been able to write that fourth part of the series.  It’s such a difficult time to process in total.  So far I’ve only managed to deal with it in short sections, breaking it down into more easily managed chunks.  This is the first time I’ve tried to peer back over the entirety of that four years (five with the separation) and look at it with a critical but unbiased honesty as a single entity rather than a series of discrete parts that happen to flow into a whole set of related events.

That being the case, I hope everyone will bear with me while I try to work out the post.  It may be some time before I’m emotionally capable of writing it properly or mentally able to put it together in an unbiased way.

Brief Reflections for the Anniversary of My Birth

As I’ve gotten older (and if that title is any indication, more than a little pretentious), I have found that I spend free time on my birthday in reflection and contemplation on not just the previous year but my life as a whole.  In the last two years, I have found it to be a grounding experience that reminds me of who and what I am.

This year is no exception.

• This is the third year in the last 15 that I spent my birthday “alone” in the sense of my chosen mate not being here.  I did the same last year and the same 4 years ago when my now ex-wife was in the mental ward.
• This is the first year I have been “single” during my birthday in the last 15.  It is an interesting experience to be unattached during a personal life event after having been part of a couple for so long.  It is strange to know that not only is she not here with me for it this year, but that she has no real cause to be and very likely didn’t even remember the significance of the date.
• This was yet another year out of a large number where I only heard the words “Happy Birthday” once, but read it several dozen times.  It reminds me that our methods of communications have changed to the point where we’re conveniently reminded of someone’s birthday by a piece of technology and then can send them a birthday greeting through the same technology.  It is, as the cliché goes, a strange and wonderful time we live in.
• I didn’t not receive a gift this year.  This is the 6^th year in a row I didn’t.  That’s not a complaint; mind you, just an observation.  It’s also an admission that my wife ignored the tradition of gift giving on birthdays and Christmas for the last four years we were together (five that we were married).  It was, in retrospect another missed sign of how far gone she was, how little she cared for me and how far down our relationship had come.
• This is the first birthday since 1991 where I did not smoke an overly expensive cigar in celebration.

Even with all this, I was and am happier this birthday and I have been in quite a few birthdays.

1. I didn’t feel like I had to cater to my wife’s ego because she wasn’t the center of attention.
2. I didn’t feel like I had to keep an eye on her in case her mood switched while I was distracted by my own celebration.
3. I didn’t have to worry that any preparations I made would be rendered moot by her having an “episode” or an “attack” or a “bad spell” which would have led to my having to nursemaid her all day.
4. I didn’t have to worry that I would go out on my own and come back to find her having committed suicide (that one wasn’t just on my birthday, but nearly every day).

So yeah, I guess this was a good birthday in spite of everything.  The bad things I jettisoned were much worse than the ones I gained.

I Didn’t Marry a Crazy Woman…

If someone had told me that I had a problem with having married a “crazy woman” five years ago, I would have laughed and thought they were trying to make a joke.  Sure, my ex-wife was mentally ill, but “crazy?”  No way.

I retrospect, I couldn’t have been more wrong.  I like to say that my wife and I had seven great years as a married couple; the problem is we were married for eleven years.  It’s true enough but it doesn’t tell the whole story.  Our marriage wasn’t one day of bliss followed by another.  It was sometimes a hard struggle.  Sometimes the money was low, or one of us was out of work or one of us was sick and the doctor’s bills ate up all our savings.  There was debt and accidents and job losses.  There was stress and weeks where the money ran out and sleepless nights.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way.  I was supposed to be “easier.”  It was supposed to be smoother.  It was supposed to be partners in life conquering all the problems.  We were supposed to be an unstoppable team, she and I hand in hand, backing each other up and staring down any difficulties that dared to get in our way.

Arguing With My Wife

One of the “tells” I should have noticed that my marriage was in trouble was how we argued.  Over the course of our lives together the frequency of arguments increased dramatically, which was an important and easy change to notice, but more important than that, the way we argued changed.

People tend to have a particular method of arguing; they use a limited set of tactics and a limited set of styles that they use all the time with very little variation.  My ex-wife and I were no exception.  We had very distinct arguing forms and seldom strayed from them.

In the year since she left, I started analyzing the last few years we had together.  I started seeing parts of the pattern that I’d missed.  I saw where we escalated in the number of fights.  I saw where she’d changed her arguing style.  I saw where I had done the same.

However, it wasn’t until I looked back over the whole of our time as a couple that I really noticed just how changed we were.

I started writing the following several months ago.  It was supposed to be a personal account of how we argued; a sort of diary entry so I would remember one of the reasons we’re not together anymore.  I wasn’t ready to take such a hard look at us when I started.  I was still dealing with how we’d changed in other ways and wasn’t able to really look at our fights.

Over the course of the last few months I’ve written, edited, rewritten and altered what follows into the closest I can come to a true overview.  It is, to the best of my knowledge, true and unbiased by any of the high emotions related to the end of our marriage.  I’ve read it several times and I don’t see where I was unfair to her or overly fair to myself.

It is a rather long account, so I’ve put it after the jump.