Happy families.

I've just found a description I wrote and left in my G.Docs of something that happened around the 30th August 2020.

I don't think I posted it here?

Just in the name of being complete, of saying it all, of describing reality as I see it, this is how one Friday night was for me..

He had moved out...

In the name of being civilized people (which I am not) he had invited me into his dead parent's house.

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30th august 2020.

On Friday I was meant to be nice and normal and possibly grateful as I took the invite to eat fish and chips with him. I managed OK (not normal) and I was grateful enough until I found the courage to ask him a question to which I truly needed answers.

His attitude of belligerent animosity, because I was too scared to speak, caused me to have to write the words out in shaky handwriting, as the only way to focus my thoughts enough to communicate..

I was unable to speak.

He read my words. His reply to my question was "No". Nothing more, other than "I can see why it was hard for you to ask"

But nothing else.

Silence.

At which point I should have left. But I was shaking. I didn't see myself as fit to drive; I needed eye contact and a hug, something to get me back to the land of the living.

Nothing...

A buzzing undercurrent, his heavy resentment and hostility crushed the air from my lungs and froze the blood in my veins. I was paralyzed by it. 

At some point in the depths of this loss of contact, grief and the reality of this unkindness, my anger clicked in.

I felt as if I was holding the last remaining photos portraying the good man and really it was time to consign all the snapshots and recordings of happy and loving times to the funeral pyre.

I asked myself: Is this a good man?

And my answer is, no, a good man works to mend, to heal, to help...This man makes it all about punishment, about right and wrong and judgment. He hears the genuine fear and loss I'm experiencing, and he is aware that his decisions have real consequences for our family. 

So be it.

It is time for me to judge.

So let the present eclipse our past, I will recast and re-frame as it appears to really be...

There are many stories that could describe us, but there is one core narrative which is beginning to feel true. A new core narrative to dismember and rip apart the one I preferred. I want to believe he is good, I want to believe in love. But this isn't what I'm seeing, it isn't what I'm feeling...

So let's rewind, how was it really?

When he asked me to marry him - there was was something too fast, and not fair about it. I didn't believe it was about me...So I asked him questions, he sounded sincere, and I decided to trust. I felt as if our marriage had been arranged by fate, I let myself be taken down, like Persephone by the undertow, by forces that felt bigger than me.

I was both grateful and torn by it. And to love is easy.

What really happened? What do I believe now? I believe that he had decided that he could never be like his dad so he wanted a family that would be totally different to his birth family.

Why?

To escape who he is, to avoid his family script. To have a life in which he could be 'the good man' forever rescuing his mom from the bad man (hidden inside himself). For years he tricked himself into thinking that all he needed was to be 'better' than his dad.

Not a terribly high bar there, as a child he had concluded that all it took was for him to listen and do what 'his mom wanted' because his dad didn't....So my husband pretended to be the man who listened and to do what I wanted - and so he bottled up all his resentment and threw it into the compost heap of  un-named dreams. 

But he couldn't hide his resentment.

And children can't be children forever...family stopped.

It was time for us.

He had no plans about our future, I wasn't in it, and there wasn't anywhere.

For us.

And of course I'm not his mom...

Meanwhile, just as his dad wouldn't listen and just as his dad lied I got why his mom had found it impossible to describe what was actually happening to her. Clearly my husband expected me - as his dad had expected of his wife - to 'suck it up' and keep smiling, saying 'nothing to be done, oh isn't it awful'. I was expected to smile through tears that fall only when my husband is out of the room; as his mom had done, trapped in her bed, confined by her inability to name and shame, living under a regime that gave no easy way to access the anger she needed, to end her abuse.

And she would say '...oh but he is a good man, I shouldn't be like this'.

Clearly, anything other than placid null wave was 'out of order' not hard to get the picture! 

By 2017 I could feel the weight of lies and deception being placed over me, as suffocating as a plastic bag. But it wasn't easy to deal with at all. I tried naming it. I accessed anger. But the thing was on automatic, beyond my husband's awareness, after all for him it was home - the stink of lying and manipulation didn't offend him, it was a stench that he had grown up with.

Partially because of this I chose to head out to college uncomfortably aware that I didn't feel safe or secure about my future at all. When I bought new clothes I always had the sense that I was packing my bags for a long journey beyond shops and civilization.

Soon, my youngest son (in his early 20s, away at university)  began to un-ravel and I was trying hard not to focus on my husband becoming his dad; superficially polite and loving but really someone who is absent, un-hearing, un-feeling...

Where was he?

Where was the good man?

I didn't really believe that he was playing happy families elsewhere.

But it felt like it.

I knew that at work they sat together at dinner times. And as Josh smashed our home and traumatized me, my husband and she bonded over how they are 'both victims of other people's madness'. Basically when our son Josh was drowning in psychosis my husband had transferred his sense of home to work and I was replaced. 

She was good.

I was not.

When things became violent.

She appreciated it when he protected her from the child at work who attacks her. She wasn't filled with agony and despair...finally finding someone who really is violent inside.

For me it was hearing Josh hit the concrete of the kitchen floor.

You know, it took me too long to judge that. I had to hear him say "I'm glad I hit him, I should have hit him more"...before I could judge and see underneath my husband's veneer of good. Clearly this kind of thing suited her? She could be who I cannot - the 'good wife' who lies to, and about her husband, her soul as blank and non-stick as Teflon. Now as my husband's ' mother-to-be-saved she gives him the essential key component to justify his lying, describing her husband as a violent man.

She tells my husband 'he will kill you if he finds out about us'. So my husband sneaks into her house when her husband is away...? go figure!

Her husband had to be 'the bad man' because my husband's battle with the 'bad man' inside himself (his own dad) was something he wouldn't face. The inner bad man was projected onto and carried by her husband. Now all the unkindness and violence my husband can't accept about himself became as nothing compared to how dangerous and bad he imagined her husband to be! But as this story about her husband isn't actually true, to make it true my husband actually had to go into their home and force the issue. It is a strange thing but afterwards, my husband told me he had believed that he was saving her. 

This was of course, another lie.

The text he received from her husband - who had grabbed her phone as she and my husband were messaging - was something like, "Come round, my husband is at work, the front door is unlocked". It takes more imagination than I have to read that as a plea for help.

Though it was obviously a very stupid lie, a part of me wonders how much he had vanished into his own fantasy? It was important that he saw it this way to hide from the truth of what he was actually doing, needing to get himself hit, needing to see himself as the hero, accessing his inner  'Manly man'. This belief was so strange and not justified by the text that took him there...But my husband can only see himself as good if he believes that her husband is bad; so it was very important to him that I know how dangerous her husband is! Unlike my husband, who is the only person I've mentioned in this post who has used direct violence and not felt sorrow or sadness..

And it continued...fantasies that her husband was looking for him.

But I met her husband - he told me that he felt sick at the idea of seeing my husband ever again. The most curious thing about this horrible episode in my life was how my husband tried to absorb her husband, to become who he imagined him to be from her description - as if that would give him permission to have sex with her, to be in their home, and to use violence? Or? I've no idea. I watched his personality change as he bought the same sort of car as her husband ( the car that her husband had been proud of as theirs) and get manly tattoos from the manly man tattoo shop. 

My husband started to make snap decisions in a decisive way, without paying any regard to anyone, just as his dad had done. And all the time he lied and lied and lied, and told me to 'shut up' because he just wanted everything to be 'normal'...and I was the reason things weren't OK.

Which became he...

whose natural enemy is she...

who says,

 "and how does that make you feel"?

Whilst she got her husband to buy her beautiful underwear...to wear to work for my husband. 

After the fish and chips, after asking the question, after he refused to show any compassion for the price I was being asked to pay for his decisions, after I took a gulp of air and returned from the land of the dead,  it was time to drop the narrative of: 'You made me feel safe, you were my love, you were good enough (true) you are a good man (I believed that)'.

So I told him.

"You were just playing happy families you never actually wanted me, just a different family to save you from yours, and that certainly makes sense in the light of what I've seen happen here! And I don't know if I'm right. I can't know. But I want to know. Now you are in your dead parents house. You are a child whose heart was broken with love, needing to save your mom, the child who wanted and never got his dad's respect...Unable now to take any responsibility for the harm you have done to your true wife, and true family."

He said "take that back...you are 'turning my past to shit!"

"Then tell me I'm wrong and tell me how it really is."

Silence

Null wave.

I described the present.

"You are living in the house your grew up in. You have abandoned your real wife and your real family. We didn't tell you to go! That was not our families decision, we didn't accuse you or blame you! And we need to have this conversation with a counsellor present, but you wont go to counselling".

He exploded in rage and said "you wouldn't say all this stuff to a counsellor!"

And I fell for this 'look over there' manipulation...by replying.

"Of course I would! But if you don't like the way I describe what's happened tell me my view is wrong. Tell me how it really is!"

And I wanted to know. I so much wanted not to be right. To be able to leave with a sense that all the love he had once said he had felt hadn't been one more lie, on top of another lie, on top of one more...

No answer.

Null wave.

My re-frame stands.

Onwards! to the future.