Is it possible to go from an abusive household with no role modeling for healthy relationship skills and have a successful marriage?
I can’t answer for anyone else. I can only say, for us, it was not a given, no matter how much we loved each other.
Is it even relevant?
What do you say about the issues in your early years of marriage, when you are writing about them from 40+ years out? From having navigated struggles and joys, successes, near-death episodes, and all that life can throw at you? When I think of who we were back then compared to now, we were almost more like strangers.
Priorities, “triage,” and setting up the “base camp”
For any successful team to operate, there must be an agreed-upon set of rules and priorities. And Ed and I were a team. So, during this “adult” phase, we had five priorities:
Sitting at the dining room table, I stared across the room and studied my husband’s face. He was seated at the desk in the living room, speaking on the phone. I watched every expression for a hint as to the “bottom line” of this call. The conversation seemed pleasant. The call was brief.
Hanging up the phone (Yes, this is before cell phones), Ed turned to me and said,
“Well, the job in North Carolina is ours if we want it….Do we want it?”
Never has there been more of a pregnant pause between us…not even the time I called him when I was actually pregnant….
It was the summer of 1985. I had resumed the dating service and met several generally nice men. I say “generally” because a few were just “non-starters,” but certainly not harmful.
There was the divorced man who spent all of our supper date talking about his ex-wife. No, thank you.
And the one who kept calling me to arrange to meet, but could never quite figure out if he wanted to because he also wanted to go play paintball with his friends. After several rounds of this, I told him to go play paintball and stop calling.
But the absolute “best” of the non-starters was the computer engineer who worked in the same company my father had. We met for lunch at a burger place. I’d been running around all morning and skipped breakfast, so when we met up, I was ready for my burger and fries.
As we talked, or rather, I TRIED to start a conversation, I made short work of my lunch. He was rather …aloof? No matter what I asked, it was one or two-word answers. I mentioned that my father worked at the same company that he did.
No response. Oh, he did note that I had finished my lunch quickly and said, “Gee, you eat a lot.”
After the chaos of the winter months of 1984, I’d like to say things quieted down, and I could then just proceed in therapy to full healing and live happily ever after. For sure, at the time I thought it worked that way — if I worked REALLY hard, fast, and fiercely, I could get over all of this quickly and be “normal” and healed. That statement alone indicates just how far from understanding myself and the situation, I really was.
Yes, I had stabilized and was no longer suicidal. And that was no small achievement. But it just meant I had finally landed at the bottom of that abyss, the crash hadn’t killed me, and I was now standing upright on two legs facing a mountain whose top was obscured by a heavy bank of clouds. I had no idea then just how high that mountain was or that I would still be climbing it today.
“As you can see, I’ve been remiss in my journal writing – 21 months. That last retreat (Nov 80) really did me in, and I just wanted to tune it all out for a long time. But since then I finally got up the guts to go to another retreat…a FEW of them actually. One-day retreats at a new place — The Cenacle in Middletown…”
Looking back, what a difference a place makes…though, maybe it was a difference in the person going to the new place that mattered, too? At the very least, the fact that I sought out a new retreat center in spite of how the previous one triggered me, implies that I was willing to trying again…fertile soil just waiting for the right seeds to be planted?
Either way…this became the turning point of my life. More on this, shortly…
The previous entry was one of the very hardest to write so far. Every fiber in me just wanted to beg off writing it. I could barely force me to the keyboard, and I felt such a heavy load of pure exhaustion.
My husband asked me, “Was the desire to avoid writing because I was afraid to show my shame publicly to my readers?”
I thought that was a good question, so I wanted to answer it here.
My mentor’s question
In reality, at my current age, I don’t really care if I share my moments of shame publicly anymore. What is the worst anyone can do to me? Think poorly of me?
And do I think I am the only person who has ever failed to live up to their ideals and ethics at some moment of their life? As a mentor once said to me:
“Did you expect to be perfect?”
If anyone thinks that this story is of me being the totally strong, ever pushing hard forward hero, who never slipped and fell or erred in choices, they will be disappointed. There are more shames to come, more poor choices. I was not perfect. I can simply say I did the best I could at any point, even in my mistakes. Sometimes our best is wonderful, and sometimes our best is flat-out poor. But I tried. And when I failed, well, in writing what it was like then, I can now see I was simply human, pushed too far.
I was waiting for Dad to pick me up from my dorm at the main UCONN campus at Storrs. My stomach was tight, knowing that, as always, I had to go home for the weekend and back into that atmosphere.
This was my third year of college, the one I got to live on campus, like a REAL college student. It was early in the fall semester, but I was already loving it. I was rooming with a friend from high school and the branch. Her father had set our room up with bunk beds, and we had a good arrangement.
Photo by author
Also, I reveled in being surrounded by the other students, having real connections with the other girls in the dorm, and making friends. There were all different personalities and attitudes, but I was learning how to “work and play well” with them all. They even seemed to enjoy me, and one of my late-night study companions in the dining room would leave me funny notes when I fell asleep over homework. It was all so NORMAL…
Even the campus grounds were a pure joy to be in. A campus the size of a small town. Leaf-strewn walkways, farm land across from my dorm, even a campus dairy with fresh ice cream. Being on campus made home recede into a background a million miles away, and let me lock that reality into a little compartment…at least for the weekdays.
How to make this end
I realized that, somehow, as I continued my education, the whole sexual thing with Dad needed to end. And even his whole wanting to control all my time to be with him. I wasn’t sure how it would work out, but certainly, this new level of separation had to be the next step to finally bringing things with Dad to an end. After all, he couldn’t expect “it” to go on forever, right? I mean, once I finished college — and I wasn’t exactly sure how it would play out — but SOMEHOW, no longer being a student, but an actual adult, it had to stop.
My path to a future…whatever that might be, even as I didn’t yet know.
The expectation that somehow by the end of it, I would be independent, on my own, somehow no longer being abused, and just living a peaceful, “normal” life.
What else could I want?
Yes…..
My own world
The University of Connecticut, Torrington Branch, may have been only a mile away from our new home at “the Lot,” but in another way, at least for me, then, it was a world away. It was a place I could go and “stay all day” and into the evening if I wanted. Classes were not the solid schedule of high school and strict rules, but were on a schedule you set. And you were your own boss. You failed or succeeded on your own, and no one interfered with your right to that. As long as you paid your tuition.
Most of the friends I had in high school had gone away to college. But a few of my friends continued on here and there were new people from the local towns, all of us in the same boat — able to go to college only because this local branch gave us low tuition. We bonded over our mutual situations.
For the past few days, I have been in 1972…1979-1983…1986…then 1995-1997….teens through my forties, the incomplete adult through escape, suicidal to the warrior trying to fight him.
And it has been GRUELING. I would sit in the back room where I write, reading those years, and just reeling from the intensity of it all.
I thought I was ready for those pages…and I AM strong enough, but, oh God, I was still taken aback by the crushing pain in them.
To read the journals was to be back there again…living all the moments drenched in despair, confusion, fighting, and fear.
I had not read those journals since I wrote them. For a long time, they lived in a box in a closet, those parts of my life literally hidden. At some point, knowing I would eventually write this memoir, I emptied out every last box of photos, journals, and life documents, and put them in order.
I flipped through the pages of those books just long enough to see what was there and thus put them on a shelf chronologically. But that was it. I resisted actually taking in the full meaning of the cursive writing on those pages. I wasn’t ready, yet, to see, much less, feel, what my agonized and despairing younger selves wrote.
But the other day, I knew it was time. I can’t just “wing” writing about the worst part of those years. It would be wrong to trust my memory when I have actual, in-the-moment records soaked in the pain and despair of those days.
Soul Mosaic 