Ghosts of Abuses Past

I’m not sleeping well – maybe three hours in fits and spurts, even with sleep aids.  When I do sleep, I revisit over and over, the house I lived in when my first husband and I divorced.

 

It’s 1994.  I’m helping a friend of mine move, and find, hidden in the wheel well of the car, a very ugly book on how men should approach divorce as a war.  I read it, confront my husband, who tells me he’s “hiding it for a friend”.  I choose to believe him.  The fact that he now carries a pager and it buzzes incessantly when he forgets it is overlooked.  Also overlooked, that this pager mysteriously became a “job requirement” after he spent time at an air show and made “friends” with a woman.

 

A few months later, we have the offer of a family vacation at a swanky location.  He tells me he can’t get off of work to go to this amazing venue, and I threaten to go to his job to explain that he has the time off available and force the issue.  A miserable vacation is had by all.

 

It’s Spring of 1995 – the day before Easter.  He has just changed jobs, and lets me know that he’s moving out.  We’re getting a divorce – but am I cooking dinner for his family the next day?  He has left me with a half tank of gas, half gallon of milk, and two children, and no health insurance.  It turns out while I was volunteering at the school our children attended, he was getting and furnishing an apartment, moving his stuff out, and cleaning out the safety deposit box.  Within days I find out that he has set the phone to be cancelled, and had already filed for divorce – a process that took at least two weeks.

 

Over the next six months there are never ending battles in court, that he wants to be bought out of the house, he wants HIS car, he wants the better furniture, he shouldn’t have to pay child support because my family was well off…  The constant rip offs to the children on child support go on for years.  He wants to work in a different country; it costs more to live there, he has to pay taxes in two countries, it costs so much to fly the kids up to see him, he shouldn’t have to pay for the supervision of minors on flights, now that he’s out of the country it costs too much to insure the kids, and finally the “gift” to our daughter via Child Support Enforcement, that just *happened* to be the minimum due until our son was no longer a minor.

 

It was just recently that two things came to my mind – the first being that he paid for all of this with cash gifts that were given to him by my well-to-go grandmother.  He took that money and used it to be as ugly and nasty as possible.  He used our children to punish me for Heaven only knows what.  He treated our children like shit, to prove some schadenfreude point that he was better than anyone else.  The second is that I’m pissed off I didn’t fight harder for our kids.  I’m angry that I didn’t point out that I sold jewelry to my grandmother to get the sizable down payment on that home, that he had been gifted with thousands of dollars and that he had profited from our relationship.  I’m furious that I didn’t push harder to get his tax returns from both countries, and force the courts into seeing that he was being cruel and petty, and despite his feelings towards me, he had no business screwing the kids over like that.  I realized that he would have cleaned out the  house while the kids and I were on the family vacation, leaving me with nothing, if he’d been given the chance.

 

Every night – I return to that house.  Some things have changed; there are trees, or the carpet is different or I have someone I’m sharing that space with.  Every night I crawl back into that space where I was used, abused, my children were ignored and treated as a financial burden and not  as small humans.  I go back to a place where my sole purpose in life is to make someone wealthy – to provide things that that person doesn’t want to work for.  Every night I return to Hell.

 

I know some of this is situational depression – my hubby has been home for a month, looking for work.  Financial stress is very high right now.  Tomorrow will be the 100th anniversary of G’s birth – which means talking to Mom and reminding my siblings to check in with her, because I cannot handle another 2 1/2 hour phone call with her.  It’s emotionally draining.  Some of it is the ongoing frustration with my knee and swelling and the unknown battle of leg pain.  I do think I have a handle on where to go on that, the challenge there is trying to figure out what’s going on with our insurance, and getting the approval to go to yet another specialist.  I’m tired of seeing doctors.

 

I realize that my head space has shifted.  My brain feels older, less like the passion of the 18 year old me, and more like the fatigue of the 30 year old me.  I know I need to spend some time talking to myself and being forgiving of the things that I did the best I could at the time.  I know I need to rest and recharge and “fill” my own bowl before I fill those of others.

 

I don’t know how to stop dreaming of that ugly place and time in my life.   I keep thinking I’ve moved on past the anger and sorrow.  I want to be done with it – I’m not that broken person any more.  I hate spending time or energy (even tangentially) in feeding that toxic era.  I want to be present in my life now, I want to be putting the energy into sharing with people who love and appreciate me for me, and not for what I can “do” for them.

 

I just want to sleep, and wake up refreshed.