Twenty years on...

This coming Thursday, September 19th, 2019 will be the twentieth anniversary of the day my marriage ended.

Well, it was the beginning of the end, as it would take nearly three more years for it to end in a legal sense, but it in essence was the end of five years together that were interesting, but far from tumultuous, and for a very selfish reason.

After all this time I have managed to put aside most of my hate for my former spouse, but not all of it, and while she is far from blameless for the dissolution of our marriage, time has decidedly NOT healed all wounds...at least on my side of the equation.  Enough time has passed and, with her remarrying last year, (in a situation that deserves it's own blog entry), I feel free to finally let some of the bitterness I have largely held at bay these two decades in an effort to give myself closure of sorts.

This blog has been active nearly ten years now and though things have been somewhat personal over that time, I haven't peeled back this petal of the stinking onion of my sometimes woeful personal life as yet.  Mainly because it exposes a lot more than I care to about who I am and what I've been through, but mainly because there are already too many whiny blogs out there in the universe to read that have basically the same sad content on the same sad subject.

As I indicated, two decades on I am still very bitter that things turned out the way they did.  

Our marriage ended for a stupid reason, and a fraudulent one considering the amount of hyperbole that came from the other side.  

As it turned out, I didn't know a lot of what I'm about to tell you until she was gone.

I was accused of being an abusive husband.  That I didn't allow her to have any friends and that I didn't allow her to go to church and that I was bad with money.

But the part that I find worst of all didn't actually happen after she left me.  No, it happened two weeks before, when I was between jobs and my parents were willing to step in and help us financially while I got my working feet back underneath me.  After my parents made us the offer, my parents though it prudent to coordinate with hers to see that we got back on track to self reliance so my mother invited hers to lunch at a fast food restaurant and her mother proceeded top drop a huge bomb right in my mother's lap.

She asked my mom if she thought that I had the capability of harming the child that we had on the way at the time.  It floored my mom, and she brought it home and told my dad, who ordered us to come over to their house and confront us with it.

My dad had a direct way about him.  He didn't mess around and shot straight.  He asked me if I had EVER raised a hand to my wife and of course, I told him no.  Needless to say,this was the first time I had heard of this and I was stunned and of course, hurt by these accusations.

When it came to our marriage I didn't tell my parents when we were having problems.  Not once.  I didn't want them to know because it wasn't up to them to fix our problems and I respected them enough to not bother them or ask them to step in.  Partly, this was my doing but, before we were married, my father made it abundantly clear that he would be supportive but that was the extent of it.

I assured him that he had not raise me that way and I would NEVER harm a hair on either my wife or my child's head.  Ever.  We had fought verbally, like every other married couple has back to Adam and Eve had, but I would sooner harm myself than I would my family.

Looking back, I should have been the one to leave right then.  Hindsight being 20/20 two decades down the road.  

The problem being, however, that the child she was carrying at the time wound up being the son we have now and we were just shy of three years shy of the anniversary of the death of our daughter, whom I've spoke of may times here in this blog.  

I was pissed off, hurt and felt betrayed, but at the time given the fact that I was responsible for the child I felt it incumbent to stay and try and make it work.  I may not have been the perfect husband but I am not going to abandon my wife and child, and though it sounds regretful that I didn't throw in the towel I'm not. That again is the 20/20 hindsight kicking in.  The fact is that my foot should have come down and I should have shifted the dynamic of our marriage right then and there instead of sitting back and letting what happened take place.

I was blind to two things in this process, the first being that I didn't recognize that her parents were firmly in control of my wife at that point in terms of her mental state.  They didn't like me, I didn't fit the criteria for who they imagined her being married to, and I didn't bow to their will so I was made expendable and they made sure I was gone.  My money gets to stay, but me...I was shown the door. 

I wouldn't have had such a problem with our marriage ending had it not been for the interference of her parents.  They never liked me from the beginning, and when they saw the chance to step in and kick me out, they took it.  As I said above, my ex-wife is most certainly to blame here but I wonder how things would have turned out had they not been in the picture, steering the ship toward the iceberg.  

I dare say hijacking the boat in the process. 

The tipping point was, of course, her mother telling mine that she believed that I had the capability to harm the child that we had on the way at the time.  That was deceitful, and it is something I will go to my grave with a great deal of anger about and I will NEVER forgive any of them for, and if I am to roast away in the fires of hell for that then so be it.  I was far from a perfect husband but since there isn't a template that anyone can follow to be the perfect husband I felt I did the best I could.

Now, twenty years later, I haven't heard so much as an apology.  My mother went to her death never hearing one either, and in truth I would want one more for her than for me.  This was the woman who RAISED ME and a woman she only knows as her son's mother in law is all but accusing me of child abuse.  It really hurts my heart to know my mother had to endure that accusation of her son.

Anyway, I've prattled on long enough I suppose.  Not real sure how curative this was but I am glad I got some of it out.  Hopefully Thursday will pass like all of the September 19ths have in the past two decades, but it's still hard to deal with even with that amount of time gone.