How I never put all those things together...I just don't understand. I knew it wasn't normal, and I knew that there was, in me, a hatred for my father so intense, that it was impossible to explain to anyone else without seeming insane. So I went about my life. I graduated high school. I went to college. I had an awesome roommate and great friends. Until that day that I remembered everything.
How can our minds hide such things from us? How I wish to God that I had never remembered. It would have made my life so much easier.
When I came home from college for that week, I never confronted my father. I never told my mother. For whatever reason I thought it would be a good idea to transfer to a college closer to home so that I didn't have to live on campus. Why? I would like to know the answer to that one, myself. My second year, at the new college, was a flop. I had all passing grades, but I hated the school, didn't have any friends, thought the professors were sexist.
I did have a part time job that I loved. I worked at a high end jewelry store and got to play with diamonds all day. Who wouldn't love that? The women I worked with dared me to put a personal ad in the newspaper. Yes, people still did that way back then. There was no Match.com. I put an ad in the local paper and every day we would all call and listen to the replies and laugh....I mean, some of these men could barely put a sentence together, or they had just gotten out of prison, or were married looking for something "discreet."
But one message caught my attention. He sounded sincere. So I actually called him. We talked every day for two weeks: LONG phone calls. When I finally met him it really was love at first sight. He was shy, funny, smart, and kind. Maybe a little too short for me - but hey, a girl can work around those things.
Frank and I met in June. We got engaged Thanksgiving day. Announcing our engagement to our families was anything but a joyous occasion. His father asked if I was pregnant, my father made him cry and kept saying that I was too young to get married. This really should have been an omen. When we got married a year and a half later, it was on April 1st. No joke. The universe was smashing me over the head with bricks and I just kept smiling stupidly.
The first year of our marriage was great. We were happy, I got along with his two kids, and we went everywhere together. Then he started drinking. His behavior was intensely erratic and when he finally agreed to see a doctor about it, he was diagnosed with Manic Depression. The drinking and the psych meds were a bad combo for him. When he was drinking, he was nasty. He never laid a hand on me, but he was so verbally and emotionally abusive. He did finally quit drinking a year later, but by then he had already cheated on me.
I was raised to believe that marriage is forever. I actually took my vows seriously when I said, "For better or for worse." He agreed that he wanted to work on it. We went to counseling, he went to AA, I went to Al-Anon. And for a while things got better. To make a very long story short, he cheated on me two other times, tried to commit suicide twice, we separated 5 years after getting married, and two years after that finally got a divorce.
The day I moved of out "his" house, he had left so we wouldn't fight. I was packing my things up from the back room and I noticed his gun case. It was locked but I knew where he kept the keys. I opened it up, and looked at all the guns. He loved hunting. He and his son went all the time. I took out a small pistol that I had used at the rifle range before. I loaded one bullet into it. I remember crying so hard I couldn't breathe, crying so hard and so long that I ran out of tears and my crying became soundless sobs. My dog came and laid next to me. I kissed her head, told her I love her, and put the gun to my head.
No comments:
Post a Comment