It Takes Two

There is a calmness that comes after a divorce. It can be rather immediate. Sometimes all it takes is finding a calmer place to sleep—what the lawyers call "Establishing Separate Residences." Sometimes it takes getting through to the other side of the un-co-mingling of the family finances. Sometimes it just takes hanging out with enough Normals to where you get where you trust your instincts and your feelings again.

Dear Abby last week had a letter from a young woman who found out that her father was binge-drinking again. He started up when his wife, the writer's mother, went away on a vacation with her sister. The writer wanted to know whether or not to tell her mother. Abby told the writer that the family dynamic was this – Husband was punishing Wife for going on vacation. It was a startling thing to read in the newspaper in the broad daylight—that people who love you so much that they went and married you could punish you. Oh, what an Elephant on the Sofa Moment!

If you stay in a dysfunctional marriage long enough, you begin to self-monitor yourself to avoid this punishment. You will, literally, catch yourself being happy and check yourself, knowing what will happen later on. I have always gone through life lucky—things just happen to me, good things, happy things. And the saddest part of my life was being married to a man who resented any happy thing—and I mean anything that could put a smile on my face—that did not come from him.

I remember taking him along to my Senior Convocation, when I got my bachelor's degree at age 40. My voice teacher had urged me, "Bring your husband," and I remember having a little mental blip of "Why would I do that?" It turned out that I was the only triple-dipper, the only triple honoree. It was more than my husband could stand. And then, afterwards, over by the red-punch-and-cookies that the nuns supplied in endless quantities for all Catholic college occasions, people came up and hugged me, told me congratulations, told my stoic husband how proud he must be of me. My teenaged daughter could see him getting tenser and tenser and then start to twitch ("like a popcorn machine, Ma."). He could hardly wait long enough to get to the car, where he turned to me, still with the three parchment certificates in my hand, and sneered, "You just think you're such Hot Sh*t."

I remember thinking, "I do not have a normal marriage."

There's psychology behind all this—Google "abandonment-engulfment cycle" sometime, or "Narcissism." But it mainly amounts to hostage taking. You are punished for being a "Bad Hostage, Bad, Bad!"

My neighbor lady works two jobs to support a husband who will not hold down even one job if it gets in the way of his drinking. He punishes her for working that second job by doing things like letting her beloved little dog out loose, cooking up all the meat in the freezer and gobbling it down in her absence, and—just last week--getting her little car impounded when he went out driving at night, with no valid driver's license and his third OMVI, and he got a mandatory four days in County Jail. She did a very brave, un-Hostagy thing—she did not go down to Payday Loans and get the money to bail him out. She, instead, had four days without him. She told me, "It's so-o peaceful." Yes, Dear Heart, it is.

Janelle