LJ Idol Week 12
Oct. 17th, 2024 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
littlebitofearthIt only took minutes for my marriage to officially crash and sink, Titanic-like, a rudderless ship on a moonless night, leaving me and my two children standing together on the shore as any security sank from sight.
A long time coming, I really should have known this was how my marriage would end. A lot of people say their partner changed after they got married, just became a completely different person, but not mine. There had been warning signs long before I married him - his quick temper, our nasty fights, his selfish choices, but I chose, as many people in love do, to turn my face away from the negative because, I thought, who am I to want someone perfect when I'm such a mess? When he decided I was the prize, there was no end to what he would do to win me. Romantic letters every day, "Reason Number 124 why I love you..." a deluge of precious gifts and sweet words that amounted to calculated manipulation, to gain trust, to get control. All that ended when we married, and what was left was his inconsideration and petulance on good days and anger and violence on bad ones.
On a chilly January morning, not quite four years after our wedding day, I stood at a park just a week after New Year, stood beside a man I used to love deeply, the father of my children, and knew beyond a doubt that our marriage was really over. Months before, in the summer, as the effects from the recession started to roll into every household, he was laid off from his job due to no fault of his own beside being in the wrong profession when the real estate bottom fell out.
That day he lost his job and drove into work to pick up his final paycheck, I knew he would come home dejected so I prepared myself to be the most supportive wife when he arrived. Instead, he entered yelling. Startling the children yet again and sending them running. He screamed at me that it was "time for me to grow up and get a full-time job because I've been spoiled for too long" (I worked 30 hours a week and watched the children the rest of the time) and that he had supported me for too long. I couldn't have been more offended at his words, but I wasn't surprised.
He had never been a father in the four years since I had our first, always much more consumed with playing video games and arguing with football refs on television. He had no idea what it meant to be a parent and how exhausting my life had been, basically single parenting with another adult in the house because he just didn't care to participate as a father.
When we were dating, those occasional angry outbursts which should've been red flags from the start, those outburst become violent tirades where he would grind his teeth, throw furniture and break things. It was hard for me to admit that I was in the kind of relationships I saw on daytime talk shows. That summer he had grabbed me by my hair and dragged me around our living room while I was holding our little girl because I had interrupted the MMO he was playing on the computer. So when he came home and told me to grow up, I knew immediately it was time for me to not just grow up, but also to get out. I told him I would get a full-time job but we would probably have to move to where I can find work. I started looking for openings in my hometown because I knew, if I was going to be a single mother soon, I could do it there alone. Although my family had long since moved on, it was a place I understood and a place I felt safe.
Hired for a job at a university in my hometown just three weeks later, I started looking for a place to rent. I found a little 800 square foot place in an old neighborhood with a park in walking distance. I was looking for a house that I could afford on my own if it came to that. And as I packed a boxes to move there, I began separating our seven years of time together - unblending our books and movies and packing them in in separate boxes so that when we got where we were going, it would be easy for me to separate us when it was necessary.
So, after a holiday season where the whimsy of having small children at Christmas, watching their joy of Santa Claus and fireworks on New Years, when these moments should've brought us closer together, instead he just continued pushing me away and making it very clear that the only needs that really mattered where his own.
When he turned to me on that January day at the park and said "Hey we should go see a movie together, maybe get a babysitter?" I looked at his soft brown eyes which once seemed as comforting as a warm glass of cocoa, and I just felt cold. Our daughter was on the swings, my son beating a stick on the metal slide and I told my children's father I didn't want to be married to him anymore.
"A date? I don't think so. I don't want to go on dates with you, I wanted a divorce."
He chuckled, thinking I was just fucking around, but then looked at my face and realized I was dead damn serious. There must've been more conversation, but I don't remember it just that within minutes of making that proclamation he said he needed to go back to the house. I continue to play with the children, a million thoughts swirling - What had I done? I had no plan! No family nearby! No savings! and then something inside me told me I needed to go home. We walked quickly back to our house where I caught my children's father putting a bag he had packed in fifteen minutes in his car because he planned to just leave me alone with the children so that he could move back in with his parents who lived four hours away. If he cared at all, wouldn't he try to fight for the marriage? Get a place close by so he could still be in his children's lives?
The first year as a single mother was one of the scariest times of my life. Although he signed the papers, telling a judge that he would pay child support, he soon told me that he didn't make enough at his job to support the agreed upon amount so he gave me what he could, and I was too poor and too scared of lawyers to fight it so money was a struggle every day. I made up a meal called poor mom's dinner, Ramen noodles, a pound of beef, a can of carrots and a can of peas. For a few dollars I could feed us for three days and I just prayed they got actual nutrients at school.
When he left, he took our family SUV. It was in his name, but I begged to buy it. We had purchased it but I'd made the payments on it. Both the kids' car seats fit comfortably in the back, and it was a safe, reliable vehicle to get them where we needed to go. Looking for any way to hurt me, and not caring if it hurt his children too, he insisted on taking the car, leaving me my beat up Corolla with over 200,000 miles on it. Because he'd never been able to keep a job, we never had money for things like oil changes, so the car was basically running on the oil from when I bought it 10 years before. I realized if this was going to be our sole source of transportation it needed to last so I took it in for an oil change and the next day it stopped running forever! I actually think all that old engine gunk and grease was holding the car together. So now completely broke, I had to figure out how to buy a new car.
When I dropped them off with him at his parents house in the car I barely scraped enough money together to purchase and I wasn't sure if I had enough money for gas to even drive home, he told me to go fuck myself. "Why don't you ask your new boyfriend for some money?" he snarled and I was left digging in my car seats and under the floormats trying to find enough change to get home.
A friend of mine taught me the delicate art of kiting checks. I don't know if you could get away with this any longer because everything is digital now, but in 2008 if you were expecting to get your paycheck or a child support payment in a couple days you could write paper checks at the grocery store or the gas station over the weekend and buy your kids a new pair of shoes with money that wasn't there. It was a scary game but when you were as poor as I was, it bought you some play time with the bank's money.
He was supposed to pay for medical insurance for the kids but he never did, so I went on state funded healthcare so that my children could continue to see their pediatrician and get medication when they got strep throat or pink eye. Yet, when my daughter fell off the top of her bunk bed in December, and a goose egg popped up on her forehead that made her look like a bruised unicorn, he screamed at me that I was unfit and neglecting his children. I just pressed my lips together, not wanting a fight, remembering how I had scooped her up sobbing as blood poured from her nose and begged her to sing her ABCs for me so that I knew she wasn't permanently damaged by the fall.
Our little rental had two bedrooms so the kids were sharing a room. Before the divorce they slept in the bunkbed, but after the divorce they preferred sleeping curled up around each other in the queen size bed on the floor we kept for when my mom visited. I would read them their stories every night before bedtime and often pass out from exhaustion in that bed and wake up, crunched between their sweaty bodies, three of us clinging to each other like a life-raft.
Many times I had night terrors that something, some amorphus, awful thing was happening to the children in their room and I would run into their bedroom - still asleep - waking when I was by their bedside in a dead panic expecting something catastrophic had happened to them. I actually injured my knee dashing from my room into theirs while sleep panicking. I was wearing slipper socks and slid into their door frame and crashed to the floor crying out, so sure that something was wrong.
I worked at a college and they offered a preschool that was run by both professionals and students for the School of Education. I don't use the word blessing lightly, but that place was a blessing. A place that I could know that my children were safe and loved all day, Where, when I needed to get a few minutes of exercise to work off some of my anxiety and bitterness m, I could leave them early and go to the gym on the campus and get on the rowing machine and sweat until I cried. They were also willing to work with me when I got behind on my childcare payments. My daughter was there for free because we qualified for state sponsored preschool, but my son was only three and it was $800 a month for someone to take care of him while I worked every day. When I was broke, I begged them to give me some grace until February when I could get my tax return and I would square up with them. Miss Heather looked at me with such pity but gave me grace. I couldn't believe with a masters degree and a full-time job I had become a charity case. She let the kids stay and I did pay back everything I owed them, and suddenly, I could breathe again.
I've been through tough times, I've been broke, I've been depressed, but surviving that first year of divorce was life altering. Not only making it through, but doing everything I could to keep my children safe and happy - a soft spot for us all in the eye of the hurricane - felt like a badge of honor.
My daughter's birthday is in late March and spring had just begun in North Georgia. Someone else who lived in my home years before had planted daffodils and crocus bulbs and the happy purple and yellow sprays of flowers were blooming all over my yard. I picked the children up from daycare and stopped by McDonald's for milkshakes on a sunny Friday. The kids wanted to play in the yard so I took a seat in the battered Adirondack chair that had a wedding present just five years before. We should've stained it, painted it, done something to make it last longer, but now it was just a splintered mess, full of termites in the backyard.
The children played by the plastic turtle sandbox and I sat in the chair in the cool of the early evening. A warm breeze rustled my hair and I took a deep breath. In that moment, I realized we had made it through the worst and now spring was coming. I hadn't believed until then, but I knew in that peaceful moment that we were going to be OK. My daughter rushed over and said I looked really pretty and I smiled, honored to be loved by her even if I didn't see it through my own eyes.
She asked if she could take my picture so I handed her my phone and my five-year-old girl snapped a shot of me in that old chair. The photo is definitely the work of a child, my feet cut off and way too much blue sky above my head, but when I looked at it later that night it brought me tears. The woman in that chair was not the bright eyed girl I was in college nor the naïve young woman who married a careless man. She was a survivor. I can see in the knowing look on my face. I can see in the dark smudges under my eyes, the year of exhaustion, of frustration and fear. I can see the determination in the set of my shoulders and my smile that was real and hopeful. And spring was finally here.
A long time coming, I really should have known this was how my marriage would end. A lot of people say their partner changed after they got married, just became a completely different person, but not mine. There had been warning signs long before I married him - his quick temper, our nasty fights, his selfish choices, but I chose, as many people in love do, to turn my face away from the negative because, I thought, who am I to want someone perfect when I'm such a mess? When he decided I was the prize, there was no end to what he would do to win me. Romantic letters every day, "Reason Number 124 why I love you..." a deluge of precious gifts and sweet words that amounted to calculated manipulation, to gain trust, to get control. All that ended when we married, and what was left was his inconsideration and petulance on good days and anger and violence on bad ones.
On a chilly January morning, not quite four years after our wedding day, I stood at a park just a week after New Year, stood beside a man I used to love deeply, the father of my children, and knew beyond a doubt that our marriage was really over. Months before, in the summer, as the effects from the recession started to roll into every household, he was laid off from his job due to no fault of his own beside being in the wrong profession when the real estate bottom fell out.
That day he lost his job and drove into work to pick up his final paycheck, I knew he would come home dejected so I prepared myself to be the most supportive wife when he arrived. Instead, he entered yelling. Startling the children yet again and sending them running. He screamed at me that it was "time for me to grow up and get a full-time job because I've been spoiled for too long" (I worked 30 hours a week and watched the children the rest of the time) and that he had supported me for too long. I couldn't have been more offended at his words, but I wasn't surprised.
He had never been a father in the four years since I had our first, always much more consumed with playing video games and arguing with football refs on television. He had no idea what it meant to be a parent and how exhausting my life had been, basically single parenting with another adult in the house because he just didn't care to participate as a father.
When we were dating, those occasional angry outbursts which should've been red flags from the start, those outburst become violent tirades where he would grind his teeth, throw furniture and break things. It was hard for me to admit that I was in the kind of relationships I saw on daytime talk shows. That summer he had grabbed me by my hair and dragged me around our living room while I was holding our little girl because I had interrupted the MMO he was playing on the computer. So when he came home and told me to grow up, I knew immediately it was time for me to not just grow up, but also to get out. I told him I would get a full-time job but we would probably have to move to where I can find work. I started looking for openings in my hometown because I knew, if I was going to be a single mother soon, I could do it there alone. Although my family had long since moved on, it was a place I understood and a place I felt safe.
Hired for a job at a university in my hometown just three weeks later, I started looking for a place to rent. I found a little 800 square foot place in an old neighborhood with a park in walking distance. I was looking for a house that I could afford on my own if it came to that. And as I packed a boxes to move there, I began separating our seven years of time together - unblending our books and movies and packing them in in separate boxes so that when we got where we were going, it would be easy for me to separate us when it was necessary.
So, after a holiday season where the whimsy of having small children at Christmas, watching their joy of Santa Claus and fireworks on New Years, when these moments should've brought us closer together, instead he just continued pushing me away and making it very clear that the only needs that really mattered where his own.
When he turned to me on that January day at the park and said "Hey we should go see a movie together, maybe get a babysitter?" I looked at his soft brown eyes which once seemed as comforting as a warm glass of cocoa, and I just felt cold. Our daughter was on the swings, my son beating a stick on the metal slide and I told my children's father I didn't want to be married to him anymore.
"A date? I don't think so. I don't want to go on dates with you, I wanted a divorce."
He chuckled, thinking I was just fucking around, but then looked at my face and realized I was dead damn serious. There must've been more conversation, but I don't remember it just that within minutes of making that proclamation he said he needed to go back to the house. I continue to play with the children, a million thoughts swirling - What had I done? I had no plan! No family nearby! No savings! and then something inside me told me I needed to go home. We walked quickly back to our house where I caught my children's father putting a bag he had packed in fifteen minutes in his car because he planned to just leave me alone with the children so that he could move back in with his parents who lived four hours away. If he cared at all, wouldn't he try to fight for the marriage? Get a place close by so he could still be in his children's lives?
The first year as a single mother was one of the scariest times of my life. Although he signed the papers, telling a judge that he would pay child support, he soon told me that he didn't make enough at his job to support the agreed upon amount so he gave me what he could, and I was too poor and too scared of lawyers to fight it so money was a struggle every day. I made up a meal called poor mom's dinner, Ramen noodles, a pound of beef, a can of carrots and a can of peas. For a few dollars I could feed us for three days and I just prayed they got actual nutrients at school.
When he left, he took our family SUV. It was in his name, but I begged to buy it. We had purchased it but I'd made the payments on it. Both the kids' car seats fit comfortably in the back, and it was a safe, reliable vehicle to get them where we needed to go. Looking for any way to hurt me, and not caring if it hurt his children too, he insisted on taking the car, leaving me my beat up Corolla with over 200,000 miles on it. Because he'd never been able to keep a job, we never had money for things like oil changes, so the car was basically running on the oil from when I bought it 10 years before. I realized if this was going to be our sole source of transportation it needed to last so I took it in for an oil change and the next day it stopped running forever! I actually think all that old engine gunk and grease was holding the car together. So now completely broke, I had to figure out how to buy a new car.
When I dropped them off with him at his parents house in the car I barely scraped enough money together to purchase and I wasn't sure if I had enough money for gas to even drive home, he told me to go fuck myself. "Why don't you ask your new boyfriend for some money?" he snarled and I was left digging in my car seats and under the floormats trying to find enough change to get home.
A friend of mine taught me the delicate art of kiting checks. I don't know if you could get away with this any longer because everything is digital now, but in 2008 if you were expecting to get your paycheck or a child support payment in a couple days you could write paper checks at the grocery store or the gas station over the weekend and buy your kids a new pair of shoes with money that wasn't there. It was a scary game but when you were as poor as I was, it bought you some play time with the bank's money.
He was supposed to pay for medical insurance for the kids but he never did, so I went on state funded healthcare so that my children could continue to see their pediatrician and get medication when they got strep throat or pink eye. Yet, when my daughter fell off the top of her bunk bed in December, and a goose egg popped up on her forehead that made her look like a bruised unicorn, he screamed at me that I was unfit and neglecting his children. I just pressed my lips together, not wanting a fight, remembering how I had scooped her up sobbing as blood poured from her nose and begged her to sing her ABCs for me so that I knew she wasn't permanently damaged by the fall.
Our little rental had two bedrooms so the kids were sharing a room. Before the divorce they slept in the bunkbed, but after the divorce they preferred sleeping curled up around each other in the queen size bed on the floor we kept for when my mom visited. I would read them their stories every night before bedtime and often pass out from exhaustion in that bed and wake up, crunched between their sweaty bodies, three of us clinging to each other like a life-raft.
Many times I had night terrors that something, some amorphus, awful thing was happening to the children in their room and I would run into their bedroom - still asleep - waking when I was by their bedside in a dead panic expecting something catastrophic had happened to them. I actually injured my knee dashing from my room into theirs while sleep panicking. I was wearing slipper socks and slid into their door frame and crashed to the floor crying out, so sure that something was wrong.
I worked at a college and they offered a preschool that was run by both professionals and students for the School of Education. I don't use the word blessing lightly, but that place was a blessing. A place that I could know that my children were safe and loved all day, Where, when I needed to get a few minutes of exercise to work off some of my anxiety and bitterness m, I could leave them early and go to the gym on the campus and get on the rowing machine and sweat until I cried. They were also willing to work with me when I got behind on my childcare payments. My daughter was there for free because we qualified for state sponsored preschool, but my son was only three and it was $800 a month for someone to take care of him while I worked every day. When I was broke, I begged them to give me some grace until February when I could get my tax return and I would square up with them. Miss Heather looked at me with such pity but gave me grace. I couldn't believe with a masters degree and a full-time job I had become a charity case. She let the kids stay and I did pay back everything I owed them, and suddenly, I could breathe again.
I've been through tough times, I've been broke, I've been depressed, but surviving that first year of divorce was life altering. Not only making it through, but doing everything I could to keep my children safe and happy - a soft spot for us all in the eye of the hurricane - felt like a badge of honor.
My daughter's birthday is in late March and spring had just begun in North Georgia. Someone else who lived in my home years before had planted daffodils and crocus bulbs and the happy purple and yellow sprays of flowers were blooming all over my yard. I picked the children up from daycare and stopped by McDonald's for milkshakes on a sunny Friday. The kids wanted to play in the yard so I took a seat in the battered Adirondack chair that had a wedding present just five years before. We should've stained it, painted it, done something to make it last longer, but now it was just a splintered mess, full of termites in the backyard.
The children played by the plastic turtle sandbox and I sat in the chair in the cool of the early evening. A warm breeze rustled my hair and I took a deep breath. In that moment, I realized we had made it through the worst and now spring was coming. I hadn't believed until then, but I knew in that peaceful moment that we were going to be OK. My daughter rushed over and said I looked really pretty and I smiled, honored to be loved by her even if I didn't see it through my own eyes.
She asked if she could take my picture so I handed her my phone and my five-year-old girl snapped a shot of me in that old chair. The photo is definitely the work of a child, my feet cut off and way too much blue sky above my head, but when I looked at it later that night it brought me tears. The woman in that chair was not the bright eyed girl I was in college nor the naïve young woman who married a careless man. She was a survivor. I can see in the knowing look on my face. I can see in the dark smudges under my eyes, the year of exhaustion, of frustration and fear. I can see the determination in the set of my shoulders and my smile that was real and hopeful. And spring was finally here.
