Today I’m Just Plain Old Ugly Angry

The kind of anger that just brims from everywhere and nowhere both at the same time.

Had we stayed married, today would have been our 37th anniversary.

The first wedding anniversary that came after our divorce, I swore I would start a little venomous tradition on THAT DAY each year in which I imagined I would ALLOW MYSELF the luxury of being as pissed off with him as i wanted to be without guilt. There were going to be two rules, only with friends or my mother … and never where our daughters could hear me venting.

But that never really went too well. The first wedding anniversary date after our divorce, his father passed away. It was a weekday and I was at my job … and yes, I was venting all kinds of noxious sentiments here and there … but halfway through the morning, I recevied a phone call at work from his sister. Their father was dying and they couldn’t get hold of Gary … they wanted to let him know so he could try to make it to Danville before it happened.

They had tried to call his work, but he was out of the office on a business trip and whoever the spoke to refused to give them any information. They asked me if I could please try to find him and let him know.

Now this was in the days before cell phones … not to mention we weren’t exactly very friendly immediately following the divorce and I’m sure everyone that Gary worked with knew it.

Even so, I called his work and asked for his boss (who was a friend of Gary’s) … I explained that althhough we were divorced, I really needed someone to try to get hold of Gary because his father who was in hospice care was apparently very close to dying and was asking for Gary. Perhaps he could pass this information on to Gary’s secretary (because they were dating at the time). I remember his boss saying …. ah ah … oh ….. um .. well …. you knew about that?

YEAH … I did. But the point is we need to get this information to Gary, so any help you can offer is fine with me.

He immediately given three phone numbers and Gary’s travel itenerary. He was in Huntington County for meetings that morning. He gave me that office number … then he was to stay in a motel in Altoona overnight and head off to a second district that afternoon. He gave me both the motel number and the second district office number.

The first office said he had just left and was on his way to Altoona, they thought he was checking into the motel first. So I called the motel and left a message but he hadn’t checked in yet, they promised to deliver the message.

Then I called the Altoona office number …. someone found Gary and he was quite angry with me for tracking him down at first .. until he learned the reason why …. and then he was all about getting back to Danville to get to his father as fast as he could.

Now keep in mind that the reason my father died in May of 1994 PRIOR to me even thinking about divorce …. was because Gary would not allow me to go to my family and drive my father to his preferred hospital on the day my father first became ill.

My parents only lived 16 miles away … the hospital my father preferred and where he had established physicians was in the MY TOWN … my didn’t know how to drive a car.

I said “sure Mom, I’ll be right there” … and Gary said “where do you think you’re going. (to my father to take him to the hospital) “why do they call you every single time he farts?”

MY MOM HEARD THIS … I told her to just ignore him, I’d be right there.

He threatened to take the distrubutor cap out of the car and told me that it was time I learned to take care of my OWN family and let them take care of themselves. The rant went on and on ….

My mother said “Honey, I’m going to hang up the phone now. You just stay there and try to calm him down keep the peace. I’ll call Uncle Ernie or an amulance … we’ll figure something out. Just take care of yourself and those kids.”

They contacted my uncle … he was up in years and wanted to knonw if it would be okay to just go to the closest hospital instead of the one my father was used to.

They misdiagnosed an infarct to the large intestine, as food poisoning, he never did see a doctor or have blood work, a Physicians Assistant prescribed compazine suppositories and told him it would be awful, but it had to run it’s course. That was Saturday.

Sunday I called my mother, I wanted to sneak over for a visit, she told me to just stay put …. she had enough on her hands without worrying about making Gary angrier with me than he already was.

Monday morning my mother called at 6:35 … exactly 5 minutes after she knew Gary left for work. She asked if could please come pick up Dad and get him to his preferred hospital. That something was horribly wrong.

So I had a neighbor get the kiddos off to school, raced the 17 miles to pick up my mom and dad, raced back the 17 miles to get him to the hospital he preferred in our town ….. and the surgeon immediately informed us that he was in serious condition, peritonitis with sepsis … they could operate and try to figure things out and clean things up, but there were no guarantees …. he made an analogy to having bases loaded and sending a blind man to bat.

Dad went into surgery, I called Gary at work (like I said he always hated that) and asked him if he could please get off work at lunchtime and pick up Alyse from Kindergarten, and Janelle at 3:00pm and take care of them until I could get home from the hospital because my Dad was really sick.

His answer was … NO, that’s your job. You figure it out.

I called my neighbor again, she agreed to pick up the kids after school.

So I called Gary back …. (glutton for punishment aren’t i?) to let him know where the kids would be, and to pick them up from Debs house if I wasn’t home by the time he got home.

I think he said “humph” and hung up.

At any rate, the surgery didn’t go well … someone came out and asked us if we wanted heroic measures ….we said YES YES YES … but when he came out of surgery he was on a respirator (he was also a dialysis patient for the past 18 years so his health hadn’t been all that wonderful to begin with) …

The doctors urged me to get my mother out of the hospital when he came out of surgery because she was argumentive and unbelievably not herself … they told her to get some rest at home, and they would call her if anything changed …. I had her home by 9pm, got her settled, returned to my home around 9:45 … and Gary was there, all irritated that he had to make his own supper while I was galavanting around all over God’s creation … I asked if the kids were in bed … he said how would he know where they were, I was their mother, knwoing where they are is YOUR JOB …. and obviously you don’t do it very well.

So I called my friend, she still had the kids, they were in bed sleeping …. she had two children of her own and had clean clothes for them in the morning … said to just do whatever it was I had to do and she’d make sure they were okay. I asked her not to tell them their grand daddy was sick and I was helping … that I’d see them soon and that I loved them.

Gary was mocking me in the background as I was saying this.

I explainedhow sick my father was and he said, GOOD, maybe he’ll die and you’ll be influenced by your husband rather than your daddy.

My father died the next day … Gary cried like a baby. He swore he didn’t mean any of it …. that he hadn’t realized how bad it really was.

A week after my father’s funeral, I was still a mess …. Gary was upset with me for taking it so hard … so I decided to take time that day to pull myself up by the bootstraps, clean the house and make a nice meal. I lit a scented candle … to make it seem homey and happy … and the minute Gary walked in the door he said

“What are you doing? Having a seance for your Daddy?”

After the kids went to bed that night, I asked Gary how long he had hated me. He said probably from the second week we were married, that he had never really ever loved me. I asked him why he hadn’t filed for divorce. He said because I hadn’t given him any biblical reason and he was fearful for his immortal soul … then he asked me why I hadn’t filed since he had given me every reason in the book … I said because I don’t have the money.

He went upstairs, came down and plopped a large amount of money on the dining room table and said “think this would be enough to start?”

I filed the next morning …. told him I hoped he would be treated better than I had when and if his father ever died. Secretly promised myself I’d throw this all back in his face if that ever happened.

But when it did happen …. I couldn’t do it. All I could do was feel so badly for Gary. As a little boy he couldn’t do one single thing his father ever approved of. His father was emotionally unavailable to everyone …. had been abused by his own father as a child, abused his own wife and children not knowing anything different, and while Gary WISHED for something different, HOPED he’d learned from the experience … when things didn’t go Gary’s way, the best skill he had in the heat of any given moment was all the best tricks of the punitive trade learned via the school of hard knocks.

My father too had been an angry father …. at least with me … not so much my sister … I was a bit of a challenge …. willful, rebellious, mischeivious, sometimes outright dishonest …. and in those days the belt was often a first resort rather than the last … but I always knew my father loved me, he never punished my mother or treated her badly in any way. They were a team, a united front, and even when they did argue, it was in hushed tones behind closed doors when it concerned the children, and right out in the open heated discussions when it was something else.

One time, my father kept making comments over and over again about his own mother always had cookies in the cookie jar, always a cake or assorted baked goods every single day even during the depression, that he didn’t understand why my mother didn’t do that.

The truth was, his mother was a piano teacher and some of her students would pay in baked goods and cookies or apples or treats … which is why she always had so many … my grandmother couldn’t bake a cake to save her life … she had told us so many times … but that isn’t how my father was remembering it …. and so he went on and on, day after day … until one day …. my mother decided to DO SOMETHING about it.

She baked all day long. Asssorted treats. Cupcakes, cheesecake, two pies, an applesauce cake, ginger cookies, chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter cookies, sugar cookies, cinnamon rolls.

Mom fed us about an hour before Dad arrived home from work, a regular meal like always … only with no leftovers. When Dad arrived, she brought his plate to him filled with baked goods and only baked goods.

He asked where the rest of it was? She just looked him in the eye very sweetly and said, “Why dear? You said you wanted cookies and treats and now you have them!”

This went on for two more days before my father finally broke down and apologized to my mother for making her feel as if she wasn’t measuring up to his mother … that she was an amazing wife and maybe we should just go to dinner that night.

Amazingly, my mother simply opened the oven door and pulled out a plate of regular food just like the meal my sister and I had earlier … it was if she knew this was going to be his breaking day …

In all of this there was no yelling or screaming … my sister and I watched with round eyes, more amused than scared because it was kind of clear to us that my mother was just finishing a game my father accidentally started ….we were more interested in seeing what would happen day to day …. our Mom wasn’t much of a game player and our father’s reactions to this game were rather amusing (he’d sometimes wink at us and make a bit of fun of her behind her back whispering to us that it’s a good thing he stopped for a burger on the way home!)

I don’t know how I got off on this on this subject … the real subject is that Gary’s parents beat one another routinely, Their father beat their mother, the children, for no better reason than he didn’t like how they looked at him or didn’t like how they did a farm chore. Both children were frightened that he would kill their mother, or that their mother would pull out a rifle and kill him as she often threatened ….. they didn’t talk things over … they yelled and screamed and cursed and called each other vile names. He would drag his wife around my her hair and make her sit on the floor beside him and his stinky feet because a friend of hers he didn’t like had visited her in earlier in the day, or because the kitchen sink started leaking and she was the only one who ever used it so it was her fault.

At mealtimes he would overturn the table if something didn’t meet with his approval, he witheld money, affection, found fault with almost everything. Gary once told me that the very first time his father ever hugged him or told him he was “proud of him” was at our wedding.

And suddenly, on his death bed … all he wants is to see his son … to be with his son …. it was heartbreaking.

Gary took it hard. I attended the funeral with the children at Gary’s request. We were divorced but I let him cry on my shoulder, explained to him that his father always loved him but just didn’t know how to show it …. to try to let go of the past hurts and try to hang onto the better memories … his first bike, when his father got him his first bb gun … when his Dad taught him how to shoot a rifle … field dress game … whatever he find good, try to find a little more .. .and between all the recriminations and nastiness … to try to find a little piece of good … that his father had done the best he could with what he knew …had only gone to 8th grade, had been forced by his own father to take over the farm before he was ready, his father used to be a person with goals and dreams by the paintings and drawings he used to do as a kid (I told Gary to find them all and have them framed …. try to piece together his Dad’s story from the farm ledgers and the diaries and whatnot … that he might not be able to undo what’s already been done, but perhaps he could learn to read between the lines and realize, his dad did love him, his dad was proud of him …. his Dad loved him so much all he wanted at the end of his life wasto have his son holding his hand.

Months later Gary thanked me for not treating him as badly as he had treated me when my father died. I’ll give Gary that much.

But right now I’m just really really really really really ugly angry with him. For lots of reasons. For breaking my heart. For misrepresenting himself to me when we dated. For dying the way he did. For that stupid obiturary the girls composed about how compasionate he was and how he adored his family …. or maybe I’m just jealous because he did adore Janelle …. but compassion wasn’t part of his nature … at least I never saw him show mercy or compassion to anyone except our daughters.

He certainly wasn’t compassionate with his sister when their mother’s inheritence was misapproriated, was in the midst of a huge legal battle over the farm with his sister that had been going on for years …. he had a way of forgetting to consider and plan ahead … had a mental disability that was diagnosed after our divorce but made perfect sense to me when I heard about it.

I’m angry that he didn’t have a current will but still named his warring sister as his executirx and merely crossed off her name and hand wrote another in and then initialled and dated the change without having it renotarized …. I’m angry that he forgot to pay the premiums on his life insurance and used whatever funds he had to pay for the lawyers suing his sister, or buying a stupid bush hog in the first place when the mortgage on his own house on his own 12 acres was 2 months in arrears with back taxes.

I’m angry that he died. I want him here right now on THIS DAY to tell him … YOU NEED TO LISTEN TO ME FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE …. I’ve been telling you for years that life is too short to waste it blaming everyone else for everything wrong in your life … drop this lawsuit against your sister. If she wants to divide the farm into two, then do it … that way you’ll each have half …. let her do whatever she wants with her half …. forgive her for using up your mother’s money and forging your name .. it’s done, no amount of money is going to get it back …. you’ll just make yourself sick dwelling on all the things that are wrong with this life. It’s life. It’s messy, people are human, no one is perfecct …. spend your time doing what you can do … take care of your own land, your own bills, protect THAT for your children, not take on a battle to avenge ancestors that are in a place where I doubt they care one iota about money or land or possessions or material things …..

and I hate being mad at him because he is dead …. it’s not fair of me to be angry with him for anything …. so … I forgive him everything … but no one says I have to forget so I’m sure I’ll go on ranting and raving from time to time about this or that or something or other else.

Know what I find really crazy? The tractor tipped only a few hundred yards from where the bedroom of our trailer used to be. He actually died on the lane where he and I used to live when we were married and helping his father with the farm. I can’t get over that.

I also can’t get over the fact that the girls tell me that he never once told them anything BAD about me. Only that I was whacky and goofy and drove him nuts, but that if he hadn’t have married me, he never would have known what love was.

why would he say that to them?

I on the other hand, have had trouble keeping my mouth shut when it comes to all my hurts.

Ironic isn’t it, that I am angry with him for being an angry man … am saying it isn’t good to be so angry and yet I’m so ugly angry today it isn’t even funny … so here we go again … it’s a two way street, it’s either one way or the other …. so am I angry with him becasue I hate him … ?

No … love proabaly has more to do with it. Misplaced, misguided, and imperfect though it may be, I always did have a stupid soft spot where he is concenred … and if I hate anything about him at all, it’s that he still has the power even dead, to upset me.