Miffed

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I’m miffed but I don’t really have cause to be which doesn’t reduce the miffiness one iota.  I thought perhaps writing it out here might get it out of my head and let me move on so you lot are getting the brunt of that.  Aren’t you lucky??

{Can I just add that Snarf is mauling my right leg as I write which is really not helping anything and if he doesn’t stop in 2 minutes I’m going to Have a Word.}

Apparently the Roman Catholic church does not recognise a civil divorce when a marriage ends and instead a process of annulment has to be gone through for anyone wishing to profess their faith fully.  From what I can gather this takes the form of an investigation by the Deacon of the Scottish Catholic Inter-Diocesan Tribunal into the causes of the breakdown of the marriage they’re investigating and only when this process has been gone through thoroughly and they’re satisfied the marriage has irretrievably broken down do they consider it null and void.

What has this got to do with me?

Well Bev, who has been married to my ex, Boyd, for the last 2 years, has been searching for some spiritual upliftment for some time and has eventually turned back to her childhood faith – i.e. Roman Catholic.  But in order to take communion and become a full member of the church, the marriage between Boyd and I has to be annulled in their eyes first.

This had been mentioned absolutely yonks ago by Bev herself when we used to go to line dancing together and at the time I remember thinking that I’d never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life.  She said I might get a visit from someone in the church and I bristled enough at that but said nothing and thought I’ll worry about it when it happens.  Nothing more came of it so I presumed it had all been abandoned but I got a text from Boyd last month to say they were away down to Glasgow for the interview (2 hours!) to start the annulment process and I’d be getting a letter giving me 3 options.

Right enough a letter came through the post the following week telling me that ‘remarriage in the eyes of the Catholic church is only possible if the Church herself, after a thorough and confidential enquiry, judges that there are grounds to declare a marriage null.’  Really?  So how does that work then when the person concerned has already remarried?  Doesn’t that therefore become bigamy?  Furthermore the purpose of marriage in the RC church is apparently to have children.  So how does that work with Boyd & Bev cos they sure as hell aren’t going to be producing any offspring any time soon are they?

{What the fuck is on my leg??  Willow has just come up and given it a good sniff then began licking it to death until he inadvertently licked Snarf’s head by mistake to which Snarf responded by biffing him one and knocking him off the bed where he sat with a somewhat surprised expression on the floor wondering what had just happened.  Him and Bailey are now watching in amazement as Snarf attacks my right jeans-clad limb like it’s something that’s wandered in from the wild.  Literally.  Claws, teeth – everything’s going in there.}

Sorry I digress.

Anyway my 3 options were:

(a) To co-operate fully with the investigation and request an interview with a member of the Scottish National Tribunal;
(b) Not to take part in an interview but be kept informed of the progress and outcome of the investigation;
(c) Wish only to be informed of the outcome of the investigation.

I had no desire to be part of this ludicrous craziness in the slightest so ticked (b) and in due course I was sent another letter acknowledging this – along with the statement made by Boyd.

This is what has produced the miffidness.

First of all according to him I was born on the 5th September 1950 and at first I thought perhaps someone had misread his handwriting and mistaken an 8 for a 0 but further on it says when we married he was 34 and I was 33!!  (I was 25).  Then, despite saying the marriage took place on 30th June 1984, further on in the petition it says we met in 1983 and became engaged later that year and after a short engagement we were married in June 2004!

And according to him the marriage was in trouble from the beginning because I wanted a child and he didn’t which isn’t true.  I had absolutely no indication of his reluctance to have a family until it was broached 2 years after we were married and then he refused to discuss it.  I was just supposed to accept it.

Then he says the marriage started to break up after he found out I’d been unfaithful – again not true.  The marriage was already in trouble 1 year in because of HIS DRINKING.  And that continued to be the ‘other woman’ in the relationship all the way through as many miserable entries in my diaries will testify.

Don’t get me wrong – there is absolutely no excuse for infidelity (apart from keeping your sanity perhaps) but if a relationship is cracking and one partner refuses to acknowledge it, take responsibility for it or do anything about it, then it’s a hell of a lot easier to go down that rocky road when someone starts to appreciate you for who you are.

And the statement ‘the marriage started to break up after I found out about my wife’s affair in 1993’ just annoyed the hell out of me.  He didn’t ‘find out’.  I told him – believing that the relationship couldn’t survive if we couldn’t be honest with each other and also to let him see how bad things were as a result of his drinking.  It was an attempt to repair a damaged history and try to start again but because he did nothing about his drinking the main problem remained and we couldn’t move on.

If I hadn’t cared about our marriage would I have stayed until 2008 before finally plucking up the courage to leave?

Anyway I haven’t come here to air my dirty washing.  I’m looking on this as karma for my past behaviour and have no wish to rock the boat between Boyd and Bev at this late stage but it really pisses me off that this is all getting discussed, recorded and filed away somewhere when it’s of nobody’s business but ours.    And when the facts are rubbish.  With every day that passes I want to write to them (although I think the time period has passed now) and set the record straight but also let them know (in a nice way) that I don’t think what happened in our marriage is of any business of theirs and it shouldn’t have any bearing whatsoever on what faith Bev chooses.

I shall give it some more thought and decide what to do this week – it’s just not going away in my head and when things don’t go away in your head it usually means that thing is significant and needs to be dealt with.

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