20 Year Old Anger

When my ex-husband committed suicide, just three months after our divorce was final, I immediately felt guilty.  Well-meaning people told me that it wasn’t my fault, and I told them that I knew that, but I still believed that if we hadn’t split up, he’d still be alive.

I can’t recall ever talking about Dave without prefacing it with “he was a good man, he just wasn’t a very good husband.”  Or I’d explain how we were just young and dumb and neither of us had ever really known an example of a healthy marriage.  Etc., etc., always defending him.

Since I resurrected this account, I have shared my whole history of relationships, up to and including my current, and God willing, final relationship.  If you’ve followed along, you would know that I have had a long history of relationships that went bad for obvious reasons.

The reasons that my marriage went bad were not quite as obvious to me.  Aside from the frustrated rants I could share with my friend, Wendy, who was going through her own divorce, I could not articulate to other people exactly why I was unhappy.  I couldn’t even explain it to Dave.  All I could bring myself to say was, “I just don’t want to be married anymore.”

I met Dave when I was 15, and my home life was pretty much a disaster.  My parents were abusing drugs and alcohol, and some of their drug addict friends were permitted to abuse my siblings and myself in a myriad of ways.  We began officially dating on my 17th birthday, and married one month after I graduated high school.  I was divorced at 26.

We never had a chance!

Now, at 48, I’m nearly four years into a relationship with a man whose story isn’t a whole lot different than mine.  Despite all that I’d gone through, rushing into relationships that would ultimately damage me further, I knew with absolute certainty within a week or so of meeting him that I wanted to be married to him.  That actually slipped out of my mouth in a moment of passion, and I felt like I needed to staple my mouth closed!

Drew treats me so well, I feel like I can never express my gratitude.  There are so many tiny little details that he pays attention to and it boggles my mind to know that there are men like this in the world.  It makes me wonder how any woman could have let him get away.

The other thing it does, though, is make me angrier than I have ever been.  I had no idea that someone could love me enough to want to take care of me.  When I had my stroke and no one was sure if I’d survive, much less be anything more than a drooling mess, Drew was making plans to bring his adult daughter out here so that he could bring me home and they could feed me, change me, and basically take care of me as if I was a giant infant.  He wasn’t just willing to do that, he needed and wanted to.

When I was married, if I needed to go to the doctor, Dave would get angry and yell about what it would cost.  If I went a few cents over the $5 he had budgeted for gas for my car, he would get angry and yell.  If I put a cassette back in its case without rewinding to side 1 and side 1 facing out, he would get angry and yell at me.  When I was rear-ended, injured, and my car was pretty damaged, he got angry and yelled at me.

Yet, when he and his friend knocked a shelf off the wall sending a set of precious figurines that my mom would buy special for my birthday cakes every year crashing to the ground and busting into pieces, they made a joke of it.  I didn’t get angry.  It just hurt my feelings, but I kept that to myself.   When I got off work at 6 PM, and Dave was two or three hours late picking me up while I sat at a cold, rainy bus stop, he’d laugh at my anger, as if he thought it was cute.  It hurt.  We spent almost every single weekend at his Dad’s house.  When I’d suggest that we go visit my family, he’d ask how long we had to stay.

I think that being with a man who actually treats me like a precious treasure has opened my eyes to the realization that I was a prop in Dave’s life.  He had very clear ideas of what a man was supposed to be, and one of those things was that he had a nice, virtuous wife.  The 15 year old virgin he met fit that role.  The problem was that after he pushed me to have sex before I was ready, he still wanted me to behave like that virginal teenager.  In the nine years that we were having sex, I was not allowed to suggest anything or he would get angry.

I was a prop in the performance of his life.  I look back now, and realize that every critical moment in our life together was a performance.  I’m not sure who the audience was.  I think it was him.  I know that I was not entertained.

So now I’m finding myself reliving those 9 or so years with him and I have so much anger.  How can a man who’s been dead for 20 years still cause me so much grief?  Who am I still trying to convince that I had every right to feel the way I did?

And why do I feel like a bad person for maligning his memory?  They are my memories and my feelings were and are just as real.

I just want to live my life.