I'm just pondering and mulling through my own thoughts here on Pandora's thread, "Loving the self-absorbed." Guest and Pandora's question's regarding why some of us become the bad guy or are made to feel like that. Feel free to read and no comment necessary.
WARNING! WARNING! it's a longy and it's actually a type of therapy for me.
I feel I have a thought to jag on this topic of Pandora's, so I'm hunting for it here. I know I fall into this type of guilt mentality too, even though I know better. I don't want to cause a log-jam over there with this, my rambling, so I've brought my thoughts over here to my journalling. I feel under no restriction here.
I know I was definitely the bad guy in most everbody's eyes after I left my first husband. I felt so guilty and responsible for everything that was unhappy about that marriage. I just couldn't make it work, and I know how damn hard I tried.
I got the kids, and he got the friends and family.
He was a very-self absorbed individual, plegmatic by nature, and anyone who understands the basic temperaments knows that certain types express aggression differently. He was a passive aggressive. Anti-social, stubborn, cutting dry humour, punishing, withdrawing, critical, gossiping and a couch potato. He reacted very negatively to any authority figures and hated all police for some strange reason. He wasn't a criminal though.
He hated being told what to do at work by bosses or at home by me. It used to drive me up the wall. I had to be very careful in asking him to do things with the kids or around the house. It had to presented in such a way that it he would think it was his idea or somehow would mainly be of benefit to him.
I remember how often we would be getting ready to go out, he'd get himself ready and watch TV while I'd be getting myself and the kids ready. If I asked him to help, or made any request at all he'd say "If you ask me or interrupt me one more time we're not going." I didn't drive a car back then, and the kids and I learnt not to interrupt him. He meant it. So many times, we'd all be nearly ready or ready to go out, and because he was interrupted, he just wouldn't go, so we couldn't either.
A christmas party, friends birthday party, church function, so many times he would just throw the car keys down and watch TV and not take us. It was awful. Other people never saw this side of him in depth though. If his boss criticised his work, he'd just quit. That was it, employed one day unemployed the next. Didn't matter that we had bills and kids. But the other side of his coin is he's a great friend to others. People who don't live with him really like him.
I remember he would go to, and throw himself into working bee's at our church and mow the minister's lawn, and clean windows. Our lawn was 2 feet high and risin', and he didn't care. The kids couldn't play in the yard for fear of snakes. We had acreage at the time. "I told you, nag me one more time about the lawn and you'll be doing it yourself. Right. I'm not doing it now." Zot. End of story. Stubborn as a mule. And nothing could budge him.
In the end I tried to make our marriage work by starting my own home-based business, to have regular income supply. That was foresight because he eventually gave up on working completely. It probably also contributed to him giving up work when he saw the money coming in. My business grew and became quite successful and after a few more years of limping along with him as an extra child to care for I divorced him.
But before I divorced him he was mainly at home, watching TV or playing records. I was working and he just plain refused to help in any way. He never cooked, washed, cleaned, he even put a lock on the inside of the bedroom door so that the kids wouldn't and couldn't disturb him. I slept in another room with the baby.
The messes I would come home too were unbelievable, and often dangerous. I found my two year old one night asleep outside the dad's bedroom door on the floor. He'd cried himself to sleep, locked out, because daddy wouldn't open the door.
Little kids making sandwiches for their dinner with large sharp cutting knives, and I'd find all the ingredients on the kitchen floor because they played with it all, or one was too small to reach the benchtop. Dinner in the fridge just needing heating up on the stove by the responsible adult who instead chose to lock himself away playing DOORS albums.
I don't remember the details of the specific incident that sent me out to get an order on him to move out of the house. But I do remember being impacted, like a lightning bolt, of the futility of what I was doing. Keeping my family together and literally working my fingers to the bone to keep it together. Because of my messed-up childhood I wanted more than anything for my kids to grow up with their two parents under the same roof and be normal, and able to fit into the world. Not be fringe-dwellers like I had felt I was. Then I saw, gradually at first, then vis lightnin-bolt what it was really like for them. It wasn't normal or healthy or happy. Now I'd seen it, that it was my fault, I had the responsibility to do something about it.
After he was evicted, he was shocked and devastated and over about a 6 month period regularly wrote me sad heart-wrenching letters on how much he loved me, how he could see how he'd taken me for granted, how different he would be in the future if I took him back.
Later I found out how he was preserving his dignity while at the same time writing me these love letters. He was telling his family and our friends nasty stories about me, saying he had nothing but contempt for me, saying things like "She's a big-shot busines woman now, and has thrown away her family and religion for money."
I didn't fall for his false promises fortunately, even though I did think he was capable of change. I just didn't believe he could change the way I believed he needed too. No matter how much his heart may have hurt.
It's like the Thomas the servant says in 'A Man For All Seasons' , "I wish water was beer, but it's not!!!" That water could never become beer. Once I knew what I needed and wanted, and what our children needed it became easy, in as sense.
Our friends thought my business success had gone to my head. I got shunned at our church in a major way. That was a terrible period. It felt like the Moses parting the Red Sea when I walked into that church after I'd put divorce proceedings in place and had him evicted. All I saw were rows of turned backs when I went to church a few more times. If I started to walk over to an old circle of friends to say hi, they would rapidly disperse into the crowd. Close friends cut me off, accusing of being selfish, and self-centred. These people had been my closest friends for years. I got over this too eventually.
I lost his family for a long time, and these were people I'd come to love and accept as my own family. That was hard. They completely rejected me for years, during the loneliest period of my life. After we divorced I contacted my ex-brother and sister-in-law (Church minister's themelves) who I had always felt particularly close too. I asked if my son could come and holiday with them because he was missing them. They told me that I didn't deserve their help.
Everyone abandoned me and our children at that time, except for a couple of very close personal friends from my pre-marriage days. These were people who if they came to visit me, my ex would ignore them and go out or go to bed. But everyone else at the time seemed to want to see me fall flat on my face, I think. I came to terms with this eventually and don't hold it against them. I rationalised that they didn't want to be seen to be helping me make my escape. They didn't want to be seen to be condoning me or supporting me because of their closer family ties with my ex.
Thankfully I didn't fall flat on my face, and my kids were and are much happier and healthier and eventually so am I.
Anyway, I grew up a lot in those hard early post-divorce years, and after 15 years in that marriage I realised the cold harsh truth. It could only ever have 'worked' on his terms. I'm glad I have a new life far away from that one.
I guess the key is having a solid foundation of self-knowledge, to support us and to rely on during the trials of life and love. I guess for me personally it is, "To Know Thyself" which as a child was totally opposed by my caretakers. I didn't exist at all as a person with needs. My job was to meet the needs of others.
Listening to sexual conquest stories from a parent at pre-school age.
One set of clothes for everthing. And I mean it, just one set for school, sunday-school, friends parties, "You grow too quickly, no point you having more than one set of clothes, you'll just grow out of them." That was humiliating, I mean really humiliating. And we weren't poverty stricken. Making breakfast in bed for the parent before I went to school, being quiet, learning to walk 3 inches above the floor. Thank goodness for books. They've been my sanity. And thanks for reading if you got this far. I warned ya', it's a longy. Till we meet again,
The 'I' that i am, the 'I' that i was, the 'I' that i hope to become, and still journalling