How frightening it was to read The Drama of the Gifted Child and recognize everything from my gilded childhood. I was told I was the kid who could do no wrong. My dad’s little champion. Things had been getting rough lately. The three-year lake house expansion project was completed without bloodshed. My dad out-mansioned his dad in an award-winning house less than a mile up the lake from his father’s house. He gloated. He started stopping by his mom’s lake house soon after his father committed suicide on vacation in Cuba.
The gifted child of my father really began to come unraveled after indirectly causing his dad’s death. My biographical memory is more about the lake house, the huge forest of undeveloped land out back, and a few terrified datapoints. I would construct a protective fort in my room, blocks, blankets, green army men, all pointing their weapons and tanks at the door. “Robbers,” is what I chanted in my mind. The reality was more grim.
In the raging nights of my father’s fury I was protecting myself from him. I had a cap gun pistol under my pillow. These were supposed to be the happy times to remember. Once my dad was kicked out of the glass castle on the lake all of our lives became dark and cold. Christmas went from an extravaganza of excess to a sad display of a mom trying to overproduce for her kids, but having less money and time. She braved herself into the protector role, but she was more afraid than any of us kids. She could see the consequence of her ex-husband’s actions and rich-man investments. He had stuck her with three sinking apartment complexes he used to offset his income. My mom had no income.
My mom’s dad was still around at this time and he jumped in and helped her unload the most draining of the junk property. There were several more “investment partnerships” that cost my mom money to get freed from. And as afraid as she was, for the rest of her life, she managed to live fairly well on the spoils of the lake house sale and her own frugal living. As the baby of the family, I didn’t comprehend all that was going on, but I ached for the laughter and joy that had left with the departure of my dad. Yes, he was a monster when he was angry or drunk, but he was a sweetheart when playing hide and seek or wrestling with his kids.
“You missed Dad in the really good years,” my living sister would tell me.
There’s a lot of my father’s joy and energy in me. I am a little too fun, too bouncy, too playful. My ex-wife started using the term irresponsible. I replied that she’d become untouchable. This was as my own marriage was struggling under the weight of both our Gifted Child Dramas. (CGD) My then-wife expected I should be able to make her happy. I should be able to earn enough for her to stay home full-time with the kids. I should be happy that I had such a powerful job. Lots of men drive more than an hour each way to work. I had it good.
On the surface, that was true. Two kids, a dog and cat, a house in the top school district, and I got to play tennis at the nearby country club twice a week. I was working too hard, getting fat from the long commute and cafeteria food at work. It was rough, but we were making it. My wife, on the other hand, continued to suffer under the premise that I was the cause of her unhappiness. I gave her a copy of Gifted Child. We communed on our hard lot in life. She continued to get harder and harder to reach.
I became alone. The darkness found me again. I could only imagine the fall my father experienced when he was banished from his castle on the lake. His divorce was splashed across the local newspapers. His wife had withdrawn, gotten angry, and ultimately booted him from his house.
Oh. Shit.
That’s my story too. My wife got mad. She quit relating to me, focusing 110% on the kids. She left my amorous efforts on ice. We struggled along as roommates aboard a sinking ship. My wife got mad and never returned. Today, fifteen years later, I’m certain she still loves me as the father of her children, yes, but she’s unable to grow beyond the vindictive bitterness that must’ve been her own defense mechanism, established when she was a gifted and misunderstood child. There was no moment of lightness between us, no trust, only chores. Chores and more chores. It was her mantra. We couldn’t have sex–there were too many chores. She didn’t want to go to the pool with us on Saturday– she was going to do laundry. She got colder and angrier.
It was only after the occasional party, when she’d had a few glasses of wine, that she came to her emotional senses and apologized for being such a bitch to me. “I’m sorry I’m so mean to you.” We were sitting in our car, about ready to go in and relieve the babysitter and rejoin the warm cuddly bliss that is parenthood of elementary-aged kids. We focused on the kids. She lost track of me. I never quit fighting to be with her. She was ambivalent. Ready with an easy excuse. The undertone of fury from her was palpable. She woke up angry and went to bed angry, with little or no interaction with me. She would prefer it if I would just move out and leave her the house with the kids. “We can tell them you’re on a business trip.”
This was her plan for divorce.
I fought. I cajoled. I romanced. I pleaded. I cried. I got depressed. I got manic. I got a new job. I got fired. I got another new job. I reached out for my wife, and she was still angry. Even pleasantries were off limits.
In my first long-term relationship after divorce, I was forever shifted by being with a woman who could and did say loving things all the time. “I really love you,” she would say. Maybe it was a bit early in the relationship for me, but the effect was immediate.
I had not been told “I love you” in years. At the same time I glowed in Sharron’s attention, I was also pulled by the divorce and loss. My kids were going to be taken from me. I would become a fractional parent. A marginalized dad. I couldn’t imagine the scenario at the time, but I would also become a deadbeat dad in the eyes of the state of Texas. She did all that. She didn’t have to. I played my mom’s role. Accommodating. Conflict adverse. Trying for a joke to cover the pain.
I learned as a kid that I could be the entertainer, the magician, the star football player, and if I did it all perfectly, I could save my dad. I prayed to Jesus to protect us, to help my dad, to protect my mom. I learned how to be the best boy I could be. How to run into the woods when Dad started getting hot.
I learned so much more about myself in my first marriage to the narcissistic rageaholic. By going to some Partners of Survivors meetings, I learned two principles that still guide me. 1. I can be your trigger, but I will not be your target. 2. I do not ever have to put up with being bullied or abused, even from a 90-pound Spanish hellion. I learned to protect myself. To forgive myself for all the pain I suffered from my father’s rage, from my first wife’s rage, and from my second wife’s indifference. It was a common pattern.
Getting free of divorce guilt has been a process. Could I have done more? No. Would I have stayed in the dead relationship for the sake of the kids? Well, that’s a loaded question. It’s unclear if staying would’ve provided a better outcome for any of us. I would’ve fallen deeper into despair, continued to step up my game, and still fail. The real truth is, she had made up her mind years earlier that she was going to divorce me at some point. After the soft affair, she dabbled at couples therapy with me, but it was only to tide me over while she arranged the accounts and numbers on her spreadsheet. I know that sounds so cliché, but I see it still, in my current life. She tries to manage our two children with a spreadsheet and oversight into their banking activity.
“You need to get your own bank account,” I have repeated to my kids since they were in high school. In college, my daughter was horrified when her mom extracted $500 from her checking account to pay a debt. It was $500 cash I had given her for a long weekend with friends at the beach.
“She can’t do that,” I said. “You’ve got to get your own banking account, your own money.”
I just realized how deeply personal this money thing is to me. My father made oodles of money. We lived in a castle. He owned airplanes, three country club memberships, and commuted to work from his boat to his Mercedes. When he turned off the funds, my mom’s life became a nightmare; she became paranoid and poor. Still, she gave me everything I needed. Money, however, was used as a weapon. I think both ex-wives must have unresolved issues around cash flow.
I’m balancing my life at the moment between money safety and money disaster. My full-time job doesn’t pay my mortgage, but hey, I have a mortgage, so that’s a start. I’ve got to find a new job in the next month or so, before I am forced to liquidate some of my kid-money reserve. And I’m here writing. (Chuckle.) I should do nothing but apply for jobs 24/7. Instead, I’ll go do my shift at the store in one hour and forty-five minutes.
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