I don’t recall the exact moment. I do remember saying, “This is me breaking up with you.” You didn’t like it. I think you heard me. Maybe your mind refused to decode the message.
In truth, I still love you. I will probably always have a place in my heart filled with all the love you contributed. Seriously. You were amazing. It’s not you. It’s me.
Saying goodbye to someone who expresses little more than love for you is a hard decision. Like leaving the woman who gave excellent blowjobs. There are many reasons to stay. The blowjobs in the previous case, the love in the most recent case, are not enough to keep us together. She acted like it was my fault.
“I don’t deserve this.” She texted a few weeks after the end was recognized. “I did nothing wrong.”
I get the feeling. Just like in my divorce. I wasn’t drinking or drugging. I didn’t have an affair. (She did.) I, however, was beginning to complain about our lack of affection. None. Zero.
The lift on the partnership was left up to me. During the year she was furious with me for getting laid off from Dell with a six-month severance, she simply closed up access to her private parts and private thoughts.
She became bitter and vindictive even as she was the one causing the unrest and conflict. And, to be clear, we were not fighting about sex. I had taken matters into my own hands soon after we graduated from vasectomy confirmation class. The sex dropped back into the “hardly ever” mode. I was no longer going to sit on my hands to fake my body into thinking someone else was stroking me. No.
I was married to a beautiful woman. As we all do, she’s gone through some stages of looking haggard and harried. She looks pretty good these days. Not sure if she’s had filler. It’s unlikely she is getting more rest. Most likely, it’s my rose-colored glasses. As I mentioned, I will always love the mother of my children. Her actions, however…
Wait, there’s more…
A few of the facts to set the scene for what came next.
- she’d had the emotional affair with a coworker (the same way she had lunches with me while living with an older man, a cuckold)
- she’d closed up the sex shop for good
- she consulted with a lawyer about her ‘options’
- she forgot to mention that concept in couples therapy
- she asked me to simply move out, immediately, giving her and the children ‘a break’
- a few years after the divorce she asked for she filed against me with the AG’s office, the “collections” department
- she wanted to destroy me and my newfound post-divorce happiness
- she didn’t consider the damage to her children
- she never did
Where am I going with all of this? For real, this book is not about my divorce or my drug-addled kid. Or, I should say, that’s not my intent.
I don’t know exactly what my ‘intent’ is, it’s early. This is literally the first chapter. Let’s fuck around and find out, shall we?
A moment of truth arrives.
Crap, okay, a slight diversion about my son’s issues, but what can I say, this is about realtime. What’s happening. Well, this happened a few months ago as we were driving back from dropping our only son off at rehab in a nearby town. On the way up I drove and my ex-wife slept in the passenger seat beside me. My son was swiping and texting furiously in the back seat. His airpods were on with loud music and noise canceling.
On the drive home, my ex-wife needed to drive so she wouldn’t get car sick. I took care of the playlist and conversation. It was an open and raw moment between us. We’ve been divorced for 14 years. Our son is twenty-three and fighting the world. We chatted about the moment, about the rehab prospects, about the money it was going to cost. She was Excel-driven. That, I discovered after we were divorced, is her love language. “Show me the money.”
Okay, so there’s a question, a scene really, I’ve been nurturing in my large living language model of a brain. During the period of fucking myself I came into the bedroom after putting our kids to bed to discover my wife in bed crying and singing along to a song on her laptop. “Goodbye Lover” by James Blunt.
I have been curious about that moment. Let’s say sixteen years after the fact I asked her “What was going on for you? Was it the song? The moment? I have wanted to ask you about that forever.”
“It was just a song that was in my range.”
My mind splintered. “That’s it?”
“Yeah, I was singing that whole album. I don’t even remember the moment.”
Well, obviously she doesn’t remember the moment. Doesn’t want to. Remembering how badly she behaved both in and after the marriage. She can’t look at her own culpability. Ever. Or, I should say, she spends a lot of energy and effort suppressing her sadness, anger, and regret. I think I read somewhere, that anger is always covering up sadness.
In the car beside me she was not sad. She didn’t appear to be hiding. She just said it matter of factly, “Great song.”
“Yeah. Powerful song.”
Crickets.
We took a moment. The revelation that my ex-wife really was emotionally crippled brought me to a full stop. I don’t need to know anything else about her life. There’s no “reason” behind her actions. Just actions. Lies. “Framing” she calls it, when she’s making up a story for why things are the way they are. I’m guessing she “frames” a ton of her life.
At the end of our pilgrimage we learned from my son’s Airbnb landlord that they were changing the locks on his room. He’d told us he had one more day to move out. So, at the end of it, we put 99% of my son’s stuff in the back of my car. An hour of packing and rubbing shoulders with my ex-wife again, unexpectedly. The good part, I wouldn’t have to move his shit tomorrow.
This moment reframes most of what I imagine about my divorce from her perspective. I thought she was more mindful of what she was doing. She was not. She was freaked out, she was running scared, and she fired the best part of her young life. She executed me from 70% of our children’s lives. She did this. She negotiated with me as a cooperative parent. She got what she wanted. She knew that I would never lawyer up and sue her.
I became a fractional dad. She got what she asked for, married a neurodivergent man, and sailed on into the next chapter of her life and the lives of my kids. It was not a prosperous time. Things got darker and more isolated in the alt.family home. I’m imagining that my name was never mentioned without scorn or attitude. I’m certain the message was, “Your dad caused this. Your dad’s depression. Your dad’s unemployment. Your dad’s immaturity. Your dad…”
From what I understand, the stories I’ve been told directly, it was a shitshow. Everyone retreated into their own rooms closed and locked the doors.
“Always?” I asked my son four months ago when he first came to live with me.
“Yeah.”
“Well, we don’t lock doors in my house.”
“Okay.”
“It’s why I leave my door open when you’re here. I’m hoping to initiate a conversation. A laugh. A hello.”
“Alright.”
“Do you understand?”
“Yeah, it’s just different.”
“You always locked your door? Why?”
“Fucking roommates, man.”
“No, I mean in your home, before you left for college.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re welcome to lock your door if you need privacy for something, that’s fine, I lock my door occasionally. But in general, in my house, there is no reason for you to lock your door.”
“Okay.”
“I want to be able to look in on you. You don’t answer. Your AirPods are always blasting. I simply want to check that you’re in you’re alive.”
I’m providing a link to the song and the music video for James Blunt. Give it a listen and explain to me how my ex-wife skipped her chance to share what was actually going on her life. She can’t. She would have to admit so much. Yes, I was starting to fight *for* our marriage. She was building financial models to support her idea of divorce. If we went 50/50 there would be no mandatory child support. She didn’t want to work that hard. She did learn, from the divorce attorney, I suppose, that she was going to need a full-time job to keep the house.
She had a job within a week. A *job* she’d been looking for since Dell announced the layoff. She no longer believed I would ever be a stable partner. She was right about that. I’m still unstable. But, that’s how I like it. You may call it depression or even bipolar illness. I’m going to stick with “emotional variability.” Also, “artist.”
goodbye my lover – james blunt
