If I Had Only Known

If I had only known what I was about to learn, that I would have SO much more bootcamp to get through after the initial hazing. If only I had known that the trauma which came to define me so early on was only the beginning of my process. If only I had known that that specific, pointed clawing, grasping, pining, and straining tier of growth was only the first of many. If I had only known.

If I had only known that I need that much more growth, those many more lessons. That enduring that at such a vital age, and for me being such an already premature, immature person for my age, had to be necessary somehow. If I had only know how many self-help books and articles I would have to read after unceremoniously returning to a life of post-traumatic undertones.

I cri.

It just was not fair. I would have learned more if I needed to. I could have. I tell myself. I could have learned what I needed to learn necessarily and satisfactorily without all the bloodshed and agony. I was a smart girl, I thought. What did I need to know beyond what I had learned already? What was with all these hardships I had to endure with that much drama? Why couldn't have someone just come down and said, "Here, Amy, this is how you deal with things better." Not that I didn't have an ego to contend with, but that mine just didn't seem that big. Not only in comparison to most my age, but in comparison to who I was as a whole. It's not what I could have learned or not learned that bothers me, it's how the lessons had to go about being learned. Excruciating and humiliating and my forgetful brain betraying me at every turn. (And not just rhetorically forgetful! I had been truly attempting to recover from my concussion!) And then learning, as much as I could, drenching and soaking up and striving to be a better person each time a setback reared its ugly head, and still witnessing and discovering ugly, horrible, deep-seeded uglies both in myself and in other people.

What had I needed to atone for so badly that I would be given more than I could handle? But what on earth could I have done additionally and beyond that to ultimately warrant that much more heart-wrenching, nerve-shredding, rude-awakening sets of tests? I never once had the heart, not truly deep down anyway, to proffer or suggest any other belief than our God being the absolute entity of love and mercy (and I would only learn to what depth and with which greater mystery as the years went by), but I'd be lying if I said I didn't notice a direct correlation between trying my hardest in vain with hotly confused tears and olympian levels of anguish to keep loving and deepening my faith against evermore-challenging life quests, both mental and emotional.

If I'd only known how much further I had to go from those first days.

I would have chocked it up to a dozen other things, too, in order to feel better about any possible why. Personal growth. Need. The nature of the beast that is time and age. Needing to be put to the fire to build my strength. So and so forth. Except I had never started out as that rotten of an egg. At least I thought so; and I checked a thousand times trying to figure out if I had missed some grand self-realization here or some grand self-realization there. I held onto stories of the saints, reading about the ones that had lived a life of debauchery and excess and amended their ways within inspiring conversions, the ones who died young but used every small instance in their life as a stepping stone of growth and love towards Our Lord, the ones who were in various positions of power and either discarded their power to live in servitude or used their power to provide for the feeble and powerless. There are even saints who struggled with depression, despair, and various other seemingly lost causes who used those afflictions to power through and within the love of God.

I read and learned about these elements on an earthly level, too. God helps those who help themselves, right? So I read every decent and bullshit book I could get my paws on to wade through and discover things like boundaries, personal worth, healthy relationships, and toxic personalities and applied them not only to the things surrounding me but on myself, too. You know, to make sure I was covering all my bases on the self-healing AND the healing of others, especially if they'd been hurt on my account. I did this first, with waning and waxing phases of religious devotion. I felt unworthy to  even consider a platform I could share with the saints. Yes, we are called to be that, but I was nine realms away from even the closest consideration. And although deep down my faith is what got me through all of this, I did approach self help on as much as a scientific, psychological, and pragmatic level as possible because I have always been aware of the reservations and contempt society has for God at large.

And just when I thought that was enough, I learned it wasn't because there will always be, it seems, things to work on no matter how much I try and champion my lessons because there is just no respite, no refuge. I figure that I obviously haven't refined something enough. The trick, however, I'm finding, is how to be happy in the thick of of that struggle. Just. It would be nice to get a break...

At 22

At 22. So the big old 22. The name I put on my blog. The age I was when my ex-husband and I returned back to the town where he had gotten a teaching job and we had attempted to start some kind of married life. For the second time. 22 was the age I was when I started this blog. I made a mangled attempt to talk about this once before, but it was four years ago. Four very different, long-ago years.

But, yeah. 15 years ago I started this beastly thing. Someone had told me that I should be a writer after receiving multiple periodic updates from yours truly about my ex, who was in the hospital with in-patient treatments for cancer and going through various stages of ill. Then someone else mentioned something about my writing after we got back to the town with the job for my ex. Then a few other comments here and there along with the suggestion that I should write my story. So that's what this *waves hand over whole of blog disaster* is.

But 22. Yeah. I guess you could say it was the age I made the concerted effort to attempt writing a story of any kind, the processing of it. Kind of like a journal, but better, I guess, because there seem to be similarities between publishing something for the hypothetical world to see and being on stage, in that you work really hard behind closed doors to put it altogether and then you present it. Although that's where the comparison stops. Because looking at the scraps that make up my blog and looking at the scraps that make up my performing life, well, let's just say performing (accompanying, wedding playing, church hymn-ing, one north-tour-touring, pit ensembling, concert banding) has looked much, much cleaner.

The trainwreck has primarily included two-fold agendas: to hammer out the deets to my life and make some sense of some of the more gritty stuff; and find myself as a writer. I have found very little of either.

But I started it at 22. The age I was when I had emerged, barely, from the near-fruitless storm of whiplashing bootcamp of three years of significant dramatic changes: becoming a mom at 18, haggling to get through college, getting married, and moving to a new country. Not to mention the not one, not two, but three separate diagnoses of my ex which spit our newlywed arses into a vortex of uncertainty and instability. I have to laugh at myself, but not too hard. There was so much I was crunching on. But much like a child after a temper tantrum, I came out of my proverbial room, sniveling and sniffing my red-eyed tears away, only to think I had grown oh-so-much, that I had learned something. And I had, oh yes, for sure I had. But as they say, if I had only known, if I had only known...

Each one of medical instances with my ex were difficult unto themselves, but it can definitely be asserted that the last one was the worst one. Last one, as in, he has not, to this date, needed to receive any more treatment. He survived. A happy, miraculous story unto itself. But a story that has defined, way, wayyy too much of my life. I do not, as of this very moment in time (and have felt for a very long time now), want to recite all the terrible things that either of us had to go through as a result of him being the hospital ever, ever, ever again. I have become so very tired of hearing the story come out of my mouth, this many years later, that I am already too tired to recount the nine other years, 6 of which included four - FOUR - entire joint replacements, and anything left of which was the crumbling dust of a relationship. I just can't believe it took so long to figure out that it scarred me that much and that I should have been talking to a professional years ago. (Well, I can, because I did think about it many times in the course of time in my life prior to this one, but it just wasn't feasible.)

But I had to work through all of that, and work through my own demons apart from the marriage, and I couldn't. But that was 22. Since then, I've hacked my way through the jungle of people and years and learned about real boundaries, about my needy and lacking approach to find fulfillment and how to find true fulfillment, about being authentic, about truer, deeper faith, and being okay with being my own person. And having come to all of that, realizing with much joy that I have so much more to learn.

Healing

Since I've had some time off over the holidays, I've been reading over some of my old blog posts. Some of them are practically memorized from having reread them several times (did I say what I wanted to say? Does what I said still make sense even now? Are there embarrassing un-growths I was complaining about and unable to resolve?) and some of them I've just reverted back to draft form so that no one can EVER see that garbage. But some still prompted that inexplicable urge to get something else out. I'm never quite sure what when that happens. It's a sign that there's something else I need to work out, but I tend to pull back because I still know that old garbage is still lingering in cyber space; and what more can I say that isn't just going to be more whining?

I'd like to venture and say that I've done a lot of healing this year. Over the last four years, for sure, but definitely something more pointed in this last year. It's just the way things happened to pan out, and I'm grateful for it. It's come with some heavy realizations, but realizations nonetheless that have helped bring a whole lot of context to my life and, consequently been so eye-opening for me that I've been able to put what is more or less the rest of my life into some freaking logic puzzle solution.

Surely, the pinnacle of a healing point is never at a single drop of the hat, nor a solitary moment all by itself, but being able to pinpoint the source of my wounds in a few words has surely given me occasion to also realize that those wounds were all that I was struggling to make sense of back in my twenties without an iota of vocabulary, assistance, or recourse to utter the least of it TO make sense of it. Never mind that I was just coming out of the generation where talking about our feelings was new and still relatively unheard of. My generation was better about it than our parents' baby-boomer generation (my parents were the baby end of the baby boomer era), and we are far less dubious about it than all the self-righteous millenials out there (not all of them are!), but talking about it and figuring it the hell out was, for me, at least, something I needed to do because trying to be normal wasn't working.

But something even more remarkable has happened that even this old here cranky, sour-ass curmudgeon can't chokehold onto and that's this little thing called forgiveness. As the experience of realizing that I endured several abusive relationships continues to dawn on me in several facets, it's released the knot that not only was the knot I have been holding onto for the better part of twenty years, but has released the knot almost entirely. To such a grievously enormous extent that the most serious of perpetrators of those abusive relationships have my softening compassion. Because, in a painfully simple way, they've all been lost themselves, males close to me in my life. Males who didn't have their own clue before thoughtlessly contributing to my wounds or butthurts.

And this is remarkable in itself, yes, but it's remarkable because for all that I have pained over, bled over, poured tears into, and picked my heart up off the floor for, that. . . is "all" it is. That's "all" a childhood and lifetime of skewed ideas "is". Just broken men passing on the broken buck. (From my father passing on his woefully mangled ideologies to my brothers and me and me going out into the world expecting to be loved by anyone because I fit the ideology of my father and getting into relationships for every broken reason.) If this had been any other kind of transgression, any other kind of violation, it's hard to say that I would be so readily forgiving.

This is NOT, I repeat, NOT to downgrade, minimize, or Polyanna-ize the painful experiences I had trying to get here or to, least of all, understand the overpowering panic, heartbreak, numbing, and sheer anxiety I had at any given point during my marriage. But it is to say that 1) I could have always had it worse, 2) I have context now, and 3) it frees me to love more.

It Wasn't Just Me Pt. 2, The Ball of Yarn Unwinds, If You Love Me, Let Me Know

It really does just explain it. The hard reality of the thought. As opposed to the mere abstract concept of it. This is wow. Just wow, big fat wow. Pause. Think. A token, slough-off phrase that kids use to get out of trouble or lesser punishment is actually true here. It wasn’t just me.

It opens my eyes to an enormous world of possibilities. Who would have thought in all the time and thousand-and-one things to pass since trying to process this (the whole of the category) or this that that ONE thought, or even the revelations as of late, or any of the moments that have given me pause to ponder, could actually tear back the veil and explain shit.

But the sentiment, which is much more than just a sentiment, does just that. It applies to the past. The true application of those exact words – “it wasn’t just me” – revokes things that needed to be revoked. It recolours things. Most importantly, it exonerates. It finally, FINALLY, answers soooooo many gaping, wounded questions that needed to, for the love of God, just be freaking answered! I had learned to put away all the top-heavy guilt and blame I assumed – assumption that reached far beyond the necessary, and to the extent I thought my hell with M was my punishment – away on my own because obsessing about irretrievable answers was pointless.

Because it really wasn’t just me. It wasn’t. I wasn’t alone. I didn’t just self-destruct all willy-nilly. I had help. Besides my own innate ability to trap thoughts in my head and whip up grandiose bullshit theories, I had a few people willing to let me carry the weight of two. For more than a little while. It took me so long to see that I was the frog in the pot whose water rose to boiling. It took me so long to see the abuses I was getting because I was focused on trying to do the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the mowing, the wood-chopping, the grocery-toting, the mom-ing, the dad-ing, and whatever free-moment, free-wheeling, self-deprecating spiral-down I could manage.

And of course it wasn’t just me, any number of people could say. Any number of people now. Even a few lone rangers who reached out back then, back when the split was fresh. But until you realize it, you are fighting yourself from the inside out, tormented by the web of unanswered questions, and throwing and taking indictment on yourself because it somehow makes things seem easier to “control” and because you have a sense of accountability.  But it only takes being loved – truly loved – the right way once to understand that if he – K – loved me, loved me in earnest, he would have never allowed me to beat myself up so much, but he definitely would have performed in a way that let me know he loved me and not just leave me to assume I ‘should’ know it. M, either.

Not that my mental capacity was ever his responsibility, no. But that in the simple idea that people generally protect and cherish the ones they love, he oppositely appeared content to let me to spiral down in a Tasmanian devil flourish. Not just once. Or twice. But over the duration of ten whole years. Even calculating all the times I’ve lost my shit, channeled my inner Gloria (Modern Family), you don’t. Treat. People. Like that. I’m not supposed to treat people I love like shit (oh, the muddy wartime trench of where I’d lose my footing on human behaviour), you don’t treat people you love like that.

Regardless, and I digress, I spent countless hours and years wondering, poring, contemplating, and crying about what I did wrong and what did that made him check out. Spanning the first days to the last days trying to explain the cause of it and coming up with the only answer: I did something. Something here. Something here again. Something there, that one time. Oh, this other time, too. Because why else would someone who called you their “angel” just stop talking, interacting, conversing? I obviously disappointed him. And I could see my real faults, as much as I would make them up, so I’d lop it all out, hoping K would respond in kind to the least of them to say ‘yes, that’s it’ or ‘no, babe, you’re crazy.’ But he wouldn’t.

I still, even as of writing this entry, “know” which moments gave him “cause” to throw in the towel – i.e. his excuses for not owning his own behavior; but knowing where I owned my shit and knowing why he defected out are two, very, VERY different things.

Yet there I was trying to fix the sullen, disaffected disdain he had for our life in chunks. I tormented and languished over what I could have done better, kinder, softer. If I had just been a better person. If I had just been any kind of different woman. If I could just not do this, his behavior would have been this. If I hadn’t lost my shit on him at x, y, and z moments, this would have been better. If I could just figure out the magical, perfect solution, he would have been more engaged, more loving, more wanting to connect, less angry, more protective, more… invested.  Less foot-tromping, less swearing at everyone and everything. Maybe we could finally begin our relationship. He would finally… love me.

But that never happened. It was the furthest thing from his reach. And mine. And it’s just about as wrong as you can get on any relationship goal. Checking out, retreating, withholding, stonewalling, all of it. It is its own kind of abuse. You cannot expect to check out for the entirety of ten whole years on somebody, for whatever reason, right or wrong, him or me, them or us and equally not expect them to process it in some kind of adverse way. You can’t expect to go tromping around swearing at everything, at home and at work, and pretend like nothing matters when everything mattered, everything was on the line, without there being some kind of repercussion.

But I’m not the one just saying that. I apologized profusely in the six years since the divorce for my own contributions and for being a crazy ass and hard, hard, hard. But he knew it. Of course he knew I blamed myself. And he let it be. The mindfuck of it all. I know that none of my sins justify someone else’s behavior. At all. Explain, maybe. Justify, no. I was the furthest thing from the perfect counterpart, but he knew this – in all of his cancer days and after, when the choice to be bitter and angry was still a choice and not a habit – and he did nothing. Not only does the phrase “the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” absolutely apply here, but it explains what I could not, in all of the fault-assuming, guilt-owning hodge podge of anguish that came from trying to figure out why.  That it wasn’t just me.

Sometimes, it’s just the other person.

"Never Argue With Someone Who Believes Their Own Lies"

Indeed. It seems pretty self-evident, although it was a truth that was escaping my grasp for quite some time. It should go on the list of wise, golden nuggets of Things People Should Just Know. Or even better, Things Amy Wish Someone Would Have Taught Her Long Ago. This couldn't have been any truer in relation to my most recent posts, which is where this quote actually got me thinking. 

But yeah. SO wise. You don't want to argue with people who believe their own lies because well, they're not really listening in the first place. They can't. They're too busy clinging onto their own views and versions of things to have enough room in their mind to even consider an alternate possibility.

Even on the minute, slight, miniscule chance that they might take a moment to at least feign their reception of your argument, the problem is just that - they're faking it. Or already preparing for a rebuttle (that probably has nothing to do with what you said). Or taking your words and mincing them. Or twisting the meaning or bastardizing the implication.

They're too closed off. They're self-important. They're deluded. In word, and I ask for a drum roll please, narcissistic.


I would know. Because I used to be one of these defensive dipshits. All truth be told, I'm still one of those dipshits. But at least I'm working on it.

Let me attach a huge disclaimer right here and now: NOT ALL PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE THEIR OWN LIES ARE NARCISSTIC.

But many of them are. M was. And both of these instances lend itself to a wider understanding, a wider spectrum of a wider truth that does not have labels. Like the entire ramifications of psychological and spiritual laws.

We're all that someone who believes in their own lies at some point. From the littlest ("no one will know who took this last piece of cake if I eat it right now"---where there is very little collateral damage) to the biggest, most extreme cases ("this is okay for me to do, but not you" or vice versa "this not okay for me, but it's okay for you").

But when it creates such a decrepit imbalance in any matter of debate or contention, especially in a close relationship, it becomes inappropriate. I'd like to say that age makes a difference, but it doesn't. When there is an absolute lack of loving self-awareness, it becomes horribly inappropriate and wrong. Misaligned and disordered. I've read all kinds of books that could back up why this is (I highly recommend their reading), but there's just no way to deny how dangerous it is to be involved in exchanges with a person where compassionate bending is not allowed or practiced.

http://RelRules.com

You Shall Reap What You Sow Pt. 2

However self-conscious I had become with M beside me in his home province, where I chocked all the minutiae of his idiosyncracies as well as outbursts to the nature of French acceptible behaviour, I would only come to learn how much more mortified and petrified I could be once we left his much kinder, sweeter family (the one my gut told me I would probably never see again) and we got back to the west and all the familiar, welcoming surroundings made me feel way more planted.

Previously after goading me into using the only money I had left to my name, the piddling stash of retirement savings, to pay for his failed semester in college (because he failed, oh yes he did, the one, very large, very pivotal argument for physically being there), we floated around like nomads in a non-cash flow existence until he found the job that brought us here. 

After an exchange I could barely understand (from a cause-and-effect point of view, not language), we left his mom's house to stay with his grandparents. After a feud with his stubborn grandfather ended our few-month stay there, he rounded up enough cash from his part-time job for us to stay at an off-season cabin for a month. After that month was up, his aunt offered her cabin to us until it was time to come here. Because we were staying there for free, I was more than happy to help her with the massive yard work, but M just stayed inside, recluse, on his video game, a pattern that would not change for the remainder of our time together.

As if there weren't enough obstacles to getting back to a place where I could actually feel like myself, there was the crippling surprise that he'd used me and my girls to help him get a better deal with the bankruptcy he was filing and him leaving without me to take the job. He was offered a plane ride, I would be made to drive the full four-thousand kilometer trip with the shitty car I purchased packed to the roof and his little shih tzu, Emma, alone. 


                    



I should have used the retirement stash to get myself the hell out of there sooner. It would have paid for the gas, real food, and get me as far as I needed. But where would I go? I had finally become proficient enough in French to get a job, but by the time I could get a job (ironically enough, to teach English), M had already accepted the job here and had already soaked up the last of my funds. There was nothing alive after that that could have stopped me from moving back west. Not after the "my girls" bell was rung. I would be with them. I would be reuinted with them. We'd actually, physically be in other's lives again. And no more airplanes. Which K took the hit for. Which I felt and still feel shredding guilt over. Which was another effect of my irresponsible choices.

But I did it. I made the trip. All forty hours of it. I drove 12 hour days, slept in my car on both sides of Ontario, ate the sandwiches M's mom stocked me up with, and reached the destination needing a serious shower. And then we haggled and scrounged to deke out a living with his money management "skills". He couldn't manage money worth a shit; and I felt the rage of every advantage he'd taken of me, especially because I "wasn't allowed" to look for a job, either. Why? Because it would interupt his bankruptcy status.

The more I stood up for myself, the more vile and caustic he became. The more I resisted, the more polar his reactions became. The more rational my arguments grew, the more his irrationale exploded with vitriol. Often followed by long bouts of retreat and withdrawal, neglect and manic outbursts. I felt the real me surfacing in swells, waiting to be let out. He'd told me I didn't need to be a "badass' like my friend, T, as though he were calling me out on being something I wasn't. Oh, but I very much was.


The very big next problem was having the girls be exposed to the high, caustic rate of stress. K had agreed to let the girls come live with me and try out the town. A colossal, gigantic piece of my soul was restored when they moved in. One of the most problematic things about living in Quebec was the lacking space in which to call home, which could have only happened by having my own place and having my girls dwell in that space. 

I enrolled them in what I was told and later learned was still true the best French school in town. The staff were amazing. I loved going to parent/teacher interviews. But the precarious state of fight or flight at home bogged the girls down. I was constantly trying to soothe and manage incident after incident with him, but to no avail. His puratanical, unbending ways exploded an irrefutable disgust, contempt, and done-ness in me.

Both girls were very polite in the beginning but it was C who spoke up and out against him first. She was getting sick of it, too. All three of us agreed to make it through the school year, wait until I got on my feet. We were just trying to make it until I could get out. But we didn't even make it that far.

We were scraping and pinching, getting food at the food bank, taking favours and freebies wherever we could, but it was humiliating. I'd lived like that in Quebec for almost two years, and I was sick of it, but always knew that new beginnings are hard. In the new year, I got on as an accompanist with one of the high schools. While I was away at one of the rehearsals, M decided that I needed an overdraft and applied for it, logging into my account (because I had given him permission early on and wasn't thinking about my severe mistrust of him in relation to him having that access) and requested for two grand. I was furious. All of the red flags I ever missed, all of the behaviour that sent me reeling more than a few hundred times, all of the upset I'd ever diverted away from him came screeching into a fireball of savage rage right at him. We fought about it that whole night and he would not apologize.

In fact, he treated it like it was his own free money and ultimately goaded me into racking that overdraft up for things for living. When I came home with what I thought were frugal purchases like cheap plastic ware, he was livid and interrogated me about it. Not even two weeks later, he logged on again, bumped up the overdraft limit and emotionally beat me into make the rest of the purchases he thought we needed.

For some reason, I had still been trying to reason with him.

The second upping and subsequent maxing of the overdraft broke me.

Finally, proverbially, and even masochistically it would seem, I was taking on the beating of a life time. I didn't have anyone to blame for the $4500 maxed out overdraft but myself. And I blame myself entirely. But the amount of betrayal I felt was incredible. It was done. 

And shortly before I would get my first, real-paying job since being back west, the girls went back to Estevan. Because...

M managed to get a vehicle from one of those high-payment, no-credit vehicle places because the car I'd driven home with had been t-boned and smelled like gas after the hit. The car was t-boned because M had pulled out in front of a guy from a two-way stop thinking it was a four and in a super-duper flooded panic from me asking what he was doing, stopped in the road. His consistant, instant flooding of emotion that accompanied him while driving made him a poor judge of character and he was easily made volatile if I so much asked a question he deemed to be cornering him. I knew he wasn't a good driver. He'd only been driving a few years and he'd only been driving a few years because it took him forever to get his license. He saw no reason for it and still carried scars of the time he was 5 and engaged his mom's vehicle that rolled down the hill at his grandparents' house onto the highway and killed 2 people.

And so I felt somewhat, if only barely, entitled to use his truck when I needed to go somewhere. Only he would get pissed and so all four of us would ride in the truck with him to the school (where he worked and they attended) with him angry, emotion-boiled, and flooded behind the wheel. One morning on one of these joy rides, I was making my case with him. He didn't like it. C said something rather harmless if only fed up. That was all it took. He hit the brakes, punched the steering wheel and was nearly jamming in traffic, and screaming. He was pissed about her comment, flooded about my alleged nagging, and over the moon that I wouldn't defend him to her. He was in his own world. I could have said every ego-massaging thing in the world and it would have fallen on deaf ears. I only quite knew he never cared about others in the first place.

I dropped him and the girls off and promptly, if rashly, went back home, called K, and explained the situation. The next week was the winter break for the girls and they were moved back down to Estevan faster than M's head could spin. I would get them out of harm's way, finish my arrangement with him, and, once again, get the girls away from M.

It was rash, it was fast, it was unstable, but I could only think fiercely of removing the girls as far from M as possible. M tried giving me permission to take his truck but I was going to take it anyway. The morning before we were to head out, he insisted on coming to breakfast with us, then on the road trip down. At breakfast, he presented the girls and me with jewelry, which I could not fathom an explanation for, and tried to bribe his forgiveness.

Balls of fire. Balls of fire everywhere in my stomach. All I could do was scream from the inside and fake smooth on the outside. I would have agreed a deal with Satan if it meant getting my girls out of harm's way. I certainly didn't deserve to have those precious angels in my life with all the piss poor decisions I continued to make. But come down he did and stayed at a seedy little dive right outside the city limits while I moved my girls into their dad's home.

With the two-ton of loss bearing down on my heart, I hugged and kissed them several times before heading out (but not before one of the tires on the truck blew and I had to purchase a new one on a Sunday in a small town), picking up M and bearing the brunt that this nightmare was, indeed, happening again.

The Sunday night before the girls were to have returned to school, it hit me hard. They were gone. Again. They were supposed to starting school. Here. Tomorrow. I laid on my side of the bed and cried. Then bawled. Then howled full, body-racking, soul-emptying sobs. I didn't even question why or how they weren't there. I knew why. I knew that this was the consequence of trying to reason with the devil and take less than full responsibility for my life, pull up my big girl panties. I poured all of my hate and contempt for his complete and total lack of empathy into my angry sobs. As I lay there, knowing there was no one to go to, no one to hold me, no one to point me in a direction, I knew that I had no one to blame but myself. I hated myself as equally as I hated him. Blubbering like I was, as unapologetic for my sobbing as I was, M did nothing. He certainly didn't even ask me so much what was wrong. His side of the bed was black and motionless.


I was ready. Ready to be accountable for my life. No matter what kind of hell bills and debts would be, they would just be numbers. The weight of all the money he managed to take me for was a happy, light weight in comparison and would be totally worth kicking his ass to the curb. There would never, not ever, in a hundred more years, ever be a hell like this one. But it would not be over for a little bit more...

By the summer, my part-time job had changed into a full-time one at the dealership. I found an apartment. Told him I was done. I happily conceived that taking on the debt we'd both incurred in my name would well be worth it to be done with him for good. As one, final, last good gesture, the only thing I could summon was not leaving him homeless as his paychecks would stop for the summer and let him follow me to the new place, but yes, I know how stupid that looks to read it. He was a genuine ass about moving but happy to be in a new place. Go figure. I hotly and savagely maintained that we were over and that he was to be out by September. He nodded happily in agreement. And then he lost it.

In an uncharacteristic move one night, I went home with one of the guys from work that I had been drinking with. I didn't get home until 6 in the morning, wherein I was greeted with empty, dark, and hissing black eyes. He harrassed me and interrogated me until I was crying my makeup off, blocking my way in the hall, and I was shouting back at him. I was trying to get to work. I finally made my way past him, got to work, and was horrified to see him unannounced in my tower at work. From whence he came, I did not know, but there he was glowering at me, cornering me at MY work. People were walking in and out of the tower as usual, but seeing M there. I was beyond humiliated, composure eroding in waves.

I hissed at him low and guteral to leave my work. The only bargaining chip I had for his messed up mind was to let him know that whatever minute chance there would have been about getting back together, if he did not leave, he would annihilate that small chance. It worked. I don't know how, but it worked. He clammed up, clenched his jaw, and exited the tower.

I was shaking. It was hard to focus back on work, prep the shop for the day. I hadn't even proven myself at this job and wanted SO badly, and here M was messing it up before I could even decide for myself that I could make it. Just as I was managing to calm down and start thinking about work orders, the appointment coordinator was talking in a heightened, rushed voice, calling to the service manager to come out back, hurry, hurry. Something was going on. I saw movement in the shop, a kind of rushing to the one bay door. I went to follow the action and what to my horror do I see? Blood on the ground and a screaming French man walking backwards, with my service manager yelling at him to get off the property or he was calling the cops.

After leaving my work station, he'd gone out back, found the guy I'd gone home with, tried sucker punching him, and subsequently received a beating by that guy's best friend. The service manager, T, hauled my ass in the office and demanded an explanation. I had none. I swallowed tears as I apologized profusely and explained what information I had. He softened his approach and let me go back to work. The dealership manager found compassion for my situation and had someone bring me a coffee. I was going to be okay.

I avoided going home for days. I went home the day it happened, packed a small suitcase, and left in my new car (that I had qualified for just weeks prior). M tried pleading with me to stay but I would not have it. He could live the remainder of the summer there, I didn't care. I knew he would not leave, so I left. I lied and told him I was staying with my friend, C, but the guy I'd gone home with, S, turned out to be pretty cool and let me take refuge at his place. 

Finally, before the summer was out, I took a last minute trip up north to see my friend, T, and celebrated her son's birthday. I left for the weekend without so much as a word to M. I didn't see him, but I knew he'd been there because he hadn't showered in days and his body odour would permeate the air. When I got back from my trip, I found M sitting in the kitchen dazed and clearly medicated with a hospital bracelet on his arm. I didn't ask him about it. I just wanted him out. When he had finally left, citing something like a defeated kid about how he should leave because it's my home, not his, I scrubbed and scoured the entire place down with soap, water, and bleach until it smelled clean again. He must have let himself go. But I couldn't have cared less.

I went to the police to see what I could do about a restraining order. I needed to force this guy out of my life because he wasn't leaving and I didn't have the money to make other options happen. As well, I wasn't going to crash with a friend and invite whatever drama would befall this break up into their home. But the police couldn't do much unless M had physically assaulted me. The officer was very sweet and gave me the phone numbers to all the places I could need and told me they started a file. He gave me his card with this number on it in case anything happened, but I felt better just knowing there was that tiny little prong in the fire.

A couple of hiccups later (a screaming match when he came to pick up some items, an episode with a puppy he'd forced on us to have, and a few seething texts about bills), and he was out. He was finally out.

I got a second job at the mall and ran into him there once, and I was terrified. But he just looked at me like nothing had ever happened, told me I looked good (I had lost all the weight I gained in Quebec). I side stepped him, went back to work, and never saw him again.

That, my old and new friends, is my comeuppance.