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.
Just so you know, there was enough penance to go around. Even though it was an explosive mess, there were little triggers all over the place I started to take stock of almost immediately. Besides the little moments that I scoffed off as two erred people in a partnership, there were big ones. Like the time we were heading to an evening of performances by solo youth symphony performers and I was griping as per my usual custom in the car, but M stopped the car in the middle of the road and screamed at me. I was stunned by his extreme reaction, whatever it was he said, out of nowhere, but I had apparently said the wrong thing in the wrong way and we almost turned around. I only felt momentarily attacked but then admitted that whining about things as I had done with K was probably not the best way to continue.
When I was on the back porch reeling and rocking night after night, or crying, or both, his reaction changed from stoic observer over a week to a rigid, red-faced pitch. I thought he was frothing at me out of tough love. He was actually quite stern with me on a number of occasions, and I would have only registered the sum total as amounting to nothing more than relationship hiccups, except when I couldn't understand other emotionless, arbitrary stances he had and question him angrily, it would invite draconian responses.
I remember sleeping away many mornings believing there was nothing on the agenda, only to find M had been up for hours, hadn't bothered to wake me, and scornfully contemptuous about all his plans that I was ruining with my alleged flaw. But when I asked that he let me know of any plans he had the night before, a simple solution that would have alerted me in advance to be up in good time, he would not respond, not even so much as to agree or disagree and continue on his haughty path. This pattern eventually resulted in huge fights because I would feel
guilty and angry and he didn't even so much as refuse to provide
me the courtesy of including me in his next-day plans. I was just the lazy ass.
His extreme patterns brought me instant self-awareness, if for no other reason it was a type of shock therapy. Here was a person I assessed and deemed to be both more vocal and far less bound to put up with my shit than my ex. I don't know that I was so much as scared that M would dump me on the side of the road or abandon me in a province a trillion miles away from anything I ever knew, but I was mindful that he could. I let M call me out on my bullshit, let him have the upperhand, even when my temper was going to boil out of my mouth, even when I knew he was being unfair because I couldn't find my words. But I began approaching him with an increasing, heightened sense of caution.
In addition to and in complete contrast to the mounting tensions, there were all three activities I had that he would follow me to in the meantime. Community band, French class, but then finally youth symphony. They were suggestions he made and helped intitiate. But he came along and stuck around as though I was so broken that I couldn't handle it alone. He seemed to be so proud of me getting back to playing bassoon and helped me acquire the rental of one. But he was always around. A little too much. I learned how to understand music conducting in French, I could infer that without his help. I didn't shy away from being instructed in French, either, but I wouldn't have done that anyway. The instructor seemed to mind but not say anything and eventually M would let me go alone. My French instructor, however, asked him to not be there explicitly; and so by the time youth symphony came into the picture, M was only ever mildly involved in being around during practices. But my half-my-age friends in the symphony noticed and remarked how much he must love me because he was always pacing the lobby when we came down after rehearsal.
His awkwardness filled all the rest of the gaps. From his superficial views on religion and relationships to the vexed brooding brewing below the surface, he slowly, unwittingly revealed an inflexible and unrelenting monster. Fights between us increased in number and voltage. He would often refer to himself as "innocent" and it would catapult me into the fourth dimension of anger. He was anything but innocent.
By the time he got the job that moved us back west, I was quite sure we were done. I had no idea of how to ensure my exit, but I know that I wanted to. And that meant sucking it up and playing the game back until we got here. There was something intrinsically wrong with him. It wasn't just me anymore. Between the incident where my legitimate questions provoked a fight and resulted in him screaming and pleading with me to understand his pain and finally digging the plastic part of a razor into his arm and the other random vitriol, I knew it wasn't just me.
Newly landed and freshly hazed, I tried to remember how I got there. We had this special connection, so strong, M needed to remind me. Oh. Right. The girls and I were alone with M in his mom's house, a cabin on the far outstretches of the village limits. His mom was overseas on her trip with his sister and the sister's husband. I could recover here. I could yell and scream at the top of my lungs and no one would hear me, probably not even his grandfather who lived about 5 kilometers away.
I settled for getting up with a coffee and a smoke out on the flimsy dock out back where the ducks would float around and I would try not to burst into tears as my chest and stomach were as thick and heavy as well-sealed cement and my little girl would sidle up to me. The mistakes were welling up in the thousands right behind my eyes.
It was a beautiful home and breath-taking scenery, but it could have been the local dumpyard for all I was worth. My mind was pooling with the blood I had shed in my wake and teeming with barely half-formed questions. How could I fix this? How could I just... go... back? And thoughts. Oh my god, my girls are going to find out what this is. Burning, searing regret. And huge, huge doses of reality wave by wave - the girls never get to see their friends, the sights and sounds around them strange and unfamiliar now, would they ever see past my bullshit move, would they ever forgive me, would they be okay now and hate me in the future as adults. How was I going to explain this to them? How was I going to turn this huge mistake into something better?
Oh but "thank" goodness I had M. I had allowed him to be my voice of reason. I looked to him for perspective, hoping that he would have sound advice to give, or cool, soothing words to make me feel like the fire of hell wasn't as bad as it really was. And he did. Meh. He sounded the part. Meh. When we finally got the internet up and running, I knew I'd have hell to pay on every forum that I could be reached, and I did, and when it knocked the wind out of me and the rock hard ball that burned from my throat to my gut and I finally had to walk away from the computer to go cry outside, he came with me and let me cry. He wasn't in there, wasn't in the pain with me. But he watched. Red flag 546. He watched like a dutiful, expectant puppy dog and tried to offer anecdotal reminders of why we did this, why we were together, tried to remind me all the conversations we'd had. And I'd wipe my tears and try to remember that what's done is done. I appreciated his temporary cure and I'd try to fall asleep fighting the nightmares I knew were coming.
But I distinctly remember that he was rather antiseptic about the whole thing. Red flag 723. Not defining behaviours or characteristics as being inherently evil. This was a person who claimed to be as passionate about things as I was, was advocating and supportive of these BIG moves, talked high and low of grand love, used my very private and intimate beliefs to get me to talk and return such sweeping grandeur; but then, when I destroyed that life because of how all of my unreconciled/unrequieted issues felt like they could finally explode into the air, this same person met my heartache and self-destruction with a mere quizzical curiosity.
And for what.
All of that was Big Red Flag by itself. People who love people, or even people who are just well, don't agree to closing one chapter like that. They don't agree to it, they don't perpetuate it, and they certainly don't advocate it. They say normal, caring things like, "no, it's not right" and "tie up your own ends first before we get together." I don't know what I was thinking. Or how I was thinking.
By the end of the summer, the girls had decided to go back to live with their dad. Some far away part of me, wayyyyy in the back of my head, where rational thoughts barely peeped, was so ginormously relieved for them. The new home they'd be where K had gotten his new job would be foreign and stressful, too, yes, but at least there would be a fuckload more of familiarity than the current situation. They'd get to see that their dad was okay. And all of the people who were seething at me would get their triumph in knowing the girls were with the "better" parent.
After the girls' departure, M and I took what I thought was an adequate look at what to do next. His schooling was on the menu and not much else. No point in me looking for a job until I could speak the language. He vowed to take care of me.
Taking care of me meant following him to class registration, waiting in the library when he was in class, climbing in the car with his mom afterwards, and riding home together for the hell ride home (she was a terrible driver.) When I tried to object to going, I got an earful of lecture, but a few times he relented and I'd just stay at the cabin by myself all day and clean or blog or pore over how I could talk to the people I used to know.
Taking care of me meant kindly responding to his whims. Sometimes for my benefit (a fluke good thing like French class or community band or auditioning for the youth symphony) and sometimes to allegedly get my mind off the horror I was still reeling from.
Taking care of me did mean, I loathe to admit, him trying to make coffee in an ancient percolator every morning until he started classes that would leave grounds in the bottom of the cup and taste like little more than browned water.
Taking care of me meant watching him clumsily do things he'd never done before and appreciate them with my mouth shut. If I ever kindly moved to help him, though...
Taking care of me meant living with his mother once she returned from Paris and to her job as a prep school instructor and losing all sense of independence...
And all of these things are harmless in themselves, that is, until you get to a cracking point where those things matter and you consider all the damaged places from where an individual engages (or disengages) and the relationship is unhealthy to start with. But this went so far and above two wounded people.
Red flag 456, 457, 458.
I wanted to be taken care. To be felt sorry for. To be picked up off the floor. My old, whiny, wanting-a-hero self took one last kick at the can. M obliged at first. For all of the time period before leaving the small town he did. At a time where I had long put that crap away and didn't have any expectations of people giving a shit about the great many things that I was still upset and hurt about, he did. He noticed. Or at least I thought he noticed what needed noticing - my lacking career ("you need a profession, not a job"), a deep spiritual connection I was craving, not being appreciated.
But taking care of me shortly changed into the monster it would ultimately become.
Broken promises.
Lies.
Lopsided, one-sided outbursts that would reel into the cosmos.
Tremendous lack of independence.
Loss of self.
I lost the blog post between the last one and the one before it, so I try again.
Reading the brutally forthright blog of my best friend, C, regarding when her life fell apart, I felt like I was still hiding behind my own stories, or trying to dirt stomp them into the past. I'm glad I did that. I'm glad I put all my momentary energy into severing all ties with M and ensured that he would be blocked from re-entering my life at any corner. I did all the social media blocking things, but I changed my phone number, I moved, I reviewed my priorities, defined my deal breakers and red flag so that I could never ignore them again. Yeah, it was pretty good.
But I've been ready to account for the things that have hurt people for quite some time. They may have never had a second thought, but I have. I've thought about what people said all those years ago. I've thought about the emotional and social hell I put my ex through. I've thought about - or tried to think about - the whys and hows, at least until my head wants to split in half from the illogical, unreconciled reasons. So it's time to do a little poking and prodding into something that I've yet to answer for. And while it may not make sense to anyone but myself, I really think it's something I need to do.
It cannot be stated enough HOW relieved I was to be free from M. I was so, so, so embarrassed for a long time, both during my time with him and after. I look back with utter humiliation, disgrace and replusion. I was told growing up never to hate people; and I don't hate anyone in my life. I hate M.
I was also told that people "accuse as they are" and they do. Nothing can tell you about a person faster than listening to them complain. So I know that the hate I project on M is the hate I have about things I've done or failed to do; and that the hate is mostly rhetorical. Well, somehow real and rhetorical. About 90/10 because I have absolutely zero room for relenting. I will hate him until I'm an old prune. Then I will stop hating him because I won't want to be an old prune, but a lovely dying old lady instead.
But all of the things I ever whined about in my marriage as being K's concern, of all the things I've repelled about M in disgust were only ever pointing to me. I'm talking about that sneery, inner repulsion for something you don't like about yourself. Like: personality flaws, habits, etc. Not things that are true. Like M being a textbook case of narcissistic butt-wipery.
I hate that I was indecisive. Temperamental. Inconsistent. I hate that I didn't use all of my dramatic flair and justice-stompy energy to define and establish who I was from the inside from the beginning, rather than for the temporal, two-second instances of miscalculated proclamations from on high that I exemplified. I knew a girl before young motherhood who, even in all her hot-blooded, teenagery drama, had more gumption than that.
I hate that it went so far. I hate that I was a waif who would move with the wind or as the wind blew. I really hate how I left. I hate that I didn't know how to deal with the panic I felt about my relationship, or moving just then, or any part of anything. I had no friends. Everyone was my friend. I really hate how I couldn't even find the forebearance to find a logical solution for my daughters' sake.
Sooooo many things were wrong before I even left.
It started with a simple Facebook friend request. He had taught my oldest and was still teaching my youngest. I thought he was sweet in an awkward way (if only I had known the epic social awkwardness that knew no bounds was really just the precursor to being inappropriate) and wondered why I had never paid attention to him before. He did, after all, help my oldest with her oratoire competition the year we went to the big city for it and seemed to champion the French language.
It all happened soooooo fast.
I still hate Facebook.
And oh yeah, I didn't notice him because he was a brooding viper whose crippling narcissism kept him burrowed deep in the halls of the school.
That lesson came later. Several times.
Anyway.
K and I never recovered from everything that pounded on our marriage. Whatever conversations I wanted to be having didn't exist. Whatever states we were in, we couldn't line up. He finally got a job offer from a high school, which entailed moving several hours and switching provinces; and while I thought it would be this that finally made him happy, I became instantly panicked about selling the house.
In the meantime, I soaked up all the lovely things M told me like moths to a flame and also learned that M would not be staying in the province, either. For whatever godforsaken reason I had come to treasure our conversations (and I DO mean godforsaken), I was beside myself with the move and with losing a friend, or so it seemed. What a terrible injustice it seemed to finally be having the conversations I wanted to be having and watch it all just dissipate. He had to take a few more classes to get a full certification and was going to go four-thousand kilometers back home to do it. Flag 241. Who goes all the way back to a province, home or not, that didn't give him the credits he needed in the first place AND in which completely qualified teachers don't get more than subbing in for years before getting hired on full-time! Flag 241. He knew this.
I didn't pay one iota of attention to it.
It was irrational. But all of the things I could never make sense of, all the past eliding into the present, all of the self-bullshitting came screeching into one ball of yarn and I could not untangle it. I didn't feel right or good or sure about a single thing. It could truly be said I didn't know my ass from a hole in the ground. I had just been so used to going with the flow of the opinions that turned me like the tide that when it came to making decisions, a meth addict taking speed with moonshine could have made a better decision. But I quit trying to fix that mangled yarn ball. I kept spending time with M.
Red flags. Red flags everywhere.
A week before I left, as kind of a test, and surely unsure what was to follow, I mused the idea to M about going to Quebec. He purchased airline tickets without so much as blinking his eyes. What about the girls, I asked. Of course they could come, too. No disbelieving. No stopping. No "no, that wouldn't be right"s. Just purchased the tickets. Without consideration for anyone but himself. Flag 346. With the last of his teaching money. Flag 347.
I was only thinking about the relief I might get to feel if I just went so far away. I was only thinking about how heroic he was for buying plane tickets, showing his commitment. But now I was on the hook for these tickets. And I was pretty convinced K wouldn't care all that much that I was leaving. Truly.
The hardest thing I've ever had to reconcile has been how I could have been so simultaneously gutless AND believing I had any presence of mind. I was convinced no one would care. I had stirred up so much confusion for myself in the earliest days of the cancer/joint saga, tearing at myself to understand what on earth I could have done to deserve being thrust into this spinning world of duress that was equal parts motherhood, new wife, foreigner (yes, no matter what Americans or Canadians say, there is always a tiny bit of a stigma with being an American in Canada), unemployed, and grieving medical bystander; that I had no way in hell of processing it all. No matter how half-cocked my reasons were for getting married fast, leaving the states, and jumping into life with K were, surely I didn't deserve to be put on the spot for every single crisis imagineable in life at one time.
And because I thought everyone would care and very few did (even less knew how to react), it started me on a reaction train. I didn't make a lot of alone time to think about the least of the three previous, cram-packed years (motherhood at 18, the baby daddy, dating K, marrying K, cancer diagnosis 1 and 2) to gain perspective before the next thing happened (cancer diag 3) because I didn't know how to think about it. I didn't know who to ask for help because my family was thousands of miles away, the mother in law was grieving her son's diagnosis, and none - none - of my high school or college friends would have had a single hot clue. I didn't know where to look. I just had more questions because I could never get answers. And what I could put into some kind of order just got thrown out when the joints started going. More questions.
Round and round it went like this for eternity. So as much as I thought my infatuation was for real, it certainly was not. It was my ticket out. But I played into all M's lies. Listened to him carefully tell me he could sense the Virgin Mary's presence behind me. Lies. Listened to him as he kyped poetry from Dante. Thief. Read his long and rambling poetry about how I was one above all others. Lies. And the next thing I knew, we were in the air, reading the electonic maps on the jet trying to figure out how much longer the ride would be, trying to cradle and protect the girls from the hell they had just been through. Red flag 1,000,000, you dumb, f***ing bitch I still scream at myself.
And before we even left town, everything fell apart like the house of cards I had stacked everything on. The girls were crying because they had seen their father cry, but no solace from M. Only resistance. The taxi that took us to the bus depot was his friend giving us a ride, but the bus tickets hadn't been purchased. I ate that cost with the money A had won for her Young Humanitarian award and I had set aside in a joint savings account, which he vowed to pay back and never did; and he let me take the fall for it when Aurora found out. Red flag 3572. And 3476.
One taxi ride, one overnight 10-hour bus trip (wherein K raced to the second of the last stops on the route at 4 a.m. with police escort to stand up for the girls), a multi-hour plane ride, one huge road trip and a night at a strange family's house later and we finally landed at M's mom's house. Red flag 3 or 4. He had not told me the extent of travel and was not considering the girls at all.
At all.
The heartache I brought upon my girls is unconscionable.
And as I held them while they fell asleep (C cried herself to sleep every night for weeks) and as my body recoiled in disgust with what I had done, the monstrosity of my actions for what they were hit me full on like the most horriffic horror movie you could imagine.
And after I would finally get them down to sleep, I would go on the back porch, hold my knees while I rocked back and forth and cry. I would yell and sob into the night air, angry, disgusted, repulsed, and hiss the words at M, "What have I done!? What have I DONE!!?"
I wanted nothing more than to go crawling back, receive my public whipping, and be rid of this mistake.
But Facebook would do the whipping for me...
