Beautiful advice from a divorced man after 16 years of marriage.
There have been a lot of times in my marriage that I feel like it’s just a big huge hole in me. I’ve suffered a lot of things, except for physical abuse, but I swear my spouse is a cross-dresser because he’s walked across my heart in stiletto heels a time or two. We’ve had some good times too, which I guess is why this roller coaster has lasted for so long, but there are days when I just want to run away so badly, I google maps of places I want to run to. I used to do that from time to time– just run to spend time with friends or family and sometimes not tell him… I guess I’m too old for that? Nah… just too broke. I guess I’m living the legacy: the pattern my mom made.
My parents married in August of 1959. She died in December 2010. She was living in the same home (different bedroom) when she died. The irony is they divorced in 1986-7? Before that, there was separate bedrooms, the same bed, different houses on the same street, different homes in neighboring states an hour from each other or 20 minutes apart, disappearances and reappearances of my mother, and that was just during my time since 1973.
Before that, apparently before I was born, she left and ended up in Pittsburgh, Kansas with my decade older brother. Somehow, Dad ended up living there for awhile before they came back here. That was about the time I was conceived so I’ve always made the joke that I was a reconciliation baby, either made in KS or once they were back here. She would “escape” but they would never be “apart” for long, even if it was the cold war between them. I always made the joke about a Garth Brooks song being written about a couple like them:
Hey, all the neighbors lights
Came on last night
Just like they do every time
We have a little fight
It’s gettin’ to the point
We can’t get along
We’re always fighting about things
That should be dead and goneWe bury the hatchet
But leave the handle stickin’ out
We’re always diggin’ up things
We should forget about
When it comes to forgettin’
Baby, there ain’t no doubt
We bury the hatchet
But leave the handle sticking outWell, I was kissing on Cindy
Hey, that I won’t deny
But that’s a long time ago
I let a dead dog lie
But if you want to cut deep
How ’bout you and ol’ Joe
I caught you down at the creek
Just ten years ago
We bury the hatchet
But leave the handle stickin’ out
We’re always diggin’ up things
We should forget about
When it comes to forgettin’
Baby, there ain’t no doubt
We bury the hatchet
But leave the handle sticking out
Hey, we got enough on each other
To wage a full scale war
If we could ever remember
What we were fightin’ for
We bury the hatchet
But leave the handle stickin’ out
We’re always diggin’ up things
We should forget about
When it comes to forgettin’
Baby, there ain’t no doubt
We bury the hatchet
But leave the handle sticking out
We bury the hatchet
But leave the handle stickin’ out
Yeah, they buried the hatchet, alright… or the tomahawk, depending on which lineage they got their stubbornness and tempers from. They say still waters run deep– well, bitter waters make your eyes tear, your nose run, and leave a taste in your mouth that’s hard to get rid of!
But I’ve tried to bury hatchets, but like a light switch, I’m either one way or the other– a study in extremes. I buried hatchets that should have been buried in a few people I now believe. My mother was a little woman in stature only– her voice, mouth, opinions and beliefs were paraded like a group of flags. On the other hand, I was so submissive, most of my life, I’ve been rebuilding ruins from where I let other run me right over. I let others run my life, even when they were just trying to give me advice. It took me a long time to figure out why until I learned what re-victimization was.
At the hands of my mother, I was taught a great many powerful, honorable, and intelligent things. The same can be said of my father. But at the hands of my mother, I’ve been bruised, bloodied and hurt, inside and out. The things she would twist to manipulate might make the Guinness Book of World Records, especially for their complexity. She could be a bully and a slave driver of sorts. But you have to take the good with the bad. My dad was oblivious to a lot of it, and I didn’t understand until later that he suffered at the hands of a drunk father after his mother had left (boys stayed with fathers, girls stayed with mothers, so his brother and he were motherless while his sister, a baby at the time of grandma’s leaving, was just a baby). Apparently, he was beaten so badly, a neighbor didn’t know who he was at first– she couldn’t recognize his pulverized face. Once she did, it took days to nurse him back, and she told me she worried many a night if he was going to die. She thought he might have been about fourteen at the time, if not younger.
Growing up, my belief was: Mom hates me; Dad doesn’t care. It’s all about you when you’re a kid. They can’t be wrong! Oh, no! YOU had to have done something or not done something or you aren’t good enough, whatever…
So fast forward, I get married the first time at sixteen like an idiot. It’s not that I wasn’t mature enough… it’s that I was too naive. And having a temper and living with someone with anger issues and baggage of their own, who ISN’T mature enough to boot spells disaster. Even though my mother had been eighteen and my father twenty-six, I did choose based on the source of patterns my parents laid out for me. Thanks, Mom & Dad :0
Darkstorm73 