Yes, I Really Was That Big an Asshole

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the events leading up to my marriage ending. But I have been thinking of it more these last few weeks. It had me feeling (and acting) depressed and introspective but I didn't know exactly why.

I realized that I had not felt at peace for a long time. Among the many compliants I had about living with my wife and kids, one thing I never felt there was like a stranger, an interloper. Happy or unhappy, from  day to day I had a place I knew I would be each night, with food on the table, the isolation of the basement to retire to. I may not have been happy, but I was at peace.

I think if you were to ask Wife, there would have been times when she was convinced that we were on the verge of disaster. I remember her acting, and I have since learned she was not misrepresenting herself, like we had a moral and legal obligation to start packing and give up the house the first time we had a late mortgage payment.

Over the years, she became far more comfortable with the fact of being in debt and being overextended, but she has still not accepted it emotionally. But, there is more here than merely my failure to live within my means and her disapproval of it even as she enjoyed the fruits of our overspending. What I stole from my wife is much more valuable than money or dignity or even happiness. I  stole the last bit of her sense of peace.

You see, my wife was born in an atmosphere where she was regularly assured, through action and routine, that she was safe. I was raised in the same community. My own experience was a little different because my family had neither the wealth, the connections, or the bloodline of the Gilded Cage (the name I have for the suburb on the North Shore of Lake Michigan, a collection of suburbs where nearly everybody has lots and lots of money, land, or stock. But Wife was the real deal.

For some reason, Wife continued to have that sense of peace with me until the very end. She wavered in the last 10 years, but hey, when push came to shove, she was on my side. And because she was on my side, things would turn out fine.

I stomped all over that sense of peace, of being loved and protected, sheltered. I stomped all over it with other women. I stomped all over it by managing to sabotage my career at every opportunity. She will never not worry about money, or her mental health, or the mental health of her kids. Hell, she'll worry about me. I don't know if she will ever open herself up to a man again.

I killed off her sense of peace and mine. I knew it as I was doing it. I didn't want it, I kept telling myself. And yet, I did little or nothing to stop it.

This is a complicated thing. But it's kind of at the center of the shitstorm, if you know what I mean. It isn't going to be particularly fun for me. It will be incredibly boring to some, self-indulgent shit to others. But I gotta get over this hill before I can see what lies beyond it. We're gonna be her for a little while.