My husband (married 2.5 years, together for 10) recently asked for a semi-permanent separation after moving me from Chicago to L.A. and cheating on me with a friend. This is how I'm dealing. I swear it's not as depressing as it sounds!
I now spend my days vacillating between a desire to live in bed, under the covers, shut off from any sort of stimulation beyond the numbing qualities of television, and a desire to be out in the world, hoping this will momentarily facilitate a kind of amnesia wherein I'll get five, maybe ten minutes of peace. I know it will be quickly replaced with the memory that my husband has indeed left me, but even a few precious, oblivious minutes seem worth it.
My mother and sister appear to be firm believers in 'getting out there', as they plan daily activities to keep me busy, like a pair of manic cruise directors working exclusively for the morose. They drag me out of bed one Saturday to an arts and crafts fair in downtown Cincinnati. This will turn out to feel like a form of low-grade torture. Everywhere I look, men with rings, giggly babies latched securely to their backs and placidly smiling wives at their sides, peruse the booths. In my head, I hiss "don't get too comfortable. He could kick you out on your ass in a second, even with the kid". My sister examines a table containing lovely gold pins and necklaces, birds nests and deer heads punched into solid-looking gold metal. I look up at the man behind the table, and our eyes meet for a moment too long. He's cute, dark, curly, hair, mild stubble gracing his square jaw. I think to myself 'Oh, well, it is nice to know I'm not a visual leper'. It had been so long since I had even thought about flirting, though my husband had evidently spent a large swath of our years together perfecting his technique while I was doing god knows what. Making awkward conversation with his friend's new girlfriends? Searching for a corkscrew? Running to the car for his cigarettes? I'll never know. I continue to meet his gaze, letting a smile play across my face for the first time in weeks, and he responds in kind. Suddenly, a woman pops up from behind the display with a fistful of tiny plastic bags. She is wearing a ring. And I now see he is as well. My smile disappears with such speed that I swear I can hear I 'wooshing' sound pass in front of my face. Though I've always erred on the side of public decency, I want to spit. Suddenly, they are everywhere, these men. Men who are committed but without really meaning it. Men who've said 'I do' while somewhere in their consciousness thinking 'but I'd rather not'. I wonder if I'll ever be able to go out in public again without a vaguely nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach.
One gray afternoon during my second week back home, I was in the car with my mother running one of her suspiciously frequent errands. As was normal at that time, I was focusing all my energy on holding back a torrent of tears based on nothing more than my general depression. By this point, as sweet and kind and understanding as they are, my family was having a hard time acting as witnesses to my pain. My poor mother had offered every bit of wisdom she could muster (a good deal of it falling within the 'fuck him' category). Much of what she said felt like a thinly veiled plea for me to quit being so visibly broken. Though I could not comply, I understood. Her child, her love, her life's work, was flattened and very nearly dehydrated to the point of needing medical attention due to crying. We had just been discussing how often he was texting and calling, when I felt myself choking up. As I sat in the passenger seat, weeping while simultaneously pretending to be absorbed in the suburban, early winter landscape, I blurted out "I've never felt so far from myself".
This was her tipping point. "You know, at some point, he'll stop calling and texting all together. You have to get used to that". My mother is a good woman. A good woman with set limits. I had clearly pushed her beyond one such limit, probably overshot it by a mile.
I proceeded to accuse her of failing to be supportive when I needed it most, my voice squeaking, my face increasingly slick with tears and snot. I grabbed a rough, brown fastfood napkin out of the glove box and proceeded to mop at my cheeks and nose vigorously. We argued back and forth for a bit while sitting in her SUV, parked uncomfortably close to the entrance of a drab Meijer store teeming with Thanksgiving-related customers. We found no solution to the problem of my deep sadness and her inability to interact with said sadness, though we did agree that he may just not be a nice person and may never really have been a nice person.
This conclusion left me feeling sick to my stomach. If he was not a nice person at the moment, I could handle that. I could understand that his father was dying, that his life had changed drastically and that our being parted for so long had left him disoriented and testing out new values and a new reality. It was unsettling that someone could change so much in such a short time, but something I could address in future relationships (if there were to be any, which I still seriously doubted). But if he had never been a nice person, if he had always been an asshole and I had never realized it in our ten years together, that was utterly devastating. That meant I could no longer trust myself or my perception of others. And, most heartbreakingly, it meant that I'd wasted ten years of my life with an asshole.
There was some supporting evidence. That past April, I had experienced complications from a kidney stone that was larger than the initial CT scan had indicated. I spent that Saturday morning nervous that I was feeling twinges in my kidney that might soon develop into the searing, vomit-inducing pain I'd felt earlier in the week. When I knew for sure I was beginning to feel that very particular pain again, I asked to be taken to the hospital. Instead, he telephoned the on-call doctor at our doctor's office asking how best to handle this. She recommended I take the pain medication and the Flowmax (has a medication's name ever been more self-explanatory?) and head to the hospital in an hour if it had not worked itself out. When the hour passed and I remained doubled-over in pain, I weakly suggested getting in the bathtub because I had read that sometimes helped assuage the pain. He ran the bath and poured me a glass of scotch with the hope that this combination would be enough to keep us out of the hellscape that is a Chicago ER waiting room on a Saturday night. When the pain remained, he finally agreed to take me. The wait was awful, naturally, and I shuffled between a chair and the bathroom, vomiting until I had nothing left to give. I was later admitted with a raging kidney infection related to the stone. He did not visit as regularly as he could have, and when he did visit, he behaved as though he wanted to be anywhere else.
I was put under general anesthesia for the first time in order to remove the stone and insert a splint, an extremely frightening experience, all alone. He could not take the day off because he needed to save his days off to work on his web show. I chalked it all up to his dedication to his creative work, something I did my best to support in any way I could. But from my family's perspective, it was unfeeling behavior. They began to worry about how he treated me at that point. I thought he had gotten me through a terrible time while balancing his job and his creative endeavors, and I loved him for it more than ever. Behavior can be a lot like an optical illusion; what you perceive all depends on where you stand. And I was obviously standing way too close to see the full picture.