The major renovations on the house
are wrapping up, and listing day is approaching. Tiling the kitchen
floor is the last major project, and after that, all the remains is packing,
cleaning, and various little touch ups. I’ll plant some flowers today. The long
winter delayed the garden from budding, but I have some annuals waiting to go
into the ground. Annuals are inexpensive and make the garden look nice. We are
moving forward.
There isn’t much discussion between
us anymore. For a while, I had doubts about my decision to leave.
I wondered if I were being selfish, if I were taking away opportunities
from my son. I wondered if there were a chance…
There is not. The fight I waged for
respect and agency before is laughable compared to what it would take now.
Ideas I propose are dismissed before I complete a sentence. He is more anxious
to get out than I am. If it were within my means to help him leave, I would. I
would give him the freedom he wants so badly.
I cannot understand, on an
empathetic level, the anger. I cannot imagine my decision was a surprise; he asked if I were leaving for months. When you pose the same question
multiple times, isn’t it because you already know the answer? Things were not
going well, obviously. I often wondered if he was conducting a test to see how far
he could push, how much I would take before I would finally break, and say, “That’s
it; I’m done.”
Okay, well, I said it. So if he actually
looked back on his behavior up to that point, if he reflected, how does
he justify this anger, this resentment?
You cannot come to me, a week after
I say I can’t do this anymore, and tell me you don’t want me to leave, when for
almost two decades, you acted as if you wanted me to leave, as if I ruined your
life, as if I were a horrible, ugly, fat, and unattractive person. The time to tell me you wanted me in your life, the time to say you love me is when I'm there, when the risk of me leaving is low. You cannot
make me the locus of blame and then turn around and say, “But I don’t want to
lose you.” Then you should not have treated me as if I didn't matter to you.
Or, maybe you can, because if I
leave, who do you have left to treat that way? What happens to the prince when
the whipping boy dies? What an awful, misguided concept – the whipping boy. To
have a stand-in for physical punishment, someone who takes a beating for you when
you do something wrong. What a horrible thing. But I digress…or not.
Achieving personal responsibility
is a difficult balancing act. When children are raised in an unbalanced
situation, where good is dismissively expected, and mistakes are punished – when there is an
absence of praise and an abundance of criticism and punishment, children
develop a self-protective, defensive instinct. If the only hope of not being
yelled at, grounded, spanked, or worse, is not to be at fault, kids learn to
deny that anything was ever their fault. Of course, that’s impossible. Mistakes are made. Sometimes, shit happens. When we create environments where
mistakes are intolerable, where all shit must have an owner, we create
environments where personal responsibility becomes something to fear.
We have to find a whipping boy, or
girl, or spouse. Someone on whom we pin the blame for things, be they mistakes,
or serendipitous shit. “You ruined my life.” That person.
Did I? Did I ruin his life by
saying I couldn’t take it anymore? I could argue that, but here’s what I realized.
There is no point in the arguing. If he’s the person who believes that I’ve
ruined his life, if he’s the person who needs the whipping spouse, he won’t
hear the arguments against that position. Not from me. Whatever I say, he will
contradict from his arsenal of my defects. He will not confront his culpability
in this. He will say that he knows he’s done wrong, but it will be because I
somehow caused him to do wrong.
Hear me out…I am not saying he
is entirely to blame. I bear the weight of at least fifty percent of what has
happened. I was, in many ways, on many days, wrong. I was wrong and I’m sorry.
The difference is I want to let go
of this, now. I don’t want to punish anyone for this. I don’t want to watch
someone hurt. I want to live at peace and know that at the end of the day, the
time is coming when we can go pursue the lives we really want. I won’t ask him
for what he can’t give, and then resent not getting it. I won’t begrudge him
what he wants to do, because I won’t make demands on him. And I’m willing to do
that now. I have no investment in making him do anything, anymore.
I wonder if he knows that. Because
if he does, and the person he is showing me now, if this is the person he chooses
to be, then my choice to leave is more justifiable than ever. This is a moment
of clarity. I am grateful for it.
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