Journal Entry 9.12.23
The grief I feel for my family’s abandonment and neglect is old, as well as fresh, so it is easy to write about. The grief over the loss of my first marriage is also easy to write about. It is in the past and 24 years have past since those wounds were first made. There is no new wounding. But writing about recent grief is harder.
The grief I feel for the send of my second marriage is marred by relief. Taking care of a mentally ill partner is like a slow death of self anyway. The realness of his psychosis and his violence made real the suffering I had endured for so long.
Perhaps more than grief, what I felt more was the wastefulness of it all.
For years, my second husband complained of how badly his family had treated him. He complained that his step father had used money from his family to make money for his children, leaving his step children with nothing, despite the money originally coming from a family business. My ex-husband often said, “A man who takes inherited money is not much of a man at all.” I supported his sense of right and wrong and injustice, assuring him that I agreed that a man who takes money that by rights should be inherited by his step children and uses it for himself is somehow cowardly and unmanly. So the irony hit me hard when my (soon to be ex-husband) demanded massive sums of my not-yet-inherited money in a divorce settlement.
We had existed during our marriage on a modest income. We were quite comfortable, but in the context of my d family business it still seemed like a modest amount. My ex-husband’s father died in February of 2020 leaving his son with nothing—not a photograph, not a favorite tennis racquet, not a book. My father died in May of 2020 and within days my soon to be ex was doing inventory of my fathers vehicles and possessions, calculating what he was going to do with “his“ inheritance. I never actually saw the money I inherited from my father. It went directly to the settlement I gave my ex-husband. I ended up having to borrow money to cover the full cost of the settlement. Today, he has more money than I do—all of it my family money. He bragged to my friends that he had bought land to protect himself from having to have neighbors. They said nothing but were disgusted because they knew my inheritance had not only paid for his extravagant land purchases, but I had also paid for his years of hospitalizations in top notch mental facilities, cars, ski trips, and other personal indulgences.
I suppose I would begrudge him less if he hadn’t made such a big deal over the financial injustices he had endured at the hands of his parents and step-parents. Hypocrisy sits uncomfortably in my throat. It also makes me feel the fool. His indignant self-righteousness had been so convincing, but clearly he had been planning his fleecing of me for a long time. In hindsight I realize he had been collecting stories of men who got “huge” settlements and men who got “ripped off” by their ex-wives. He had talked with his therapist about the conflict between me and his mother and had been encouraged to re-connect to his mother who despises me and who had tried since our engagement to break up our relationship. He had projected that he was certain my brother-in-law would leave my sister as soon as my father died—a shocking claim knowing their marriage. I dismissed the idea as crazy not realizing he was revealing his own fantasy to me. I now know why he would not look my father in the eye as he was dying.
I devoted myself to him, giving up my identity, my art, my autonomy and he used up as much of me as possible before discarding me like waste, his hand in my purse.
Waste indeed. I feel like I have wasted my life on people who treat me like I am worthless (my money, the only worth I seem to have to my husbands). What a waste.
Do I grieve the loss of my husband, or do I grieve the loss of myself, the devoted wife? Conned, used, discarded.