35 Things - Number Seventeen: The Whole Story

You would think one long year would sufficiently exhaust my tears.  No.  There are still good days and bad days.  Don't get me wrong, most days are good -- or at least so filled with work and other commitments that they have room for nothing else.  But some days are still very bad.  Oddly, now that I don't see or talk to the Professor, I think more about the things I loved, the things I miss, not less.  (My therapist says it's "normal.")  In his absence, I suppose it's easier to forget the most exquisitely painful moments of the last year and, instead, to recall the sweet moments we shared in the seven years before.  Not that they were all sweet.  I recall many horrible moments as well, but the moments I recall best involve my being horrible.

I have a special skill for recalling the worst in myself, but that probably has something to do with the fact that my worst is pretty bad.  I cannot deny that I am a person of extremes.  Like the nursery rhyme says, There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the  middle of her forehead.  When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid.  

It would certainly be easy to embrace a version of my marriage in which I followed my husband to Chicago, worked at miserable, demoralizing job so that he could pursue his PhD with leisure, financed his every consumable (and expensive) desire, and was left once he secured a position teaching law before 80 new young and admiring students each semester (approximately 54% of which are female, according to statistics).  It would be easy to embrace the simple version in which he left (or, rather, did not leave but said he wanted out); began dating immediately, while still living in our house, regularly staying out well past midnight; yelled contemptuously at me to stop crying myself to sleep night after night, as I was keeping him awake; moved into an apartment with two total strangers and slept on a mattress on the floor for months (which apparently was more appealing than living with me); and asked me to nonetheless be available to him for practical and emotional purposes for many months thereafter -- a request I willingly, happily, and heartbreakingly obliged.  It would be easy, and those things are all factually true -- and painful to recall.  But that is not an accurate rendition of what happened, because it lacks context.

The context is this.  I am hard to live with and hard to love.  I am sensitive, demanding, bratty, selfish.  I am rigid.  I can be hysterical.  I can be nasty.  I can lose my temper, and lose control.  I have thrown a remote control across the room, splintering it.  (I had to order a new one from Tivo for $50.)  I scream.  I cry.  I do not tolerate dissent.  I have been known to bite my hand, literally, when I can't take it anymore, don't know what else to do to release my anger (although, in my defense, rarely).

The day before the Professor proposed, we bought him a new grill for Easter.  We assembled it together at home -- precisely the kind of task that brought out my worst, my most rigid and demanding self.  For not getting it exactly right, for not being quick enough, I derided him.  I degraded him, I dismissed him.  I know that much.  We had a terrible fight, which I can't precisely recall, but I'm sure it ended with me screaming and sobbing hysterically in bed, as they all did.  The next day, he asked me to marry him nonetheless.  He hid Easter eggs all over the house, a treasure hunt ending in a fuzzy yellow chick hiding a blue Tiffany box.  When I remember that weekend, I remember how I yelled at him over the grill.  And he was hiding Easter eggs, a sweet clue to the next egg tucked inside each one.

There are other, equally horrific and shameful memories, and they all share the same theme:  I was ugly, I was selfish, I was cruel.  I often acted like the Professor's love was assumed and expected, however I treated him, whatever I did.

Perhaps we were never a good fit, perhaps it would not have worked, however perfect I could be -- I don't know, and I never will.  But what I do know, what I have come to face over this last year, is that I have a huge hand in the end of my marriage.  In a way, I helped to set the end of things into motion before we'd even started.  I crushed him.

The last year is not the whole story.  It is humiliating and painful in a special way, because it means I have to take some ownership of my marriage and divorce -- to look at myself and cringe -- but, it is true.  I shared seven years with the Professor (eight, if you count this last year).  I knew him.  Despite what those who love me most may want to think, because it's easier, because they love me, because the alternative is complex and, thus, uncomfortable, the Professor is a good person -- a person enthusiastic and hopeful for love -- and for most of the eight years that we shared, he was probably better to me than I often deserved.  And so, whatever has happened in the last year that has hurt me, damaged me, destroyed my trust and hope, I have learned this:  I, too, am culpable.  

It is not the whole story, but the story is not whole without it.