Where to Start....

Vulnerability: truly the hardest thing for me to begin to fathom right now. Having been so hurt, and destroyed emotionally by my ex-husband (EH), it is impossible to wrap my mind around letting my guard down completely. That is not to say I don't want to be vulnerable, not in the slightest. I want to be able to open up and truly connect with someone else, but my current emotional baggage seems to be doing nothing but causing grief. 

I have a feeling that this whole process would be easier if EH were completely out of my life and I didn't have to deal with the chaos he continues to create in the periphery of my life. But, such is life because EH and I have two children together. As much as I don't want it to be the case, sharing joint custody continues to give EH a means of control over my life. That control seems so inescapable at times, and it is terrifying.

Now, let me back up a bit to give you some perspective; I was married to EH just short of four years and we were together a total of almost eight. That's a long time to spend with someone - nearly a third of my life - and those years were tumultuous. I thought I had a handle on the issues that went on between us when we were dating, and albeit naively, thought that marriage would be the solution to anything yet unresolved. Long story short, I was wrong. So very, very wrong. Marriage magnifies problems and creates many new ones, then, compounded with a surprise and complicated pregnancy, a premature delivery, two months of our daughter being in the NICU, and another pregnancy before she was seven months old, we were more or less doomed. And I don't say that there was no hope in saving the marriage had we been two normal people, because if that were the case I think we might have had a chance, or at least ended things more amicably. But no, normal is the last word I would ever use to describe EH - I say that because he is a narcissist.

Narcissist: what a big, scary word to define someone by, but so painfully accurate in describing EH. After our daughter was born I became depressed, and the few times I reached out to EH to try to seek counseling he shot me down completely. He told me it was all in my head, that I was fine, and that there was nothing wrong with me. I didn't argue with him, and just accepted my lot at that point in time. After all, our finances were tight beyond reason and my going to counseling would only add to that, and I didn't want another reason for him to yell at me about money - that happened often enough as it was. So, I lied to myself and everyone else and pretended everything was alright. It wasn't. Getting pregnant again (I did nothing to stop it, and actually was trying for a second baby) just added to my emotionally weakened state. While that pregnancy was healthy and I carried our son to term, it was full of high risk monitoring because of the history of my first pregnancy. My stress levels rocketed and my body paid the price for it - I developed full-blown eczema, and nothing the dermatologist prescribed eased the severity of it.

A clear indicator of how stressed I truly had become was when I had a case of shingles six weeks after our son was born; never had I been in more pain, not only from the shingles, but also from the emotional turmoil I was constantly holding inside. I was a stay at home mom to two kids under the age of two; my daughter had special needs and was in therapy a few times a week, and apart from that the only time I got out of the house was to go grocery shopping. I was completely isolated and that only furthered my depression.

EH and I still fought all but constantly, and about everything imaginable: money, the kids, the house, the yard work, the meals I cooked, sex, free time, how I kept house. Nothing was spared from EH's critical judgment, and nothing could ever appease him for very long. I neglected buying things for myself so that I could cover what the kids needed. I cut coupons and shopped sales to cut back on the grocery bill, but the savings went unacknowledged and unappreciated because EH would turn around and buy fast food at any opportunity and always refused to eat leftovers. Sex became a major sticking point - I would be exhausted from keeping up with the kids and the house all day, and didn't have my former confidence because of the toll two back to back pregnancies had taken on my body. EH would not take no for an answer, except on rare occasion. He would wake me up and ignore me telling him no, insistent on groping and kissing until I would either give in just to get him to leave me alone faster or would fall asleep only to wake up the next morning without clothing and obvious signs of sexual activity. At the time I was too close to the situation to realize it, but rape can still happen in a marriage - no means no, and EH never honored that. 

Not only did EH sexually violate me, but he did so emotionally and verbally too. Nothing I ever did was right in his eyes - the whole house could have been cleaned, but I hadn't gotten to the dishes so that meant I was lazy and did nothing but sit on my butt all day. I cooked a meal, and he ate it once, but when I would pack his lunch for work I was yelled at because he didn't want to eat the same thing again and I needed to stop cooking the same things over and over again. I would get a little something extra for the kids when I went to the store which meant it was my fault that we were living paycheck to paycheck even though I made sure the bills were paid when he would go out and spend $300, $500, sometimes even more each month on fast food, movies, and video games. He was blameless, and I was the cause of all of his problems. I was constantly told that I was a selfish, controlling bitch that had never worked to earn a living and wouldn't be able to if I tried.; that I was so selfish to sit on my butt all day with two kids at home and make EH work long hours to provide when I was the one with a college degree; that none of EH's friends and family liked me because I stuck my nose up at folks who didn't do things my way and that I'd never have any friends who would actually stick around; that it was my fault that our groceries were so much more expensive after I found out about my food allergies and changed my diet - eliminating most of my eczema and numerous stomach issues in the process, and that it would have been better if I had never gone to get allergy tested in the first place (he admitted to my face that he'd rather I would have continued to be sick than to find out about the allergies). EH also told me that I was always looking for a handout because I went to my parents when things got really tight (like making the choice between buying diapers and paying the phone bill), and that it made him look bad that he couldn't make ends meet and we needed their help to get by. The arguments were unending, and looking back, I honestly don't know how I got through most of those months at home by myself with two babies; it is all a blur of sadness and misery with very few good points.

The last year of my marriage was decidedly the worst year of my life, and it's not something I am able to revisit in much detail yet. The relationship I had with EH made me doubt myself in many ways - in my judgment, in my self-worth, in my confidence - just to name a few. I am terrified to get close to someone new and at the same time desperate for closeness; I get defensive, pushy, and clingy all at once and it's hard to process. It is a new realm of possibility that is still foreign to me, and something I'm having to learn as I go. Never in a million years would I have thought that I'd be coming up on my 26th birthday as a single mom trying to navigate the dating world, but given the past eight years, it's a much better place to be than I was.