As the news this week hit closer to home, I woke up this morning missing the belief that I had someone in my corner, by my side to face life. For one brief moment, I missed him. That was one of the weaker illusions I convinced myself of in my marriage though. He didn't hide very well where his priorities lay.
I can still hear his voice and the countless times he told me, "You're never on my side."
I felt alone in those moments because the accusation came at times I was thinking of "us" while he was just focused on "me" (as in himself). His mother even ganged up on with him once after he (likely at her urging) had called one of our financial institutions to complain about something and agreed to arbitration in a scenario where I didn't think we had a leg to stand on. When I discovered what they had done while I was out, I was not immediately supportive and had a lot of questions (so I could understand the extent of the damage that might have been done). She accused me of not standing by my man while he sat there silently.
It came up other times when I wouldn't agree he was right to drive aggressively as I feared for our safety. Or when he wanted to buy another car and I was concerned with the impact on our finances and the impact on me physically in having to go through the draining process so frequently.
I remember another time when he wouldn't stop complaining about the dog barking in the courtyard. I had listened to his complaints. I had empathized with him. I had walked the apartment complex to figure out which apartment it was coming from and I had reached out to the apartment management to make a complaint. But the complaining still wouldn't stop and it was a heaviness on me that drained me even more than normal. So I told him I couldn't keep listening to the complaining and tried to change the subject and then remove myself from the area. That is another time he accused me of never being on his side.
In conversations years later, it came up that he didn't feel I was on his side when he was applying for a law enforcement job that would have moved us around the country often, disrupting my career and kept us apart frequently as he traveled and worked long hours. My simple desire to talk about what it would look like and how we would manage that big of a change in our relationship was enough for him to claim I wasn't on his side. What frustrates me now is that I never even got that conversation, yet I still took concrete actions to support him.
Why did my needs or the needs of our relationship not matter in those moments? He was accusing me of not being on his side while simultaneously himself not being willing to consider my side or even the side of our relationship. The burden of looking out for us rested heavily on me and required me to be willing to speak up and push back against his self-focused views. In reality, I never had a partner who was willing to face the world with me. He may have been physically by my side and sometimes what he wanted may have aligned with what I wanted (helping me maintain the illusion) but he wasn't really working with me.
So I may miss his physical presence from time to time (and the illusion that he was standing by my side) but all I've really lost in the divorce in this sense is someone who fought against my best interests. I no longer have to spend energy monitoring his decisions and pushing back when it seemed against our best interests.
Last year, he accused me of being too strong. That's because I could never relax and trust him to have my back. I didn't have someone to lean on and share the burden of facing life's challenges. I couldn't even trust that he wouldn't work against what was best for us. I had no choice but to be strong.
Last year, he also told me he wished I would just agree with him instead of asking questions about the things he wanted to do. He wanted me to unquestioningly trust his judgment. Maybe if he had demonstrated he was considering what was best for me and our relationship in addition to his own needs and wants, I could have stepped back more.
So as the uncertainty of next week weighs on me, I'm going to lean into my reclaimed energy and joy now as I continue to face the world alone but without having to battle a partner who doesn't consider me. I'm going to continue to dance in the rain and stomp in the puddles - what a metaphor that is for the way I have been facing the significant challenges of this year!
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