A memory reminding me how little he considered me

A winter storm is covering so much of the country and so social media is filled with photos of winter scenes.  It triggered a memory I had long forgotten.  When we got married, we were living in an apartment complex in Burnsville, Minnesota.  The apartment came with one garage space and one uncovered parking space.  In the midwest, garages matter more, especially in the winter, because it is a pain to scrape ice and clear snow off your car every morning before going to work.  A garage keeps it dry and eliminates that nuisance.  And plowing isn't always great in parking lots and so at times, we had to shovel snow around our car to even get out of the space.

Unsurprisingly, my ex-husband insisted on full time use of the garage space for his car.  It wasn't even something he was willing to discuss.  Even in our earliest days, I guess I recognized he cared about his cars more than anything.  But I did push back a bit asking that if he got the garage space, he would at least help me clear my car in the mornings.  He very reluctantly agreed although ultimately, I still ended up doing a lot of scraping and shoveling on my own.  It's not that I couldn't handle it but if I had married someone who considered me, I wouldn't have had that fall so disproportionately on me.  I wouldn't have even needed to advocate for myself.

Fast forward half a dozen or more years, we owned a house in Brookfield, Wisconsin that had a two car garage.  One summer he bought a used Porsche convertible (or maybe it was the year he bought the mustang - I forget what came first).  When winter came, he decided to park his sports car for the winter and purchase a "beater" (or so he liked to call it) to drive in the winter.  He actually had the gall to initially suggest he would take both garage spots that winter (one for his sports car and one for his "beater").  I shouldn't have had to advocate for myself to be able to use half of our jointly owned garage.

I knew better too.  I knew this wasn't how a man who loved a woman treated her.  I had such a different experience growing up.

I can't even count the number of times I walked out of the house in the morning as a high school senior or college student home from winter break to find my Dad had already cleared my car for me.   Or that time as an adult, when I arrived at the park and ride to catch the bus to work to discover they had only plowed the aisles.  I had give my little car a lot of gas to get over the windrow and into a parking spot.  As I was trying to park it, I had no clue how I was going to get my car out of it at the end of the day so I e-mailed my Dad.  When I got off the bus that evening, he and my mom were waiting for me.  He had already shoveled out my car and cleared all the windows.

Some of these examples of such a lack of consideration from my ex-husband go back to the very beginning of our marriage or even before the marriage.  Why did I accept a man who had so little consideration of me?