I remember in detail what my first classroom as a teacher looked like, some of the students who passed through it, the crazy way I would act out words, the chemistry teacher down the hall that I would share about my experiences with the fog and clouds on my drive in, etc. And it's not just the good parts of that first teaching job I remember. I remember in detail the embarrassment in the moment I realized I had handed a dad a different child's grade printout, the parent who yelled at me when her daughter didn't get the high grade she expected on a project, the conversation when the principal let me know he would not be renewing my contract.
I can visualize in detail the condo we lived in, where the fish tanks sat, where I hung the fresh evergreen garland at Christmas, the tree in the front yard with berries that would ferment over winter and attract the Cedar Waxwings who I caught getting drunk off them one year, the boy across the street who would bounce soccer balls off our garage door sometimes, etc.
But I can't visualize any of his parents' intrusive visits during the school year, the ones I only really remember from the journal entries I had written about them. And although I still feel like I hold the tensions of the constant fights my ex-husband and I had, I don't remember the details and I can't visualize them. All I have are the feelings that remain from them and the journal entries I wrote about them. No wonder he was so easily able to convince me that I was to blame for those fights - I didn't remember enough to refute his claims.
Going back further to the time period I had convinced myself was so great, I can paint an elaborate picture of the places I lived in college, of the conversations I had with my closest friends, of the afterschool elementary Spanish program I started and wrote curriculum for, the chemistry professor who offered me a research opportunity, the student teaching experience I had with such a fun, older, eccentric teacher, the job I took at the local grocery store when we were living off campus, etc. I even remember the long hours alone in my parents' brown van going back and forth to spend weekends with him.
But the visualizations I have that actually include him are far and few between. I have no recollection of the conversations that clearly made me uncomfortable when he was suddenly changing his graduate school plans and pushing to move in together - those I read about in my journal. I can't visualize how we interacted together in our first apartment. And although I can walk you through the entire apartment - where all our stuff sat, how it was laid out, the path through the grass we had to shovel ourselves in the winter, etc., I can't picture him there with me. His chair is empty when I walk through the apartment in my mind.
If the beginning was truly as great as I had convinced myself it was, why can't I remember those supposedly great memories? Why has my brain selectively held onto all the memories in that time period that don't involve him but let go of the ones about him?
My therapist yesterday asked if I had lost more of these memories since the separation. I really don't think so. I think I discarded them many years ago as a coping mechanism to not counter my belief that the relationship was good or at least good enough, maybe I even subconsciously chose not to store some of them in the first place.
Sometimes even with more recent memories, I remember telling someone shortly after the breakup that he would say or do X and they would ask me more about that and I couldn't come up with a single example which then made me doubt whether I was right in my initial claim that he had done or said X. But then as I processed more and more of my marriage, I started finding journal entries, e-mails, notes, and other writings with detailed examples to back up the feelings I was still holding onto.
There are still some things that I'm confident he did yet I can't come up with any details and I just have to trust my gut on them. Sometimes there is a random piece of a memory to suggest my gut is right but other times I have nothing. Like I have this sensation of repeatedly throughout our entire marriage of arguments ending with me soothing him and my issue getting pushed to the side. I can't give you a single specific example of when this happened. It's just this ingrained pattern in my body alongside one clear memory of a single sentence he said to me once (with a lot of attitude during an argument) that was something along the lines of "I know I'm not supposed to talk about me." But I can't visualize a single thing more about the rest of that specific argument - what came before or what came after.
My body kept score of all that was happening to me. It hung onto the feelings even as my mind tried to erase the details.
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