One Way Street
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It’s early in July of 2021. Independence Day took on a profound meaning for me this year. First, I have been fully vaccinated and after well over a year of being in lockdown I have finally decided it’s OK to come up for air. I have been seeing friends, making plans, hugging others and receiving hugs in return. I’m getting my house ready to be sold so I can again be closer to the people and activities I most enjoy. I’m still concerned about the Delta variants (and now there’s a Lambda variant?) and the possibility that I’ll be one of those people who will endure breakthrough disease, but as a friend of mine recently said, “I sheltered in place. I quarantined when I thought I might have been exposed to Covid-19. I wore a fucking mask everywhere I went. And I got vaccinated. I did everything I could and now, for my mental health, I need to live.” Amen to that! I have colleagues and friends overseas who don’t have access to the vaccines we do here in the USA, and it would be silly of me not to celebrate the privilege of seeing light at the end of the tunnel.
This past holiday has taken on additional significance for me for reasons beyond a glimmer of hope from the pandemic. I have recently learned that some of the people I most trusted have been the most destructive to me, and I have cut them out of my life (or at least I put them in a container on a shelf and know not to reveal my innermost thoughts). While there have been multiple betrayals lately, one hit me harder than the rest.
About a month ago, I received a letter in the mail from a woman who had been engaged to a man I was involved with many years ago (around the time I started this blog). In fact, my inability to confront what I felt then and in the years that followed kept me away from my keyboard. I tend to overshare (ya think?), but this is something I didn’t know how to write about. What I learned in that letter brought up emotions that need an outlet, and while screaming in my car has been helpful it’s not as satisfying as putting my thoughts down in words.
This man - let’s call him, “Bob” (because that’s actually his name) - and I separated four years ago after a tumultuous period of living together. During our two and a half years of cohabitation, I paid all housing costs and in exchange he agreed to fix up the house. We made this agreement before I went through with the purchase of the fixer-upper home, and he even weighed in on selection of the house by making sure I found one that accommodated his needs – mainly that it had a potential for a workshop and a separate bedroom for his daughter. Our barter arrangement was only supposed to last for a year by which time I thought he’d allow me to help him build a flourishing carpentry business. He didn’t, and so the roof over our heads continued to be paid for by me alone.
Anyway, I signed the paperwork in December of 2014, and we moved in together in March of the following year. Things were amiss from the weeks before we combined our two homes into one. There were child custodial decisions that were made without consulting me, and I was told didn’t concern me. I saw behaviors in Bob’s daughter that clearly indicated she had mental distress. I was confronted with the newfound and shocking knowledge that Bob’s relationship with his daughter’s mother was anything but cordial. Meanwhile, my concerns about all these things were dismissed. Indeed, during the few months leading up to our move-in date I reached back out to my broker to ask if I could list the house “as is” and possibly cut my losses. I only wish I had been courageous enough to follow through on that instinct.
I won’t go through every detail of the relationship. I will only say that two years after Bob and I moved in together I recognized I had been living in a limbo state of feeling captive in my own home. I had previously quit my job of many years because I needed a significant increase in my income to pay for home repairs and as an insurance for my freedom. I was living the definition of co-dependence. I couldn’t get out of the house without having it fixed, but I couldn’t fix it without Bob. He knew it and held it over my head. He also complained that I hadn’t paid him for the work and said that housing costs weren’t an acceptable substitute since I had made him miserable and wasn’t welcoming to his kid. I suggested I could pay him, but then he would be expected to pay half the housing costs. Bob, of course, declined my offer to pay him for his work and split living costs. (I subsequently learned that whatever money he did earn went to his daughter’s mother; not a penny went to me.) Not being paid and then perpetuating a narrative that he was being taken advantage of was far more rewarding to Bob than the truth that he’s an ass. I suppose that’s why he continued to do work for me after he moved out (though I did pay him for that). Playing the victim was a rather lucrative gig for Bob.
Three years after I bought the house, the environment was downright toxic. My bedroom looked like a bomb had been dropped on it. There were hot wires hanging down around my head. There was a toilet in the hallway. And my asthma and allergies were exacerbated from layers of dust that were left for me to sweep up. Things started to fall apart at my job, as my frustration with my living situation bled into my professional realm (as it often does for me). One night, I was out for a walk while distracted and I tripped over a crack in the sidewalk. I broke my collarbone and fractured a rib (or maybe two). Bob tended to me for a couple of weeks, but I felt his anger towards me for needing help. I suppose my incapacitation distracted him from the things he actually cared about.
By that time, we had stopped sharing a bed (though we had not stopped having sex because, well, that was kind of all we had). It was chaos. He chose that time to go to Michigan to join his family’s startup business in marijuana farming, and during the two weeks he was away never once checked in on me. Upon his return, I told him that I didn’t know what I would do about the house, but it was time for him to move out. These threats had been made before – both my telling him to go and him threatening to leave me in the mess that I allowed him to make. But this time was different. This time I meant it. I told him that I wasn’t withdrawing emotional support but that we needed to separate our finances and lives. I couldn’t keep paying to support him and his daughter while being told to stay out of their business and being left to handle mine on my own. However, I suggested that Bob stay until he found a suitable place to live and until his daughter’s school year was up. I made this offer out of compassion and expected to receive the same level of consideration in return.
Over the next few months as we were working through our separation, Bob made several extended trips to Michigan. I was left behind, in a home that was torn to pieces, while unable to use my right arm. It was at this time I learned my job was being eliminated. Simultaneously, a friend of mine had a relapse of appendiceal cancer that was not responsive to treatment. The last straw for me emotionally was when my cat became critically ill and ended up in the hospital. Here I was, grieving over the state of my home and loss of my partner, feeling guilty that I wasn’t mentally well enough to be there for a friend who was losing her grip on life, struggling with injuries that exacerbated chronic health issues, living in total squalor that I had the luxury of paying for with income I received from a job I was about to lose, and my cat was near death. At one point, I was so overcome with grief that when I went to visit my cat in the animal hospital I collapsed. The veterinarian resident helped me to his office and had me lie down on a doggie blanket he placed on the floor.
I learned in this letter I received a month ago that as this was going on, Bob was already fully immersed in his new relationship in Michigan with a woman to whom he would subsequently become engaged. He claimed the marriage was her idea but whether it was or not is irrelevant. He agreed to marry someone and become a stepfather to her son without confronting the lies upon which his relationship was built.
In the months leading up to our separation, Bob came back to town every couple of weeks only so he could spend time with his daughter in the house that was paid for by me. When he did move out many months later, I was told he was moving to the home of the woman he had dated immediately prior to me. I was devastated because I saw this as evidence that he bounced from woman to woman and I had just been next in line. I had no idea that he was essentially already living with someone in another state, who would eventually buy a home she intended to share with Bob and his daughter. Rinse. Repeat. This certainly validated my fear that I was just next in the chain of women willing to lend a hand, but what’s worse is that this truth was concealed from me for four years.
In the letter I received, I learned that Bob had two years ago begun cheating on his fiancé with someone else in Philly, and that the woman in Philly started doing detective work when she developed an STD. The two women spoke, and the fiancé realized that the story she had been sold about the length and timing of my relationship with Bob might have been another lie. She contacted me to send me a warning, and I immediately got in touch with her to learn more. She was able to easily contradict lies I was still being told and I reciprocated. I felt grateful for the concern a stranger showed for my well-being. I was also relieved that I only found myself in bed with Bob twice in the past year. I had mercifully rejected his advances when he had been in my presence only two weeks prior to getting that letter. I have since received a clean bill of health and now intend to put this entire part of my life in the rear mirror.
Bob called me a couple of weeks ago to tell me his child swallowed a bunch of pills. My initial reaction was to offer to help, but ultimately I resisted the urge to be kind to someone so undeserving of my empathy. In the end all I did was provide my medical opinion about the likelihood she would physically recover.
The letter I received from the woman in Michigan was a gift for many reasons. First, this woman is a total bad ass and I feel lucky for the time I was able to speak to her and for our reciprocal words of support. Second, I was able to protect both my physical and mental health and kick the Bob habit for good. But third, this letter forced me to take a good look at myself and why I might constantly find myself sacrificing my self-worth to please other people. I talk ad nauseam about how invisible disabilities deserve to be a priority. I deserve that for myself too. I understand now that I spent my life being told to believe negative things about myself, but I’m finally on a mission to turn that around, and all because of a piece of snail mail that actually got to my front door. Changing the voices inside my head can be a daunting task at any age but it feels nearly impossible for me as a middle-aged woman. However, I will persist. As I said in a song I wrote back in the days when I used to do that sort of thing, “I will endure. I always endure.”
To try and eradicate the mean voices in my head for once and for all, and to celebrate the author of the letter who may have saved me from myself, I have embarked on the kind of self-help tactics that would have made me roll my eyes just a few months ago. For starters, I bought myself a Peloton! While I’ll never be at the top of the actual leader board, I’m at the top of mine. So far I have to admit that it’s a worthwhile investment. Even my therapist lit up when I told her I took the plunge. Those twenty or thirty minutes per day that I set aside for a ride or a workout, at my own pace, are minutes nobody can take from me. I’m also making travel plans again. I’m going back to school part time in the winter. It’s time I get those Ivy League credentials in healthcare leadership! I’m seeing friends and have found respite in being reminded that I have many of them. I recently reconnected with a friend I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years, and while I’m not the religious kind I know she is, and I told her I think God sent her to me. I do think that’s true, whether God is the universe, quantum energy, or a spiritual being, this friendship delivered exactly what I needed at the moment I needed it. I finally have a job that isn’t half bad with a boss who is nice to me. (What a shock!) I’m recovering from years of illness due to a new treatment I started two years ago. And yes, I’m writing again. Life can beat us down, but I’m trying to learn how to focus on the things that can lift us up.
I still say self-deprecating things as easily as I breathe and understand that I put myself down in an effort to make others feel comfortable. I’m working on that. I’m great at validating everyone else. Now it’s time I learn to validate myself. While I can’t promise that I won’t keep looking back from time to time, I know that life is a one way street and hope to spend most of my time looking ahead.
Love,
Fab4Eyes
