So I'm 63 and living in squalor in an unheated back room of an old double-wide, the last stop on a 17-year odyssey that could have but two endings: 1. Stay and die; or 2. Leave and live.
Before? Businesswoman, ex-politician, artist, mother, writer of mysteries and an off-Broadway musical. Now: depressed, overweight, bad health, chewed nails, wondering whether to keep the $3 winter jacket or sell it for $10 to buy groceries to fix dinner for my educated, wealthy husband.
I realize now that our marriage was a perfect intersection of our pathologies.
I was raised in a grim Swedish Mormon family whose motto was Work, Suffer and Die. Weekend outings were survival drills in our bomb shelter. Put your shoulder to the wheel, we sang, and I learned it all so well: my worth was measured by sacrificing my needs for others. My reward in the next life would be proportionate to my suffering now. And so I found my husband; I could suffer and sacrifice for him.
He has a personality disorder. He hoards things: boxes, money, toilet paper rolls, real property - and me. I was his to control.
He ploughed through life with a wrecking ball. He never opened mail; he hid or "lost" it. He refused to file taxes. The IRS arrived. I filed the taxes, paid his bills, solved his disputes, cooked, cleaned, shopped, repaired properties, and spent all my money taking care of him while he used his money on properties from Hawaii to New York, including a Paris apartment, all of which, he assured me, were ours for retirement. I believed him.
Six years of couples therapy. We worked. We worked! And things got better. But he quit therapy, and the monsters roared back to life.
When my folks, who had a nursery in Oregon, became sick, I went out to help. My husband loved the property. He loved being a redneck gentleman farmer. When Mom died, he bought the land so Dad, who had Alzheimer's, could stay home. We moved into the back of Dad's doublewide. My husband worked via computer. I cared for him and Dad. I ran the nursery with our Hispanic crew, who heard everything, including his tirade about my wastefulness when I threw out the refrozen bags of peas I used to cool my mother's overheated body as she lay dying.
My writing collapsed, replaced by fear. When he drove our '89 Mercury (his dead mother's car) at high speed on I-5 (non-working seatbelts) I asked him to slow down. Braking to twenty. "Is this slow enough for you?" Increasing his speed. Once he hit a cat and kept going. I begged him to stop. He would not.
Dad died. My appendix burst the same week. I ignored the pain, took care of family, funeral. Sacrifice! Then: Hospital. Septic. Failed kidneys. Ten operations. I nearly died. My daughters cried when they saw the squalor. "Leave him, Mom, or you will die here," they said, trying to clean up. His yelling at them for "touching his things" was drowned out by my childhood voices: Suffer.
I was too weak to work. "You're so debilitated you can't even walk around," he said. If I expected to remain with him, I was required to find "gainful employment," say, at the grocery store, to bring in money. "If you don't like it, don't let the door hit you in the ass."
What was I doing wrong? Why couldn't I make this work? And then someone put a name to it: Abuse. And oh, the power of naming something, and the light bulb went on. I cried because it was true, and because I was ashamed, and didn't want it to be true. I knew it was over the moment it had a name.
So here I am, facing his promised "nuclear option," maybe ten years of litigation, like his first divorce. And he has the money to do it. And I will be 73.
It's frightening. It isn't the bomb shelter drill. It's the real thing. I climb in and out of black holes. I'm broke until. . . until when? Who can tell? All I know is that I will have to put my shoulder to the wheel to survive until a court declares The End.
But here's the thing. I'm alive. I'm free. And I'm writing this essay, the first substantive piece of writing I've done in four years. So Praise the Lord and Pass the Affidavits - and make mine water. No ice. I can't afford a martini. Yet.