For more than five years, I have been under increasing attack and castigation by my own husband. Oh, he's quick to say, when I use the word, "abuse" to describe his behavior toward me and now toward the children, "I haven't touched you." And in his mind, he's alright. He still have room to do as he does, because it isn't physical. Never mind the physical effects on my health and the bouts of depression and anxiety attacks, he "hasn't touched" me.
The last Sunday that we hosted our home church group at our house (he always avoids the house during these hours), that was August 17, he waited until all the company had gone, and then came across the road from the barn to the house, and stormed in demanding something to eat. Since I had some delicious broccoli salad left from the gathering, I put that in front of him. He started yelling about no meat, although it did have bacon in it, and why didn't I make him something to eat, like a good Christian (always said with scorn and derision dripping in his voice)...so I told him that I had just been entertaining many people for whom I certainly had cooked, and baked, and in fact a good Christian lady had made that salad. He spat it out on the table, before proceeding to eat the rest of it anyway. All things considered, this episode had not garnered enough reaction from all of us, didn't quite have the desired shock value that he wanted. So he tried again, and this time he attacked the character of a very wonderful young man in our congregation, and that of our oldest daughter, the one who wants to be gracious to all no matter what, who goes out to milk the cows unfailingly. He said something so ugly and in such a foul way, my poor daughter lost her composure and screamed at him to stop it! shut up! I hate you! And my second daughter and oldest son were right there for this disgusting performance. (Our three oldest children are 17, 16, and 14.) I stood there and defended the young man's character, to this pig, while the children (not the oldest, she had run out to get away from him) chimed in with support. I did my best to keep calm and used only rational statements. I have gotten good at this, now I have had my eyes opened since the beginning of the summer, to the fact that he loves to control me through my mood and press the buttons that make me feel most hated. Although, there is no "feeling" about it anymore: he said that he hates me now. And after I made it clear that I would not be forced out of my home or away from my children, he promised, "then I'll just torment you until you leave."
My daughter had told him to stop, and he turned to her, that sweet, beautiful young woman I admire so much, and said to her, "fuck you. No girl is gonna tell me what to do."
Later, I confided to a friend, the latest barrage of garbage. It was her son who had been threatened with smearing by my "husband."
"That's all just words," she said. And I know this was to try to calm me to where I could appreciate that something has gone desperately wrong and twisted in my husband, and she wanted me to keep focused on how hurting he is. How hurting he is.
Words, said another friend, are stronger than any fist. She is right. And this is not the life and the plan, that "hope and future" that God has designed for me or for the six children I spend my life attempting to nurture.
My children are all upset. They fight me, they fight each other, in ways they did not before. The core of our home life, homeschooling, is in jeopardy because of Daddy's passive-aggressive attempts to derail it, with having the t.v. on whenever he is in the house (an instant draw for the children), and because I am simply the easiest receiver for the angst they have built up. They know he is wrong, and being monstrous, but they cannot go after him.
God is not calling me to grin and bear this. He is not calling me to just love this monster through it. He has shown me how we can have peace, and how we can be free from the perverted "freedom of speech" that this man has chosen to wield ever since before our sixth child was born. By degrees it has all progressed from insulting my intelligence and telling me to just keep my mouth shut, always at the meal table with the children around us...to telling me repeatedly that I don't have any power here, that I don't own anything here, not one thing, not one! so I'll feel that I have to depend on him financially (and when I've said, "don't speak to me that way!" he says, "there's the door if you don't like it")...to telling me to just "do your job" as I struggled to get out of bed in time to make a midday meal, in the depths of depression, and then making snide remarks to the children which I could hear, about how "your mother doesn't [fill in the blank] anymore." Then the children came to me at summer's start and told me that his sudden fixation with Jill Barton this and Jill Barton that was making them uncomfortable, and the details woke me up. I confronted him, after the two girls confronted him, and we were now at a point of You against Me. I have taken the stance of defender of the sanctity of a home and the children/family unit in it, and for a period of weeks we took every blowup chance to urge him to come back to being the good husband and father he had once been. But it has all met with hate, whatever hurtful things he can think up on the spot, and oh yes, the counter that I am the controlling one, because I attempt to do things by standards.
And it hasn't all been verbal speech on his part. He gave up personal hygiene, except for when he goes out in public. At home, he comes into the house and peels off his barn smutted outer clothes, throws them on the family room floor by the washer (we built a room in the garage to house all the dirty things, it is a few feet away, and has a separate entrance through the garage into the house). Then he sits at the table, in stinking underwear, demanding food. Like as not, when it comes, he digs in while the children are still gathering to say grace, and then leaves the table for his recliner, which smells of sweat, manure and other filth, to recline and eat the food balanced on his bloated belly, with the t.v. turned up obnoxiously loud on a show that is either Law and Order Special Victims Unit, or something containing about 5 bleeps per sentence. Many times he will have "washed up" at the kitchen sink, and grabbed one of my good kitchen towels to wipe on, and now that I've asked him to please not do that, he also rubs a sweaty face with it, then scrubs under his reeking underarms, and hangs it about his neck to taunt me. So I have had to put away all my nice country kitchen towels, and use paper towels. So he went for the stack of cloth napkins in the drawer. I had to put them away, too. Maybe my handknitted placemats will be next. His dirty socks end up wherever he peels them off, too. Then he criticizes me for "not keeping the house clean." Yeah.
Long ago, I realize, he killed the desire to be with him. He has been my enemy except when he wanted sex, and now he is my declared enemy.
**************************
Later tonight: It turned out to be my clean, knitted dishcloths. He went for my kitchen sink to splash around in, then pulled out a clean dishcloth from the drawer. I tried. I said, "I have asked you to please not use my kitchen linens. Look, here are paper towels, you can use them." "I don't want to waste them," he said, which is utter nonsense. I buy them very cheap at Aldi's. I pointed this out, and the fact that we all use them for the purpose of drying hands and counters. I said I thought he was doing this, even after he'd been asked not to so many times, just to aggravate me. "You're nuts," he said.
Please, do not anyone get on a high horse and tell me that God hates divorce. I know that. Don't I surely know that, as steeped as I am in all the theology, and as constantly as I have endured the ridicule for being seen reading my Bible, looking things up in my concordance, taking notes. I also know, that my husband divorced me years ago when he took to torturing me. There is no relationship left in this name-only marriage. So to hold me to the letter of the law is only to imprison me and my children, to hold us captive to my own ideal, while he savages me and the children, because HE doesn't hold to my ideals or to God's standard for the man.
No comments:
Post a Comment