Divorce and Ex-es

I believe you should not ever get one - and ex or a divorce. However, sometimes its just can't be helped.

Its been almost 17 years since we divorced. The anniversary of the event is approaching, and is why I am musing about it now. I've remarried - very happily - and this time it will be forever. My wife and I are soul mates. But in my experience, it has taken an unhappy marriage, and a horrible divorce to really help me to understand and appreciate a great relationship.

Mary (the ex-spouse) and I met in 1975 on an ice skating rink in Houston, Texas. She was just 18 and the product of a very unhappy, even chaotic home situation - workaholic bristly mother, and an unstable homosexual father. And they still lived together! Mom stayed sequested in one part of the house while Dad entertained his gay lovers in another part. She was very ready to get out of the house and be married. While I was a only handful of years older, I should have known better than to get married just three months later. And the full depth of disfunctionality of her childhood homelife was concealed until after our wedding.

Within two years we were blessed with a bright, healthy son, and only fifteen months later a beautiful and talented daughter, both of which are now grown and have children of their own. Unfortunately, these offspring were the only two good products of the marriage. I must assert that I was always a good father, attentive husband and excellent provider. During the early years of our marriage, I attended school at night and earned a mechanical engineering degree, but always devoted weekends and every spare moment to the family. The degree greatly enhanced my earning power, and in my late twenties, launched a very promising career in the oil industry.

The prosperity seemed not to be quite enough for Mary. It was as if the chaos experienced during her formative years required her to construct a facade, so the world would see only what she chose to reveal. While this scenario is true for many humans, the small degree to that "truth" played into her construct was abnormal. While far from qualified for any sort of clinical diagnosis, I believe she was (and probably still is) a borderline sociopath. If facts didn't fit the facade, she would just change them. This means I continually caught her in little untruths. Most were little things - typical of young marrieds. "Did you mail the check to so-and-so?" "Yes" she would answer, but she would not have done it. She lied about the places she went, the people she saw. Little things, Inconsequential things. Very puzzling. While I made note, I only confronted her infrequently about them, because it would always cause a horrible fight and crying fit. "Boo-hoo-hoo. You just don't understand..." While it was true, I didn't understand, for 12 years, I tried to be supportive.

But it began to come unraveled when she stole money from "us". Money just disappeared without logical explanation. She told me she had no money to pay her share of the bills, at one point she was two thousand dollars behind on just her credit card payments - and these were credit cards that I did not know she even had! As a remedy, I borrowed several thousand dollars from my 401K so she could pay off the complete card balances with the condition that she close the accounts. She took the money and made the promise. 6 weeks later, I found out that she had made only the minimum payments, and the rest of the cash had disappeared. "She's so fine, there's no telling where the money went..." The confrontation put a stake in the heart of our marriage.

I suppose some people just get a little crazy in their early thirties, when things don't work out like the fantasies of their twenties. Mary was no different. She had a career, someone made a pass at her while on a business trip, and she disappeared for three days. I mean off the face of the earth. It was a boyfriend she later married. Her justification? I didn't trust her anymore and drove her away. To this day, I am certain she does not believe she was cheating on me.

The marriage officially ended on Nov 21, 1988 when the ink finally dried on the divorce papers. The process of obtaining the divorce was rather painless, after I got over the fact that Texas Dads don't have a snowball's chance in hell in a child custody fight. She got the house, and she got he kids.

While sitting alone in my cheap inner city apartment, I had trouble understanding why my life had to change so radically. And I really, really missed the daily interaction with my children, who were now 9 and 10.

Its the stuff county and western songs are all about....and now I had to live it.