Posted by:
catnip
(
)
Date: August 20, 2018 08:52PM
My now-ex and I got married in February of 1970. We were very happy, and I adored him. Within a month or two, he got shipped out to Vietnam, until December. He sent home an allotment that I could (and did) live on very comfortably. This was in SoCal, the only home I had ever known.
I woke up when my body was ready to wake up (around ten or so), went out to swim laps in our apartment pool, showered, had breakfast, then hauled out my little Smith-Corona and worked until well into the wee hours on short stories for "confession" magazines. I had an agent who sold probably three out of every four that I wrote, and life was good.
Then the DH came home and demanded that I get a "real" job. He didn't care what I did, as long as it provided a paycheck every other week. I told him I was already doing what I wanted to do. We fought like rabid bears for weeks.
He began circling things in the "Want" ads. I was to apply for this one, that one, yada, yada. Every day, he wanted to know how many interviews I had lined up.
I wound up in a Federal job, typing up medical narrations at a Navy hospital for a couple of years, but once I had learned all the vocabulary I needed, I got bored. A friend told me that they desperately needed bilinguals in Social Security, so I applied there, and bingo. Thirty years out of my life.
The now-ex insisted that I could return to my writing in the evenings and on weekends, but every time I sat down and cranked a piece of paper into my Smith-Corona, he would say something like, "There's no dinner," or "The house is a pig pen." He would NOT leave me alone.
I wrote and sold a couple of stories after being employed, but eventually the Muse dried up. I tried my hand again after being retired, but it was like pulling teeth. While I do get a very nice retirement from the Feds, I deeply resent that my writing - the thing that I always felt I was born to do - has left me.
He cheated on me for a number of years with a woman he knew from work, and I wanted a divorce, but he resisted because he liked our combined incomes. We finally divorced, but it was very, very ugly.
He eventually married the other woman, but to this day, she hates me because he made her move out and support herself before and during the divorce proceedings. (It wouldn't look right, see, if he was living with "the other woman" during divorce proceedings.)
According to my son, who visits them occasionally, they might as well be two cucumbers in the produce bin, for all the interaction they have. Oh, well.
I found the love of my life and know what a happy marriage is, so I feel like after 17 years of depression, I'm heading for my 27th year of life with the sweetest guy ever born.
I think that the reason I was so deeply disillusioned was that the only example of a married man I knew was my own father. He and his brother were raised to deeply respect and love their mother (which they both did,) and choose their own life mates with care (which they also did.) I literally never heard my parents fight. I remember telling my best friend this, when we were 13, and she said, "That's not normal. REAL parents fight." But I cross-checked with long-time family friends and relatives, and they all agreed that they had never observed discord between my parents. So that's what I thought marriage should be.