Change Is Good

or How did I get here?

Today, for the first time since my divorce in 1996, I wished my ex-wife a happy birthday. By text, but still.

It's weird, I guess that that has been the case, but divorce is a pretty shitty experience to go through, regardless of the fifty percent that I contributed to the shittiness of the relationship, which I didn't recognize as shitty at the time because I didn't really give it that much thought.

Maybe shitty isn't really the word for it—for her, yeah, since she's the one who filed—at least I didn't see it that way. I mean I see now what a shitty husband I was—in ways that didn't involve cheating, physical or verbal abuse, getting drunk every night, neglecting the kids... you know the typical metrics by which a shitty marriage is determined as such. No, it was my lack of emotional presence; it was my all-consuming desire to not fail at the job I was failing at that kept me away from home more hours than I care to admit. I went in early, came home late, and often went in late at night for a couple more hours. I was a supervisor and I sucked at supervising, so I did a shitload of my staff's work because for the most part, they didn't care one way or the other if it got done. Our clients' work (often research scientists) required timely delivery. Let me add here, though, that it wasn't all of the people who worked for me.

To be fair, I never instilled in my staff the importance of meeting deadlines. But in my own defense, at what point was that my responsibility? How do thirty-year-old people not get that when something is scheduled to be done by a certain time, you plan your day around that? It was something I could never wrap my head around because every job I'd had in photography/graphics/advertising had been very team-oriented. Everyone understood what had to be done and did it. Anyway, that was where my head was at for the last almost-eleven years of my marriage.

You'd think, of course, that my work would be a subject for discussion between us, but no, my mind set was "why should I burden her with this after her long day with the kids?" It was cyclical in that way, I suppose, since the more I clung onto that rationale for not talking about my problems, the more it became a problem that I wasn't talking about it.

I'm typically not the type to blame his parents for the way I acted within my marriage, but neither can I ignore the fact that I never heard my parents discuss stuff, whether marriage related or really anything. There probably is a certain amount of modeling from our parents that comes into play. I failed to rise above it, though. Not long after my divorce, after I'd moved into my apartment, I was on the phone with my mom. My older brother had left his wife after twenty-five years of marriage, and my younger brother had been kicked out of his house by his wife because she'd found out he'd been screwing around with someone. In possibly the only time Mom had displayed vulnerability in the years I'd known her, she said something to the effect of, "I should have shown more love to you kids." It was a bit of a shocker really, because as best as I can recall she had never once said, "I love you" to any of us. (Years later, she did.) Mom didn't kiss us before bedtime... I don't recall getting hugs from her. Anyway, my response to her was something like "Mom, you did the best you could. We're (referring to me and my brothers) all adults and we have to live with the decisions we've made in our lives."

It probably didn't help alleviate her Catholic-fed guilt much, but it most certainly was the truth.

It's kind of weird how the thought of wishing my ex-wife happy birthday brought all this out, but it just goes to show how so much of what we do and say and don't do and don't say are related.