ShootingStar1

My XAH just told me that, 2 and a half years after I left, 150 women later (his count), he is getting remarried.

I texted a dear friend: "I think there should be a new tradition in which the ex-wife gets to give away her former husband in the wedding ceremony to his new wife. Kind of part "good riddance"/ part "better-you-than-me"/ and, a larger part, a sincere, "Godspeed to you and yours".

We all need to move on, and when he told me he was remarrying, my first reaction was to genuinely congratulate him. I am glad that he is reconstructing his life after the debacle of the dissolution of our marriage.

He cannot bear to be alone. He has apparently moderated his drinking. I know that few can do that, but he has immense willpower, and he has suffered being on his own. He has told me that I was a high standard, and hard to find someone to measure up to. I think that the loneliness and terror of dying alone that he has felt may have impelled him toward some greater health than when I was with him. But what do I know? He may just be on his best behavior to entice his new woman to become his bride. The story of their courtship is almost identical to how he swept me off my feet and married me after being suddenly widowed and alone twenty years ago.

There is a part of me that will always love him. Twenty years was too long to just dismiss his impact on my life, and it was truly for better and for worse. Our marriage was intense, intensely good, and intensely bad. The "for better" was glorious and illuminating and joy filled and life altering. We rode the tail of the kite as close to the sun and the moon and the stars as I thought anyone could ever go. We used to go to Disneyland and ride "Mr. Toady's Wild Ride" and laugh and laugh, but in real life, in the end, Mr. Toady drove us off the road and crashed, and like Humpty Dumpty, no one could put us together again. Only when the "for worse" in the marriage vows we took became far too profoundly and destructively impactful to my emotional survival, did I leave.

My daughter, (with my son, my main supporters in leaving him and reclaiming my soul and my life), said "Hallelujah! Thank God! He won't be back to try to claim you again! And good luck to him. He supported me a lot as his step-daughter. He gave me a lot, and he started me on a positive financial track that I will always value. He was one of my greatest supporters, especially when my bio dad was not. I appreciate what he did for me. You can tell him that, but don't give him my address." The damage that he did to her emotionally in his last alcoholic hurrah was insurmountable.

I'd give him away in marriage in a minute, and God bless me and forgive me, if I were to wink as I did it, and inwardly say "I've escaped; better you than me"; and "I hope that he cherishes you as I once thought he cherished me". I genuinely hope that he is capable of that, now, after the grief he suffered from the dissolution of our marriage.

As did I. I began a post on Wisconsin's thread last night about "Reactions when you first joined Sober Recovery", and it reconnected me to the horrors of the life I was living when I ran away from him on July 4, 2012.

The night before I left, on July 3rd, 2012, he was still enraged and blaming me for his ambulance trip to the ER with a Blood Alcohol Level of .329 four weeks before. He had almost died at the restaurant, cocktail in hand. It took 8 men at the hospital to restrain him and he was 69. He threatened me, he blamed me for the ignominy of his hospitalization and the doctors' designation of him as an alcoholic. Several weeks later, on that July 3rd evening, I came close to being a murder/suicide victim as he drove over 100+ mph in his new racing sports car down the highway, weaving in and out of lanes, barely escaping accident after accident. I was terrified. When the Fraud Squad on MY credit card called me the next day to verify his charges of $1500+ on my credit card for porn, I left. I snuck out of the house with a suitcase and my valiant loving little dog, and I never went back. I filed for divorce within the week.

I was in shock. I did not know who he was, who I was, or what had happened to me. I did not know that I was being emotionally and verbally abused, gas-lighted, Stockholm syndromed; I just knew I would not survive if I stayed. For one more moment. It was my intuitive brain that packed my suitcase ever so quietly, called my dog to me in a whisper, and drove silently, terrified that he would see me, out of the driveway for the final time. SoberRecovery, my two adult children, and a compassionate psychiatrist got me through the first months. The details of my story are in the sticky “What Abuse Is”.

What stunned me most when I found an apartment for just me, my dog, a borrowed air mattress, a picnic basket, and a folding chair and table, what stunned me most was the silence. The peace. No one criticized me, yelled at me, and called me unbearable and unbelievable unprintable names. No one said I was vicious. Or frigid. Or a failure as a woman. Or evil and manipulative and punitive. No one threatened me. Or left porn visible on his computer where I could not help but see it to mock me. Or said that he would hang himself from the loft railing where I would see him when I woke up and that would be my fault for being so evil.

No one said anything to me like that. There was comfort from family. There was quiet. There was peace. I think it took me a year of that, with SR support, to just decompress. To stop jerking and jolting as if an attack was always imminent, from some unknown but inevitable evil attacker. I no longer slept in the spare bedroom with the door locked, and a chair against the door knob for when he picked the lock and demanded I come back to his bed.

The first step was understanding and believing that I had suffered abuse. That his behavior was not normal; it was psychotic and depraved. That I had been totally dominated and subjugated, of my own will, and at my own volition, and I had almost lost my soul. That I had PTSD. And most of all, as you dear friends, strangers but the best friends I have ever had, told me again and again, that I did not deserve this and did not have to accept it. That his behavior was beyond appalling and that I was right to leave and stay gone.

That was hard enough, but the next step was even harder. It had to do with the beginnings of my recovery from abuse, of my own will to recover my soul from the debris of my marriage. After leaving him and thinking it was HIS fault as an alcoholic porn addicted narcissistic rageaholic, I gradually and with much humility gained profound insight into who I am and what I did to tank this twenty year marriage, this love of my life love affair. When I stopped thinking that this volcanic explosion and burial of a twenty year marriage was his fault, all his fault, I learned so much.

There is a lot of humble pie for me to eat, and I have served up many helpings for myself. He is accountable for what he did, and it is true that what he did was terribly horrific, appalling and devastating, and I so dearly hope he understands that and never does it again to anyone. In a rare moment of introspection, when he asked me to come back to him a year and a half ago, he apologized to me and said that he thought he had lost his mind for that time and he would give anything not to have done what he did to me.

I think he, at that moment, for that moment, understood the devastation of being he had caused in me. I also, however, understood that he had irreparably annihilated the trust that is so core to marriage and, with that, broken forever my future capacity to ever trust him enough again to honor the intimacy that is the heart of marriage. What was broken in me couldn’t be repaired with him ever again. I could not believe that something in him, in me, in us, would not again precipitate another descent into that hell. And I believe that if I ever went there again, I would never be able to escape again.

And then he forgot that, drifted back into the world without cognitive dissonance, where, since he is sure that he is a "regular guy", he couldn't have done those things, and therefore I either caused them or imagined them. He chose not to continue on the path of ruthless honesty. And that is his right. But I do believe that deep inside, he knows what he did and the devastation and pain he caused, and he does not want to repeat it.

AND, not BUT, but AND, and it cost me many hours of solitary searching and honesty, I was a big player in this equation. My arrogance, my surety that I knew best, cut him off from the necessity to solve his own health problems, deal with his own drinking. My need to control and fix played into his willingness to use any excuse to prolong his drinking and other addictions. Had I said, 10 years earlier, "your health and your drinking are YOUR problems, not mine"... Had I detached and said "I cannot live with an alcoholic who dominates and diminishes and controls me", so make your choice... Life might have been different. Or not.

But I did what I did, out of best intentions and the poorest of results.

I believe that a funny, quirky, psychological trait in us human beings is that when we cut our losses, and make the best decision for ourselves to move forward and as a result, to leave something behind, we begin to regret what we have lost more than we remember what we have willingly abandoned as destructive to our very being. So sometimes, when I falter deep in the memories of the good times, I have to force myself to remember why I left. And when I do, I am again shocked at how bad, how dismal, how depraved it was just before I left him.

I do wish him well, I do miss him deeply, and I do profoundly, deeply, irrevocably, want to give him away. I don't EVER EVER want to live with him again. He is not trustworthy. His rage is too deep, his pattern of blaming me and feeling entitled to rage at me for all of his deepest demons is too entrenched. I left him when I ran away on July 4, 2012, and I left him again a year later when he invited me back in June 2013, and I said no. I left him a third time in May 2014 when he said he had met someone new who was crazy about him, but he "would take me back" if I wanted him to...

My sense, my deepest intuition, is that he has suffered dearly from the loss of his life with me, with me as his wife who saw him as her beloved, did whatever she could for him, and unknowingly, enabled his addictions and alcoholism. At 72, having spent the past 2 years desperately searching for a replacement, I do not know that, with the desperation of living and dying alone as a relentless driver, he has dealt with the underlying issues that caused his emotional rage and alcoholic and other dysfunction. It is not, now, my business to know, or even to speculate.

I need to free him cosmically of his bond to me so that he can move on in whatever way he sees best. At some unarticulated, deep, universal, God-level, I need to set him free, just as I need him to set me free. He recently wrote to me, a few weeks before he told me that he was remarrying, “You were my lover and best friend for so many years that I cannot just forget you.”

The truth is, now, two and a half years later, that I do love him. I always loved him. Part of me will always love him. I can’t make that go away. I have tried. It is just the bedrock truth. There have been many many times when that is NOT how I want to feel. I want to hate him, excoriate him, malign him, disintegrate him, vaporize him, especially for what he did to me, but just because. But the truth is that this tumultuous love affair, intense, volatile, adoring and despairing, was the core of my life for twenty years. I cannot disown what I once owned as part and parcel, as core of myself I do love him, and at the deepest level of my being, I now bear him no malice. I know now that I can live with that, just let it be, as part of the tapestry of my life. I do not have to do anything about it. It can just be. And I can go on and be whatever, whoever, I need to be, for me, for the world I want to give to.

We came together for some purpose that I may or may not understand yet, and perhaps it is in the dissolution of this union that I am finally to come to myself, alone, sole and soul. For myself, of myself, and to give of myself without the impediments that I had when he and I were married. As intrepid and soulful and brave and giving and loving as I was when we met, I was still defining myself by being in connection with – or in rebellion against – another powerful person in an all commanding relationship.

Now I am alone. And I must face who I am, what I choose, what I do, and who I want to become without the buffer of someone else deflecting my true reflection away from me. It is an honest although lonely and difficult place to be. I am coming to believe it is the place of salvation.

An era is over. Two decades are done. So maybe now, my heart is done. Maybe now I can translate the joy and transcendence and passion of what we had when I married him 20+ years ago into something that I contain within myself, without the need for a partner, for him, to own this capacity for joy and love that resides within me.

I am a metalsmith; I work with gold and silver and I transform them in the crucible of the torch, of the kiln. The raw material is what it is. It is the maker who has the capacity to reform it, retool, repurpose it into something of glory.

The suffering, as many of us know, has been great.

Some of us delve deeper into the nature of our souls and what makes us whole and what destroys us. Some of us don’t. And there is not a value judgment there. It is to some extent part of our individual nature as to whether we are deeply introspective or mildly so, or not so. What we require of ourselves we cannot necessarily require of – or demand of – anyone else, even our most beloved.

It is his right and his duty to himself to learn what he wants to, what he can, and move on, as best as he can. Or not. Because I have felt so deeply and felt so much pain and so much loss is more a recognition of who I am, than it is a commentary on who he is or is not. It is the honoring of our mutual and independent souls to recognize, then acknowledge, then finally believe that we have been to each other all that we could be, for better and for worse, and it is now time for the final dissolution of the marriage of our spirits.

And I will cry myself to sleep again, perhaps for the last time, or approaching the last time, and I will wake much freer to create whatever it is that God has next in store for me. I have chosen to not choose him. For the past two years, that was still at some level, my choice. Now he has chosen someone else, as I required him to do, given his need to not live alone, when I would not come back.

My choice is now reverberating with consequence. And I would make the same choice again, and even though it is bittersweet, because it is the only path I can choose and honor the integrity of who I need to become. God help me.

ShootingStar1

Helenlee

I'm speechless after reading that.
Thank you for writing it. It's beautiful.

honeypig

ShootingStar, this is stunning in its honesty, its insight and its beauty. Your courage in the face of all you've endured, your continuing growth, the unflinching way you have faced and continue to face obstacles, both within and outside yourself, is so inspiring.

"Thank you" doesn't begin to cover it.

queenapple

I am printing this out so I read it again and again. The insights you have are truly life-changing.

Eauchiche

Thank You so very much for your thoughtful post!
What do they say? Detach in anger or love, but....detach. Sounds like you are doing a fine job.
Some people make better friends than spouses. I know one lady who regularly meets her ex and his new wife for breakfast. She still cares deeply for him- as a friend.

I too tend to romanticize the past. I drank with my partner to placate him. This added at least 10,000 calories a week to my intake, and resulted in screwed-up blood panels, high blood pressure, cardiac problems and 100 pounds overweight. I probably should have died. I am losing weight now, and everything else checks out just great. My last drink was in March.

My mate has given me a clear message that if I am unwilling to drink and be sexual with him, then I am not worth much. Not much of a relationship in retrospect, is it?

You sound like a wonderful person. I wish you every success!

HopefulinFLA

Shootingstar this is so eloquently written. I am in awe of your ability to convey such deep thought and emotion in your writing. I got chills reading this.

Thank you so much for sharing your story!

HopefulinFLA

I think this should be a sticky!

dandylion

Dear Shootingstar.....thank you for offering this very intimate glimpse of yourself.
I remember, well, your posts as you struggled through this transition in your l ife.

The image of you, that I carry, is of you walking along the water with your little dog-- soon after you had arrived at that first home. Orienting yourself, I expect, to your newly found peace tranquility. LOL!

dandylion

redatlanta

Your writing just astounds me.

Reading today a snipet silly thing about marriage and #1 was 'You and your partner will change throughout the marriage". I think about that a lot and certainly after reading your post. We all enter into it, well for most anyway, not in the same circumstances for why we leave. How many times on here have I read "this is not he person I married", and aside from the addiction, I wonder was the person always that and you just didn't know? How is it, for example, that in a long term marriage there is not physical abuse and then there is? A story shared not just when addictions present. Your story makes me think of those thing in your acknowledgement that you loved him deeply and at one time and it wasn't always this way.

Thanks again for your beautiful writing.

maia1234

SS- so heartfelt! You know what I have learned, that we need to feel grateful that you experienced "real authentic love". You are blessed as a lot of people can't say that they have ever felt true love. You have truly loved someone and that's ok.. you might never feel that again but you have felt it and know what it feels like.

Being angry and wanting to hate him is normal. But you have moved on and he obviously loved you as much as you loved him. He has a disease and that stops him from ever loving you the way you deserve to beloved. I feel I have that same love for my stbxah, after together for 34 years. I have to let him go. I understand that we can love from a distance, we don't have to stop loving him today, or ever. Our choice.

I al ways felt the same, that had I kicked him out 10 years ago he would have gotten help for himself. God has a plan for all of us and this was his plan. We are not In charge.

I guess u should be grateful someone will take care of him when he dies from this horrible disease. It won't have to be you. You will always be his one true love!!!

((((((((((((((Hugs))))))))))))) you have wonderful children that love you!!!

lizatola

Every time I read your story, I learn something new about you and I learn to appreciate you even more. Thank you for being a valuable contributing member here at SR because you inspire me to make changes in my life that I know will lead to new horizons as I have witnessed your transformation lead you there, as well. HUGS!

ShootingStar1

I am overwhelmed by the responses today to my story. I woke up thinking, oh why did I post such a long thing, I should never have clicked "reply".

So I reread what I wrote, and I read what you, my friends who know, wrote.

And here is what I think.

When two lovers have written indelibly on each other's souls, as my former husband and I did, it can never be erased, nor should it be erased.

It was a profound part of our lives, and it was "for better and for worse" and it just was.

We don't need to erase what happened to us; we need to face it, own it, drink in the truth of what we did, how we lived, who we were, until the power and passion of those experiences fades.

Then we can assimilate who we were into who we will become.

There is no freedom in repression or expulsion of what happened to us. Freedom comes when we own all that we were, better and worse, and from that depth of knowledge and ownership, we can begin to move forward in a new, authentic way.


ShootingStar1

maia1234

Way to think SS- No one can EVER take that away from the two of you!!

Our life is a stepping stone to where we are going. Most people would never trade shoes with anyone else. If you hadn't met and married your husband, you wouldn't have your beautiful children!!

There are blessings out there that we are thankful for!!

Rosiepetal

What a powerful touching post, thanks so much for sharing

Fathom

(((((ShootingStar)))))
In my early days of leaving my XAH, I had a really hard time owning my experiences with him. All of the previous ten years with him suddenly felt surreal, like it hadn't really been me. I stopped telling any stories about us, good or bad, because it felt so awkward to be telling someone else's story. It just didn't feel like mine.

These days, it is less awkward. I can't quite remember the turning point, but I've slowly come to terms with the fact that I am everything I am today because of my history. And, it IS my history. I like who I am today, so why shouldn't I proudly own the experiences that got me here?

I love your eloquence, SS. And, I love that you still hang with us on SR. Mostly, though... I love that you are in a much better place right now. Like you, though, I find myself analyzing and reanalyzing events and emotions, particularly surrounding our breakup and divorce. When I do this, I think I'm seeking to understand him and my role in his life still. I do believe he loved me, as I loved him. But, now I am just part of his history, part of what makes him who he is today, for better or worse. And, he is part of my history, and I am not keen for him to be a part of my future anymore. My recovery goal now is to keep focusing on myself and steering my life according to my own decisions and desires. His decisions and desires are no longer my business.

Wishing you continued peace,

Fathom

Argnotthisagain

Profound! Whew, I want to think and maybe even write in my journal after reading that.

I have to get ready for work, though.
Thank you, Shooting Star.......wow. <3

Kboys

Wow. Thank you for writing that.
It makes me feel again, how thankful I am to have found SR and so many like you with so much wisdom and insight to share.
Also makes me realize how much I still have to learn and grow, but I'm starting to feel excited about the journey ahead.

FireSprite

Amazing. That seriously took my breath away, SS, you are living & breathing a true recovery & it is inspiring!


Every time a newbie posts asking to hear a success story I think we need to direct them to this thread.

Wisconsin

Blessings to you, SS! Your recovery story continues to inspire me on a daily basis.

NYCDoglvr

"Women mourn, men replace"