Endings, like beginnings, have no real set definitive time. We may think they do, especially those who like certainty and answers, but even a death starts with the decisions made before dying and continues with the impact on others afterwards. But, we like narratives and, as such, like clean endings and beginnings.
But sometimes that’s not possible.
My marriage ended on December 24th, 2019 when the judge granted us the divorce I sued my wife for. It ended on April 9th, 2021, when I was forced to evict my ex-wife’s stuff from my house. It ended on June 6th, 2019 when we finalized the property settlement. It ended on March 3rd, 2019 when I found the journal. It ended on December 16, 2018, when Laura asked me for the divorce. It ended when she had the affair earlier that year. It ended when I, or my daughter, did whatever we did which broke her to have said affair. It ended when we got together, two people with very different expectations in life who never thought to talk about them. It ended before we met, when those expectations were installed in us.
… and, in one very important way, it will never end, my ex wife and I talking just this morning about the child we raised together.
Laura and I met in 1987 @ Georgia Southern University, dated for 3 months, broke up for 15 months, got back together for 29 years. We both transferred to the University of Georgia when I ran into her as we were entering/exiting the same bus, and that, ladies and gentlemen, was that. It was a sunny day and her lovely eyes, always with that hint of uncertainty, caught my attention again as they did at GSU. If you want to know what Laura looked like at the time, while keeping her privacy, I can say that when my daughter saw this photo of Katarina Witt, she gasped at the similarity to her mother. Especially the eyes.
Got engaged. Moved in together. Got married (really, our wedding should be a copyrighted JohnT™ story, guys, you need to bug me for this one). Bought our first house, a duplex in the suburban Atlanta city of Lawrenceville, Georgia, we rented one half, the other we lived in. Not a bad gig. For the most part, especially post-2000, we worked in the family business, which I briefly discuss in a thread which has become a private project. More on this later.
The problem was, and we were too young to see this though my grandmother made mention of it, was that we were of completely different backgrounds. My family was, completely and 100%, totally made up of what I call strivers, the subset of middle-class people who are always striving, working, and plotting on joining the upper middle classes or even the upper classes. The only possible exception to this was my father, who was naturally lazy, but had the fortune of marrying women who had no problem kicking ass making him succeed beyond his natural level… and when he passed away he left behind a business with $20 million in annual revenue and a 12% profit margin, four kids whom (at the time) were happily married… so at least he was able to recognize a psychological gap in his life and fill it. And, to make things worse for Laura… we could be mean. Especially my mother’s side of the family and, later, my stepmother.
My wife’s family was different. Because of situations beyond this thread, they were almost the opposite - very mild, very considerate, very nice, and as a result Laura is filled with a compulsion to be nice, non-confrontational, and extremely helpful. Very smart, well educated, but too gentle to really understand what she was getting into when she got involved with my family. And my grandmother understood this.
What I’m saying here is… I don’t blame Laura. We can be intense, and Laura went through 20 years of… now looking back on it… just insane pressures that one wouldn’t expect in a normal marriage. Like the time my parents demanded that she and I commit insurance fraud for their benefit. Or how her wedding had more of my father’s business partners than her family members. Or having a daughter with the same genetic disposition as my uncle, a person so intense and easily angered my grandparents sent him to a private Jesuit school in Pennsylvania at the age of 12 because they could not handle him any more. Nothing prepared her for what it was going to be like, marrying a, and marrying into, a family of psychologically damaged workaholics. The fact she lasted as long as she did is a testament to her love for me and Sophia, and dedication to her principles.
And being married to me couldn’t have been easy. I traveled a lot for the family business, I got angry easy (some Entitled Conservative White Guy Syndrome™, some a likely genetic/environmental disposition to anger), I was imbued with the typical selfishness of the young man, and I’m sure I was pretty wild - smart as hell, but never really raised, there were a lot of edges which needed to be smoothed, and lord knows it was difficult for her, especially given her nature. But, to her credit, she tried and did a great job making me a better person.
When we moved to Knoxville along with the family business in 1999/2000, we had a child and then the tumultuous years began - my stepmother became more involved in the business, she was an absolutely abusive manager/person, and from 2002-2004, long story short:
1. Quit the family business
2. Bought out a competitor
3. Lobbed bids at my parents clients, winning some, losing far more
- Going broke.
(As I mentioned, I have an anger issue. I once got publically sick on First Communion wine and have carried such a grudge I haven’t tasted alcohol since. I know I keep harpin)
Laura, it goes without saying, was completely unprepared for any of the above. 3 years of 100 hour weeks on my part, finally failing sometime in 2004, early 2005 with my parents rehiring me (my Dad saying “Well, at least you learned a lot of lessons on someone else’s dime”, which was true enough it drew a laugh), going through the complete emotional journey of watching your husband seemingly sabotage his life.
But… in my family… you just did stuff like this. As a teenager, my older sister refused to talk to my father for 3 years because of an honor issue. If one of us pissed you off, you let the other know. And if you went to extremes, well, won’t be the first time in our experience (sending your 12yo to Jesuit school), won’t be the last (deciding to cold-shoulder your father for years).
What I’m saying is that while the Venn diagram of expected familial interaction norms may have touched between my ex and myself, there sure as hell wasn’t a lot of overlap. And that’s an issue when raising a family.
(And for those of you worrying along these lines, excepting Stepmother #1 (who didn’t last long) and her whole family, who was just trash (the 1970s were my fathers nadir, no doubt about it), there were no sexual or addiction issues at play here, we were just really intense strivers with a strong Calvinist streak installed in us by my maternal grandmother of Scottish descent and a series of striving women my father married. Good times!)
Stepmother #2, Jan, was of the same cloth as my first two mothers - she kicked Dad’s ass, was just as much a striver as my grandmother, and had her own psychological issues as well, with my armchair psychological diagnosis being narcissistic personality disorder. But Jan just didn’t limit her ass kicking to Dad, she kicked everyone around her, regardless of how much they needed her, or she needed them. And the more she kicked… for about 20 years. the time she was with my father… the more successful she became. So she fit in the Venn diagram, but she also moved the Overton window of viciousness.
… and this was the world Laura married into.
Eventually, in 2007, my father passed away (another story™ or three, OMG) in the same year Steve Jobs drove a stake through the heart of Dad’s industry (telephone directories). I stayed another year at the family business, and in the depths of the Great Recession, January 2009, sent out a whopping 5 resumes, one of which caught me a very nice position in San Antonio, Texas, a city about which everyone had nothing but positive things to say. So I accepted the job and we moved out here by April, 2009, Sophia starting the Catholic school she would continue in for the next 6 years.
We did a lot better in SA than in Knoxville. Away from the toxic family environment we made some decisions on how we wanted to introduce ourselves to SA society and, lucky us, became a very early supporter of the man who is currently Mayor. We also got into volunteering, 99% of this on Laura’s urging - partly as a thing to do for Sophia’s development, also non-profits were a world Laura didn’t have the freedom to enter while in Knoxville. And Laura did very, very well, and by extension, Sophia… and, yes, myself… as well. Even nominated for volunteering awards, got to go to fancy dinners, all that.
And sometime between 2014 - 2017, it all fell apart.
And here, dear reader, is where I disappoint you. I’m not going into a retelling of the above years. It’s just too painful and personal (like the rest of this isn’t?, you ask) and the ladies deserve their privacy too. But, a short list of issues would include increasing financial pressures, an increasingly distant and frantic husband with a derailed career, a daughter who worked out her puberty issues via such a level of vitriol it was devastating to Laura and concerning to me, and a couple who had problems communicating because the discussion would turn into an argument and the argument would spiral to being about the argument, then it would spiral to being about correcting something said within the argument, and then it would spiral to correcting the correction of that thing said earlier… and so on, and so on. And, because of this habit, the couple stopped speaking of things important.
In short, a fairly typical and common recipe for marital disaster. Tolstoy was simply fucking wrong, guys and gals - many unhappy families are exactly alike.
When the divorce was asked for in December, 2018, I had but one (again, common) request - that we hold off on telling Sophia until after the 2018 holidays, that we tell her in January. The request was a typical “It’s not me, it’s you” divorce ask, referencing many of the things above with a lot of focus on arguments I had with Sophia (a Jr in High School at this time) and, oddly, my emphatic anti-Trump stance. And, for about a month, that’s how things went.
Until Sophia found the journal.
Mid January, 2019. Sunday night. I was asleep. Sophia sees a black book she noticed her mother carrying around for the past weeks. Mom leaves, goes to bathroom, something. Sophia grabs the book and starts reading. And discovers that her mother kept a (G-rated, thankfully) hand-written journal of her affair. And, Sophia being Sophia, immediately brings it up to an ashen-faced Laura as soon as Laura returns.
I missed the ensuing argument, but a little after 12am I was awakened by my wife who asked me “You do know I’m having an affair, right?”
Well, now I know, yes, but that detail was not referenced a month earlier. And she sits there and confesses, giving me the guys name, etc. And that changed, well, everything.
Next day. Sophia is enraged. She swears that she will hate her mother on my behalf for all time, how could she do this, etc etc etc. And, the three of us at a diner, with the determination of a child who once convinced a man to upgrade his suite at the Beverly Hills Plaza so she can join them on their vacation at their expense (another story™), she enacted her plan to Destroy Mom. Just lashing her with that tongue of hers, me thinking of the misery ahead if I went the same route my friends did, that I saw in movies, of what many expected of me - what would happen if I decided to destroy Laura, enact my revenge, etc etc etc.
And that I could not have. So I made a decision sitting there in that Denny’s: This marriage was over. Not going to fight it, not going to try to win her back, the only thing I could do is calm down my daughter and, effectively, game plan the transition. There’s no blame here - if I was a fantastic husband we would not be at this point. So, I thought, let’s just admit we had a 30 year run which had exhausted its course, our kid was old enough so that custody isn’t a concern, let’s just accept reality and move the three of us to the next stage.
Lets. Not. Fight.
Sitting there, I told Sophia that her intervention was neither wanted nor desired, nor was it done to do me any favors but solely to act out her anger at her mother, so drop the damned act, OK? This may be of Sophia, but not about Sophia. In time, every child learns that their parents are just regular people, bumbling along like everyone else, and Sophia learned this in the same manner which some of her friends have learned about their parents. I don’t know what else to say, but while we will no longer be married, the three of us will always be a family.
We just talked, I speaking to the above disjointed paragraph’s themes, reinforcing the same point: “Continue your life, we will work this out among ourselves, and we will minimize any disruption to Sophia and her goals and dreams.”
So I gave up the anger. Gave up the revenge. Sophia got the message. The relationship between Sophia and her mother was saved. It was touch and go for a few weeks, but Sophia wisely (heh) came around. Being a typical scorned man and joining Sophia on her revenge quest against her own mother would have destroyed all of us in one form or another, I will go to my grave convinced of this.
And as for the affair itself, for a person as fundamentally decent as my ex-wife is, to go to this extreme was, in my mind, a bigger indictment of me than it was of her. (And don’t argue me out of this, I know the people involved more than you do.)
By June of 2019 we had worked out the property settlement. I got the house, the car, and custody. Laura didn’t get the house because the house was purchased by my inheritance trust, and was my sole property. She didn’t get the car because she couldn’t afford it. She couldn’t afford it because Laura never had a full time job in her life, had no savings, had no assets, and didn’t even have a career - the first salaried position she held came to her a month prior to her 50th birthday, 4 months after she asked for the divorce. And custody, really in name only, as Sophia was going to be 18 when the court date occurred, and would be out of high school 5 months after that.
Had she done a bit of prep work prior to the divorce, she would’ve known this would have been the outcome - but she preferred talking to friends than experts, and that helped her not in the least. At one point, I even called a lawyer on her behalf and asked the lawyer to call Laura back, telling Pam (the lawyer, a mutual friend of ours) that Laura really didn’t know what she was doing and really, really needed some legal advice. And, to be honest with myself, I didn’t want to be the one who reminded Laura that she has very little in joint assets.
The divorce became official Christmas Eve, 2019 - we got a lawyer who put the property agreement in the proper legal forms, met before a judge who was a friend of my (soon to be) ex-wife’s, and, in a case which took 4 minutes to adjudicate, that was that.
Laura stayed in the house, with the agreement being that Laura was to move out sometime in the summer of 2020. Well, COVID hit, Sophia’s senior year was ruined, and having Laura there was a godsend for the both of them. But, eventually, high school graduation came… and went… and Sophia went to St John’s University in NYC… and still Laura stayed… and, eventually, I had to evict her from the home she asked to leave 2 years before.
When I look back of the 32 years we were together, we had 22-25 good to fantastic years, 2-4 blah years, and the rest were just wretched. We raised a brilliant young lady who is determined to make her way in the toughest city in America. Laura made me a better person. I hope I made her a better person. I miss her. I’m glad she’s gone. And while I never, ever planned for things to go as they did, I will always be grateful that Laura and I ended our time together by repairing damage, not creating more.