The Gypsy is Reborn

Remember in my previous post how I promised to get to the leaving part? I’m getting there. I’m just getting to that point in the telling in the same way I did in the leaving: I’m leading up to it.

You’re with me, right? Good. Now here’s the thing. By lowering my expectations in my marriage, I’d unwittingly laid the foundation for my divorce. I didn’t know it back then and had assumed the new path would lead to happily ever after. Bwahahahaha!

Sorry, sometimes the new me interrupts my memory’s train of thought by punching it in the head.

Anyway. Hubs and I are cruising through the years of our marriage. Twenty of them, remember? And things are great–as long as I don’t expect anything from him in the attention department and don’t mind being an afterthought.

See? It sounds pathetic now, but back then I wore my ram horns and was barging through this marriage arrangement as blindly as Billy’s goat. And I would win, damn it! Problem was, my marriage wasn’t a game to be won. Nor was it an accomplishment to check off my Bucket List.

It was my life, and ignoring and smothering and choking and smashing down my inner voice slowly and inexorably bled away my spirit. Until that dawning moment when I realized I was dying, that my marriage was killing me. My spirit. The essence of who I truly was, until I didn’t recognize me anymore. I’d become an adjunct of my husband.

Did I kick the door down to this epiphany?!

Luna shakes her fur.

Nope. I sagged to my knees and cried. Cried, cried, cried. Words like failure, idiot, and dumb wove across my heart, trailing bloody slices in their wake. I suffered under this epiphany and I did it silently. My shame allowed for nothing more. My self-loathing allowed for my self-destruction.

I didn’t care. I started driving fast and taking chances. I let things go. Why weed the flower gardens and rake away the gravel from the edge of the drive when the snow receded if hubs was just going to park his truck on the nascent grass? And then toss the shit from the back of his work truck right next to or onto the flower beds I’d labored and poured my heart into?

Hubs wasn’t metaphorically burying me, he was doing it in reality. Demonstrating his complete, utter, and entire lack of respect for me. For me. Not only his wife, but me. A real person. A good person. A person who had given him every God-damn ounce of myself!

Yeah, well, you see how the anger finally picked its ass up off the floor of shame and rose its triumphant head. Ram horns and all.

Though to be truthful with you, the previous paragraph is short and concise but the time it took for this outrage to manifest spanned the length of writing a real book. It was my first story–Luna–and I’d put so much of myself into the main character my closest friends recognized it instantly. Luna was fierce. But Luna was trapped–until she dared to free herself.

*And I’d thought I’d been fooling my small pack of woman-wolves with my “everything’s fine” face?*

Hubs had been fooled. So when I announced I was leaving to take a job, any job, as long as it took me away, he sat before me stunned. Capital STUNNED. And I couldn’t even say I was surprised by the sight of his slack jaw. Yet his bafflement underscored the fault line in our marriage as vividly as the red pen in the hands of an editor with a vendetta.

Sad. But there it is in a twenty year nutshell. Next, I’ll share the packing up of those twenty years and the Pandora’s Box of emotion that charged the way.

~S.C. Dane

 

 

The Job and the Leaving

In that order. Though to be honest, the leaving had begun before I’d gone searching for the job. The decision had formed so incrementally I hadn’t even known I’d been forming one. Until one day, as ordinary and as profound as opening your eyes to a new day, I realized that walking away was my only option.

Having been married at this point for twenty years, that’s a long-ass dawning.

Except, you know that seven year itch? I’d gotten it. Way back then, merely seven years into our marriage, and I had audaciously scratched it by having an honest talk with the Hubs. Which went something like this: Hubs and I had gone to bed just like any other night–me first and him coming in sometime later. (Which was another red flag of doom, but I won’t unravel the thread here.) Anyway, the story: Our bed didn’t have a head board and was pushed up against the bedroom window–right at mattress level–exactly how we both liked it.

We were both in bed with the window open at our heads. Hubs was sleeping on his back and I was on my stomach, staring out into the night–because the window was right there at my face and I was staring out, breathing, and staring inward, too. That kind of thing. I was awake and hubs was just starting to doze and I gave words to the ache in my heart. God, I remember even all this time later the knot squeezing my throat, making my voice queer. The writer in me would say “reedy” but…
I said, “I don’t think I’m in love with you anymore.”

Hubs opened his eyes. It was dark, yeah, but you know how you know? It was like that. He woke up a little, my words registering along the cusp of his dreams. Then he sort of sighed, or his breathing changed, so I knew he was awake.
Staring out into the night and breathing that fresh air, I said, “I mean, I love you with all my heart, but I don’t think I’m in love with you.” My tone was utterly apologetic. I was apologizing for the hurtful thing I was saying because I did love him. For the things that was a list trailing the length of my arm. But. The one thing erasing that list, or regaling it to next-to-nothingness? I truly and utterly believed he didn’t love me.

Hubs had never been intentionally hurtful or hateful–and right there was the awfulness in what I was admitting. He was a good man. An honest man. A kind man, even.

But he was a neglectful man, and I needed attention. Which was stupid, right? And selfish. So, so ruinously selfish. I was laying there, staring off into the depths of the night, and I was telling hubs he was awful and not good enough and I didn’t love him anymore because he didn’t pay enough attention to me.

How self-absorbed it sounded! Which was why the apologetic tone oozed out of me as I was admitting my pain. My pain was self-ascribed, something that was my problem, not his. He’d done nothing wrong. Therefore, I had. There was something wrong with me! And as I stared inwardly into the night in front of me, my admission blasted away the barriers to truth…which was that I didn’t need to leave him and change my address. I needed to change the address in my head! I needed to change how I saw our relationship! If I did that, if I did away with my expectations then I would see how much he loved me. Who wouldn’t love that back?!?!

Well, you see the problem here, don’t you?

My epiphany disguised my cowardice as handily as a magician draping a kerchief over a table. I had caved. I had forgiven. I had shouldered the blame, making it all mine and somehow molding it into a newfound and shiny nugget of true love.

Yeah.

No wonder I escaped into writing novels about sex and monsters. In the next installment of Gypsy Writer Divorcee, I’ll get us closer to the leaving for the job part.

~S.C. Dane

Gypsy Writer Divorcee

As an author, I’m supposed to share my life with fans ’cause they want to know the person behind the creative genius 😉 Okay. Not a natural inclination for me to share, but here goes:

My first post as the GWD. Can I throw an A in there and make this GAWD!!! It only took me 28 years to get here, but hey, who gives a rat’s sash?
I’ve been divorced for eight years, so yeah, doing the math means I was married for twenty. Wow. I’m going to say that again: Wow.
How in the hell did that happen? I write about love as a secondary job, but holy wedding vows, love is some powerful shit. Not to mention blinding as f*&#.
I stayed with someone for twenty years and then left him. Gawd, writing that down hits home, you know? I stayed with someone for twenty years and then left him. How in the fanny pack did I even do that?
Well, I know how.
It reached a point where it was killing me to stay. Simple as that. Either I died emotionally and spiritually…you know, where you just give up? Where you just can’t even argue about shit anymore because what’s the point? Yeah. So that’s where I was when I decided to become a traveler.
It was either hit the road or hit the bottle, and I have juuuuust a smidge too much self respect for the latter (okay, brief aside. I hit the bottle in binges and chased it with a bit of Idon’tgiveableep. Aaaaanyway…). So, my first excursion was onto the internet, where I searched for a job in another state

The “real” face of S.C. Dane

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Found one. I’ll end the post here ’cause the job and the leaving deserve their own air time. Come on back if you can stand to listen to one more author blather on about her personal life and how she came to write books.
Tata Titties–which I cut off, but that’s another post–for now 🙂

~S.C. Dane