And So It Begins

S

You don’t know me but you think you know something of me. You have never met me but you think you have, in some small way, through the words of my husband. You are on far sturdier ground than I because I know nothing of you except that you make my husband’s heart beat faster and he won’t hold my hand now he has held yours.

You think you know the following: that I will never change my ways, and I will never be enough for him; I will continue to bring him pain and frustration if he continues his life with me. I know this because you told him so in a message that I read.

You think you know that I can be nasty and mean to him because a third party, who I trusted until recently as a friend, has unscrupulously listened to pocket-dialled conversations that had a context to them that that ‘friend’ was not privy to.

You think you know that I speak to him like a school teacher speaks to a child because he told you that. And that is all fine and possibly all true but there is so much more to our story (and my story) and I want (need) for you to hear it. It’s the one thing I ask for in all this. Whilst he messages you in another room of the home in which we raised our family, I write this to you at the same time.

You think you know that our passion for each other dried up long ago and you think you know that we don’t make love anymore, and you think you know that we are meant to separate and that it’s okay for you to sleep with my husband and caress him and make him feel good about himself because he’s told you that I already knew we were separating and that I already knew the writing was on the wall, written in the stars, that I should have expected it and seen it coming, and it must be obvious to me, his wife, that it was okay for you both to do what you did. I think he told you that I might even be okay with it and you both believed it.

You think you know all this and more because my husband has made you believe these things about me and about our situation because that is his perception of the truth. He is entitled to express his perception of his truth. But it is, and only ever can be, his truth. Not The Truth. I know enough about life and relationships and the human condition to know there is no single truth. There is no single story. There are only ever perceptions of truth and they often intersect and they are often paradoxical.

As the beautiful and wise Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells us, our lives are composed of many overlapping stories. She warns us of the danger of listening to a single story and believing it to be the only one.

Nothing of who I am or what I stand for or what I believe in or what I feel or what I would do for those I love has been expressed so far in his truth to you because my truth is only mine to tell.

You don’t know how, when we met, I fell in love with him at first sight. That, at nineteen years old, in a country foreign to us both, I never knew that someone could love me the way he did: that our passion was fierce and loyal and protective, and exceedingly fragile.

But you also don’t know that, a few weeks after we met and I realised I was pregnant, he couldn’t handle the way the narrative of our love-story was playing out. He got frustrated with me when I felt sick and anxious at the thought of having a child at twenty and of being in another country and having to manage the early fears and uncertainties of pregnancy without my family. He told me to just get over it and get on with it when I felt I couldn’t move one morning at his aunt’s house in Colorado Springs at Easter. He told me that other women do it so you can too. He was mean and angry when, after talking with his aunt, I chose to tell him I wanted an abortion, and he felt betrayed by his aunt for allowing me the space to speak of it. But he took the anger and pain he felt out on me and refused to speak to me for days afterwards and actually left me to go mountain-climbing whilst I waited for him, unknowing if he would ever return to take me to the clinic: I stayed back in our room in a foreign city, in a cold and foreign country, waiting for him in our bed and not knowing if he would ever come.

Just like I have been waiting for him to come home to me these past few weeks: not knowing has been a way of life for me. His unpredictability, his moods, his withdrawal, his anger when he doesn’t understand something I do or say. I know he says I do that too but he has done it all along and I loved him too much to see it as clearly as I do this day.

He yelled at me once in a grocery store in Denver when we first lived together in the youth hostel. I was so embarrassed and angry because I had never had someone treat me that way before. Not a man. Not in public. And it was over a small jar of Vegemite I wanted to buy to have a taste of home to quell my homesickness for Australia. I probably should have left then but I was young and in love and didn’t have the wherewithal to see the path ahead if I stayed or if I left. So I stayed because it was safer at the time. And love. Love played a big part.

There was another time, not long after the abortion, when we had a small party on the roof of the hostel in Denver and I said or did something that upset him and I didn’t know what it was. Whilst I don’t remember the details, I do remember feeling so intensely confused by his accusations and him accusing me of lying when I tried to explain my side. Again, I was twenty years old; younger than our daughter now, and I remember thinking: this is not good. I can’t have this happening to me for the rest of my life. I thought (but I didn’t know for sure) that I deserved better. But he apologised and we made up and the honeymoon cycle began again and all was well for a while; as it always would be down through the years; 29 of them coming up in March next year.

He both hated and loved me for spending the last of my remaining money in Denver on a Georgia O’Keefe print of a vulva-like flower and a vase of real flowers to brighten our room. He was shocked that I could be a person who thought so flippantly of money that I could spend so unwisely; but he, conversely, loved that about me as well and told people of that love for years to come. It became one of our ‘stories’: this wonderful, quirky girl who turned up one day at the youth hostel, turned his head, and made him fall in love. This beautiful young thing that never recognised her own ethereal kind of beauty; who irresponsibly spent her last money on art and flowers but who made him mad with desire.

You don’t know any of that because you can’t know it. But I am offering it to you now because you have shared him without my knowledge; the man I have loved and been loved by for all these years and so you might as well share my story too. It’s really my only defence in all this. And I deserve something now he cares more for your well-being than he does for mine. Now he answers your texts and not mine. Now he yearns to be with you and not me.

Do you have any idea how I missed him when he went away to Germany this year and I realised that I truly wanted to rekindle our romance? I cried so much when he was away because I realised he was the only one who could soothe me in my depression and make me feel as though I was going to be okay. But those months he was gone I understood real loneliness for the first time and I had a tiny sliver of insight into how someone could be driven to take their own life. I yearned for him to come back and hold me in his arms and rock me and tell me if was “going over”. But he rarely emailed me and rarely replied to my “I miss yous” and all the time I grew sadder and darker, I now know that he was getting what he needed from you.

I honestly thought that now the children had left we would find each other again and begin the transition into the second half of our lives together. I thought we could go camping more and go out and listen to live music and make love without having to worry about anyone hearing us. It seems so foolish now but I dressed up all pretty to pick him up from the airport that day he arrived home and my heart skipped a beat at his handsome, tanned features and beautiful body. I really felt a desire for him I had not felt in a very long time and I was excited to have him home and to show him the love I needed to offer.

But he kept ignoring me and going out for hours and hours at a time and sometimes I would make dinner for us and he wouldn’t come home. I honestly was blindsided when he told me he didn’t want me anymore and I paid for our daughter to fly from Melbourne so we could sort ourselves out as a family. And it was hard and I was devastated but I accepted it and our children accepted it and we tried to go on as well as we could and keep our love and care and respect for each other intact.

But he kept going out and not coming home and telling me he was bored and staying away from me and I was hurt that the last weeks and months we had together were marred by his absence and silence. I felt sick with worry and fear for the future and I had no one to turn to. I turned it on myself and blamed myself for his disdain for me; his not being able to stand my presence. What a fool I must seem to you now that I didn’t once realise he was spending his time with you and then coming home and lying to me about it. I believed in him and trusted him so much that I question now my own blindness. And even my sanity. But I also think part of me is just pure and I see the purity in others and that makes me more vulnerable than most.

But my words and my story matter. And that night I came over to our mutual ‘friend’s’ house looking for him when he failed to return home, and I saw the soft light behind the window shades and heard your soft moaning, and then believed him when he told me it wasn’t him in that room? That’s part of my story too, unfortunately. And it’s where yours intersects with mine, unexpectedly and uninvited. I am just glad I believed his lie when he came out looking confused and dishevelled at 1.30 am after I knocked and pleaded for him to come out to me, his wife. And you too should be glad I believed his lie that night because I had violence in my heart and I might have hurt you. I probably wouldn’t have, but I might have because I found my inner scream that night standing out in the freezing cold, the white of my breath coming in harsh clouds out of my mouth as I raged with the pain of an animal. That night I turned monstrous with the head of a hyena and the hindquarters of a wolf. I reached what I thought were my limits that night. I have since found my limits have been displaced and reformed.

Here are some things you don’t know that I need to tell you:

You don’t know that he gave up eating normal food for weeks before he finally arrived in Australia in 1991 to meet my family and that he only ate apples for weeks on end like a crazy person. You don’t know that I was so excited for him to meet my brothers and my mother and dad and to take him to all my favourite places and shower him with the love I had needed to since we had parted five months earlier. But when he arrived, he was so skinny I nearly didn’t recognise him at the airport and he wouldn’t even eat the specially-bought jam and lovingly-purchased food and drinks I had wanted him to have when he woke up that first morning. And on our first meal out with my family on the beach at sunset, he refused to eat.

You don’t know the fact that our first apartment in Subiaco had no proper bed but only a mattress on the floor and no fridge and no chairs at the old dining table we borrowed from someone. Or the fact that he insisted we have no television so, when I got in from work every day where I worked physically hard in a warehouse, I had the choice to sit, read, or sleep. Except on Tuesdays when we walked into the city to see a movie or that, when I caught chicken pox, my brother loaned us a television so the days of awful sickness could at least be broken by watching a movie or a talk show. And I remember watching “Grease” and him telling me the sickness was “going over” because that was the direct translation from German and we have used it ever since in a loving but joking way whenever one of us is sick. But you never knew the subtle control he had of me with what we ate and spent and did together on the weekends. The fight we had on that mattress when he threatened to leave me and fly back to Germany. Or the huge argument he got into with the real estate agent about the bond money and I felt sick over his anger and aggression.

You don’t know that when we travelled back to Germany and lived there for six months we lived in a tiny attic room that had the bed in the lounge-room and the mosquitos from the river that ran below the kitchen window were so huge there were blood-spatters on the walls when we attempted to kill them with books or the palms of our hands. You don’t know that I am allergic to mosquitoes and they left angry, itchy welts on me for days.

You don’t know that, when we travelled through Vienna that year, two years after first meeting, and I fell off my bicycle and under an on-coming truck, that he rode on unaware of my accident and strangers had to help me up and onto the side of the road before he realised I wasn’t behind him and came back for me. But he was angry with me for falling off or not being careful enough and he took his frustrations out on me because he was angry and obsessed about the lack of proper cycle paths in the Austrian city. He begrudgingly took me to hospital, or that’s how it felt to me at the time, to have my leg checked. You don’t know that my knee has never been the same and I still can’t kneel on it because of that fall and that, when I found myself lying on the road with the truck looming over me that day, I thought I was going to die.

And you don’t know we broke up on that trip once we reached Hungary and I was too afraid to cycle anymore and I had my passport stolen and we couldn’t travel on to Prague as planned because I had no visa. I felt so bad having to line up in the queue at the police station and the Australian Consulate to order another passport and it cost money that we needed for our trip and, again, he was angry and I felt undone by it all and never enough. We lay in our tiny tent in the campground in Budapest, side by side, and called it quits. But we had nowhere to turn or no one to talk to but each other and so went on together back to our attic apartment in Germany and slowly and sadly made the flight bookings.

But you also don’t know that we couldn’t live without each other once I returned home to Perth and so he flew me over to Germany for Christmas and we reconnected and made love in the little room we booked in Obersdorf, and we walked through the snow and drank too many Bloody Marys; and I wore the little satin pyjamas I bought especially for the trip so we could slide together as one body in bed. And we did and it was one of the greatest memories of my life.

You don’t know that when we were married I wore a second-hand wedding dress that cost me $160 because I couldn’t care less about things like that. Or that I had him place on my finger the second-hand fake amethyst he had bought me in America when he asked me to marry him the first time when I was pregnant and we had no money because we were travellers and, anyway, I couldn’t care less about diamonds or jewels or expensive things that could never express or represent our unique love. You weren’t there when we chose no wedding cars, no bridesmaids, no bridal showers or pricey decorations for our simple wedding; when it was just us in front of a huge fireplace with 43 friends and family and the ceremony was in both English and German and we rolled back the big rug and danced to The Blue Danube and ate Black Forest cake in the shape of two hearts.

You don’t know how he sat in the birthing pool at the hospital for hours and hours rubbing my back when I was trying, unsuccessfully, to deliver our daughter and that he was so white when I screamed in pain because the epidural was too late and only worked down half my spine as she was forcibly removed with suction, and that the staff turned from me to him and tried to calm him down and stop him from fainting by offering him broth.

You don’t know that he saw and held our daughter before I did and sung to her Braham’s Lullaby which he had sung to her every day she was inside me and that he gave her her first bath whilst I lay unable to move from exhaustion in the bed down the hall. You don’t know that, when we got home to our rented house, he carried her, wrapped in her blanket, outside to show her the stars and let her smell the rose petals that she crushed in her little fist and wouldn’t let go.

You don’t know that, when I was heavily pregnant with our son, and had to use a walking stick for the pain in my hips, he screamed at my mother for arriving late Christmas morning and it was the beginning of several awful, long, and emotionally-painful days when they refused to speak to one other and we spent a family holiday down south in anxious separation and I, barely able to walk due to my heavily-pregnant belly, would have to go out to the granny-flat at the side of the main farmhouse and cry soundlessly to let out the pain so no one would hear me cry. You don’t know how I cried for my family to be healed before the baby arrived. You don’t know that my husband seemed to not acknowledge my pain or understand my fear that I was about to give birth and needed safety and security and unity for my babies and myself. You can’t know my vulnerability then over fears for my babies, and you can’t know it now. You can’t know that it doesn’t matter to me that my babies are now 19 and 21 and the most amazing young adults anyone could meet. They are, and always will be, my – our – babies and I fear for them now as much, if not more, than I did then in that farmhouse, as I cried silently on the floor with by back slid down against the wall.

You don’t know he stayed home with our children for seven years and took them to playgroup and kindergarten and school when I worked to support our family. You don’t know that he toilet-trained our boy in two days and of my pride in my husband for doing that and being the one-in-a-million father he was to our children. You don’t know the lived experience of his depression at being an immigrant, stay-at-home father with no male support as it was the early 2000s as the other men in our neighbourhood and playgroup families didn’t do that. You don’t know how I encouraged him to attend art school and rejoiced that he seemed to have found his calling in that world. But you also don’t know that I had to keep working in an emotionally-charged profession in hard high schools with unstable and sometimes violent teenagers and try, at the same time, to be the very best mother and wife I knew how to be with all the pressure of maintaining a home and a mortgage and school fees and all the minutia of everyday life pouring down on me and us and trying all the time to remain balanced.

You might know something of the sculpture he smashed a few years ago as I believe he somehow blamed me for his frustration and told lots of people how he took a sledge-hammer to it. He probably told you that it won the Mundaring Art Prize in 2010 and that it was titled “You Are Here” and the symbolism of him smashing it to pieces in our house was not lost on anybody. But did he tell you that he smashed it after an argument with our daughter, only sixteen at the time, about onions in the food he cooked for her? Or that I had to stand between them both and look her in the eye as she repeated she was sorry to have angered him about the onions and say to her harshly so she heard me like never before that this was NOT HER FAULT. And a man’s anger like that, even the father she adored, would never ever be her fault? I don’t think you know that part, do you? I know he didn’t smash the sculpture over the stupid onions but she didn’t know that at the time and I would rather die than see that look on my daughter’s face again. And I would die to keep my children safe.

You don’t know that, above all else, I am most proud of being the very best mother I know how for our two precious, beautiful children. Or my passion and conviction as an educator; the legacy I have left for my students to believe in themselves and know they are worthy and to lead rich, creative lives, and to know that all people are broken in some way, but all people are also richly-deserving of joy and love.

You don’t know any of these things and so much more. Of the last few years when raising teenagers and financial and sexual problems have pulled us apart from each other. Or that my children and I suffer a form of diagnosed Post-Traumatic-Stress- Disorder because in November of 2010, when our children were 11 and 13 years old, I had to be held up by a stranger whilst I said goodbye to my husband in an ambulance bay behind Midland Hospital because he had suffered the worst kind of heart attack possible and no one thought he was going to survive. You don’t know the look those paramedics gave me when they handed me his leather wallet and doctors were running everywhere and he was loaded into another ambulance and driven away to Royal Perth Cardiac Intensive Care Unit and placed in a coma we didn’t know he would come out of. Or that they had to chill his body to make it cold enough for a greater chance at not having brain damage when and if he ever awoke. I held that cold hand day after day in that horrible place and watched the tubes keep him alive and I honestly thought I was seeing him alive for the very last time on this earth and tried to prepare myself for widowhood at 40 years of age. And that I had to tell our children that the chances of him surviving were very slim and the doctor told our daughter that she needed to prepare herself for her father’s death and that our little boy pretended to be his favourite super-hero to survive the devastation of what an 11 year-old boy can’t survive alone.

You also don’t know that, when he did survive, the children and I were confronted with a violent, paranoid man who had had so many drugs running through his system that he went a little bit mad the night we brought him home and that I had to call a friend to come and help at 10 o’clock at night because Robert was drinking beer and kicked a table over in anger and that the children and I sat out on the grass together, huddled for protection, whilst we waited for the friend to arrive and that Robert remembers none of this and even accused me at one point of making up the heart attack. I reiterate that this was a result of the drugs he had been on for the induced coma but it was still a dreadful, unnerving experience for me and the kids and one indelibly marked on our psyches.

And he and I have never been right since because he took up smoking again almost immediately and our daughter caught him and begged him to stop and he wouldn’t; and he drank too much for his fragile heart to bear and I took both these things as betrayal after all we’d been through and that he didn’t remember any of our most painful moments seemed to me the biggest loss of all. And that was too much for my fragile heart to bear.

But I have never stopped loving him; not for a second, all these years. No matter what, I have loved him through it. Even when I was so angry with him that I imagined walking away from it all, I still loved him. We just built layers to protect ourselves over the years of hurt and misunderstanding and I focussed on the needs of our children and surviving the pressures of my profession, which are many and complex. But he gave up when I never did and never would. Him giving up on us is the hardest thing I have ever had to bear. He runs from pain and I don’t. That is one of the biggest differences between us. I stand and fight and he runs. He ran from the army in Germany. He ran from his homeland to America. He ran from me a few times when the going got tough. And he will now run again. I am honestly, when I think of it now, amazed that I have kept him for this long. As I write this letter to you, we have been together 10,461 days. 7,843 of those days were spent raising our children. It’s our 25th wedding anniversary on the 12th December and that will be 9,081 days married.

As I write this, he is looking at some place you have found for him to move out to so I guess this is really the end for us. This last weekend when I was working away with my Literature students at a retreat at the Benedictine Monastery in New Norcia, he refused to even answer my calls for a quick chat. He didn’t read my messages. He literally hid the phone under a pillow so he couldn’t hear me call. All I needed was a little reassurance that he was okay and for him to check in with me to see if I was okay. But it didn’t happen. And it hurt.

I know I was not always the best wife and I know I let him down in many ways. But he let me down too, in ways too many to count. But I loved him with everything I had. It was a love story. He was the love of my life and probably always will be. He, I, and the children will survive this and go on to fly in a new formation. He will always be the father to our beautiful children, and we will share grandparenthood in the future, hopefully. He will always be the person I care most for after our children because he is their father and he means the world to them; and, therefore, to me. He may be someone who stays in your life or he may not be. It’s of no concern to me now.

I just thought I deserved to be seen as more than an outline or a stereotype of a wife who doesn’t understand her husband and has driven him into the arms of another woman. I am no outline and I am no stereotype. And I am no emotional-blackmailer like I have recently been called by our mutual ‘friend’. I am not a single story that he has told you and I have not made an inadequate wife and a poor life partner; and I am not an overheard conversation that no one had a right to listen in to. I am a strong and loving human being with a moral compass that always faces true north and I have the integrity of a lioness. I have loved my husband deeply and fully since the day we met and I deserve for you and the world to know that. But right now I will settle for only you because I now lovingly, but with immense sadness, have to let him go.

L