GASLIGHTING AND OTHER SHAMES (Reflections on the rise and fall of a failed marriage)

Today is my 15th year wedding anniversary, and my 45 1/2 year birthday, also known as summer birthday. It was exactly the kind of day you would expect, after two years of living separately and almost that long of missing my daughter one week out of two. Originally, I had toyed with the idea of a party. Unfortunately, as the date approached,  I realized that there was no way I was ready to pull that off.

I am tired. I work a stressful job and now I work all my shifts, and sometimes a little more than before, in one week out of two. This makes the week without my daughter possible, and I am grateful to be a mother one week in two, which is so much more than before, even if it feels part-time. But as the years go on, I am finding it harder and harder to catch up, in sleep and household tasks and finances. I feel my life shortening, my health and fitness declining, but I have not been so grateful in such a long time!

After waking up from a short night, 24 hours post my last shift, a tough overnight one, I ate a late breakfast, and went to pick up my darling girl in the pouring rain for the start of a week with me. I learned that my idea of jazz fest was usurped when I mentioned it yesterday, which was my plan today. I got back the camping equipment I had lent for the benefit of my daughter, only to find the grill uncleaned, and the propane tank tucked away, now empty. I do it for her, but I wonder at his attitude of complete entitlement, even now, and think about a new term I learned, gas lighting. I guess the term started with a play in the late 1930s, and it describes a manipulation of another person that attempts to lead them to believe that they are the ones in the wrong.  According to wikipedia, "the original title stems from the dimming of the gas lights in the house that happened when the husband was using the gas lights in the attic while searching for hidden treasure. The wife accurately notices the dimming lights and discusses the phenomenon, but the husband insists that she just imagined a change in the level of illumination." This lack of acknowledgement of the reality of the state of these items, with a seemingly sincere thank you on carrying these items to the car, but no mention, was so common in my marriage. Until I separated, I wasn't sure I wasn't the crazy one. In a marriage, there are lots of unfairnesses and slights you swallow, but you think you are in an ordinary state of craziness. Following the separation, when it was assumed that half was his, after putting in a fraction of the responsibility and money and stress and work, I was unburdened of this belief. All along, I had been given the idea that I was crazy. But it actually wasn't me.

"You don't want me to work. You want me to be free to go on vacation more than the 2 or 3 weeks a job would afford me."

"You love your job. You don't really feel stressed by it. You should keep earning money and paying for everything and I will stay at home and keep saying I'm a stay at home dad, as if that was what we planned, and spend the day on the computer but never tell you about any of it."

"I am looking for a job. I don't feel comfortable showing you my CV but it's done. I don't want to tell you about the jobs I've applied for, but I am going to work, just like I promised when we decided to have kids. I just can't tell you what the job is or what I am looking for, but you don't really want me to work because that will interfere with your work, and my lifestyle."

"Your problems are all in your head. They are not really problems. Your problems are not real problems, so they are not my problems. You just need to stop seeing them as problems."

"I can't listen to you when you raise your voice. " So I say, after I stopped trying, strongly, when can we talk then. "Stop screaming", he says, when I haven't screamed at all.

After the same cyclic conversation about how I needed him to see our individual problems as shared problems and how much responsibility he left to me when I didn't want it or feel it fair, he said, "I finally get it. I understand now. I'm tired. Can we talk more about this later?" The last time he said this was November. I moved to the basement the next April. Each day I waited for him to come back to it, but he never raised the conversation again. We were over, and I wished I had seen it years before. I couldn't figure out how to leave my daughter or how I could afford it. But he had never been in it, or left long ago, maybe before we married, the day he quit his job and figured his comfort was more important than our marriage. When I saw that, as painful as it was, it was possible for me to move on.

Today's goodbye was early, with his habit of usually calling at 19:30. I said we would be at the jazz fest so the early good bye was best to be the day's good bye. He was going out of town, he said, to celebrate Canada Day in Ottawa, as I had tried to convince him to do for years. So at a percussion interactive session, at 8 oclock, when I didn't hear him call unexpectedly  from his brother's phone, he sent this message: "Please turn up the volume and keep your phone handy close to when I call [our daughter], thanks."

I married a man I thought was kind and smart and attractive. It was not a grand love story, but it would have been enough, if he could have just turned his face towards me, found a way to take care of at least himself with the occasional gift to our daughter, if not me, and if he could have taken just a little bit of my care and burden from me. I grew to realize he would never meet me halfway on anything, but I had hoped he would try for his daughter at least, if not for me. But in the end he really felt he deserved half with no attempt to meet me near half way. He once added up his financial contribution to argue for half, despite the fact that my balance sheet had liabilities I had avoided for most of my adult life,  and his had none. His contribution was 1/16 of what mine had been (that's what happens when you work 1 1/2 years out of 15), and yet he had no hesitation to insist on dividing by two or any sense of shame or responsibility. When I met him, he was recreating his life in IT. He quit on our wedding week, and it was the greatest struggle our marriage was to bear. Against all odds, he did it again, this time recreating a job in marketing, with great personal cost to my own career and social life. It might have been the turning point, but it was then I finally saw his his true colours, and the gas lighting began anew. What I felt were not true feelings. He knew those feelings, and dismissed those feelings, and I was the one who was crazy to think otherwise.

This should give me some comfort in my escape with my sanity, but I feel my life shortening, and my constraints are much higher than I think I can manage long term. One of the hardest things is the injustice of it all. One of the major reasons I was compelled to choose my sanity over a bad marriage was the hope that there would be a chance that I could be free of an adult dependent, and maybe the only way he could learn independence that he couldn't achieve while living with me as his convenient sugar mama. So while I struggle to pay off a loan I took to buy him out of a home I paid off and maintained (minus his deposit of an inheritance from an elderly great aunt, not even money he earnedI ), he earns interest on the cash. The money I saved for future renovations that had been hoped for for over a decade went to his pile of cash. Meanwhile, I keep paying for the house, for my daughter's sake, and keep the cats alive, with vet care and food in the thousands, and pay him monthly to take care of my daughter. He gets that money, and I get to pay it, plus her dental bills because he doesn't insist of her taking care of brushing twice a day, and daycare fees if he puts her in and camp and swimming and swim shoes and swimsuits and clothes and boots and school incidentals, even if he doesn't tell me. He almost called off a camping weekend he had told her about for months before, building up her excitement because friends were going to be there, his rationale being that it was going to be "too expensive". He asked to borrow the car, and the camping equipment (I offered to drive him out but I needed to use the car to work and the hours I had free didn't suit him). I was astonished to find that, while he claimed not to have enough to pay for 2 nights camping, I pay interest on a loan so he could sit on half my house in cash, and although still unemployed, he had started not only to date, but introduce my daughter to the girl he only met 2 weeks ago!

Although it was a bittersweet day, my daughter and I went downtown by train, which was fun for us both. She was enthralled with planning her summer birthday, and the rain held off. We stopped at my friend's to help her put a chair together, and after catching up for a while, we went out for supper at a favourite pizza joint (Amelia's) with the best "white" i.e. 5 cheese pizza. Then we went to the jazz fest and stayed up too late, getting face painted and contemplating ice cream which in the end we were way too full to actually buy, and playing percussion with Julie, a jazzfest animator.

Jazzfest playground

White pizza

The day was not as remarkable as I had hoped, but it was, all in all, a very nice day. One day at a time. Immunized to gas lighting. Holding my head up high with shame slowly becoming a figment of my past.