My ex-husband is an amazing guy. Terrific. Salt of the Earth, incredible person. We were together for ten years, and we have a daughter together who passed away from SIDS twenty years ago.
The woman I became after she passed, I speak of her often. I was an oxycodone junkie, functional alcoholic, and complete fuck-up for years. I ruined two marriages, both to great guys. I had nothing left inside me, so I threw pills into the canyon and tried to pretend that I was trying to live, that I was in any way gripping firmly on functionality.
I wouldn’t have put up with me.
I was chaos, just destructive and simultaneously barely keeping it together, and I treated my ex-husband like the enemy. Not just in the capacity of a marriage, but later, when he really could have used my friendship. I feel I’m fortunate I can’t remember a lot of the scenarios, because I was constantly fucked up beyond all recognition. I stayed that way for eight or nine years, and who knows how many shenanigans I pulled during that time.
I am glad I don’t remember many of them, that the oxycodone body blocked for me, and kept me in a haze that doubled as a lifejacket. I couldn’t handle the weight of my own sorrow. It was an iron albatross.
I’ve been told stories of some of the more spectacular displays of stupidity. Not my proudest moments, and the way I treated my ex-husband can make me cry anytime I think about it.
And yet, even still
I’m the one who left him. Years, he just took it. He loved me in the most absolute fashion. It was just disguised as an everyday marriage, but he thought I was the smartest woman he knew. He was proud of me. And he believed in me.
I’ve never really had that since. Who am I kidding? Nothing that is as easy and natural as he and I were would have a sequel. I’m resigned to it, I wasted what I was given, and some people never find that even once.
I write a column every year on our daughter’s birthday. Some years, I fare better than others, but last year wasn’t one of them. I sent my ex-husband the column, and we had some back and forth. Two messages in, and I probably was surer than I’ve ever been leaving him was a bad decision, followed in quick succession by a period of only worse decisions.
He was genuine and kind, because he doesn’t have the ability to not be. He’s probably the only person I can truly say I know as I know myself, and he doesn’t have any malice inside him. He’s beautiful, inside and out. In real life, not filtered or with an audience. Just think of the best human you know, and I assure you, Tyler is that caliber.
I don’t have any secrets anymore.
I will openly admit to the fact I was a terrible wife. After our daughter passed, I knew only pain when I looked at her dad, and I’m certain it was the same for him, but he never weaponized it. I behaved as though words couldn’t wound people. As though I didn’t know the weight of the things I was saying, the shit I was doing.
I was a complete asshole to that man. I don’t deserve forgiveness. Even still, he gave it. Because that’s who he is. Not because I should have it.
There was a time in my life I justified the atrocious behavior that blew up my life, I really tried to pretend as though I was giving life a fair shake. That’s false, though, I died there with her. My marriage too. It was simply a slow bleeder.
Hemorrhaging where I made every attempt to disembowel it. Then, I succeeded. After all of the years of holding on, waiting for me to return to my mind, he let me go. Then, he moved on. He remarried, had another daughter, and lived the life that we were supposed to live.
I just kept shifting into a shell of me a little more every day, too high to feel much, not high enough to understand the meaning of the cards I held in my hand. I only knew that he was out, he was free of the sorrow and the memories, and I would stay frozen in this broken has-been suit until I was turned to dust if it meant that the curse of being with me would allow him to leave this hellscape.
I would take it all. I would live and die alone, stuck in a life I no longer recognized with memories I couldn’t trust to my habits. But he was free. And he looked so happy, and I was already dying slowly. I could carry the weight alone.
It’s the least I could do. I owed him much more. I still do, but he’s never been the type to keep score. I have. And the math, it’s clear and concise and the work is shown. No question, there is only one asshole here, it’s me.
I’m still just as selfish. But I have heard the way I spoke to him in my mind so many times, oddly, harsher every replay I sat through. I wanted a million times or more to say that I was at fault, that I ruined us, that he was so much better.
I have said the words before, or some version of them, but this time, I felt every word I said in my soul. I told him in words that I didn’t edit or polish. I just needed him to know. And he forgave me.
Now, I’m going to try to learn to forgive myself.
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This post was previously published on April Hawkins, Ask A Bitchface.
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