In year 20, when things began to fall apart, his alarm bells went off and he began to effort, ever so slightly. With all of his might, he began love bombing me and he did 2 loads of dishes. And then he did the unthinkable. He got into therapy. And one day he was following me around the house, sort of weepy, very sad and he said to me…
You were supposed to replace my shitty mom.
Later that night, he told me all the ways in which his mother neglected him and didn’t protect him. It was stuff like not stopping him from touching a hot stove, letting him play with a Swiss army knife… stuff like that. And he cried. He cried that she wasn’t there to hold him, comfort him and protect him from being a very active, very curious, very smart toddler.
I was sad that he hurt. I was sad that he was neglected, I had experienced it, too. But something was off… something felt overblown in the depth of the ways in which he blamed her. It was like he didn’t have to take responsibility for his current actions based on this. It didn’t make any sense.
She had PPD with him and she had severe PPD with her 2nd and almost killed herself, so the kids went to other homes (while dad had zero kids) until his mom was “better”. She was then placed on copious amounts of lithium, a new idea in the 1980’s, and she was a meek little braindead zombie until current day.
And the family blamed this woman for all of their money woes, they shitty dynamic and the kids and dad alike defaulted to blaming mom. Mom was the scapegoat.
I’ve spent time with her, she’s a whackadoo, but… she has zero power. None. She complained about a shower head at a hotel for 45 minutes. She’ll sit on the couch for dozens of hours just cataloging her stamp collection. And, while staying at their house, she wore see-through nighties every night. I saw everything. I asked my ex if this was normal and he said YES. I had NO idea until 2015! It was horrifying.
But the anger, the vitriol, the stories this family told about her being the root of the problem of that family. His dad even said to me “my life would have been so different if I would have married someone else”. I have SO much to say about how all the others fit into that dynamic, she deserves some blame, but she was completely abandoned and thrown under the bus. She had mental illness, but got zero support. And her husband was a doctor.
It was all the woman’s fault and that is totally acceptable, dogpile on the woman!
I was reading about men with mother wounds and how they get violent. They hate their mothers SO much that they take it out on all the women they meet. They believe women to be the reason the world sucks and the reason their lives are miserable.
And my ex, once in his own therapy, started to finally investigate his mother wound, but he only used it to be a victim, to blame her and then me. And he truly believed and finally conveyed that he expected me to make up for his mom, love him unconditionally, dote on him, kiss his boo boos and be the mommy he never had. And in this arrangement, he was the child. He didn’t have to show up as an adult for me, he didn’t have to take responsibility for his actions towards me or his inability to show up for me. Because, “he’s just the baby”.
He never believed he had to show up as an adult for me.
So I had a man who was a narcissist, who hated women, hated his mother, was looking for a mommy replacement and the moment I stopped being mommy, he wanted to annihilate me. And I had to go and do something completely egregious to give him ammunition to hate me even more… no wonder I was scared. No wonder I was stuck in fear and frozen in how to handle things.
I was dealing with someone who was angry at women to his core, expected me to be his mommy and my “reward” was getting to love him and be a mommy (and to be a wife, he believed this was my fantasy). When I stopped doing that, he hated me. And because I was so desperate for love from an actual adult man who bathes and sees me as a vibrant, intelligent, woman, not a mom… I did a terrible thing.
And here we are.
I’m still worried he may hurt me. I have told a few key people that if something odd happens, to know it wasn’t me. And I made sure my will reflected that, too. I’ve been so naive in the past, I didn’t realize how disturbed he was and I projected good onto him. I mirrored back that he was a smart, funny, worthwhile person… while deep down, I felt so hollow, invisible and like he was a parasite, draining my energy and my goodness.
And, he had two books in the house regarding a cult from the 1960’s that believed sex with women was the way to enlightenment. That women exist to give sexual and their feminine energy to men. That a woman on her own isn’t very worthwhile, but when a man takes that energy and alchemizes it, it turns into something bigger and better. And men were entitled to this. Men were meant to use women to reach elite levels of spiritual enlightenment. The parasite is worth so much more than the host, as a formal “movement”. Sounds like stereotypical vampirism. (Or the shit Pdiddy was doing,)
So, I was married to a baby vampire. I was in a bad movie series. Lord have mercy,
ETA: The more I sit with this… that he hated his mom, he was outwardly expressing this hate, he was projecting that hate onto me AND I had betrayed him all make it the perfect recipe for him to hurt me. He was angry, he was having mental problems, he began hoarding obsessively but we never talked about it (we just stepped over it), he was very secretive and had all his devices on lockdown and, towards the end, he was mimicking the movements of one of his coworkers who had severe autism. He was rehearsing and pantomiming things in a way that was SO unsettling. He skipped towards me in a strange gait when he came to tell me he was filing for divorce. I was the only witness to any of this, I was the only one who knew him well enough to see how much he had changed, but in a very strange way, in a distorted, warped way. I was the target of his glaring and evil faces. His best friend died, his other friend was terminal (and later died) and a 3rd friend was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. And the girlfriend of the best friend was probably the one who killed him (long story with drugs involved.), so… there’s another woman to hate. I could feel that he projected all that hate onto me. The timing of all of that couldn’t be more perfect. It was the perfect storm of anger towards women.
I say all this because I was scared for my safety and nobody believed me. I was dealing with a man who was very intelligent, very controlled, very angry… blaming me for shit his mother had done, for what this other woman had done to his best friend and then I was no longer coddling him and sleeping with him, so I was enemy #1. He had to go on Prozac because I wasn’t mothering him anymore so I was the reason everything was happening. I could see it in how he looked at me and the energy…. that intangible force in the room. I could feel how much he hated me. I could feel how much he just… despised me. But it wasn’t just what *I* did, who I was, I could feel the lifetime of hating women falling into my lap.
From the cornerstone that women were “less than” in a religion he grew up in, to the saga with his bipolar mother being the reason their family was dysfunctional to him believing women were only good for sex and making turkeys and a very young woman being the reason his best friend was dead… all of that vitriol landed on me.
Call me crazy, don’t believe me… but I felt that. I could feel that he couldn’t separate out all this shit. He even said he believed that “ALL women can’t love men”. That was a hateful statement. Especially after I had spent 23 years making sure he had all his needs met. He didn’t have ONE complaint. Maybe one, I forgot to pay the Best Buy bill and they slapped us with a bunch of interest (we were traveling on an emergency trip because his grandmother died and I forgot to pay it). Otherwise, he had his needs met, he was happy. He was taken care of. But I wasn’t happy, and me asking for change was the catalyst of ALLLLLL this bullshit. Me wanting respect and to feel safe, connected and loved before he crawled on top of me… and him saying NO was the beginning of the end.
I just want to say this again. I was fearful. I was scared for my safety. I felt like he absolutely fucking hated me but he wouldn’t say it out loud. I could feel that energy shift in a way that made my skin crawl, that made me feel scared to be around him. And nobody believed me. And I believe his shift into this dark place is the reason why I haven’t left my rental in a year. He scared the shit out of me on that last encounter. And again, nobody believes me. And you don’t know how this feels until it finds you. You don’t know how scary it can be, it’s just an abstract thought until it happens.
We call the women who haven’t died “crazy” for thinking their husbands could hurt them. And we say that the dead ones should have seen it coming.
Just another reason to say… If you ask for change and it doesn’t start happening? Leave immediately. I should have left in 2019. Hell, I should have left in 2011. No, I should have left in 2002 when he told me I wasn’t sleeping with him enough and he was awful about it. This will forever be the biggest regret of my life.
