This afternoon there was a pre-trial lawyers conference related to my impending divorce from Lena. After the lawyers met, I talked with my lawyer at the court house. She relayed what Lena’s lawyer had said… and I just could not believe what I was hearing. When I got home I started to write a post in response to the claims being made about me and my life of the past eight years. While writing that post I had a kind of psychological breakthrough in terms of better understanding why I feel so much pain surrounding the loss of something that apparently was never what I thought it was.
One of the claims being made by Lena’s lawyer (which is a total lie being perpetrated upon the court) is that I never lived in Rivertown with Lena and her children. When I came home I brought up 10,000+ pictures, literally, that I had taken of Lena and her kids in Westchester. Pictures of Lena, pictures of the kids playing sports, pictures of the kids in school plays and concerts and pictures of me with Lena and the kids. As I looked at these pictures I started screaming inside my head, “I did exist! I was there! I mattered! It was real!.”
The lie being told in court today was that I never lived in Rivertown… which would then negate everything that I did do there… all of the times I drove the kids to school and picked them up from school… all of the sports practices and games that I attended and photographed… all of the concerts, plays and recitals that I went to and photographed… This lie negates all of the time I spent there as an integral part of a family. This lie has a gaslighting affect… Was I not there? Did I not do all of these things that I clearly remember? No! I was there, sometimes for extended periods of time (despite Lena and I agreeing when we got married that I would only be down there up to 50% of the time… I was often down there much more than 50% of the time and I have witnesses willing to testify under oath to that in court) and I did do all of these things… and I have PROOF! I have the photographs that I took that prove I was there. How do I have 10-20,000 photos taken of the kids and their friends and classmates if I was never there? How do I literally have thousands of photographs of Lena if I was never there? I was there!!!
As this was roiling through my mind it struck me that this theme of being negated and feeling unimportant or even as if I did not exist, was one that has run through most of my life dating back to when I was four years old.
First let me say, unequivocally, that I loved my father and I love my mother and brother… I loved Ava, Aubrey and Lena. However, each of these relationships left me questioning if I mattered and feeling totally negated and worthless and at times as if I might not have even existed in the ways I remembered or thought I had.
When I was four years old my mother was pregnant with my brother when she was hit by a drunk driver. This accident caused my brother to be born twelve weeks early and very sick. Both of my parents had some serious emotional problems and both of them responded to the accident and early birth of my brother differently and perhaps, in retrospect, wrongly. My father withdrew further from the family unit and more into his work. My mother spend most of her time caring for my infant brother who was very ill. I don’t have specific memories of feeling negated or abandoned at the age of four, but I must have. Prior to my brothers birth I am not convinced that my mother and I had a “normal and healthy” mother-son relationship; but afterwards we definitely did not. Many first born children find it difficult to adapt to life after the next sibling is born and they have to share the love, affection and time of their parents with the newborn. Add on to this the fact that my brother was so ill and the affects must have been much more… and how would my four year old brain deal with those feelings of negation and abandonment?
From the ages of four to fourteen my emotional problems only got worse. I got into trouble at school. I was often in trouble at home. I acted up to get any attention that I could from whomever I could. Then around the age of fifteen my parents separated and got divorced. By this time my mother and I were not close at all so I stayed on Long Island with my father and his new wife, who was horrible to me for many many years. My mother and brother moved into New York City and I did not see them often (both my fault and my mother’s).
Whatever sense of belonging or feelings of mattering were blown apart by my parents divorce. My father’s new wife never accepted his children as part of the “package” when she married him. When I was sixteen years old my step-mother told me point blank, “I married your father, not his children.” And, my father allowed this to stand! Can you imagine how negating that felt? My own father, whom I loved so dearly and looked up to for so many years, allowed his wife to push me off to the side.
From the age of fourteen to twenty-four I moved something like 11 or 12 times! I had no roots. I did not have a sense of belonging anywhere. My therapist at the Austen Riggs Center said that I had “homelessness syndrome.”
At the age of 23 I married Ava… and started to develop roots. At the end of our second year of marriage we moved to Georgia and bought a house. It wasn’t a great house, but it was ours. I really started to nest and foster the growth of roots both in our “family unit” and in the community. We made friends and were active in the community. I was building a successful business. I loved that home and even though I had no idea back then about anything construction related, I did do my best working on the house and making it ours.
In 1998, after shooting myself but before the overdose and ensuing stay at Austen Riggs, I wrote an essay entitled “Borderline Diaries.” This is an excerpt from that essay…
When I packed up my little car and left Georgia I was leaving more that just Ava. But let’s start with that. I left my wife. Despite the fact that I did not always treat Ava as well as I could have, I loved her more than I had ever loved any one in my entire life. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, and still doesn’t, she was the center of my universe. She was the lone bright star in an otherwise dark and dismal life. I was not able to be the man… the husband… that she needed me to be. But I would have done anything within my power to make her happy. Unfortunately, I was so mentally ill at the time that I was not able to be the husband that she desired. So, she asked me to leave. And not knowing what else to do and not wanting to cause her more pain than I already had… I left.
Like I said before, when I left Georgia I lost a lot more than Ava (as if that weren’t enough). I also left behind the house I loved and the lawn and gardens I had worked so hard to make beautiful. I don’t think that most people realized how much that house meant to me. You see, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four (10 years) I had moved eleven times. I almost felt homeless all of those years. I did not have roots anywhere. Then when I was twenty-four Ava and I bought the house in Georgia. I came to realize after we bought the house that is was a piece of junk. But that did not matter to me. It was finally a place I could call mine; a place I could call home. Additionally when I left Georgia and moved to Vermont I left behind my friends, my business, and a way of life. In one seventeen-hour car trip I lost every single indicator of who and what I was in the world. I was stripped of everything. I was nothing. I had nothing. I felt so lost that mere words cannot make one understand what I was going through.
As soon as I moved out of our house in Georgia, Ava’s boyfriend moved in; she was literally cooking dinner for him in “our” home the next night. They got married shortly after our divorce was finalized. Due to the way that the marriage ended, for years I wondered if Ava ever thought about me. Had she really loved me? When did she stop loving me? Was any of it real? The same theme of negation was a constant undercurrent in my consciousness.
A year or so after I was out of Austen Riggs, I started to date Aubrey. She and her three daughters moved into my mother’s second home with me where I was living at the time.
Aubrey and I were probably doomed from the start… I was only a year out of Austen Riggs and 18 months out from shooting myself. She left a severely abusive husband and moved right in with me. These are not the best circumstances to start a relationship. But we tried. I went from living alone to living with a woman and her three children. Instant family! Instant responsibility! Aubrey and I had some amazing times… and some very bad times… but I loved her and her children fiercely. After living together for four years, Aubrey and her children moved out. Here one day, gone the next… negated yet again. Unfortunately, the circumstances surrounding our breakup really fucked with my head. Again I found myself wondering what was real. Was any of it real? Had I made the intense love I thought we felt for one another up in my head? When did she stop loving me? Would I ever be loved? Was I just not lovable? Was I just defective on some very core level?
Aubrey and I stayed in touch until shortly after I married Lena. I loved Aubrey’s girls and probably loved her for several years even after we broke up.
Five years after Aubrey and I broke up, I started to date Lena in March of 2010. We dated for 9 months and got engaged on New Year’s Eve 2011 and married 7 months later in July of 2011
Lena and I had a good life and a good marriage for a while. I loved her and her children dearly. I would have done anything for them. I tried everything for them. I risked everything, including my very life and sanity, for them… and then it was over. Here today, gone tomorrow. Negated once again. I lost another family, home, business and all of the groundings that held me in life. Once again I was asking if I was just so damaged that I could never be loved. Once again I was made (and manipulated) into questioning my sanity and my very memories.
So… I am almost 50 years old. In some ways I am a huge “success.” I have lived 20 years longer than anyone thought I would. Statistically speaking, I am a Deadman Living. I am constantly working on myself… looking at myself, my motivations and my actions and the consequences of those actions… to the point of neurosis probably. I have made huge progress on issues such as my temper, my serpent’s tongue, my patience with other people and on forgiveness, both for other people and for myself.
Unfortunately, those negating questions remain: Will I ever be truly loved? Am I lovable? If I am not in love/being loved, do I exist? Is there something so broken inside of me that I should just accept and embrace being alone the rest of my life? Was I born this way with some fractured psyche or did the events of my toddler years set the stage for this?
I don’t know the answers to those questions, but what I fully realized today while working on another post is that I do exist… in this world…And, I do matter… in this world… regardless of whether my parents and then lovers could see it or express it.
