I received her email reply Saturday night at 11:30. It is one very long paragraph, virtually every sentence ending with an exclamation point, breathless with indignation, and peppered with remarkable lies. The points are simple ones: her husband and I are responsible for everything wrong in her life, my problems are my own making and I’ve no right to take that out on her, and whatever she does with her life is none of my business. She says that she will send the little ones to live with their father, she will find a cheap apartment, and she and her oldest daughter (now in college) will get jobs and try to make ends meet, rather than live in this prison that I have created.
Her behavior is unlikely to convey any love, because she does not, in any way, love you. This woman does not love and value you. You have simply been useful.
This is what really sank in, for the first time, as I was reading her email. I see now that there is not, anywhere in her, even an ounce of concern for me. She is unable of responding to the outpouring of my heart, of feeling any empathy or even pity for me. I rush to reiterate that I am not blameless, that I have not always been kind to her.
There was a moment of sorrow. I remembered our history. I remembered us as teenagers when, for some months, we would talk on the phone for hours nearly every day. I remembered when I held her in my arms and she whispered in my ear,
I love you. I remembered how I could always make her laugh, even long after the romance had died. I understood that that tender feeling lives now only in my heart and nowhere else, that she has no good feeling for me, and that
she never will. And something like a whisper at the back of my mind said,
and that’s OK. It will be all right. I felt for the first time that I could live with that. I saw then that even if she left and withheld the children from me, I would grieve for them, but I would survive.
I went out to her immediately after reading her message. She did not want to talk to me, but we talked anyway, for perhaps 20 minutes. I was conciliatory because, as I have stated, I cannot stand hostility. I simply had to do something to change the atmosphere. I did receive confirmation: when I remarked on how we had been quite amiable lately, she responded, without hesitation, that any such interaction with me had been purely in the interest of maintaining a pleasant atmosphere, and was not done out of feeling. So, I give her marks for honesty, as least in this case. We left off without any specific resolution, but with less anger, and she has been cordial to me since. Of course, I realize that this doesn’t mean anything, and that she is simply keeping her options open.
Yesterday was a good day. After Mass, I spent much of the day cleaning, which is the sort of thing I only care to do when in a good mood. Most importantly, I was able to turn off my ears. Instead of laying in bed straining my ears to listen for her movements, I put on a movie (Karol: The Pope, The Man) and fell asleep while it drowned out all sounds from outside my room. It was a great relief to be free of that burden.
I went to counseling again this evening. My counselor was encouraged by what I told him. At the end of the session, he rather obliquely suggested that I was self-directing at this point and probably did not need to continue with the sessions.
Bless you all, and thanks for listening.
