12.16.2004
Life in the Wilderness
This is Part 2 of my 'redemption story'. I apologize in advance for the length, but there was a lot going on. Besides, this is really about me bringing these events to light for my own inspection. If others find it interesting, great, but I am not very invested in that.
After I walked out of the apartment V. and I shared with our children in early June 1995, I still had some hope that God would intervene on my behalf and convince V. that we should stay together. I spent the next three weeks as a guest of a sweet old Christian lady on her family farm northwest of Pittsburgh near the Ohio border. This situation was arranged by my drama professor from college, who knew her from church. This woman was extremely encouraging to me, having lived decades with a husband who was a mean-spirited non-believer, only to see him come to Christ in the months before he died from a fall from the barn roof. My hopefulness grew as she affirmed my essential belief that it was better for V and I to live through these terrible times seeking God's Help than to just dissolve the marriage.
At the end of the three weeks, I had to leave that wonderful place because she had family coming for a big 4th of July thing. After praying, studying and talking with this wonderful saint of a lady, I arrived at the conclusion that I needed to take charge of the situation and resume my place as the spiritual head of my family. So I called V. and told her I was coming home. She said that she wasn't ready for me to do that. I argued that I wasn't making enough money to support her and the kids and live outside the house. I had no place to go. She told me to find some fleabag flophouse with a hot plate and stay away. I told her that it was clear to me that God wanted me to come home, and that was that. I would be there the next day.
Instead, the next day I was served with a Protection From Abuse order.
There it was again. V. seeking refuge under that hideous label -- this time from the legal system. She even twisted my words to say that I said that God TOLD me to move back home. That was all the judge needed to hear. And so I was prohibited from going near V. or the kids until a hearing 10 days later. On July 3, 1995, I was informed by a Family Division judge that I was not enter V's home or have any contact with her for a period of not less than one year. There was no clarity about child visitation, other than some stipulation that I was to have 'reasonable' access to them. However, V. had a different point of view. She demanded that I see them so that she could have relief from her burden as a single mother. I've always found it interesting that someone who convinced a judge that she was in fear of me could so easily hand her four young children over to my care.
At that point, a switch flipped inside of me. I was no longer going to live for V's approval, acceptance or love. I was going to take care of myself. If she was going to use the legal system to get what she wanted, she was going to have to use it all the way. I went to an ATM, took out all of the money, opened a new account in my name only and found an apartment. I had been sleeping in my car for several days, sneaking into my job before anyone else got there so I could wash up in the bathroom.
And I had had enough. Both with V. and with God. I told V. that I no longer considered myself a Christian, since all I knew of Christians (at least in what I was experiencing at the time) was judgmentalism, rejection and abandonment. Then I walked away from any hope of having my family united together under one roof in love, hope and Christ and didn't look back.
Knowing that the court would be taking a big chunk of my paycheck soon enough, I found a one bedroom, furnished apartment near my hometown for about $200/month. I bought a TV, ordered cable, and settled into my isolation.
I cried every day back then. I'd be watching TV, and any tender, heartwarming or tragic moment involving children would have me blubbering uncontollably. Of course, it didn't help that i'd fallen back into the pot smoking habit several months after moving into the apartment. Pot tends to make me very susceptible to such emotional manipulation.
I lived this way -- going to work and coming back to an empty apartment to smoke dope and cry at the TV -- for the next two and a half years. The only positives in my life being my rising income as I prospered in the IT world and my evolving routine of having my children every other weekend. These visits were very hard for me. After all, they were still so young. Two of them were still in diapers during this period, and I really didn't know how to be a care-giver. But I learned.
I dated no one these first 30 months. I was nowhere near over V. I wouldn't be for several more years. I did, however, get to experience the joy of seeing another man with his arm around her when bringing the kids home one Sunday. That was a fresh dagger. And a new hardening.
Toward the end of 1998, I decided to start looking to get into the 'dating' life, thus kicking off a series of ill-advised dalliances that were motivated primarily by me desire for sex. On the one hand, I had more fun getting laid as I approached and passed forty than I had during my entire previous adult life. However, I also developed and fed sexual habits that I continue to struggle with nearly ten months after turning back to God.
The first relationship I had started in December 1998. I moved in with her about a month later and left after about 8 months of struggling to intergrate my kids into her domain and deal with her jealousy over V. That was the lengthiest and healthiest relationship I had until I met D. (my wife now) in 2002. In between, I had only two relationships of any duration. K. was a 32-year old single mother with a bad coke habit. She was also an angry person who jumped out of the gate demanding my utmost loyalty while playing around with an old flame on the side. We dated for less than two months.
Then there was B -- a 26-year old, overweight survivor of childhood abuse. B. and I met at work, became friends, lovers, roommates, friends again, fuck buddies, boyfriend/girlfriend and swinging partners between early 2000 and mid-2002. B. introduced me to the sexual ethos of GenX, and I gotta tell ya, I had a lot of fun. During the period that I was involved with her I had more sex than I had ever had in my life.
B. was a wonderful girl. Very pretty, funny and endowed with a lot of good sense. She also was really into NFL football -- a real fan who understood the game. We used to watch every Sunday and get into friendly little bets over who would advance in the playoffs. She was my best friend.
However, I could never bring myself to commit to B, for a number of reasons. She was, unfortunately, in love with me and had convinced herself that the only reason that I wasn't willing to settle down with her was her weight. B. was five-foot-three and easily weighed 175. While that did pose somewhat of an issue for me, the weight was really a symptom of a larger problem of overall insecurity and neediness that I did not want to deal with. B. was a perpetual victim and tended to see the disappointments in her life (her job and relationship with me) as the result of things outside of her control. As a result, she tended to let people treat her like a doormat. I knew that I could not bear the responsibility of rescuing her from this ongoing cycle of self-imposed victimization. Even if I had wanted to take it on, I would never have succeeded.
B. lived with me for about a year and a half, during which time we were almost always sexually involved, but seldom in a romantic relationship. She claimed to be able to treat the situation as 'just sex' -- which was great for me -- but after a while it became clear that she was trying to win me over by being my ever-present sexual outlet. I decided to start using online dating services to meet new women and try and break this cycle of co-dependency that had evolved between us. I really did love her, but I could never respect her as long as she was willing to behave like this. I needed someone who had enough sense of self to be emotionally honest and develop legitimate boundaries. There was no way that we could ever be a couple without a dramatic change.
By this time, I had become very sexually charged. B. and I messed around with porn and group sex, and I was hooked. I was smoking pot heavily by this time, and it had become intertwined with the sex. Sex and porn had become my new addiction.
I won't bore you with a listing of all my sordid encounters, but I was driven to each new sexual experience. I spent exhorbitant amounts of time and money trying to hook up. Once I drove almost two hours to get with a woman whom I found personally repugnant just because she had a body type I wanted. If she had slept with me on the first date, I wouldn't have gone back a second time. Add to that two months-long obsessions with people I 'met' online and had phone sex with, but who never sent me a picture and never agreed to meet me. Finally, I took vacation time and flew to Salt Lake to spend a long weekend in Yellowstone with someone I met Web Camming on Yahoo. She was also not ultimately attractive to me, but was very sexually adventurous.
Soon after I got back from my Yellowstone trip, I realized that I was out of control. I took myself off the market for a while and contemplated going back to B, but she had by now moved out and was not willing to put herself into that situation any longer.
In the midst of this hiatus, I met D. at work. Again, the attraction was heavily sexual, but the circumstances were a bit more complicated. Ironically, I met D. as a result of a problem with V. receiving her child support payments, which are snatched right out of my paycheck. D. was very helpful and professional in getting this situation resolved, and I determined to seek her out and thank her. That happened a couple of weeks later in the break room. I was late September -- still warm -- and she was wearing a mini-skirt business suit, strappy heels and no stockings. I was aroused immediately. When I started to thank her, I was looking into her eyes. I don't know what was going on, but she began to blush and get flustered. As she walked away, I was determined to have her. For the next three weeks, I waited for her to show up in the break room at a time when no one else was around. When my opportunity finally came, she said she didn't see how it was going to work, as she had two small children at home and very little opportunity to get out. So I suggested that we take lunch together to get to know each other and see if this was worth pursuing. She agreed, and for the next week or so, we had lunch together every day.
After our initial lunchtime courtship, we decided to take it to the next level, which meant I started going over to her apartment after work during the week. She and her kids also started coming to my place for the weekends. We took a weekend trip together to New River Gorge in West Virginia in early November. I introduced her and her kids to mine, and thing progressed quickly.
There were several factors driving our relationship along at that time. First, we were very hot for each other. I perceived in her many things that were missing in my relationship with B. She seemed confident and competent -- able to keep up her side of the bargain. Plus, we each lived 45 minutes from work -- in opposite directions -- making it difficult to see each other while maintaining something of a normal routine. Especially since she had kids. Lastly, I had just procured a relocation bonus from the company that would enable me to buy a house closer to work. That's when we decided to get married, in order to maximize our house buying potential.
The next six months were the happiest time of my life, in terms of sheer fun and things going my way. We were in constant motion, working so well as a team as we worked out our mortgage pre-approval and shopped for our new home. We found a 3-story brick with extensive remodeling and an inground pool located within a five-minute walk from work and moved in at the end of January 2003. Using our relo and tax refund money, we were able to take a trip to Jamaica in March to get married. Life was good.
And then the honeymoon ended.
Right after we got back from Jamaica, I began having problems which ultimately ended up with me having emergency surgery at the end of April. Then, after taking less than two weeks off, I returned to work at the urging of my boss, who said he needed me to come in. I was not feeling totally up to it, but I felt I needed to go in. Turns out the only reason he wanted me to come in was so he could fire me and didn't want to pay me the extra week on short term disability. The reasons underlying this termination are a subject for another posting.
I was unemployed for two and a half months, and when I finally was able to find a position, it was a temporary contract at a rate that equated to a 10K pay cut from my previous position. D. and I were getting along, but we each were having great difficulty dealing with each other's children. By the time I got the child support situation adjusted to reflect my current income, we had been living on credit cards for about four months. In October of last year, I was forced to file for bankruptcy.
Another aspect of our relationship was swinging. During our initial courtship, D. had brought up the subject of fantasies and wanted to talk about threesomes and orgies as a 'conceptual' way of spicing up the already great sex we were having. I took that opportunity to tell her about my experiences with B. and swinging -- and how much fun I had with it. She seemed open to exploring the possibility. And so we joined an online community and started hooking up with other couples. I had some very fun experiences, but D. did not seem to be getting very many guys she found attractive enough. I figured at the time that it was because of our age difference. Most of the couples who were interested in being together were closer to my age than hers, and several of the guys just looked too old. They reminded her of her stepfather, so she got the willies.
In retrospect, I believe that it was much more than that. Over the past year, I've realized that D. is not really as confident as I originally perceived her to be. As a result of trust issues she had from her first marriage and her last live-in relationship -- which ended when he left to marry someone he had been screwing for several months -- D. was feeling very threatened by seeing me with other women. Once I realized that, I pulled us out of that lifestyle. I wouldn't subject her to it anymore, but I was very disappointed. I had grown very fond of our fun, and I felt in a perverse way that it actually put more spark into our marriage. With that illusion now shattered, I sank into a deep depression as the weight of my recent failures and struggles hit me full on with no available diversion.
Christmas was a big, huge bummer for us. The bankruptcy filing meant that we could not use credit cards to buy our presents. And we were drifting farther and farther apart. Shortly after Christmas, D. told me she was looking for an apartment and wanted to leave. I convinced her to stay for a bit and try to work it out. She agreed, but things were pretty far gone by then.
Then in February of this year, we decided to go looking for a church. We found an Evangelical Free church nearby, and things started happening to me as I remembered my life in Christ from so many years ago. There were people I knew in this church, and the music ministry is awesome -- which won over D. However, our problems were far from over. I had retreated to my recliner and TV in a big way, and we were overwhelmed with the decay of the house and the tension with the children.
On the day of our first wedding anniversary, D. had her things packed and was ready to move into a rental house owned by the boyfriend of our babysitter. It happened to be a Sunday. We had continued to attend church, and I was being profoundly affected by the teaching and had re-dedicated myself to bible study and prayer. However, I continued to be distant from D., as I recognized in her a desire to leave. It was V. all over again, only this time I wasn't going to let myself feel the rejection.
So I got up before everyone and got ready for church. D. got up -- late as usual -- and wondered why I wasn't waiting for her and the boys. I told her that I wasn't going to play the happy family in church knowing that she was packed up and ready to leave. I was going to God alone to seek His Help in dealing. However, once I got there and the singing started, I saw her walk in and sit by herself on the opposite side of the sanctuary. At once, I began to feel what we evangelicals call 'convicted' about being in a worship service with an unforgiving heart. So I got up and walked over to join her and put my arm around her. She began to cry. After the sermon, she leaned over and said, "I give up."
It was a lift I had seldom if ever known. At that point in my life, I realized -- maybe for the first time -- that God loved me despite my quite-obvious moral failings. I was encouraged to take my faith and walk to a level heretofore unknown to me.
I wish I could say that the same applied to D., and that that experience had settled the issue of her commitment to our marriage once and for all, but that would be too easy, too fairy tale. No, what I've found out in the eight months since that anniversary miracle is that God works in real life with real problems that don't always have happy endings.
A month and a half later, D. finally did move out. Thus, began a journey out of the wilderness and into the light.
- posted by The Drake @ 2:04 PM
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That is quite the story. To see where you've come from and where you are now, it is quite a testiment to your force of will and to God's mercy.
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