I want nuance and details and postmodern shifting perspectives in this story, but I’m too close to it now.
My marriage has been rocky for a year, and my ex and I were both considering whether it would go on. Although I usually share too much information, I wasn’t talking about this with my wide friend circle for a few reasons. First, I hoped, really hoped, that ex and I could move past it. I feared that if I shared what we were fighting about, too many people would be mad at him. I also didn’t want to shame him, and I was ashamed of getting myself into this situation, by going back on my vow not to marry and not to live with a partner.
Here’s the too brief story.
Ex moved to CA from Nevada to be with me. He was supposed to get his own place, but, finding it expensive, he ended up with me. He promised if living together didn’t work, he would move out and we’d still stay together.
He hated that my son, a graduate student, still lives here. Aside from rent being expensive, it’s been helpful, since I’m disabled in a few ways and since it’s allowed me to drop everything and live in other countries for months at a time, something I couldn’t do otherwise, because of our many special needs cats.
We did family therapy. Our therapist rejected ex’s theory that my closeness with my son was wrong and somehow damaging (ex is fully estranged from most of his family members, including his daughter). She said we needed to work on our relationship, our marital communication. I definitely had things to work on too: I have trouble being vulnerable, and living with partners dampens my libido, for example.
Then, a year ago, ex had a drunken, rage-driven meltdown about my son. Rage is his word, and it’s accurate. It was emotionally abusive and controlling. That’s when I should have kicked him out. However, he was having a cancer scare and had just been fired, unjustly. My son volunteered to be the one to go, since ex was sick. We started looking for places. I hated myself, and it triggered my PTSD, specifically to being attacked by one of my mother’s partners, drunkenly screaming that there wasn’t space in her life for both of us.
Ex became fully disabled and admitted that we needed my son to stay, so we asked him to. I simply couldn’t cover the bills on my own.
A couple of months later, ex needed to stop drinking for a medical procedure but couldn’t. Finding out he was an alcoholic somehow made him slide immediately into one+ bottles of whiskey per day 24-hour blind drunkenness.
In a rare sober moment in January, he suddenly asked my son for a move out date over text. My son alerting me led to the ex telling him he was kicked out, and then days of raging at me. I wasn’t allowed to talk, since I was 100% wrong.
He got so drunk that he was in danger of alcohol poisoning and then went into withdrawal when he stopped drinking for a few hours. That’s when he accepted he needed to go to rehab.
Now, he’s been in and out twice. He insists that our problems are 100% about my son. I maintain that they’re about communication, and that I can’t stay in the marriage if, instead of communication, he has rage tantrums. I didn’t let him come home after rehab, because what happened in January was so awful. I thought it was likely we would get divorced–what I needed was to trust that he would stop being controlling and stop projecting everything onto my kid.
In the meantime, our therapist recently fired him, due to his insistence that my son and my relationship with my son were the problems.
He found another therapist, and it was one minute before a session with her last Monday (over Zoom) that he texted me that he couldn’t be my husband if my son was in my life at all.
His story will be very different, but this is mine.
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