Too far down the wrong path

I can't tell you when my divorce was finalized, not that I don't want to, I just don't remember. I think it was near the beginning of 2019. It wasn't some grand achievement that I celebrated and wanted to memorialize. It was a simple acceptance that I had wandered so far down the wrong path and needed to find my way home again. Once I got there I didn't feel alive. I wasn't in my body at that point. It took me years of writing, talking, freaking out, and losing my cool with my family and completely axing my friends to find some kind of personal balance again.

I broke myself. In a misguided need for acceptance and companionship I gave up every bit of who I was and traded it in for a life I feel now I had been coached into wanting. I grew up watching all the classic Disney cartoons. The chivalrous knight or funny rogue finds and saves some damsel in distress. She falls in love with him, and they live happily ever after. I shouldn't blame the stories I grew up on for the life I ultimately lived, I realize others probably don't fall into that trap. But in hindsight I tend to observe the 'way things are' and then copy those to a 'T'.

If this is how things are done I'm going to do it. I think a piece of my non-conformism is an unconscious rebellion against that other piece of me that conforms to the narratives of life.

I grew up in a small country town in the middle of Idaho. The worst things that ever happened here was when a few classmates slid off the rode one winter in high school, landed in a frozen pond and drowned. Yes, that is horrible, and I still think about it every few months. But you never heard about robberies, murders, school shootings, lynchings, or anything terrible done by humans against other humans. The bad things that happened here happened because of shitty chance rearing its ugly head and someone unfortunately being caught in the crosshairs.

I grew up depressed. I don't remember my childhood. I see photographs of it from time to time and can't put myself into the person in those pictures. What was he like, what was he thinking, what made him happy? It's gone. I'm 35 now and the childhood me is intangible. I have moments where I remember bits and pieces of it. Typically the embarrassing or angry moments where I felt something unfair had occurred to me. I do remember I was depressed. I wanted a different life so badly I would torture myself for having one others would probably have killed to live in my place.

So, she wanted a divorce. I can't remember exactly when she said it or where I was. I'm sure theres a journal or a video of me talking to the camera trying to process it. It was another one of the many times it had been brought up. I wasn't for it, I didn't want to be another failed relationship or to raise my kids in a shared custody relationship. My mom's parents got a divorce and that was heavy on my thoughts any time the concept was proposed. She and her brother are still processing it even though my grandparents are gone now. I didn't want to repeat that. But she wanted us to be over.

I can remember sitting on the front porch swing, watching the sun coming up over the trees across the street when she came out and sat next to me. I remember her asking another time for a divorce, or perhaps an open marriage. We'd only been in this particular house about a year at this point. We'd worked together to make raised gardens in the front yard. I built them using boards from pallets she'd sent me out to collect and dismantle. Dirt I'd driven back and forth to get from a contractor needing materials removed. Shoveling it myself to acquire. We had a garden growing, ducks in the back yard gathering flies, and two kids who were blissfully unaware of our issues.

I got off the swing and drove off to pick up a fast food breakfast for us and in that drive through a moment of clarity struck me. We'd been fighting for years at that point. Every little thing that irked her about me was a point of contention. We'd fight about petty little misunderstandings, the way I said something, how I didn't anticipate a want, the lack of money, how I was withdrawn and robotic. The house was never clean, the dishes were always piling up, I'd lost a job, found another, left it for a better one that fell through right as it was going to begin, and the money worries simply grew. I couldn't do anything right or good enough to save this and I was spending the last of our meager bit of funds on a breakfast I should have cooked for us myself.

This wasn't working. I don't know or think I could have ever made it work. We threw ourselves into a relationship and into a marriage in a misplaced desperation for acceptance from another. To find a partnership. To right the wrong we'd caused in finding ourselves suddenly on the path to parenthood. We were two incompatible people forcing ourselves to be someone we weren't to fit a narrative we'd grown up to understand was the right way to be and we were tearing each other to shreds for having the gall to fall for the cultural lie we'd come to believe.

We'd done what you were suppose to do. I was in counseling, we tried marriage counseling for a few months. I'd attended courses on financial freedom, alone, and with her, she left in the middle of one at one point. I think the curriculum insulted her. Or perhaps it was the fact that my co-workers were present (the job I lost had paid for everyone and their partners to attend), but that didn't solve our money issues. Every dollar I made was spent before it could be correctly directed towards our bills, and we were in debt. We'd get payday loans to pay bills, and more to cover the extensions on the previous ones. We'd get credit cards, one that got maxed out the day we received it.

I remember thinking of the days I'd spend driving around to various community clinics hoping one of them would take pity on me and let me have some of the diapers that low income struggling families could come to when they found themselves unable to afford a pack on their own dime. A few years previously I'd helped plan the build of a website for the organization that acquired and distributed those diapers to the clinics. Now I was begging the clinics to give me a chance, even though my family wasn't one of their patients. I knew from talking to the operator of the non-profit that anyone in need should have been able to go to a clinic and request them. But when I found myself in the shoes of someone needing them I was often turned away or told "only this one time, these are reserved for our clients".

Driving back to the house from that drive through I'd already agreed with her. This wasn't working. I could manage funds on my own and did okay with it before our relationship. But with a partner who I couldn't say no to without invoking hell upon myself I found myself living below zero. Somehow in a beautiful home (she inherited), unable to consistently and reliably diaper my children, unable to provide food without food stamps or WIC checks, unable to feel alive. I was completely disassociated. I felt as if I was watching my life, sitting in a chair in a dark room with a tv in front of me playing out my drama. It simply happened to me and I could only observe it. Occasionally surfacing to direct the ship away from the rocks but otherwise beneath the surface, gasping for breath whenever the opportunity presented itself.

I pulled into the driveway with the bags of food, walked up the steps, across the porch, sat down next to her on the swing. She looked up from her phone after a while and looked at me. I'm not sure what was on her mind at the time. I remember telling her I agreed with her, we should get a divorce. I remember saying that if we stayed together the only thing our children would remember of their childhood was their parents fighting all the time, but apart they might remember two separate, happy parents. I don't think she expected me to agree with her. She seemed taken aback.

I moved all my things out of our bedroom that day and down the hall into what was once an upstairs kitchen. I emailed my mom to let her know what was going on later that day. After a few weeks in my own room I worked up the nerve to ask my parents if I could move back home and get my feet back under myself. They had me out the next day.