I once read that marriage was the cure for love, and I can understand how love could be described as a disease. My mother’s marriage has been eating away at her for years
My father (well, step-father but tis all the same to me) is a drug. It has taken me years to realise this obvious and perfectly fitting metaphor. He is like heroin to my mother. For years, she has been dependent on him to fill a hole in her life. And when shadows fall upon her, she turns away and pretends everything is okay and that he is good for her, he helps her, she needs him. But deep down she has known all this time the negative effect he has upon her life, the fact that he is crippling her and taking away everything else that is good in her life. The truth is, she has been hiding in her dependency upon him because she is not strong enough to face life without him, the pain of separating and losing something she has been so used to having there. Sure he has his side effects, those moments when it feels horrible and takes her close to the edge of something even darker than life with him. But to leave him behind, to walk away and be free from his oppression, requires a strength she hasn’t been sure she has in her. Until now.
My biological father has never been a part of my life. My mother was a single mum in her mid-twenties when she met him. He brought her red roses and made everyone believe that he was this charming older man who wanted to look after my mother and young brother. I suppose he made Mum feel safe and cared for. After the tragic death of my brother’s father, it is no surprise that she was blind to this man’s darker side. Once they were married and living together, his true colours began to show. An alcoholic with a history of violence took over the body of the man my mother had fallen in love with, a man who never really existed. I was ten years old when I asked my mother why she choose to have a child with that sort of man, which is when I learnt that I was not a choice, I was not even an accident. I was forced upon her. It was the only time he ever physically hurt her, but the psychological scars will always remain. After they spilt, my father’s first wife told Mum how he had been violent towards her. “You wouldn’t have believed me” she explained to Mum who had to agree.
Once again, Mum hasn’t believed the opinions of everyone else towards her husband. She met my step-father when I was four and they married in 1998. My grandparents didn’t like him. My brother didn’t like him. Her friends didn’t like him. Her siblings didn’t like him. Our neighbours didn’t like him. Even my friends didn’t like him. His sons from a previous marriage allowed him and our family into their lives on and off for some years, but eventually even they couldn’t stand to have him around anymore. My own relationship with the man I have called Dad for almost as long as I can remember has varied. As a child I thought having a dad was great, and with my elder brother taking all the flak, I was the golden girl. Looking back, it makes me feel so shit to know that I let my brother get blamed for everything and treated like crap but, of course, back then I didn’t truly understand. Sure, I knew on some level that it wasn’t fair, but I guess I was like my mother for a while, I didn’t want to believe. As I grew older and stronger, I began to see things in a different light, especially after my brother grew old enough to never be around. Eventually my brother moved out, but even before there was only me to blame for everything and take anything out on, I knew that there was something truly evil about my step-father. I suppose the knowledge stemmed from what began when I hit my teens. My step-father’s attention changed slightly, just in a subtle way that only I felt and even I struggled to explain. There was never any violence or sexual assault, but there was a violation on a deeper level. “The threat of sexual assault” as my counsellor recently put it. Oh yes, my counsellor. Hardly surprisingly, after holding this information inside me and never discussing the reasons for my skin crawling whenever he is near me, I have recently began to snap. After confessing to my friend that my step-father attempted to obtain photographs of me when I was not fully clothed between the ages of 13 and 17, I was finally pushed into seeking professional help. Just another one of those things that my mother never wanted to believe.
Christmas was the final straw, thankfully. Last March, my step-father quit his job saying that his boss had it out for him. We all tried to convince him to look for another job straight away, but he made excuses about needing to do some DIY around the house and not wanting to work in the city because it was too far to commute everyday. And so the months went by, very little had been done at home and nothing in regards to finding a new job. If he had stopped making excuses and done just some of the long list of things he said he would, Mum would have probably let it go on a lot longer. But the doors in their house still don’t shut properly where he has found excuses not to sand them. The dogs never get walked. There is rarely a meal prepared for when Mum gets home from work, and when there is it is something quick, easy and the same thing they had the night before last. The chicken coop is never cleaned out. The dog mess in the garden (where the poor pups are left all day, every day until Mum is home to let them in) is left for Mum to clean up. He does the same chores all the time, chores that take an hour or less to complete and don’t even have to be done every day. Finally, she has had enough.
During the Christmas break, my brother and I were both staying at our little parents’. It took very little time for me to realise that my mum was at reaching tipping point. When I went to greet her after work one day, she grabbed me in a tight hug, tears in her eyes. She admitted that it was getting to a point that she didn’t want to come home because she couldn’t face him. His laziness is the least of the problems in their life together, but it was something that opened her eyes to the wider issue. You see, he is not as obvious in his abuse as my real father. He has never raised his hand to her or cheated or left or humiliated her or any of those explicit kind of things. He is much cleverer than that. It is like what he did with me as a teenage. If he had physically abused me, I could have and would have gone to the police, my teachers, my family etc. Because that would have been easy to explain. It would have been easy to make someone understand and believe me. But that wasn’t the case. It was implicit, sly, deceitful. I had no evidence and, even now, I find it hard to explain. The fact that he is a pedophile is as obvious to me as the fact that he is lazy. But explaining why, even to myself, is difficult. I know he took photographs of me when I changing for bed. I know that he would manipulate me into wearing revealing clothing, or to wear that thin white blouse without a bra. I know that he left his camera on record hidden in the bathroom pointed at the toilet when I went to use it. When I accused him of it in front of my mother and he convinced her it was all in my mind, so she settled it by taking his camera away from him, I know that he brought another and hid it from us. What I don’t know is why I never showed her the secret camera I found, or why I never attempted to tell someone who wasn’t blinded by dependency upon him, or why I let her convince herself it wasn’t true and buried the knowledge deep within myself until it has had years to build up into this rage I now have towards him. Somethings are easy to explain, but others aren’t.
My step-father’s laziness is one of those easy things. And with the knowledge of this, my mother’s rose-tinted glasses have slowly been slipping down her nose. Now they have fallen off her face completely and lie smashed upon the dirt along with their marriage vows.
Someone may read this and believe that divorce is wrong. They may say that the vows should be kept. For better, for worse. But do you truly believe that someone should spend the rest of their life trying to make things better while they just get worse and worse until they end up in an early grave? Do you think my mother, a woman who has failed to loose weight and get fit because he has carefully made it more and more difficult for her to reach her goals, should face another decade of oppression until her broken heart finally gives out? If you think that the institution of marriage is so important that my mother should remain with that sly, twisted, manipulative, evil oppressor, that is your business. But it isn’t going to happen. My mother will never be free from the tragedy and the pain of her life, but she will be free from him. Divorce is the key that will unlock the door to the rest of her life. If it is the last thing I do, I will see my mother blossom anew into the strong, independent, happy woman that she should have spent the last thirty years being.
Let no man put asunder.
Well God, if you are up there, if you don’t want marriages to fail you shouldn’t allow the devil to wear the body of a man.
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