FFF #37 Perseverance is the Key

I stumbled on this really neat site managed by Cormac Brown called Friday Flash Fiction. I thought I'd try my hand at this and see if I'm any good... a starter sentence is provided each Friday and you come up with the rest. A word limit was also in place and my word count for my piece is 1095 (It had to be less than 1100 words). Thanks for the opportunity...

Perseverance is the Key

As with juggling, the key to life is to keep the procession moving steady and don’t look down.

If there has ever been a time when I could relate to this, it would have been a few years ago.

I never understood the mentality of men wanting their wives “barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen”. My husband at the time turned out to be one of those types of people with that irreversible mentality. When I married him, I didn’t recognize the signs. In fact, it took close to seven years before I realized what he was doing. By then, it was almost too late.

I married a man who I thought was misunderstood, who wasn’t given the time of day. Yet he was a person who wouldn’t accept it even if given to him. I knew of his insecurity when I married him but had no idea and still don’t of how much that insecurity would undermine everything.

Naïve, I married young and had children young. I thought he could do no wrong, and when divorce became evident, I realized how far off the mark I really was.

He was a very quiet man except around his family and close friends. The only person in his immediate family he wasn’t social with was his mother. A woman in control of everything, she even had the nerve to stand up at our wedding and when asked to give advice made it known that she wore the pants.

Planning the wedding I realized that his mother and mine were similar in their quest for control but unlike my mother, his had to be in everyone’s business. It’s good to be passionate about things, but to what cost? Eventually, that cost turned out to be my marriage.

Life dished out more than I thought I could take in the last year and a half of my marriage, but I persevered. His verbal attacks grew more and more frequent. He resorted to making me believe that I was nothing without him, and that he had made me into everything I was.

I had given up my passions in life. I had been told that I would never be successful if I pursued them. I gave up my dream job, gave up trying to finish college, and surrendered the idea that I could be somebody. I went from accomplishing goals to not having a need to set them. My only goal became trying to make him into somebody, and that was somebody that his mother didn’t want him to be.

The last year and a half I had turned my back on my family thinking they had done the same to me when in reality my husband had been man enough to alienate them from me with phone calls and text messages telling them that I no longer wanted them or needed them, that they were destroying our life together and that our children should never have to deal with their radical ideals. I finally came to terms that my mother and I would never speak again and I began to mourn her death, a death that only I could create in my mind.

My job took a turn for the worst and I soon found myself trying to pay bills on half the income. Things went from bad to worse when my husband’s employer started threatening layoffs. Financial stress, church callings, difficulties with family, and the thoughts instilled of being nothing pushed me to finally seek the help of anti-depressants without my husband’s knowledge. I knew that him knowing would only make me worse of a person in his eyes and that it would prove he was right- it would prove that I was nothing.

I had been on the meds a few months; I was losing sleep at night, letting my house fall into ruins, and felt I could do nothing to stop it.

I cried to God to take away the pain and the trials that I was no longer able to endure. When the meds were found by my husband he confronted me. He screamed at me that I was no longer trustworthy and that I had become his worst nightmare.

I felt like his worst nightmare and that I was on the downward slope to hell. My life was hell. Maybe I was possessed by demons. Maybe I was just someone who couldn’t live up to his standards. Who knows for sure.

Voices whispered to me at night that maybe he was wrong, but he couldn’t be wrong, he was never wrong. I couldn’t understand why God had forsaken me and why I was no longer worthy of my husband’s love or trust. The few friends I had managed to keep kept telling me that things would be okay, that everyone goes through rough patches in their marriages and that mine was no different—in the end he would see the light.

My light was fading quickly and it took a friend visiting a church official to finally have me admitted to counseling. I owe them both my life. My husband believed that if the counselor could cure me then our marriage could stay intact, but if not then it was up to him to demolish what we had worked so hard to build. We both found it to be quite the opposite.

My cure was an awakening. I awoke to see what my husband was doing. He was abusive and destructive. A tactic used to suppress his own frustrations towards his ever controlling mother.

Our divorce was dirty, dirtier than any I had ever heard of or imagined. My marriage was ripped to shreds, my children thrown into the middle, told to keep secrets: I was a horrible person and mother, they deserved better, their grandmother and father could raise them better.

My public reputation was demolished and out of it came that I was a whore and completely insane. People began avoiding me at all costs. He took everything in the beginning, leaving me with nothing. The only thing I had was my children, and even they were drifting.

Seven months after our separation, the divorce was finalized; the judge had given me everything. He had called his mother on the carpet and gave face to what a dysfunctional family was.

Each step forward has given me new freedoms, given me reason to thank God for wonderful people in my life, and most of all has given me more reasons to live and be the person he never allowed me to be.