I find myself wondering how I can love someone so deeply yet have so many conflicting feelings about them. I don’t know how many times I’ve thought in the last few weeks about my husband. He comes into my mind frequently. A song might trigger thoughts about him. It could be a television show, a book or even a client’s story. Honestly, although I shame myself when I have these thoughts, sometimes I think about how much I miss him. I think about how much I love him. I ask myself why my love wasn’t enough for him, why he had to return to meth after years of sobriety. I feel sorry for the trouble I’ve caused in his life. He just got out of jail after 16 days. The judge released him from his probation in one county on “time served” saying that “the Court has consider that such sentence is consistent with the protection of the public, the gravity of the offense, the rehabilitative needs of the Defendant.” I know there is a new warrant out for him and a new No Contact Order being filed being filed in the county I moved to so there are new legal troubles on the way. I want to call and warn him, say I’m sorry, that I just wanted him to leave me alone and he wouldn’t so I told the police everything he’d been saying and doing. I showed them the texts and the e-mails. I showed them the call logs and voicemails logs that kept piling up, even after I had blocked him from getting through on my phone and my son’s phone. I told them about the times that I knew he’d entered my house, with me home and when I wasn’t.
Then I remember that love is only one piece of the truth. Another piece is that I wouldn’t have felt I had to call the police if he would have not come into my house, multiple times, uninvited and after being told, again multiple times, that I didn’t want to talk to him, e-mail him, or see him anymore. The truth is that way before that if he had he moved out like I asked him to do by the end of the year in 2017, he wouldn’t have been in the house anymore. He wouldn’t have been around me as his meth use hit a crescendo. He wouldn’t have threatened to slice my throat open. I wouldn’t have gone to the police in fear of my life the first place.
Another piece of the truth is that I do feel sad about much that has happened since that night he threatened me. I wish that when he completed the substance use Intensive Outpatient Program he would have continued with his aftercare. I wish he would have stayed away from his brother. I wish, when his dealer contacted him about some stupid pump for his parent’s pool he had gotten from him, he hadn’t responded to say he’d give him the money he owed him for the pump. When he told me the dealer contacted him, I told him the dealer was really trying to suck a good customer back into the life. He didn’t believe me. He didn’t want me to be right and he had already begun feeling ambivalent about not using. I lost him again to that hazy little glass pipe. It makes me so sad. I can feel the hot salt in rushing onto my eyes right now. I want my husband back. I want back the man I fell in love with. I want that romantic love we had: the hot sex, the hand holding, the playing word games, the rush in my gut when I’d see him watching me, the heat. I miss that man.
I’m sad that all of that ended up being a fantasy. I’m sad that man disappeared, only to be seen again on the briefest of occasions. Instead, I spent the last years of my marriage with a moody, sarcastic, blaming, paranoid man. And I just kept bloodying my forehead against the wall of disbelief that I’d lost him.
Why do I love this man who was so mean to me? Who scared me and scarred me? Why do I love this man who accused me more times than I could even count of one of the most atrocious of marriage sins, being unfaithful? How can I still feel bad for him after all of that? Still miss him? Still have part of my mind longing for him? I wish I had the answer. I wish I could cut out the offending parts of my brain and heart. I’m trying to be kind to myself but these conflicting emotions make me mad…at me.
My Double Life 