I would have to say that there are four women in my life currently who have a significant impact on my daily life and the decisions I make in it. They are my mother, who I love and feel very close to, my soon-to-be-ex wife, who I am in the throes of divorce, although I am doing what I can to get her to go to mediation with me, my closet friend, a woman I have known since we were teenagers, and my eleven year old daughter.
Of course I care about them all in very different ways; my mom is a very supportive lady, who has been with me through thick and thin, my daughter is a joy to me whenever I see her, which in recent months has been every-other weekend, my soon-to-be-ex, is a woman I loved and lived with through the first twenty-five years of our marriage, and perhaps let my affection for her blind me to how poorly she was treating me, and my good pal and lover from days gone by has been helping me through this very difficult time in my life … not begrudgingly, but cautiously resistant to my attempts to get her more deeply involved in my daily life in some ways. As you may be able to tell already, this business gets more than a bit confusing at times!
When things began to go south for my marriage, Mom was right there for me, offering to help in any way she could, and she did so, financially assisting me with setting up my own place, and feeding me the occasional meal as well, among other ways.
My soon-to-be-ex is a different story altogether. She and I come from very different backgrounds in many ways, most notably the fact that I am Jewish, and she is Gentile. Although this wasn’t a major problem at the outset of our relationship, or for the first twenty-four years or so of it at least, as my interest in Judaism wasn’t that strong, but as my interest in developing my knowledge of the culture and religion of my ancestors grew, her consistent belittling and denigrating of it began to really bother me.
Not that this was the major issue which led to our split, but it definitely contributed to my discomfort in her house, as she often referred to it. Our love life had been reduced to virtual non-existence (by which I am referring to the extremely low level of her sexual interest). Her penchant for collecting too many cats kept growing, and her regard for what my life meant to me, and how I felt as she belittled me, tolerated our oldest children doing the same, and made me into a drone whose only acceptable (to her) activity was cleaning up the cat messes wherever they occurred didn’t enhance my mood either! I had become disabled (I have M.S. and could no longer work), but I felt that I was able to do so much more than she would allow me to do.
When I told her I felt unwanted, unneeded, and unloved, he response was not to say anything … just a blank look. I left the next day.
My daughter is a bright spot in my world, smart, pretty, and very funny as well! When I would feel down in the dumps, it was the presence of her smiling face, and that of her six year old little brother that would always cheer me up. For a long time I held on, believing that staying there would be best for the children, until the balance tipped the other way when I realized that I was showing them an awful example or how people should treat others in their life, by allowing their mother to treat me in a way I was slowly beginning to realize was worse than slavery.
