**This is the disclaimer. Below, though true, contains some graphic language and adult content. If you don’t want to read it, stop now, leave this blog, and find your happy place.**
Tonight is Sunday. So that means I picked up my children from their visitation weekend with their father. My ex has remarried, and if you go back and read other posts to this blog, it describes for you my feelings about the relationship, the breakup, and where I am now, so that won’t be covered here. What I am telling you about is my ex-husband’s wife, and the feelings I have about her, as they relate to my former relationship, and what, if there was a wish I had for her, I would tell her.
She came up to me tonight with one word. Sorry. I have heard this word out of her mouth before, and like before I started to ignore it. Two years ago she had called me a fucking cunt in front of my children in a public tirade directed at me while her whole family watched, and followed it up with a cruel email to me sent from my ex’s email account telling me that I deserved to have my first son die. Not her shining moment, and actually sealed my view of her as vile pretty solidly for all eternity. Having heard her call me a bitch several times since, call my daughter a bitch (just like her mom), and be nasty mean to my son, I am not really convinced of her repentance, and the apologies that have come since then are moot and unbelieved. Tonight, I told her exactly why she would always be vile to me, actually even using the word “vile” to describe her to her face, for having pushed the only two buttons I had, so completely, that there really was no hope of her recovery from that, apology and forgiveness or not.
But I also starting thinking about how trapped and desperate she might be to still be apologizing to me. It has to be coming from my ex, who has previously blamed his and my inability to communicate on my unwillingness to interact with his wife. He blamed her for causing the problem to begin with. Whatever, he is delusional. No, not enough to feel sorry for her, but just enough for me to understand where she probably is in her relationship with my ex at this point, if history and timing follow similar patterns.
She is just over 4 years into her relationship with him. At the four-year mark, I had a baby. A not quite one-year-old amazing daughter who laughed and could make you smile any time. I was breast-feeding still, and she didn’t sleep much, but my ex and I had started to return our sex life back to normal.
Normal for us though had been a minimum of daily, and usually twice or more most days. Our sex was often one sided, with him achieving orgasm much more often than I did, and was consistently rough and demanding, wherever in the house we happened to be. I am not a prude, or even afraid to admit that I enjoy frequent and sometimes rough sex. I also like a balance, and that was most often achieved in the middle of the night with quiet, gentler sex where I could get off more slowly, or felt okay to use one of the toys we owned on myself once he fell back to sleep. So the rougher daily sex was a mental compromise.
This was also the point in our relationship where large amounts of pornography entered our world. I always knew my ex liked porn. He showed it to me periodically, still photography pictures of women and men, fucking, using toys, whatever. I knew he viewed more that he didn’t show me, and never really questioned it, thinking to myself that if it turned him on and I was getting off, no big deal, right? I was delusional and very codependent, with his alcoholism, his physical needs of both sex and housewife duties, his complete dislike for being a father when it interfered with my ability to take care of him, and with the verbal and emotional abuse from him that went with my own sick need to want to please him. Ignoring some photos in the face of all that was actually pretty easy.
Back to the pornography. He had been drinking one night, not unusual, and wanted sex. My daughter had miraculously fallen asleep before nine, and he and I were messing around on the computer, sending each other horny instant messages from keyboards that were literally two feet away from each other, while also surfing the internet and reading emails. He sent me a “come sit on my lap” type message, probably with the words fuck and slut in the text, and I went over and did what he asked. He was in his office chair, and I had removed the bottom half of my clothing enroute (the two whole feet away) and sat down, letting him penetrate me as I faced away from him. I was enjoying the position, and was feeling the momentum, when he reached around me to the computer and showed me a close up of a woman’s vagina with what looked like a shiny metal dildo sticking out from where her pretty manicured nails had her spread apart. As our sex got more intense, he zoomed out of the picture, slowly, one small step at a time, until finally, at his own climax, he was zoomed all the way out. The shiny metal object wasn’t a dildo after all. It was the barrel of a gun.
He held me there until I climaxed and I knew, without a doubt, that the pornography had crossed over. This was no longer about sex and excitement, this was about total and complete control. That was what excited him, and I was expected to comply. And in my sick little world, I did. I wanted him so badly, wanted my family to work so badly, wanted to feel loved so badly, that the verbal, and now emotional abuse, seemed normal.
The pornography got much worse after that, with periods where even he knew it was sick and over the top, and would stop. These were usually during his brief periods of sobriety, but even then I never again was placed in a position of shock like that first time. I was easily able to divert it to other sex or other positions so that I did not have to participate in the viewing. I could simply ignore it. And I did ignore it, letting myself believe that if I wasn’t watching it, it wasn’t really happening. I didn’t pay any attention that it was really twisted behavior about power.
So what does that have to do with my ex’s current wife? Maybe nothing. Maybe just my remembrance of where I was, and my gratitude to not be there now, and knowledge that I will never be there again with him or anyone else for that matter. But maybe it was her under-her-breath comment after I had just told her that she was vile when she said, in a voice not meant for me to hear, “You have no idea.”
The woman-I-used-to-be heard her and projected that maybe she was lost inside the relationship just like I was. Just like his first ex-wife was. There is a small part of me that wishes I cared about her at all, in that woman-to-woman way, so I could warn her, maybe. Or maybe not. I can’t judge their relationship, and don’t want to try. I am just planning on going back to ignoring her, and healing myself. I hope I am wrong, and that the fucked up stuff isn’t happening to her and she really is just a mean fucking bitch. And I hope that if it is, she gets out. I can’t help her, and I won’t, because I can only save myself. And I honestly don’t like her enough do anything about it. But I hope she realizes that apologizing any more won’t change anything about my past, or her future, and that I do have some idea, I heard her, even if I don’t ever show it. Power and control under the roof of sick men is like that, and figures out, if she need to, that she doesn’t need to have a gun sticking out of her vagina before knowing things are seriously wrong. No apology required.
