The omnibus hearing next Monday will probably only take a few minutes.
It's funny how I find myself dwelling on the fact that he hasn't had to be called out AT ALL for what he has done thus far. Showing up in arraignment court and having your lawyer interrupt the judge before the judge could read the charges does not equate to having to sit down with a police officer and tell all the awful secrets you've had to live with for seven years.
Rumor has it, he's concerned about losing his job over all this.
If I were him, I'd be concerned about losing my sphincter muscles. My job would be the least of my thoughts.
I don't know why these revelations continue to amaze me. It's like, every now and then, I want to try to tell myself that I can't possibly be right when I recall what a hurtful ass this man is. I can't possibly be right when I say that for seventeen years, all he ever thought about was himself.
But then I start recalling things he said. Some rather "normal" things he said were along the lines of "I don't know what I would do if something happened to you. I could handle it if something happened to the kids, but not you."
I remember things like this and then I follow it up with some weak phrase like "At the time I didn't think..."
How many of us have a partner or spouse that says things maybe three or four times a year that make you stop in your tracks and cock your head to one side and go "What?" And then life continues and your kids need dinner and the dog needs to go out and you do a Kristi Yamaguchi and skate right past the moment.
There are so many more things that he said which, in hindsight, makes me just want to curl in the fetal position. Things that I would bring forth in a trial which would illustrate just how fucked up he was and how stupid I was.
Hindsight is a dangerous weapon.
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3 comments:
Stop right there. You were NOT STUPID. You didn't think his occasional weird statements meant anything because NOBODY would think their husband was capable of doing what he did. That's not stupidity. It's trust and even love -- perhaps misplaced, but that isn't stupid either. I think most healthy humans tend to assume the best about other people. When you've got a lot of emotional investment in someone, all the more so. It's just human nature. You should be very glad that, even though you were living with such a bad person for so long, you were able to maintain enough of your own good humanity to keep the trust and love going. Your trust and love were badly used -- no question there -- but that doesn't make you stupid. It makes him all the more a very bad person.
"In retrospect" is such a killer. In retrospect, I should have noticed a few things, most of them too horrible to mention in 'polite' conversation, and yeah, you feel like a dumb-ass for not noticing how messed up it is. I know I did. But....(Behold the Underlying Truth) you're a good person, and, as such, you want to believe that other people are also good. Those who are Not Good are well-versed in the skill of taking full advantage of people like you.
Personally, I wonder what I'm going to be like when my marriage crap settles down--hyper-vigilant? Overly cautious? Quite likely. And it is unfortunate. Now, you and I have to THINK LIKE THEM in order to protect ourselves from people like them, and believe me, their thoughts are damn ugly. I would rather not have to go there.
But once you get past the freshness and newness of all the major revelations and no longer kick yourselves over the "Why didn't I..." stuff, will you all be sliding back into "real lives" and put the past into a closet of nightmares or will this have forever changed you from this day forward? If so, then why not be one of the few that carries the nightmare into the sunlight and share your stories in a collaborative with others who may be in different stages of discovery? What clues were you picking up on long before the big "OH" (as in OMG) happened? How did you survive the initial traumas? How did you cope?
Write it. Speak it. Don't lose yourself in the cotton candy world of pink nail polish and thoughts of "it's behind me now... must move on...". Share your truth. Singly. Pair up with another survivor. Start a group. You have been activated and this is larger than you know!
If what you share gets one victim out of a situation before one more child is victimized, will it not be worthwhile to grow through the pain and find strength?
Just a thought...
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