Jen, part two

Audio version now available.

(Click here to read part one.)

Old academic papers on the impact of alcoholism on kids are plentiful. The studies from the end of last century usually suggest that the family stay together. That’s one of the things I despise about behavioral health research. Humans are complex and coercible, and an experienced academic can usually design a study to get the results that validate his assertions. People haven’t changed much since the start of this new millennium, but the advice sure has. It is widely believed among family psychologists that what children need is one stable parent, to provide emotional support, physical safety, and healthy adult modeling. Staying in a toxic marriage for the sake of the kids is finally being openly criticised for being as ludicrous as it sounds.

Between the popular research-driven myth that Jen should keep her family together for the sake of her kids, and her financial dependence on her husband, when considering divorce, the cons column was stacked.

The partners of alcoholics almost universally bristle when they are told how strong they are. I don’t want to be strong all the time. I don’t want to carry all of this responsibility alone. I didn’t get married so I could defend my children from the wrath of my husband.

I know Jen shares those sentiments. Even so, I cannot help but to marvel at the bravery it took for her to extricate herself and her boys from a legal contract, a co-parental obligation, a financial tangle, and a deep emotional enmeshment.

Consider the financial grip Mark used to abuse Jen from both sides of the ledger. He was the sole earner for the majority of their marriage. That fact alone meant Jen would be incentivized to endure crippling emotional abuse, with lapsed professional credentials and a resume that signalled her familial priorities to potential employers. She didn’t leave when her situation became unfair, unbalanced, difficult, or mildly toxic. She didn’t leave because Mark wasn’t a good communicator or he wasn’t sensitive to her feelings. She left when the guttural fear of staying was greater than the fear of going. With her professional options, the financial risk of leaving was enormous.

Not only was Jen ill-equipped to reenter the workforce, but she also faced her half of Mark’s six-figure credit card debt he secretly amassed. He refinanced their home to buy a beach house that Jen never saw before closing. Yes, he brought in good money, and he felt that justified his unilateral control of the family finances. It is hard to know if Mark was consciously aware of the strangle hold his debt put on Jen–if it was intentional manipulation to force her to stay. But regardless of his motives or awareness, Jen felt the choking grip of Mark’s financial control.

Mark cancelled Jen’s cell phone when she took the kids to visit her parents, because the account was in his name, and he could. He closed their joint checking account, eventually giving Jen her half of the money, but not before his financial terrorism had the intended impact.

While her instincts to protect her boys were always the driving factor in Jen’s navigation of her marriage and divorce, fear for her own safety grew as things got predictably ugly.

Jen used their auto insurance app to track Mark’s movements, mostly to anticipate his level of alcohol intoxication based on the time his car spent in liquor store parking lots. One night, she noticed him staked out at an address she had visited the week prior. From the very beginning of their relationship, Mark’s obsessive fawning bordered on stalkerish and compulsive. I know first hand that while it is an overused cliche, the effect of alcohol on jealousy and paranoia is like pouring fuel on a smoldering fire. Mark thought Jen might be cheating, so he engaged in an evening of reconnaissance work. Jen knew Mark didn’t use the same insurance app, and she wondered how he knew she had been at that address. She later found out that he installed a GPS tracker in her car. It paired nicely with the listening device that she found tucked into a crevice in her car door. Because his surveillance was covert, Mark never got to ask Jen what she was doing at the address. I wonder what his reaction would have been had his investigative prowess uncovered that Jen visited that house to take part in cookie exchange. Once again, a mom doing a very mom thing, and an addiction-riddled husband making despicable alcohol-induced assumptions.

If she is physically and emotionally unavailable to me, she must be cheating.

The stay or go question really is quite simple, although it doesn’t feel at all that way as the evidence slowly pushes the decision maker out the door. The decision feels impossible, with a complete and total lack of acceptable options. But then it happens. One day, the decider reaches a breaking point. The scale tips, and there is no going back. Your tipping point and my tipping point and Jen’s tipping point might be in dramatically different places on the scale. It can be argued that no two people have the same tolerance for abuse and injustice.

But pushed far enough, all humans will break, and the marriage will be over.

Jen’s marriage was over long before the dissolution was recognized by the court, the rest of the family, or even Mark.

Jen started having conversations outside, away from potential surveillance devices, with her attorney and her parents. Her dad was shaken by Mark’s covert stalking behavior. Jen’s priority might have remained her concern for her four boys, but Jen’s dad was worried about Mark reaching a breaking point, and for the safety of his daughter.

It is often said that when your life is a living hell, keep going. That’s the only way to get out of your purgatory on earth. Jen trudged along as she and Mark divided the parts of the house and lived in an untenable in-home separation. She pulled together years of abusive and unhinged text messages and emails, and created a voluminous pdf document for the court. She followed the advice of her counselor, and leaned hard on her loving parents, and she kept going. Divorce is neither swift nor clean, but Jen bravely pushed on, keeping always the protection of her kids as her motivation.

The first glimmer of relief came when the judge told Jen’s attorney that he could verbally present the exhibits in court if he so chose, but that she had read every single piece of documentation, and reviewed every shred of evidence submitted in the divorce proceeding. Jen had submitted a mountain. Mark had submitted nothing, and showed up to court defiantly prepared to represent himself and schmooze his way to a favorable outcome. He was certain that with his charisma and intellect, he could win the judge over. She was patient as she guided him through his procedural mistakes, and in the end, she awarded him a sum more generous than Jen had anticipated in her wildest dreams. Despite the fact that the accumulation took place when the couple was legally married and sharing all assets, the judge awarded Mark full custody of his six-figure credit card debt. Jen was shocked. And for the first time, relief started to replace fear.

The end of the divorce litigation was far from the end of the battle back for Jen. She still had to sell the house she could not afford. She worked though a tedious, arduous, and years-long recertification process to return to practicing occupational therapy. She had to guide her sons through the new reality of sporadic contact from their still actively addicted father. She became aware of an ongoing infidelity that felt less like a betrayal, and more like Mark was becoming someone else’s problem. Relief replaced fear, sometimes in drips and drabs, and sometimes in tangible waves.

Her nervous system began to approach regulation after years and years in a perpetual state of fight, flight, fawn, or freeze–a condition that in and of itself can turn deadly as our biology reacts to being stuck in a mode that’s supposed to be reserved for very temporary, very imminent encounters with danger. Slowly, Jen started to feel safe in her own home and with her own children. She watched her boys rebound from the chaos and trauma, and thrive while staying emotionally connected to the mother who guided them to safety. They are still too young and too innocent to understand, but Jen broke a cycle, provided them an example of healthy, resilient parenting, and created in them a bond to their mother that will never be broken.

Relief. Healing. Safety. Slowly, Jen and her kids were recovering.

Every day Mark didn’t show up at Jen’s new home, she grew a little more confident that he wouldn’t show up tomorrow. As is so often the case with an alcohol-warped mind, Mark was mostly bluster.

But still, he did shut off her wifi and her cell phone leaving her vulnerable. He was mostly bluster, but he did get violent that one time. He was mostly bluster, but he did lack the guardrail of giving a shit what others thought of him. He was mostly bluster, but Jen couldn’t forget the listening device that fell from the slammed car door, or the GPS device that led him to stalk the cookie exchange host.

She remembered the quote word for word, not because she wrote it down, but because it was seared in her memory cataloged with the other traumas. He once said, “Who knows, Jen. Maybe someday you’ll just disappear.” He was mostly bluster, but those words came from his mouth about the woman he pledged to love forever. If he was capable of that, who knows, indeed.

People think alcoholism is about DUIs and red-wine vomit on white carpeting–things so viscerally tangible that they are universally understandable. But for the partner of an alcoholic, addiction isn’t tangible at all. Alcoholism is insidious. It’s about the things we aren’t really sure we witnessed, and we could never really explain. For Jen, a marriage to alcoholism, and the undiagnosed narcissist who poured the wine, was about one intangible thing.

For Jen, her marriage to alcoholism was about marital terrorism.

Capiche?

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